My Top 10 Favorite Movie Trailers Part 2

Well, let's keep the countdown rolling! If you missed my last installment and explanation of my love for movie trailers, check out Part 1. Here we go!

#5

Movie trailers, like most forms of marketing, don't age well. Wanna play a fun game? Find a VHS of your favorite movie, put in the VCR, hit play, and cringe at how bad the trailers are. Or you could just look up my Seven Samurai example again. Be that as it may, some trailers are simply timeless. Casablanca is one such example. It's got everything: Nazis, African locals, black market deals, romance, and of course, Humphrey Bogart. It should also be pointed out that this was an "assembly line" film, meaning the studio only expected it to be popular enough to cover the cost of making it, which was not a lot. But because of an awesome trailer convincing World War II Americans to go see it, it's become a classic.

#4

I hate to stereotype my Hispanic film, but Desperado was kind of a big deal in our house. If someone was watching it in the family room (and it was always on either TBS, USA, or TNT), the rest of the family would inevitable pass through, stop what they're doing, and watch the rest of it. The first time my mom saw this trailer, she screamed to the rest of the house to hurry to the TV to watch it. We were crazy psyched. When it came out, we went to see it as a family. It was awesome.

#3

There's no dialogue in this trailer. If you didn't notice, let that sink in for a moment: a trailer without any dialogue to explain what the movie is about convinced people to go see what would become (and to many, like me, still is) the gold standard in science fiction horror films. This may not seem like a big deal if you've seen the original Dead Space teaser or the Prometheus trailer, but both still rely on some verbal cues. And both were heavily influenced by the original Alien...which is a better film than Aliens...just so we're clear.

#2

Say what you like about Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, the trailers for all three were brilliant. I still remember seeing the trailer for the original in the theatre for the first time...I was seeing Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within...I admit it...Moving on, the trailer for the second film is simply amazing. The romantic "Will Peter and MJ finally get together?" set-up, the spidey-sense car-dodging, and the retirement and unmasking of Spider-man, set to an epic score, make me want to watch the movie despite how bad I know some of it is...And I just realized I have two trailers for Sam Raimi pictures in my list. Interesting...

And, my #1 Favorite Movie Trailer of All Time...

My Top 10 Favorite Movie Trailers Part 1

So I'm currently writing a story that's essentially about movie trailers. For "research", I spent the first day of my Spring Break looking for my favorite, which I thought I'd share. But first, my thoughts on movie trailers (or previews if you prefer). Trailers are, to me, an unsung art of the film industry; there should seriously be an Oscar for Best Trailer. Think about it. A good film trailer can make the masses go see a movie; that's an incredible power! It doesn't have to be a genre you're interested in, an actor you're familiar with, or even a good movie; in fact, some of my picks are trailers for movies that aren't that great. Further, a good trailer can make you want to see that movie again. While a bad movie trailer, and the film it touts, are simply forgotten.

So this two-part series is also a salute to movie trailer makers everywhere! I love what you do! I show up to a movie theatre 30 minutes early just to make sure I can get popcorn, a good seat, and not miss the trailers. Keep it up! And without any further ado,

#10

I have a vivid memory of standing in line at a Hollywood video as a pre-teen, staring at a cardboard stand-up for a film where a man with chainsaw for a hand stands atop a pile of corpses with a beautiful woman wrapped around his leg. It would be years later before I finally saw Army of Darkness and was introduced to the work of Sam Raimi, but the trailer for this film still stood out as a parody in itself. It's hilarious! And it breaks the forth wall with Raimi's Oldsmobile, which is in just about every one of his films :-)

#9

I live in a small town with one movie theatre converted from an old stage theatre an hour away from a multiplex. There's no stadium seating, only one screen, they actually pop their own popcorn, and they use a real projector. The college kids who run it also choose which trailers they want to spool before each show, and if they find one they like, it will show before every movie they feature. By the time The Dark Knight came out, they'd been showing the teaser for so long that it had long scratches on the film. They also did this with the Kung Fu Panda 2 teaser, and I still laughed at every "kung fu staring contest."

