The Year in Trailer Trash: 2011

Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be posting a series of “2011 in review” posts. This is because I write about movies, and the gods of movie blogging long ago decreed that at the end of each year, such pieces must be produced. The bests and worsts will be coming later, but I have decided to begin with a look back at the year that was in trailers. Through my Trailer Trash feature, I have made it my quest to keep an eye out on the latest previews and judge how effective they are as advertisements and teases for the movies they represent. It has all led up to this. I am now proud to present to you: the year in Trailer Trash.

Note #1: To view the trailers, click on the associated links.

Note #2: Some of these trailers are for 2012 movies. I’m basing this on trailers I saw this year.

The Best

This was, more or less, a year where most movie trailers seemed to be cut from the same cloth. The only previews that truly stand out to me anymore are ones that break the pre-determined formula that has been used again and again. One of the more obvious examples of a 2011 trailer that dared to be a bit different was the initial red band teaser trailer for David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which was little more than a series of context-free shots set to a rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and sung by Karen O. It worked because it felt different from most trailers while still giving you an idea of the film’s dark tone. The tagline (“The feel bad movie of Christmas!”) doesn’t really work, but as a neat, oppressive teaser it was pretty darn terrific. Unfortunately, this red band version never got a sanctioned Internet release—all the press it got was via an online bootleg—and we were forced to make do with a far less impactful green band teaser that mostly consisted of characters staring at each other. The red band version gave us glimpses into the film’s violence, but the green band does little to communicate the tone the film is going for. I write this just hours before I will be seeing Fincher’s film itself, but if it returns to the Se7en-esque style that’s promised here I will be very pleased indeed.

However, the trailer that gave me the most joy this year is likely the preview for J.J. Abrams’ Super 8, which promised more than the film itself could probably ever hope to deliver. (That said, Super 8 is pretty terrific. Just not as terrific as it could have been.) Like the movie, the trailer pays homage to the Spielberg films of the '70s and '80s, but it does so in such a way that there seems to be a great deal of mystery to be unraveled beneath the surface. Throw in the wonderfully cinematic look of the movie—along with the wonderful use of music from Cocoon—and you have a trailer that had me salivating every last time I saw it. At its best, Super 8 was incredibly successful at pulling this off. It didn’t quite stick the landing, but whatever. The first 75% of the film gave me as much pleasure as any other film that came out this year.

One last honorable mention before I move on to other trailer-related business: while I had heard great things about Martha Marcy May Marlene coming out of Sundance, the trailer is what convinced me that this would be a film that was right up my alley. (Of course, this hunch was proven when I finally got around to seeing the movie.) I think it’s a powerful little two-minute advertisement, so I’ll throw it in as one of the best trailers of the year. Also, I couldn’t think of another one to put here. Very few previews stood out to me this year in a good way. What about in a bad way? Well, on to that then…

The Worst

Of all the bad trailers that came out this year—and there were several—none stood out to me quite like The Last Godfather, a slapstick comedy about a small Asian man who is apparently the son of Mafioso Harvey Keitel. (Reminder: this man was in Mean Streets and Pulp Fiction.) The preview suggests that this man (played by Hyung-rae Shim, who also wrote and directed) is chosen by Keitel to be the next leader of the family. I’m not entirely sure, as I haven’t actually seen the movie itself. But you can watch it on YouTube for $3.99! Not until the recent release of the trailer for the Farrellys’ The Three Stooges did I think a film could be so intent on scraping the bottom of the comedy barrel. These two trailers go by the philosophy that silliness itself is inherently hilarious, but it takes a little bit more to win over modern audiences. At least in an ideal world. But The Last Godfather seems an especially strange case; a film that executes its physical comedy so poorly that I kind of want to see it. And knowing myself, this morbid curiosity may one day get the best of me.

