The last movie trailer
I spent any time thinking about was for
Lakeview Terrace, and I only thought about it since the trailer was actively unpleasant and made the movie look even worse. That movie came and (mercifully)
went without much
of a ripple, and now I've seen a new trailer that might have been even worse. But it's for a much higher profile film that will probably not vanish so swiftly into the night.
Well, let me amend that. The trailer isn't so bad; it's the movie that it makes look awful. Boring, suffocating, monothematic, depressing, and just generally unpleasant and fairly bereft of redeeming qualities. Though it did spur one good joke when I was forced to endure it while waiting to see
Milk earlier this week.
The
trailer is for the new Leo and Kate movie, the ironically-named
Revolutionary Road. I'd heard of the film since it's the first to reunite the Titanic leads, (who I'm calling by their first names since I can't be bothered looking up how to spell "DeCaprio") but knew nothing about it other than that it was one of those small, artsy, intense, character-driven films that exist primarily to keep hit films from ever winning any Academy Award nominations. I still don't know much about it; there was a feature on it in a recent Entertainment Weakly, but I only glanced through it since the recycling bin needed topping off. What I can tell from the trailer is that it's set in the 50s. Kate and Leo get married, and he's been traveling a lot. Maybe in WWII; hard to tell. He has one scene where he raves about Paris and how much he wants to go back there since "people there are
alive!"
European vacations go to the back burner though, since he and Kate get married and settle down in some Middle America type place with white picket fences and sunny kitchens and neatly-trimmed yards. Leo enters the rat race, signified by numerous scenes of him riding a train to some big city, in his Ward Cleaver type hat/coat/tie/suit costume. Kate does domestic stuff, baking pies, washing clothing, vacuuming, etc. And over these scenes of domestic ordinariness, there's depressing music constant dialogue about how they're not going to fall into a rut like everyone else, and how they want to be different, and how their lives are going to mean something. And Leo whines about how he works 10 hours a day at a job he hates, and Kate whines about how bored she is at home, etc.
And that's the whole trailer. You get 2.5 minutes of that. It's unrelieved, except by the increasingly-anguished voice over dialogue of the despairing characters, and by the depressing background music rising to new heights of clashing discordance. I spent the whole trailer waiting for something to happen. So do they break out of their joyless, soul-sucking existence? Transgress societal norms in some major way? Move to Paris? Kill each other? Apparently not, or at least the trailer never hints at that. Just how bored and unhappy they are, trapped in lives not unlike those of most of the potential audience.
As I wondered about
Lakeview Terrace... who is this movie targeted to? Do bored, trapped suburbanites really want to see a movie about people just like them, who are unable to sublimate their misery beneath new flat screen TVs and golden retrievers? There's nothing in the movie to interest action movie fans, or teens (Leo was a heartthrob an eternity ago in Internet time; people under 16 have no idea who he or Kate Winslet are), there's no love story or adventure, there's no witty dialogue or excitement... I honestly have no idea who would want to see this movie based on the trailer, other than film nuts who like every movie, or people who really enjoy acting-heavy dramas. Who make up about .001% of the film going public, these days.
I don't make movies. I write. And I know, from research and experience, that there's a very fine line between writing about characters who are bored and imparting/impacting the reader with that, and boring the reader with a bored character in a boring scene. This trailer crosses way, way over that line, and then never even bothers pretending that it's going to come back to the fun side. Even if the whole movie is like that, it's crazy to make the trailer emphasize it so much. Who wants to subject themselves to 2 hours of that? Not me, clearly.
Oh, I almost forgot. The one redeeming aspect of the trailer was that after 2 minutes of yawning and fidgeting through it, my date mumbled something about it looking depressing, to which I replied, "Yeah, they look really unhappy. They should take a nice cruise. That would cheer them up." I was amused by that, at least. She didn't laugh though, which is just a symptom of various underlying reasons I think that was our last date.
Labels: movie trailers
