Friday PREview REview

How'd you get behind me so fast? Say hi to your mother for me.

I thought I'd try something new. So I thought I'd start reviewing movie trailers, remember this isn't a review for the movie itself. It's a review on how clear and enticing the trailer is on provoking interest in the  film, or how deceptive it is on luring you into watching crap. 

Some new trailers were released this week. Lets start with the good. The trailer for "The Fighter" coming out December 10th.

Good cast, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, and Marky Mark even seems to land his role decently.

Clear outline of the character's goal and struggle to achieve it.  Making something of himself as a boxer.

Clear opposition of the goal. What he'll have to become in order to reach the top, a sell out.

Nice display of subtext displaying a possible moral/message behind the story simply put with Wahlberg's line "I'm the one fighting, not you, not you, and not you".

It's hard to see what the possible subplot would be, there's some indication that it focuses on the brother (Bale) or the entire family as a whole. But that's what's good about this trailer, it's not overcrowded with the mentionings of subplots, it's clear and precise on what to expect from the movie, and if a trailer can be clear and honest while leaving you wanting more, than you know you'll get your money's worth come December.

Now the bad, and this one hurts for me to say. Clint Eastwood's "Hereafter".

The only good thing I picked up from this is that it's Clint Eastwood's and that it stars Matt Damon, but to me it seems just from watching two and a half minutes, that Damon just can't fit into this role.

The trailer is clear about the characters struggle to hide from his past or from his proposed ability/curse to communicate with dead people. But what the hell is the plot? He just walks around telling people he's not a psychic anymore.

Then the epic music ignites with scenes of disaster implying potential character deaths, and confirmed character deaths, always a no-no. Don't lead me to believe, and for god sakes don't flat out tell me that character is gonna die, no matter how small the role. Between character kill-offs we see a character crying, and then another, but we don't quite know why and the ambiguously, out-of-context, lines of dialog say nothing. Ok we get it, this movie is dramatic and it's about death. OOOOOOHHHHH! I'M SO INTRIGUED!

Clearly this is a character driven plot, but this movie does have a physical plot in there somewhere and we need to see what it is so that we know WHY we have to care about Damon's character.

The main thing that is clear about this trailer is that they just threw something together because they're clearly just trying to ride on the coat tails of Eastwood and Damon's names to be enough to sell the movie. I hope the same effort didn't go into the actual production of the film.

I will say that I thought something similar about Gran Tarino's trailer, and that film blew me away, so maybe trailers just aren't Eastwood's forte.