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?
Carancho Trailer
Ricardo Darin gets a pass from me simply because of The Secret in Their Eyes. A taut thriller that didn't relent, that film was deserving of the accolades it received and I only wish it was seen by more people. Carancho looks like it's going to deliver simply based on the trailer but, again, it's Darin who seems to carry the heft of the weight in this thing and here's to hoping second time's a charm for people to see how this guy can work.
What's here in this trailer, mind you, is a collection of moments that don't really seem to make much sense but the opening is about as much information as you'll need, or get, to carry you through the end. Besides the obligatory Cannes declaration, the way it touts its inclusion into that festival, the initial interstitial simply tells us that this is probably going to be about crooked lawyers. A trope we've seen before many times over thanks to the milquetoast musings of John Grisham, this story seems to be infused with a little something special, something unique. It does not disappoint.
The trailer juxtaposes Darin, who gets his face used as a human meat tenderizer at every turn, against a quite weary doctor just trying to eek out an existence of helping those who come into her ER. Of course, the doctor is all kinds of hot and Darin is a man who lets his mouth do the talking and is not above paying a visit to the bald man in the canoe, a couple of times actually, with this lady but what's interesting here besides how fast we move from niceties to cunnilingus is that we aren't given any structure whatsoever. He's crooked, she's smokin', he's packing heat, she looks caught in his world and gets getting roughed up because of it, and he gets all kinds of angry.
At about the minute, forty second mark he barges in an office and smacks some guy with a metal drawer. It's pretty exciting, actually, and the music is perfectly situated behind the breakdown of events that happen all around them. The actual structure of this trailer is one of a gently sloping hill that careens downward with no stop until the very end.
Director Pablo Trapero, who is probably best known in these parts for his excellent film Lion's Den, looks like he's bringing the same kind of marriage between violence and humanity together in one package and this trailer mixes together these ideas in a way that is both maddening, loving, and awesomely sexual.
Ride, Rise, Roar Trailer
If you ask me, if you're going to choreograph "Burning Down the House" on stage at least some part has to incorporate the fireball. You can't have House without the fireball and that's all there is to it.
When you think of musicians who no longer really consider themselves as such, people who have instead taken on world hunger or dedicated themselves to championing bean curd as the food staple which will bring peace to the Mideast, those paragons of peace who while the day away based on any whim they have I usually think of Peter Gabriel and David Byrne. Both these gentleman are probably really fun to have at parties but I miss when they were making music that mattered. This trailer, though, gives me hope there's some life to Byrne and his br
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