Editor's Note: This is the first of a weekly column by Christopher Stipp, an online film journalist who also writes for Quick Stop Entertainment. At /Film, we love trailers and write them about them frequently, but it's sometimes impossible to cover every trailer that comes out. Starting today, "This Week in Trailers" will be your comprehensive guide for all the trailers that have been released in the past week or two, with a special focus on trailers that we were unable to cover. Christopher has been writing about trailers and covering other aspects of the movie industry for over five years. For my money, he's one of the best internet writers I know. I hope you guys will agree and that you'll give him a warm /Film welcome in the comments.
Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they're seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: I celebrate all levels of trailers and hopefully this column will satisfactorily give you a baseline of what beta wave I'm operating on, because what better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising? Some of the best authors will tell you that writing a short story is a lot harder than writing a long one, that you have to weigh every sentence. What better medium to see how this theory plays itself out beyond that than with movie trailers?
Me and Orson Welles Trailer
I mean, who here doesn't want the heir apparent to Leonardo DiCaprio and, subsequently, and additionally, DiCaprio's poon tractor beam, to succeed in this business? Those of you who genuinely saw through the preciousness of Efron's performance in High School Musical 3 should agree that the man can carry a tune, is genuinely charismatic on the screen and is an acceptable option to the answer of, "If you were gay, but I know you're not, but if had a gun to your head and HAD to kiss a dude…" He's more than deserving to go on and be fruitful in this most superficial of businesses. But I just can't feel positive toward this teaser.
Actor Zac Efron is playing what looks like…Zac Efron. Additionally, we start with an awkward moment between the man boy and Claire Danes. The exchange feels as if he already knows how great and influential he'll be and it all seems like an exercise in time travel. The discussion between the two is excruciatingly hokey and if this movie is really trying to play it straight it is not starting off the way a teaser should.
On top of this you have the tired, busted, hackneyed soundtrack from the Now That's What Granny Calls Music: The 1930's.The clips of Efron scraping out a living on the mean streets are equally sterile and devoid of real emotion. The scenes are so crisp, so well lit that I'm not sure if this is a movie or a new production of Newsies. And that's when I see it: the quote from Roger Ebert. When he calls this film "possibly the best movie about the theater" he's ever seen gives me pause. Is he serious? Did Michael Jackson's doctor, Steven Hoefflin, get access to our beloved critic and pump him with a little bit of "milk?" The dialogue used to help show how great the movie is woefully lacks any substance and the clips stitched together here only prove that this seems much like any other period piece.
If there's something worth getting excited about, someone left it out of the teaser.
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Trailer
There is terrible and then there is Clarence the barber from Coming to America, "good and terrible." This is Randy Watson, Sexual Chocolate, good and terrible. I would dare assert that anyone who believes this looks like a film worthy of their time and money need to give it to me because you shouldn't be allowed to manage either.
This trailer celebrates the kind of douchery that is only allowed in the discos where Axe body sprayed, blonde himbos rocking their Affliction t-shirts or tan body paste guidos that could impale spits of raw beef in their jet black spiky hair exist. The rest of us love to loathe that these Lotharios end up with the kind of trim our anti-hero Tucker Max is out hunting in the opening sequence of the trailer. I understand clearly that no woman likes him, that he's out to satisfy his own carnal cravings and I bet he's the one who ends up with all t
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