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?
Dreams of a Life Trailer
File this under the Unexpected pile.
It's not that you ever think you'll come across something so fundamentally different but when you're scouring the web for trailers you sometimes come across an item that defies classification. Now, a documentary about a missing person is something that isn't so novel but when you consider that filmmaker Carol Morely did what amounts to some forensic storytelling this is pretty fascinating. Fascinating as well as riveting when this trailer starts to unwind.
Never mind the details that this is going to tell the story of a woman who died in her apartment and, for three years, was left there to rot as the Christmas presents she was wrapping were still around her and as the television stayed on the same channel for 36 more months without interruption. Creepy as that is, the trailer takes a decidedly less macabre approach. Opting for a more CSI approach, or that other show on CBS where the cop sees dead people from various decades set to a pop classic from a specific era, using the reporter who wrote the initial story was a nice way to begin.
The approach pays off because it establishes that what we're talking about is real even though the reenactment is not. The emphasis on the details of what actually happened takes away from the unbelievability that a young woman could have died without so much as a phone call from a family member. We get to hear the stories of people around her and what they thought of the woman who would ultimately become a skeleton in her own house. It's an ipso facto project that you could not imagine making but the trailer does well in balancing the more skeevy details about what happened to her by giving us first hand accounts from people who knew her. It's sweet, in a way, to get this kind of perspective on a life but it's downright sad when you consider the interstitial that poses the question about what would happen if you died today and how long it would be until someone noticed.
It's a trailer that
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