Great trailers and Lousy Trailers (1 Viewer)

[Gruson]

Two Towers with Requiem for a Dream music was a GREAT trailer. Very moving.

All Star Wars trailers (prequels) were MUCH better than the movies.

Anyone remember The Lost World teaser? Some theaters actually had some strobe lights installed for it.

It was VERY cool.

 

[Scott Simonian]

Yes! Lost World, oh I forgot. This was an awesome teaser. It shows close to nothing but it is very effective. The cineneplexes that I had access to did not have strobe lights built in. I was a HUGE dts fan at the time. I remember reading the whitepaper on dts and how they could sync up certain special effects for movie playback. Realy cool. Makes me wish that more movie theaters had put in lasers and strobes.

 

[Jason Seaver]

Have you seen that? That thing is scarring. It is the punchline to every trailer-related conversation I've had recently.

My all-time "favorite" kind of lousy trailer is the foreign film desperately trying to hide the fact that it's not in English. Subtitled trailers are a kind of relief, even if they are usually only done by the smaller distributors and not as slickly edited.

 

[Steve Y]

I actively dislike trailers that follow this formula:

I. Intro
a. For drama, a wide epic shot of the landscape/city.
b. For comedy, a cue of fanciful music set to shots of the main character(s) in mundane expository scenes.

IIa. Drama - Voiceover (most of the time)
"IN A TOWN/WORLD/TIME (OF MYSTERY/FULL OF ROMANCE/FILLED WITH CORRUPTION) ONE MAN/WOMAN (STANDS ALONE/WILL FIGHT FOR/HOLDS THE KEY)... each part of this drawn-out voiceover line is punctuated with obvious visual cues.

IIb. Comedy - Voiceover (only occasionally)
"MEET (THE SMITHS) (JOE SCHMO) (JANE SCHMO)..."
"(JOE SCHMO) LIVES A REGULAR LIFE..."
"(JANE SCHMO) HAS THE PERFECT JOB..." (etc.)

III. After standard exposition featuring "hook" scenes, we approach the coda of the trailer, which involves quick shots of gunplay, explosions, hand-to-hand combat, or in the case of comedies, lots of pratfalls or a drawn-out slice of the movie's most embarrassing situation(s).

IVa. A short pause after the "coda" as all music and sounds effects drop out for some remarkable special effects, dramatic visual or arresting/amusing bit of dialogue.
IVb. If a comedy, always precede this with the "record-scratching" sound effect.

"Oh HELL no..."

V. This trailer "starts up" again and rushes at you full blast with a stream of dramatic or funny scenes, then the movie's credits or title are printed at the "climax" (ahem, pun intended) often with an oddly-placed and low-key scene playing in the background.

These "random scenes" have no rhyme or reason. For comedies, people giving a toast in a room or laughing and/or dancing together is a common, regardless of subject matter.

As much as people made fun of his latest teaser -- and to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of his movies -- I've always respect M. Night Shyamalan's trailers because they are intriguing and don't give away that much. I also really enjoyed the trailer for "The Fountain", which gave you an idea of what to expect -- what the plot might generally involve -- without giving entire scenes or plot points.

It is definitely influenced by Kubrick, who knew that you didn't need to give away the movie to make people interested in it. Not if your concept is good enough. Some directors and (especially) studio executives are terrified that they have a good movie on their hands, but that no one will know if "not enough is revealed" beforehand.

I violently disagree with the views of Robert Zemekis on spoiler-ridden trailers, but I think for the most part he is right about the public. Witness all the people who say out loud in the theater: "who's that?" or "what just happened?" or "why did they do that?" whenever a plot point escapes immediate comprehension. They want to know every step of the way what's going on, before and during the movie.

And it's true that some people don't want to be left mentally or emotionally vulnerable to cinema. This is probably the difference between film as an art form and as comfort-entertainment. A few of my friends like to skip to the last pages of a mystery before they begin it because they can't stand the buildup and want to make sure it's "exciting at the end". I find this hard to understand, but there it is.

 

[TheLongshot]

Now that you mention it, the teaser for "The Fountain" does remind me of some of the trailers for "Eyes Wide Shut", which have similar feels to it.