Now, on to two bad trailers for two bad movies that I actually saw and can judge fairly. First up: Abduction, the Twilight-meets-Bourne atrocity that you didn’t know you wanted. Clearly a half-baked attempt to capitalize on Taylor Lautner’s recent popularity, Abduction is two hours of cringe-inducing attempts at pandering to preteen audiences. How else can you describe the clunky references to social media, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber? (At one point, the villain even threatens to kill all of Lautner’s Facebook friends. For real.) The trailer actually finds a way to take this already-dumb premise and strip all intelligence away from it even further, all while we get a nice long look at Lautner’s one facial expression that he wears the entire movie. When John Singleton’s name shows up onscreen during the trailer, it only makes the whole existence of Abduction more depressing.

My final “worst” selection for 2011 is the trailer for Jack & Jill, which, yeah. This should go without saying.

Other Distinctions:

Bad Trailers for Good Movies

When watching a trailer, it is important to remember that it’s not always going to do justice to the film it’s representing. This was the case several times this year, including two rather strong films that had pretty weak previews. For one, there was Rise of the Planet of the Apes, a trailer which relied far too heavily on the uninteresting human characters. It opted to completely hide the rather touching Caesar storyline at its center and instead advertised a lame “humans vs. apes” battle that is far less interesting. The film itself wasn’t perfect, but this trailer doesn’t do justice to all that Rise of the Planet of the Apes does well. Also, advertising WETA Digital over the actors and filmmakers seemed like they were overcompensating for a weak final product.

I was never particularly worried about Martin Scorsese’s Hugo—mostly because of the “Martin Scorsese” part of the equation—but I must say the initial trailer did initially cause me to scratch my head. The problem is that it didn’t promise that Scorsese did anything new with the genre of the 3-D family adventure; it seemed like he just made another one that happened to feature Sacha Baron Cohen falling into a cake. Admittedly, it’d be difficult to effectively advertise the love letter to film that Hugo actually was, but this trailer swung and missed in its attempt to appeal to the broadest possible audience. It did nothing to stand out from the pack, unlike the film itself. 

Good Trailers for Bad Movies

While the above trailers did their respective films a disservice, there were a few films this year that got me into the theater simply because I was impressed with the advertising. (After all, that’s what it’s there for.) In a few cases, the movies let me down quite a bit. This was never more true than when I sat down to watch Rubber, a nasty, self-indulgent and ultimately self-congratulatory film about a sentient tire that makes peoples’ heads explode. Yup, you read that right. The film might have been good if it was half as wonderfully wacky as the trailer, which has fun with its silliness without ever making the audience suffer for it. There was a fun B-movie to be made here. The trailer knows that. Quentin Dupieux, the film’s writer/director, chose precisely the wrong direction to go.

One of the year’s most incredible feats of advertising is the trailer for Battle: Los Angeles, which promised a different, darker and more emotionally affecting take on the alien invasion film. Unfortunately, the only way the film was different from others is that it was louder and more confusing than most. It’s a shame, but at least we have this neat 2-minute video clip to appreciate and bemoan what could have been. This preview took an incredibly bland and shout-y film and made it look like something I really, really wanted to see.

At the beginning of the year, there were few movies I was less excited for than Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Against every odd in the universe, the film’s trailer actually got me slightly interested in what the film had to offer. The final product was weak—fool me twice, shame on me—but this trailer seemed to promise a slightly more palatable and exciting film than the horror that was Revenge of the Fallen. Unfortunately, the people editing the trailers did a better job at the making the action pop than Michael Bay did throughout the entire movie. The one exception is the skydiving sequence, which looked stunning in 3-D. Everything else was just clutter.

Least Gratifying Trailer of the Year

This summer, with the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, audiences across the country got to see a teaser for the most universally-anticipated movie in years: Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. The problem? There wasn’t a whole lot to see. All we were awarded was a shot of Gary Oldman in a hospital bed and some footage from Nolan’s previous Batman films. The teaser served little purpose besides letting us know that The Dark Knight Rises exists. Well, thanks for that. Not until this week (with the release of a new, much better trailer) did we see anything really worthwhile. The teaser was just sloppy, rushed and unfulfilling.

