HAIRSHIRT
Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery
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HAIRSHIRT Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery |
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Sunday, June 11, 2006Trailer Trash I find myself in the rather awkward position of actually wanting to see an Anne Hathaway movie. This leaves me feeling a little unsure of myself, because I'm not really the sort of person who takes a look at a picture like the one to the left and thinks, "Wow, that is an actress whose work I know I'm going to love." I have never, with the sole exception of Brokeback Mountain, seen an Anne Hathaway flick. I realize that this may shock some people, because, really, didn't most guys in their mid-thirties rush out on opening weekend of Princess Diaries II: The Quickening? But no, I have never seen any of her films (again, with the exception of the gay cowboy Oscar-bait film, in which I thought she was serviceable, if not quite as convincing as Michele Williams). Anyway, I find myself in this strange place because I saw two--count 'em, two--movies today. I won't go into detail about which movies, cause it's not important. I'll just say that neither of them sucked as badly as people had led me to believe, and so I was pleasantly surprised both times. I'll also just quickly mention that one of these movies led me to question just how the fuck Halle Berry ever won an Academy Award. Seriously: how? So before both of these movies, I was shown a trailer for Anne Hathaway's new movie, The Devil Wears Prada. Now, I read Entertainment Weekly. I have an awareness of this project and I know that it has fuck-all to do with anything in which I'm even remotely interested. And yet...here I am, intrigued. I'm intrigued because the trailer is so very, very different from every other trailer I've seen in recent memory. My problem with the modern movie trailer is the need these marketing fuckheads have to give away the entire story in two-and-a-half minutes. They don't want the audience to be in any way, shape or form surprised when they actually see the damn film, lest they get all scared. It's like the mama bird chewing the worm up and then puking it into the mouths of her children. Okay, maybe it's not exactly like that, but I like the analogy and I'm sticking to it. For me, the epitome of this problem was the Matthew McConaughey/J-Lo debacle, The Wedding Planner. Now, I doubt this movie could have held the least tiny little shock to a retarded caveman in the first place. But they went so very, very far to make sure that every little bit of the plot was given away before anybody saw the goddamn thing that they took trailers to a whole new ridiculous level. We get the whole basic story, "She's a workaholic with no social life, he's an easy going hunk, they meet and fall in love, but she's planning his wedding." But then they go that extra step and actually show us McConaughey searching desperately for her, running into her dad (played by Alex Rocco, in a role I really hope he regrets), who tells her, "What are you waiting around here for? Go get her!" I suppose we should all be glad that they showed enough in the fucking trailer that nobody had to go see the fucking thing. What the people behind The Devil Wears Prada have done is to go to the other extreme. They simply show a scene. A full scene. From the movie. No hyper editing. No needle-scratch sound effects. No "In a world gone mad...one woman..." Nope. They just showed a scene, featuring the excellent timing of Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci. They didn't give away every joke in the fucking thing. They didn't tailor edit it for the target demographic. They just showed a fucking scene. And for that reason alone, I intend to go see that movie. I'm just going to make sure I take my wife, 'cause it's not the kind of movie I'd want to be seen watching alone. No es macho.
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