The point I’m at in my movie watching life is the point in which every film is a little more predictable then it might have once been. Films like The Prestige and 21 Grams I can see the end coming from the very beginning. Films like The Painted Veil I’m able to guess how each scene will end just as it begins. You can see the movie dissolve in front of your eyes just as it’s being created. Not an enjoyable experience by any means. Is that because I’ve gotten smarter? Or that films have gotten dumber? Perhaps a little of both. For both The Prestige and 21 Grams, they both thought they were being clever by showing hints of what was going to happen later in the film. Anyone paying attention could have easily figured it out, and since all of the characters in each film were so incredibly narcissistic, the journies weren’t all that fun either.
But that’s the movies. You’re at least sitting there watching it. But what do you do about the trailers! You haven’t even paid to see the movie yet, and the studio is already ruining what could amount to some of the most intense scenes in the film. The new trailer for Live Free or Die Hard has just been released on-line. I’m not going to say where, cause I’m of the mind that the less seen the better. Unfortunately, in my excitement I started watching it. I was a good thirty seconds in when the film showed me how one of the big action sequences ended. How it ended!!! It even fed me the clever line MacClane says afterwards. I’m irate! Wasn’t the teaser good enough. To know that John MacClane was strapping down for another adventure was for me. Did I have to know the intricate details of the story’s setup. No! This has gotten so bad in recent times that I’ve stopped watching trailers for big budget tentpole films all together, for no other reason but to save the experience for the actual movie, and not have them wasted in a ten second clip. Thus far I have yet to see the new Spiderman trailer. My friends think I’m crazy when I close my eyes and plug my ears. But who wanted to know that Tom Hanks got off the island in Castaway, who wanted to see what the kracken in Pirates 2 looked like before the film. Who I ask…WHO??? Not me! Why can’t I find out what’s under the water when I see the movie itself. The film spends so much time not showing you, building up to that moment, and thirty seconds into the trailer you see it! Isn’t this completely antiproductive when a filmmaker and a crew and a writer and an editor have spent years designing a film to build to a moment like that, and a studio head comes in or whoever comes in and says, “Show me the kracken!” Or they show a scene from Children of Men in which they are already in the darned boat!? They spend the last third of the movie trying to get to the boat…and you’re going to show it to me in the preview?! For me it’s the smallest of visuals that can destroy the end of a movie. Maybe I pick up on too much. Maybe because I’ve studied film to death that one visual says more than an entire play of words does for me that I’m able to do this. Still though, every now and then they make a really tight trailer. It’s relevant to the style of the film, it captures the film’s essence without giving too much away. But it’s rare these days. I wanted to barbecue the guy who put together the trailer for Miami Vice. The line alone when Colin Farrel asked the person on the other end of the line if they knew what foreboding meant… here, here it is…it makes me giggle every time I listen to it…the character doesn’t even know what foreboding means!
Phil-zine! 