#8

I don't care what you think about this movie, this trailer is not only epic, it's classic in its execution. To see what I mean, go watch the original 1954 trailer for Seven Samurai. I'll wait, since it's 5 minutes long, which is kind of why it didn't make the cut...Done? Notice the similarities in the over-dramatization? Character establishing shots? Even the horsemen riding over the hill (a shot introduced by Kurosawa in Seven Samurai)? Hell, you even know how both are going to end! Sure the 300 trailer's been glossed with Hollywood and modern trailer-making trends, but they're both trailers for essentially the same kind of film, cut in the same way. And I think that's awesome.

#7

This was one of my most anticipated movies of 2011 simply because it looked so much like one of my favorite novels, The Wars by Timothy Findley. And sure, it's arguably a shameless animal-friendship story coming out on Christmas, but that's sort of why I loved it. The preview does everything but put, "This movie will make you cry," in big letters under the title to let you know its intentions. And if your a sensitive movie-goer like me, yes it is a tear jerker. But that the trailer, even after I've seen the movie, can get me a little misty-eyed, makes it awesome in my book. It also helps the film and score are just beautiful.

#6

If my wife (a social media junky/professional) had said, "Hey, let's go see this movie about the making of Facebook!" I'd have said, "Pass." But from the first time I saw the trailer for this film, I wanted to see it. This is what I mean about a preview making you step outside your comfort zone and try something new. It's also an example of a trailer you can watch after the fact and say, "That was a great film." Not to mention that the opening and song selection is excellent.

I'll continue in a day or so with #5-#1!

Questions? Quibbles? Controversies?

Scaring the Dickens Out of Batman: Victorian Literary Conventions in 21st Century Comics

The following is a proposal for a conference paper I'm working on. It hasn't been accepted yet, but I plan to submit to a couple of different places to look at the topic at varying levels of detail. Feedback, as always, is appreciated.

Lee Bermejo's Batman: Noel retells Charles Dickens' iconic A Christmas Carol using characters and settings belonging to the DC universe. While the practices of writing a comic based on a work of literature or adapting Dickens' Christmas story aren't particularly new, that Bermejo chose this work and this comic should be noted.

A Christmas Carol is the most famous work of a long forgotten genre. Christmas Crawlers were Gothic stories published around the holiday as a chilling and entertaining way to pass the season. They date back to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, a ghost story published on Christmas Eve 1764, and include the works of other prolific writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson.

Knowing this, does Bermejo's November adaptation qualify as a lost, 19th century literary genre simply because of its source material? Or is Batman: Noel a spectre of Christmas future?

Questions? Quibbles? Controversies?

My Students on the Future of Comics

Blogger Siphen.0 recently wrote about the future of comics, as he sees it. Essentially, he argues that comics' future is dependent on educating the new generation of comics readers about the great superheroes of yesteryear since they only know about these characters from TV and film representations. And while I feel that this is a little shortsighted, he accurately observes that superhero comics have only changed subtly in hopes of maintaining readership: everything from the basic new costume design to entire reboots of a universe. And sure, this may earn a few new readers every generation, but in general, they're only reaching out to the same audience without giving anyone else a reason to read the original works.

Coincidentally, my students also wrote about the future of comics last week. And they have some different ideas about the future of comics. Charisse wrote an excellent summary of the key points in the introduction of Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics:

Just because a person may not only want to make a change, but also strive to make that change does not mean a change will come to life. Scott McCloud gave light to a new view on comics in his book Understanding Comics that was published in 1993. McCloud left the debate open to new ideas and criticism, but unfortunately no one took the bait. Being the "comic loyalist" that McCloud is he just could not let this debate go cold, which is why he created Reinventing Comics just seven short years after publishing Understanding Comics. McCloud still believes comics will have their come back, but it will also take a lot of work. McCloud states that the two biggest threats comics are facing is loss of new talent and loss of new readers. Comic artists certainly don't get paid enough. With all the new technology that has come out, reading time has been pushed aside for video games and television. With all this taken into consideration, comics still have hope in the twelve revolutions, which are comics as literature, comics as art, creators' rights, industry innovation, public perception, institutional scrutiny, gender balance, minority representation, diversity of genre, digital production, digital delivery, and finally, digital comics. 

Hard copies of comics are hard to come by because they do not make enough profit on their own and the majority of people no longer read purely for pleasure. What McCloud suggests is to give comics a new appeal. If comics were to strike a broader audience, with a diverse spectrum of styles and subject matter, as McCloud puts it, then perhaps people would look at comics as a past-time worth returning to. Comics big problem is that they have only moved forward which leaves behind great work from the past and only a couple genres at a time to work with. McCloud suggests that instead of moving forward comics must move outward so as to intertwine the future, past, and present, and that will lead comics to better diversity and a better public perception. These twelve revolutions McCloud has given in turn gives comics twelve directions to grow.

