BIG FAN

I’m very excited about this movie.  Patton Oswalt has been promoting the hell out of it (it has literally zero advertising budget), and I generally respect his opinion since I think he’s a good comedian and a smart guy.  And how can you not get excited about the directorial debut of Robert Siegel, writer of “The Wrestler” – one of my favorite movies from last year and one of the great trailers of all time.

I was legitimately shocked after viewing this trailer.  I hadn’t done a ton of research about the film, but from the bits of interviews with Oswalt I heard here and there – and my own assumptions about the kind of movie he would be in – I had the idea it was going to be somewhat funny.  I knew that the writer of “The Wrestler” wasn’t going to throw an all-out comedy out there, but I figured there would be, you know, funny parts.

I was incorrect.  There are not.  This trailer is downright depressing.  Not only that, it actually offended me as a sports fan.

There was a certain realness to “The Wrestler”.  It gave a glimpse into the life of what it’s like to be a professional wrestler at a low level.  Behind the glamour (which at that low a level was very little), Mickey Rourke’s character lived a painful, lonely life.  He suffered through loss, disappointment, and a genuine isolation from society that was believable in that world.  And from what I saw in this trailer, Siegel tries to bring those same themes upon the world of fandom.  But those themes don’t work in this setting.

Any serious sports fan knows it’s difficult to be isolated when you’re surrounded by thousands of people who want the exact same thing as you.  Seeing a sport live is the only setting where I would feel relatively comfortable going alone, since it is one of the easiest places to connect with other people.  So Siegel has to fabricate isolation:

This is not remotely close what a tailgate looks like in real life.

The loser-ness of Oswalt’s character is portrayed in cliches: He works as a parking attendant.  He scripts his calls to local sports talk radio.  He lives at home with his mother.  He follows around the star player.  There are only so many professions you can look at with a Film Noir perspective, and for me fandom is not one of them.  Perhaps Siegel would have been better suited to make a film called “Blogger”, about the tragic isolation of the blogging community: living in their parents basements, pale and overweight, disconnected from society as they spend their days attached to their computers.

I also found the confrontation between Oswalt and the star player a stretch.  Sadly, I can’t actually make a serious argument that an NFL player getting involved in an altercation with a fan is farfetched, but Oswalt’s smile when approaching him was so genuine and glowing it was a bit of a shock and quite upsetting to see how it turned out.

The rest of the trailer is dreadful: a crescendo of the dilemma Oswalt faces between his own justice and loyalty to his team, as his relationships with family members seem to spiral out of control.  I recommend taking a Zoloft before looking at these:

This shot killed me:

This is PATTON OSWALT we’re talking about!  I don’t want him to be “terrific and fearless”, I want him to be “funny” or “hilarious”.  It’s such a ridiculous shot that after thinking about it long enough I became genuinely impressed by Oswalt’s acting skills.  Could you imagine Dane Cook or Louis C.K. in that shot with that description and not laugh hysterically?  I also noticed it looked a tad familiar:

Again, we’re talking about Patton Oswalt here.  And I mean no disrespect to him at all – he’s a great comedian and, apparently, and excellent actor.  But Mickey Rourke had a unique similarity with his character that made “The Wrestler” into a fantastic movie and gave him an Oscar nomination that he clearly should have won.  That trick doesn’t work for Oswalt.  I know he’s not a sports fan (from his interviews), but even if I didn’t hear him say it himself, I could have figured it out because this movie makes no sense.  Also, I would be willing to bet a semi-large sum of money that Oswalt loses a bet at some point during the movie and has to wear an Eagles jersey as punishment.  Oswalt’s character is a Giants fan and hates the Eagles, but we see this at the end of the trailer:

Looks like a Donovan McNabb jersey to me.  There’s an extremely brief shot after this that I examined for far too long of Oswalt running in this jersey.  It clearly was McSomething but I couldn’t make out the whole name.  But just look at the look of disgust on his face and tell me he didn’t just lose a bet with a friend.

I don’t want to come off as a hater of “Big Fan”.  But the point that I wanted to emphasize was that I was very surprised by the lack of humor in the trailer.  The funniest thing I found out about this movie was that the actor who plays the Giants player who beats up Oswalt is named Jon Hamm.  By no means am I saying I don’t think “Big Fan” could still be a great film.  Like I said, I am confident that Oswalt and Siegel would not collaborate on something low quality.  But I am worried – “The Wrestler” had an amazing trailer and turned out to be an amazing film, I hope the same trend doesn’t follow through for “Big Fan”.

Big Fan is now playing in select theaters.

FANTASTIC MR. FOX

As I’ve written before, Wes Anderson is one of my favorite writer/directors and has previously demonstrated his acumen in trailer-making.