“Déjà vu” Trailers of the Year

It’s no secret that Hollywood is pretty darn repetitive these days, but this trend is reaching new heights with the release of next year’s The Amazing Spider-man. Look: I like every last person involved with this movie, and I generally liked the previous Spider-man movies. But when you give us a brand new origin story not even a decade after the initial series ended, there’s something wrong with this picture. This trailer doesn’t even really try to hide just how redundant this whole thing is. It’s one thing to make a new Spider-man movie with a brand new cast—I probably wouldn’t have much of a problem with that—but it takes some cajones to make us sit through the same darn origin story for a second time.

Much was said and written about how The Hangover: Part II was just a re-hash of the original, only this time it was set in Bangkok. I mean, they even had to leave Doug behind again, because God forbid they try and write a new screenplay with brand new nouns and verbs and everything. This trailer feels like it’s advertising a remake of The Hangover, except for the fact that it’s actually a sequel. Which is supposed to, you know, advance the characters and stuff. It’s easy to crap on a film like The Amazing Spider-Man for simply re-doing what was done before, but it’s ultimately no more lazy than this film.

“Why Buy the Cow…” Trailers of the Year

Let’s face it, folks. Times are tight. Not everyone wants to spend $10 to go to the movie theater every week. That’s why modern movie trailers feel the need to pull out all the stops to get people to line up and buy a ticket. As a result, more and more trailers are just flat-out giving away the plots of their movies, including major twists and turns along the way. While what is revealed in the Contagion trailer comes very early in the film, imagine how wonderfully shocking the experience would have been if we sat down and watched the movie not knowing what was coming? This reveal ruined a key moment for audiences across the globe. Major twists are also revealed in the trailers for Dream House and The Double, and in the latter case what is revealed is actually quite baffling. Who decides it’s a good idea to give these moments away? If I were a filmmaker, I’d be furious.

An honorable mention: while the trailer for Drive doesn’t necessarily go overboard with plot reveals, it still winds up being little more than a visual synopsis of the film’s events. Viewer beware.

Best Use of Nicolas Cage’s Urine

If you’re going to take a second crack at the Ghost Rider franchise, might as well hand the controls over to Neveldine/Taylor, the directing team behind such prestigious art films as Crank, Crank: High Voltage and Gamer. We’ll have to wait and see the final result with Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, but in the meantime we have this really fun trailer that promises a joyously energetic take on the comic book antihero. Plus, it ends with Nicolas Cage peeing fire. That’ll get your attention.

Oscar, Please!

Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar wound up being little more than disorganized Oscar bait, and that is more or less what was advertised in this really self-serious trailer. I knew when I saw it the film could wind up being great, or it could just be a really frustrating case of a biopic settling for just telling the superficial story of a historical figure. Unfortunately, it was the latter. (Plus, aging makeup. Lots and lots of aging makeup.) Another trailer that seems to be battling for the Oscar gold is that of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s book that is actually quite good. The trailer, sadly, is promising a Hollywood-ized version of the story that really shoves the whole 9/11 thing in our faces. Which, yeah, that’s not what I was hoping for. Based on this trailer—and the murmurings of some critics on Twitter who have seen it—Extremely Loud seems like it completely left out the weirder elements that made the book great and focuses on just making it a shallow tear-fest. Sigh.

Most Colorful

When I watched the trailer for The Lorax, I was struck by just how bright and colorful it all seemed. So I made this category for you all to see what I’m talking about. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a world I’d like to live in. Plus, it rains marshmallows. That’s always nice.

Biggest Potential Disaster

Not long ago, in a Trailer Trash post, I wrote about how Disney’s John Carter seems like it could potentially be a $250 million bomb that proves disastrous everyone involved. I do hope that’s not the case—this was directed by Pixar vet Andrew Stanton—but this trailer for John Carter doesn’t do much to convince me otherwise. Nothing here seems to be original enough to justify the scale, the hero’s only real power seems to be that he can jump real high, and it isn’t exactly based on the most popular of source material. The Dark Knight Rises cost $250 million because it’s, well, The Dark Knight Rises. I can’t think of a good reason why Disney decided to throw such a huge sum at John Carter. Let’s all pray that I’m wrong, but boy. Right now it doesn’t look too good.

Thanks for reading, folks! Stay tuned for more posts on the year in film as we movie forward.