Jason

 

[Brian-A]

After watching Seven Samurai on DVD, I watched the trailer. That was a good choice. The trailer begins, in Japanese, "There were seven... but only three remain!" Talk about giving away the ending.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

Yes it was! I still rave about it. I'd argue it was the greatest trailer I've ever seen - I was sorely disappointed when I went back to the same theater (DC's Uptown) a few weeks later and it'd been replaced with a traditional trailer...

 

[Nathan V]

If teasers were the only trailers that existed, I would go see so many more movies. I think studios would make a heck of lot more dough than they do now if the idea of a "full trailer" didn't even exist. Imagine if all you had to go off was a simple teaser that showed very little of the actual film, only a few tantalizing images, like Hannibal (which actually shows no footage from that film, instead using a shot from Silence of the Lambs). Look at the teaser for Garden State, then look at the trailer. The teaser makes it look like some otherwordly, uncategorizable Kubrickean mindf*ck with bizarre imagery. The trailer shows a more accurate picture of the film, as a contemporary quasi-Graduate update. The first teaser offers more possibilities of what the film might be and thus would interest a larger audience, IMO. Of course, if what Zemeckis says about people wanting to know everything is true, then my theory is complete bunk. A drawback of this teaser-only idea is that it would also create a lot of false expectations and preconcieved notions on upcoming films.

Regards,
Nathan

Great trailers (I'm biased, of course, as I love all these films, with the obvious exception of Pearl Harbor):

2nd Braveheart trailer
Requiem for a Dream, with Moby Music "everloving"
Pearl Harbor (one of the most well-constructed trailers I've ever seen, aside from the too-cool-for-words Dark City teaser)
Both Spielberg/Cruise collaborations (..."Cruise"..."Spielberg"...!)
Jarhead (the use of Kanye West couldn't be more appropriate, IMO, thematically or stylistically)
Magnolia (teaser and trailer, both relying on footage not in the final film)
Vanilla Sky (bizarre imagery set to great music)
Wes Anderson films (quirky, hilarious, fun)
Michael Bay movies (the man is a great shooter, if nothing else)
Kingdom of Heaven (Ridley Scott and his visuals)
2046 (domestic trailer with a terrific moody opening)
Eternal Sunshine (it's all about the music)
The Passion of the Christ's first online teaser, when it was just called The Passion (beautiful slow-motion shots and breathtaking painterly imagery that clearly stated the film's intensity, with the great score from Rabbit Proof Fence underneath)
Farenheit 9/11 (very funny, very serious, and very interesting, all in equal doses)

Upcoming stuff:
Both New World Trailers
Munich (powerful. "Every civilization...")
Syriana (looks to have the potential of pitch-perfect brilliance)

The combination of visuals and music can be extremely powerful. A great trailer takes advantage of strong visuals and sets them against music to build a hypnotic, breathtaking slice of cinema/advertising material. The worst trailers, for me, are ones that try to "hide" a certain aspect of the film, basically false advertising, like the foreign language thing mentioned earlier, or trying to conceal a radical style (man on fire's early trailers) or controversial subject matter (can't think of an example right now, but I know it's out there).

Regards,
Nathan

 

[Yee-Ming]

Re Steve Y's hated formula, I'm surprised no one has mentioned the ultimate piss-take trailer, for The Comedian (which had nothing to do with the movie at all) -- Mr Voiceover Man enters a booth, engineer tells him to do his stuff, and he starts "In a world...", whereupon the engineer cuts him off and says "It's not that kind of movie". Voiceover Man continues with the usual schtick, engineer gets frustrated trying to get him to say what he's supposed to say etc and it all degenerates.

Another great pisstake trailer was Austin Powers 2, you get what looks like the inside of a starship, camera moving along a corridor until you see a cul-de-sac with a large viewport and huge black chair, heavy breathing (evoking Darth Vader), chair swivels and its... Dr Evil. He then cackles "You were expecting someone else?" Cue voiceover "If you see one movie this summer, see Star Wars! If you see TWO movies this summer, see Austin Powers!" All because the Phantom Menace juggernaut was opening that summer as well

 

[Jason Harbaugh]

Ahh forgot about that Austin Powers trailer.