McCloud's points are further summarized and analyzed by dlujan:

McCloud maintains that although comics may never reach the popularity of film, they are still important to “diversifying our perception of our world.” Numerous modes of perceiving our world are necessary to better understand it. Comics can’t fear change. Comics’ artists need to acknowledge their medium’s past but they must also allow their work to evolve. McCloud uses the metaphor of a chess piece to explain this concept; in order to take up a new location, the old one must first be abandoned. Comics, however, do not need to move forward from their current position, they need to grow from it! McCloud asserts that comics have the potential to appeal to everyone, but they need to become a more diverse art form, incorporating more genres and more styles than ever before in order to achieve this.

One main point from McCloud’s first book, Understanding Comics, that the author expands on is the idea that comics can be for anyone.  More than ten years after the publication of his first book, the author still maintains that comics can appeal to anyone. However, he believes a few changes need to take place before this can be achieved. He states that it is even more important now that comics artists broaden the genres employed in comics, and they must also incorporate new techniques and art styles. Comics need to be about more than superheroes! I thought that McCloud’s chess metaphor was a really effective way of explaining how he envisions how comics should evolve to begin realizing their potential. I agree that comics’ artists shouldn’t completely forget their medium’s past, but they also need to evolve to help their art mature and progress.

Finally, Doug looks at McCloud's "Big World" chapter about the importance of diversity in comics to a happy ending for all:

The topic of expanding comics is prevalent throughout McCloud’s first book Understanding Comics. There have been minorities in America just as long as there have been comics but for some reason the industry is not interested in them.  Ironically, for an industry that claims to be so accepting of new ideas for comics and stories, and a fan base that is made up a lot of nerds that are alike in the fact that they are most likely outcasts from typical society, they seem to be a very classic and stubborn American franchise in the fact that they are not open to minorities getting their chances at equal opportunities of creating comics.

If comics were more accepting, then Stan Lee's girlfriend wouldn't have felt so left out and would have had her own comics to read and maybe even her own comics to write. But because there's seemingly no place for girls or other minorities in comics, she dumped him. Though because of their break up he created some of his most famous characters. There are pros and cons to everything. but an art and form of expression shouldn't be so subjugated.

Questions? Quibbles? Controversies?

Student Spotlight: Picture Words

This week's Student Spotlight was really difficult to chose; there were just too many really great blogs from last week. Doug came back with another movie clip explaining McCloud's points in Chapter 6 (but the clip was from Ghost World *shudder*). Claire simply wrote an excellent blog summarizing and explaining McCloud's more complex ideas herself. But there can only be one!

And this week it's Karli's interesting and thought-provoking post "Picture Words". Karli does two great things in this post besides writing well. First, she hooks her reader with an interesting introduction:

Pictures and words (English) imagenes y palabras (Spanish), images et des mots (French), fotografie a slova (Czeck), immagini e parole (Italian). Pictures and words are considered to be two completely different things and they are meant to be separated from one another.  Pictures are for children and words are for big people. As we grow up books with pictures are given to our younger siblings, younger cousins, or just put at the bottom of the bookshelf. We leave the idea of word and pictures working together to make meaning in our past, and we forget how magical it was. This is what Scott McCloud's chapter six of Understanding Comics focuses on.

Then she follows up with a great summary! But where her post really shines is when she brings art history to support McCloud's notions:

During my Introduction to Art class we learned about how a priest from Rome stripped an entire church of its paintings because he claimed they were distracting peoples' focus from the bible. People argued that the art brought life to the words; and the combination of words and art could bring the past of their faith to a visual reality. This proves that this argument has been going on for a long time. Why can’t words and pictures work together to bring meaning visualization? This priest obviously had no appreciation for art and no appreciation for what pictures can do for words.  This is why comics have such a hard time blooming into their full potential, because people have the same belief as the priest did: words and pictures cannot work together.

 To top it all off, Karli's post proves that great blogs earn great comments, and there's already an interesting discussion taking place there!

Questions? Quibbles? Controversies?