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” provides two firsts for Anderson: His first time adapting a screenplay, and his first movie not in live action.  These two differences are disappointing to an Anderson fan like myself, and provide little motivation for me to be seriously interested in this film.

This is my second time seeing the trailer, but from what I recall the first time I watched it I was drunk, so in a way it was almost like seeing it new.  I was most intrigued at how – even while using stop-motion animation – Anderson was able to put all his usual little quirks in.  Dry, witty dialogue, interesting music, and his usual cast were most prominent.  Not to mention Wes Anderson Movie Font:

Event the wardrobes of the animals are in Anderson-style:

So I’ve got to hand it to Anderson, he took a children’s book and turned it into an animated movie while somehow managing to keep his signature style present.  If Mr. Fox has father issues, I’ll be really impressed.

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” opens November 13th.

YOUTH IN REVOLT

I had figured that at this point – collectively, as a society – we had finally evolved enough to understand the most effective formulas for making trailers.  If we were to put that formula into a constitution-like list, near the top would be “Do Not Use Voiceovers”.

“Youth in Revolt” violates that rule 21 seconds into its trailer.  I was less than impressed by the run-of-the-mill Michael Cera style comedy that I’m sure would make for a funny, yet average movie.  Then this happened:

Few trailers I’ve seen have provided a visual turn as spectacular as this one.  I actually burst in to laughter (by myself!) when I saw this, followed up by the Michael Cera quote, “I have decided to create a supplementary persona named Francois Dillinger.”

The next 15 seconds or so are my favorite of the trailer, when, for a brief moment the movie seems to encompass everything I learned about women in the past five or six years.  The latter portions of the trailer somewhat reverted back to goofy-Michael-Cera-comedy, but I still have hope that it will be more intelligent than the preview lets on.

I’m not really sure how the two Michael Ceras will fit in from a reality perspective, but I’m sure it’ll be clear enough once you begin to watch.

Youth in Revolt premieres October 30th.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

Let me start out this post by saying that I’m a hater of this movie.  I remember the book, but with no particular fondness.  And I certainly had no idea that this book was every person in their 20s’ favorite childhood book, as since has been made the case since this trailer was released.  Kinda like how everyone has suddenly agreed that Michael Jackson was an amazing performer who lived a “difficult” life.

And I really have no idea how you turn a 48 page picture book into a feature length movie.  But what you can do is turn it into one hell of a trailer.

Even for a hater like me this trailer is phenomenal.  From the introduction with an obscured shot of the monster holding the kid who plays young Ben Linus on Lost, to the Arcade Fire song chose to fill the rest of the time, and all the quick cuts of everything in between.  It’s almost like this book was made to be a great trailer.  I still am not convinced at how it will be a great movie, but if anyone can do something that’s seemingly impossible, it’s Spike Jonze.

Where the Wild Things Are opens October 16th.

WATCHMEN

Even though it’s already in theaters, I’m writing about Watchmen because this trailer really did not do a good job in making me want to see the movie.  I was kind of ehhh about it since I first heard about it and probably wasn’t going to push anyone to go see the movie with me.  But a friend of mine did push me to go see it – and it was amazing.  I was completely blown away, and now I feel it’s right alongside Dark Knight as the best comic book movie I’ve ever seen.  So I highly suggest to anyone who wasn’t impressed by the trailer to see this movie, even if you haven’t read the graphic novel.  I hadn’t read it, and I still didn’t have much trouble understanding what was happening, and it inspired me to read the novel immediately after seeing the film.

The main problem I had with this trailer?  It’s a big too “big” for my taste.  I really like the beginning with the creepy organ music, but once the dude gets thrown through the window the action becomes a little too intense for my taste.  One of the things about seeing trailers in theaters is they seem louder than the movie itself.  Maybe it’s because they come first and your ears haven’t properly adjusted yet, but I just remember having to recoil from the screen while watching this because it was so loud.  I also thought it played to the fanboys a bit and felt like I wasn’t really in the know on what was happening.

ANYWAY, go see Watchmen.

FUNNY PEOPLE

I think this is probably the longest trailer I’ve ever seen (not counting the special edition 7 minute Dark Knight trailer because that was an entire scene).  It’s three-and-a-half minutes!  A trailer should not be long enough to be able to play an entire pop song through.  85% of Beatles songs are shorter than this trailer.  Learn a lesson from the greats, Apatow.  This trailer needs its own editor.

What we have is a three act epic.

ACT I

This is our introduction to the characters.  Adam Sandler (playing himself) is a stand-up comedian.  Seth Rogen (playing himself) is a stand-up comedian who admires Adam Sandler.  Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman (playing themselves) are Rogen’s friends.

While I’m sure the stand-up in this movie is pretty funny, I’m slightly concerned by the whole “keeping it real” angle Apatow seems to be playing here  – an homage to stand-up, if you will.  Smart people – and more importantly in this case, funny people (no pun intended) – still really appreciate stand-up.  Your audience is smart, Apatow, you don’t have to treat them like they’re not.