Another along the lines of 'fakeout' was the teaser for Southpark: BLU. It had the voice over guy talking about the most advanced technology available for animation and showed a bunch of shots of a 3D character being rendered from wireframe to fully shaded, then pulling back to see Cartman in 2d glory.

 

[Gruson]

Here is the info on that Lost World teaser:


1996 - DTS trailer film for Jurassic Park: The Lost World released: "The teaser trailer, which debuted on December 13 at forty locations in the United States and two in Toronto, Canada, is driven by a modified DTS that activated six stategically placed strobe lights employed to comlement the images that appear on the screen. Using DTS technology, the timing for the strobe lights is encoded into the trailer's print, which is synched to the highly reliable DTS CD-ROM system. Audiences viewing the teaser trailer feel as if they are caught in a rainstorm complete with life-like sound and lightning provided by the strobe lights." (press release from DTS).


I will never forget it. People were going to Norhpark 1 and 2 (Dallas) to just witness this trailer. It sounded amazing and the strobe lights were very cool. (I wish that effect had caught on).

 

[SteveJKo]

That was a fantastic trailer. Course it makes sense that a film done in the style of the 50's would have a trailer with the same sense of style. And notice how we are NOT told everything about the charachters in those two and a half minutes.

 

[Michael Martin]

There are movies I watch with my brain "turned off", but it's not my preferred mental state for cinema. I've talked with too many people, though, who don't give films a second thought beyond thinking an effect was cool or an actor is attractive. The woman who cuts my hair is a perfect example: very nice person, great moral character...but is a Hollywood marketing director's wet dream, especially for chick flicks. Anything that's "cute" or "funny" (read: tired, overdone schticks and jokes), she tends to really like.

I don't mean to sound like an elitst, because I sure have some guilty pleasures (I actually OWN Hudson Hawk on DVD), but I also prefer well-done stories with thought and passion.

 

[Shad R]

BRIAN! Good news, it was. I saw it in the theater, I think before Hitch. My favorite line was something like "with a voice that sounds like a man who's been smoking since he was a child." I saw that, it was funny.

 

[EricW]

my fave trailers:

-Blades I and II
-Sleepy Hollow
-Strange Days
-Dude Where's My Car?
-Matrix II and III
-the Cell
-Kill Bill
-Snatch
-What Planet Are You From? (one of the FUNNIEST trailers ever )

all the LotR trailers were pretty bad for some reason. maybe because they didn't resort to mtv editting/style. still, you can do a good trailer without that.

 

[DavidPla]

Wow! I must totally disagree on that one. The final trailers for both Fellowship and Two Towers, I thought, were astounding as others have noted. Especially with their choice of music for the last half of the trailer (Gothic Power and the re-done "Requiem for a Dream" theme, respectively)

 

[Chuck Mayer]

The very first Lord of the Rings teaser (released early 2001) was fantastic. Great music, great build-up, and then the Fellowship crossing over the screen. One of the best trailers ever made. Most of their trailers were decent, nothing special. But the TTT final (with RfD music) and the Trilogy trailer were awesome.

Take care,
Chuck

 

[Chris Will]

I love the new Superman Returns teaser. It had me from the first few notes of JW's classic score and then the Jorel voiceover; just perfect. I grew up on the Superman movies and the teaser made my heart pound. I still have it saved on my DVR and watch it all the time. I can't wait to se it next summer.

Even though it doesn't show much the teaser for The Da Vinci Code has me intrigued.

 

[Kirk Tsai]

I'm pretty sure I saw the worst trailer of 2005 a few days ago: Tristan and Isolde. Even though it doesn't have a bad voiceover, it still hit upon two cardinal sins in trailer making. First, it just about gives away most of the movie. Second, I think the last half of the trailer uses a song by Evanescence. I'm not entirely sure, but it's one of those pop songs on the radio. I do not hate or love the song on its own, but paired with these images, it surely is one of the most painfully wrenching moments in cinema this year.

 

[Kristian]

I totally agree about the Tristan and Isolde trailer. I saw it in front of Syriana and the theater erupted with derisive laughter when it was all over. Whose idea was it to pair that pop song with a movie set in this time period?

Another recent ridiculous trailer I saw was Hoot. Really bad acting and some cheesy plot about saving owls.