Lately I've been fretting a lot about movie trailers, probably because I've got two films hitting theatres this Fall (Defiance and We Pedal Uphill) and I've come to learn (the hard way) just how important a trailer (and ad campaign) can be in positioning a film in the consciousness of a potential audience.
There've been a few times when a trailer was so misleading that it caused me to make certain assumptions about a given movie that kept me away from the theatre. In a few cases, I was lucky enough to have been dragged to see the films in question in spite of my bias against them and occasionally I found myself downright stunned at the utter disconnect between the film I'd just seen and the trailer I remembered.
Here's my list of 5 of the most blatant examples of Trailer-Movie Disconnect (from recent memory):
1. Party Girl (1995). This Parker Posey vehicle is not only charming, it's surprisingly clever. But the trailer was apparently hatched out of some scheme to trick teenage girls into thinking this movie was for them. If like me, you avoided this film like the plague, thinking it would be Animal House meets Breakfast at Tiffany's, you're wrong and you should reconsider. It's really great.
2. The Clearing (2004) This trailer feels as though the film is an apologia for extremely wealthy corporate titans. I actually recall audible hissing in the theatre when I first saw it. (I must have been in San Francisco at the time) The trailer pitches the film as a moral thriller, urging the viewer to shake his/her head in disgust at the unthinkable evil of a kidnapping a rich CEO. In reality, the film is far more nuanced and doesn't offer pat answers to impossible sociological questions. Instead, the film plays like a psychological cat and mouse between its two lead actors and leaves the larger moral questions open-ended in a thrilling and unexpected way.
3. Infamous (2006) The "other" Truman Capote movie. Although this one came out later, its script came first and was far more complex than its award-winning step-sibling, Capote. You'd never know it from the trailer, which, with its adrenaline-pumping music and rapid-fire use of sound bites reduces some nuanced and remarkably authentic performances into tabloid silliness. As if that weren't bad enough, someone decided that the following tag line would lay to rest any assumptions that Infamous was a rip-off of Capote (which it certainly was not). The trailer ends with this title card: "There is more to the story than you know."
4. My Architect (2003) This trailer is ponderous, pretentious and self-consciously cerebral and I remember it eliciting huge guffaws from a New York audience at the Village East when I first saw it. With its lingering shots of corners of buildings, even a bird perched on a slab of concrete, it almost feels like a Saturday Night Live parody of an Art film trailer. Too bad because the actual film is surprisingly moving and forthright and very personal. Not pretentious at all.
5. Rendition (2007) This film is so much more compelling than its trailer would have you guess. With jump cuts of violence and techno-inspired underscoring, hints of pornographic use of torture and a nod to Norma Rae, this trailer left me convinced that this would be yet another "High Concept" horror. Not so. The actual film has some winning performances and intelligent believable dialogue. Rent it. I did.