ACT II

Here’s a nice turn – Adam Sandler is dying.  This is somewhat troubling considering the fact that he’s playing himself.  One day when Adam Sandler gets cancer this movie is going to feel really awkward.  Or Judd Apatow already has cancer.  Ahhhhh, comedies!

We get a nice music change to “We Will Become Silhouettes” by Postal Service.  We’re introduced to four more characters: Leslie Mann (playing herself), Eric Bana (playing himself, he’s Australian), and their two kids (Judd Apatow’s real life kids, playing themselves).

Sandler’s new mission is mentoring Rogen on comedy and reconciling with “the one who got away” before he inevitably dies.  The trailer is two minutes deep and I’m getting ready for a title card.  But I can tell on the time scroll thingy that the trailer is barely half over.  HOLY FUCK.

ACT III

Another nice turn: Adam Sandler has beaten his disease.  Hooray!  And what do you do after having a near-death experience?  Apparently, whatever the fuck you want.  Because near death experiences make everyone do exactly what they always wanted to do for the rest of their lives, even though I’m almost positive there is no way this is entirely true.  We get our THIRD different song plus a serious of clips:

A painful-to-watch Sandler playing in a band that is far far far too serious

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John Turturro drinking a soda

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Taken from Apatow family home movies

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Knocked Up deleted scene

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What kind of douche has five massive flat screens in his house?  Props for the Conan clip though (bottom right)

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I watched this clip about five times slowing it down as much as I possibly could.  I have no idea who is tackling who, and these are both definitely stuntmen.

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At this point we’re three minutes deep in this trailer and we STILL have thirty seconds to go.  And I’m not exactly eating this movie up.

True story: When I started writing this post 12 seconds ago, after the spiel about how it was too long I literally wrote the sentence: “Despite its length, this trailer turns out to be pretty good”.  Then, since I’m such a diligent expert I re-watched the trailer a couple of times and realized how mistaken I was, this trailer is awful.  Especially the montage of clips in the third act, which is difficult to watch.

I understand that Apatow might be trying to go a different direction here with a more serious theme, but when you’re trying to go a different direction and everything ends up turning out exactly the same just less funny, you’ve got a problem.

I’ll end this ridiculously long post with my favorite thing about this movie: Eric Bana.  By far the funniest joke in this trailer is the casting of Bana, a reference to the conversation Rogen and his friends have early on in Knocked Up, when they decide if any of them are getting laid it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.  Touche, Apatow.  But seriously this movie looks like shit.

Funny People opens July 31st.

CHE

I was all set to make a bunch of Medellin jokes about this trailer.  Benicio Del Toro is a dead ringer for Vinny Chase.  As a matter of fact, in the Entourage episode where Vince ends up getting cast for Medellin, it’s because the actor who was originally playing Pablo Escobar quit the film.  That actor?  Benicio Del Toro.

But then I actually watched the trailer for Che and was impressed.  So impressed that I’m actually going to break it down like I did in earlier TrailerBlog posts.  But before we get to that, watch this “trailer” for Medellin.  I found it both hilarious and enlightening that in order to put together a trailer for a bad movie, they decided to use cheesy voiceovers – which was exactly the point I made in my last classic post.

INTRO – “LOVE”

The trailer starts with a voiceover – not a cheesy trailer voiceover, but the beginning of an interview with Guevara that we see immediately after the famous image of Guevara’s face.  I think this T-shirt I just bought from The Onion is way funnier, however:

The intro to this trailer is so great because it starts with the unexpected.  Guevara referring to love as the most important quality for a revolutionary to have is striking, and we are shown various images you wouldn’t normally associate with a ruthless revolutionary like Guevara.  And I’m a huge sucker for latin music, so the soft guitar over everything really makes the images more poignant.

One of those pictures was from Medellin.  See how easily the two can be intertwined?  PAY ATTENTION READERS.

ACT I

We get a turn into what we would expect from a movie about Che Guevara: violence, ruthlessness, controversy.  This is enhanced by the quotes from Guevara – strikingly similar to the Spanish-translated subtitles of the Medellin trailer – as well as various clips shown in black and white.  Most of all, the feeling in the turn is accentuated by the abrupt change in music.  The music in Act I is exactly like much of the music Jonny Greenwood composed for There Will Be Blood, especially the stuff featured in the trailer for that film.  It also sounds like some of the music done for The Shining.

ACT II

After the title card for Soderbergh, there’s another change in both music and scenery.  It’s now “sweeping dramatic score” over shots of the revolutionaries in action.  This is our third mood change already and it’s not even halfway through the trailer.  This film has officially reached “epic status”.  More on this later.

