Because you, for some reason, singled out the trailer folks as packaging up the movie as a product, as if what you see, or don’t see, and how much, and when in a movie isn’t already being mitigated by a ton of commercial interests.
The three best animated films of the past year – How to Train Your Dragon, The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs – had not-so-great trailers.
Like if anybody needs a trailer in order to go see a Wes Anderson movie.
Seriously though, I thought How to Train Your Dragon’s trailer was ok.
Some movie trailers reveal so much of the movie story and plot that they save me $12.
I still disagree with this. The condensed nature of a trailer tends to make everything in a movie look obvious and formulaic and it removes all subtlety, nuance, flavor. A great short film is a great short film, but that’s not when you get when you stuff 90 minutes of footage into a compressor and spit out 3. You get a sort of weird artificial distillation.
Trailers can be fantastic, when they are meant to tease/evoke/entice etc, and particularly when they are originally conceived and shot. Very few, especially nowadays, even attempt to do that.
Huh. I never really thought about not watching trailers. I wouldn’t know about most movies if there weren’t trailers for them. It’s not like I seek them out. Sure, it’s a bummer when all the best jokes in a comedy are spoiled by the trailer, but at least I can get a taste for if I’ll like it or not.
I won’t buy a book without reading a few pages first to see if I care for the style. I suppose the same goes for movies.
Now, if I know in advance that I’m going to go see a specific movie and don’t want anything spoiled (maybe a new Star Trek comes out, or whatever), then yeah, I’ll avoid the trailers…but that’s a pretty rare event.
I love The Ultimate Trailer Show on HDNET. I’ll watch it whenever it’s on.
I thought this is a thread about trailers. Checking the subject header, it seems I was right.
Wait, you think I didn’t know that? Dude, what kind of rube do you take me for?
I don’t watch trailers because it’s not the way the director intended me to experience what he’s created. They’re advertisements that have no compunction about misrepresenting and even compromising the experience. Here’s another shocker: I don’t read the backs of book covers either!
The bottom line is that I don’t really need entertainment sold to me. I have my own very particular and reliable channels to determine what movies I watch, what books I read, what games I play, and what TV shows I keep up with. I am a marketers worst nightmare! Ph33r me!
-Tom
Well, you basically say bad trailers are bad.
The sad thing is that bad trailers are really better than the movies, very often.
Scourge, I don’t want to put words in Gordo’s mouth, but I think you’re missing his point. Trailers are a very different form of expression than actual movies. As such, a successful trailer is very different from a successful movie.
Also, you seem to think trailers are created by the people who made the film. They almost always aren’t. This is because, as Gordon says, what it takes to make an actual movie isn’t at all what it takes to make a trailer.
BTW, I hated Dinner for Schmucks, the movie. I love the trailer. “He’s eating paper!”
And out of curiosity, what do you guys think makes a bad trailers? What are some examples?
-TomThose channels failed to get you to watch The Wire. Your friends are suspect.
Dude people told him about the Wire. I’m pretty sure he’s already watched it and just likes pretending he hasn’t seen it.
I’m a product of the MTV generation. 3 minutes, no mas! I like the idea that a movie has to “sell me” the idea. I’ll listen to your elevator pitch, prove to me that you’re worth it.
Having said that I also like going into movies knowing only that there’s some positive buzz going around. If I saw the trailer of From Dusk Till Down before watching it wouldn’t have been such a memorable cinema moment for me. That kind of scenario rarely happens though.
Yeah, I’ve seen The Wire. It’s that documentary about the French dude that walks on that tight rope between the Twin Towers.
-TomNo worries, that’s the same wavelength as mine. But I take another step forward: I’ve learnt to appreciate “bad” trailers for their supremacy over those even worse movies originating them.
Oh, and I have a healthy disrespect for studio governed cinema. If your movie is fucked up by someone else in its trailer, this is your fault for doing movies for them in the first place…
Exactly my point. Trailers > movies. Almost always. That’s also quite logical, considering it is much easier to produce 2 minutes worth watching compared to, say, 90 minutes.
There are really only 3 kinds of bad trailers:
- trailers giving away key story development (recent example: The Switch)
- boring crap (recent example: The Social Network)
- trailers made by people who know nothing about how to make a trailer, these include badly chosen & edited stuff and misrepresenting trailers (recent example: The A-team)
See, I saw that trailer and it seemed like a classic “Great for a sketch, terrible stretched out to movie length” job.
And out of curiosity, what do you guys think makes a bad trailers? What are some examples?
-Tom
A trailer should be its own mini-movie. It may not be subtle, it may be a movie about going to see a movie, but it should still have good pacing, good editing, good music.
The worst video I can remember was for a Ben Stiller/Jack Black movie called Envy. It took an enormous amount of time (relative to the overall length of the trailer) to get to the real meat of the plot, it’s deadly unfunny, there’s no rhythm, no energy, no “peak moment(s)”, the music feels like cheap temp work, and the ending of the trailer is just random.
Ooh, and here it is. Just lousy.
Trailers are a lose/lose situation for me. If it’s a good film, I want to discover it as it is happening. I want it to unfold as the filmmakers intended. The trailer spoils that sense of discovery. If it’s a bad movie, the trailer is going to ruin the few moments I might have enjoyed. Case in point…2012. Horrible movie, but I at least got a couple of bits of eye candy. Watching the trailer would have ruined even those minor thrills.
I want to give the director/filmmakers the opportunity to wow me out of the gate. Not the marketing people. Their job is another job entirely, god love em. (Listen to the Fincher/Pitt commentary on Se7en to get where I’m coming from on this.)
Also, that record-scratch sound effect every trailer uses to bring the trailer to a halt and make us laugh is a gag I can do without pretty much for the rest of my life.
-xtien
“Remember my voice? I do trailers. All kinds of trailers. One day they’ll put me in a film…”
I’d rather not see the entire movie in a 30-second clip.
Maybe I wouldn’t if I COULD SKIP THEM ON THE MOTHERFUCKING DVD.
I don’t seek them out. The very best way to find a good movie is to simply stumble across it, perhaps on Netflix Watch Instantly or in a bargain bin or something. Failing that, reviews are often helpful for cluing me in as to the existence of movies I may find interesting.
But I go to movies in the theater fairly often and they’re right there in front, and if I’m not there for them then chances are I will wind up missing actual movie content, which is bad. So I wind up seeing them anyway. Just like the stupid goddamn ads for completely unrelated bullshit.
I can usually spot in a trailer where they added stuff from the ending - and they pretty much always does this, giving a hell-uva-lot away, especially when you are seeing the movie itself and remembering the trailer and the end bits.
Other than that, trailers are often misrepresenting the movie to give the most popular-of-the-times bits away to represent the movie in a certain light.
A good example was the Armagaddon movie and Deep Impact. Both had trailers where there was space scenes, giant meteors, explosions, basically action stuff. That meant, whenI went to see Deep Impact, I remember people talking about it on the way out saying stuff like “Man this was boring, I cant wait to see armageddon instead”. Those were two very different movies, represented in the same way in the trailers, giving wrong impressions and set-up.