ACT III

Back to the Spanish music, a title card for Benicio, some pull quotes from reviewers, and shots of things a revolutionary such as Guevara would do: hang out with kids, shoot things, blow up buildings, pull around a goat, say inspirational quotes, etc.

This is clearly an epic work by Soderbergh – to the point that it actually is seperated into two parts.  Lucky people in New York and Los Angeles will get the chance to see them together as a four-hour megafilm, but for the public they’ll be released seperately to spare our brains from melting/bodies from going into atrophy.  And the trailer does a great job portraying the film’s epic nature.  The trailer truly is beautiful – the shots, the quotes, the grandeur of it all.  Even if the film turns out to be a snoozer, the trailer should live on forever.

MONDAY CLASSICS: GOOD WILL HUNTING

Monday Classics are starting to get depressing to search for.  The trailer for Good Will Hunting is yet another of the endless examples I have encountered of why trailers today are infinitely better than they used to be.   Watching these terrible old trailers makes me want to start a separate blog where I recut trailers and make them into what they could have been.  Then I’ll sell them to the studios and they’ll be released as special features on the DVDs and I’ll get fractions of a cent as residuals.

There are so many things wrong with this trailer, I’ll let the youtube commenters elaborate:

BerchemSport2008 (4 days ago)

lol indeed a very bad trailer
but the film is awesome though

Bugmuster (4 days ago)

Best movie…but hopeless trailer…WHERE’S ELLIOTT SMITH MUSIC and WHAT THE HELL IS THIS 80’s LIKE MUSIC DOIN IN THERE???

jbtwenty2 (2 weeks ago)

this movie is cool but the trailer compared to the one of today suck

moneyclip1219 (2 weeks ago)

this is my favorite movie, but man this is such a terrible trailer, not even representative of the film

ronnie4489 (1 month ago)

hahaah this movie is awesome! but 90’s trailers were so bad! really choppy, cheesy, and amateurish.

Buckwizzle17 (3 months ago)

this is my favorite movie ,but this trailer sucked

fleathedoosh (3 months ago)

fab movie.
really crap trailer tho.

sMC193 (3 months ago)

Great movie.
AWFUL TRAILER!!!

malekbentsarah (5 months ago)

yeah, the trailer doesn’t match the film at all.

CHErevolucion1 (5 months ago)

the music ruins the fuckin trailer

azillia420 (6 months ago)

Kind of a shame they didn’t play Elliott Smith for the trailer.

Cara401 (7 months ago)

This is such a good film but the music in the trailer is really twatty.

POWDER BLUE

I have trouble believing that this is the actual trailer to this movie.  Yet, all the various corners of the internets that promote the trailer as being “leaked” inevitably lead back to this video, which runs more like the opening credits of Friday Night Lights (the TV show) than an actual movie trailer.

But I obviously could not omit Powder Blue on TrailerBlog because DID YOU KNOW JESSICA BIEL GETS NAKED IN THIS MOVIE???? (that’s a tag that’ll guarantee me at least an extra 50 page views).  I cannot verify any of this, since all I’ve seen is the trailer above, but as an average American male surfing the web I have probably encountered about 50,000 different places telling me that there is some Jessica Biel nudity going on in this movie.  And since she plays a stripper, this makes sense.

That’s really all there is to say about this one!  It’s imdb synopsis makes it sound like a Crash or even Magnolia type plot (four people from LA with no prior relations are brought together by complex circumstances).  And the background music for the trailer surprisingly is not Explosisons in the Sky, but apparently is “Dripping Whispers” by The Soul’s Release.  Oh yeah and Jessica Biel is a stripper.

MONDAY CLASSICS: ANCHORMAN

There are two things I notice every time I watch a classic trailer: 1) It’s amazing how quickly these movies become dated, and 2) It’s even more amazing that it took this long for trailer-makers to figure out that cheesy voiceovers are not the way to go.  Seriously, I’m shocked by how many classic trailers I’ve seen that are just plain terrible – even for great movies.  Since I started TrailerBlog, I’ve been impressed at how much better the quality of trailers are now.  It’s not just compiled footage anymore, it really is an art form.  I’ve even read about movie directors who insist on putting together their own trailers (I have no idea who does it normally, the studio perhaps?).  And it has become standard to go with a words-on-screen approach over cheesy trailer voiceovers.  Sorry, Don LaFontaine, your career might be over.

And while it is striking how dated Anchorman looks (it was released in 2004), as a trailer it was really ahead of its time.  There is some voiceover at the beginning, but it’s not cheesy movie style, it’s old-school narration style.  And it’s only used at the very beginning, after that it’s all words on screen.

The trailer is also well structured – 3 acts, each with a different feel.  I particularly enjoyed the third act – most of the funniest clips shown over “Carry on Our Wayward Son”, and several of the clips shown weren’t even in the final cut of the movie.