Tag Archives: Tom Hanks

This is not a post, it’s a preview for a trailer for an upcoming post

Xzibit, you are all too knowing. Memegenerator.net.

It’s been said that we live in an age of lowered expectations; schools expect less from students, audiences expect less from television, voters expect less from their leaders.  But every time you think we’ve bottomed out at the nadir of what is meant to impress us, someone finds a way to dig further down and underwhelm even more.  Recently, we’ve seen the rise of a new low in the aspirations of marketing, like a badly mixed soufflé sputtering to inflate itself in an oven with the fuse burnt out:  the movie trailer trailer.  And that’s not a message from the Department of Redundancy Department.

Yes, studios have decided now to capitalize on an audience’s hunger for any tidbit of information about an upcoming blockbuster by releasing trailers not for the movie itself, but for a more detailed trailer about the movie.  Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s enigmatic sci-fi prequel to his 1979 classic Alien, got the ball rolling last month, and in the last few days we have had a trailer for the trailer of the unclamored-for remake of Total Recall.  Honestly, if there was any more recycling going on they would have to pack film reels in blue boxes.  Faced with an appalling glut of unoriginality, studio marketers have decided to double down by trying to create buzz not for the projects themselves, but for the very ads promoting the projects.  There is a very popular Internet meme involving Xzibit and Pimp My Ride which comes to mind, an appropriate variation on which would be thus:  “Yo dawg, I heard you like trailers so we made a trailer for a trailer that you can watch in your trailer while you wait for the new trailer.”

I suppose it might be forgivable if the advertisements being advertised (God, the mind implodes at that) were anything of substance.  The complaint used to be that trailers gave away too much (Cast Away, I still haven’t forgiven you for giving away that Tom Hanks gets off the damn island!), now, they are a big pile of nothing.  The Total Recall trailer trailer tries to entice you by showing everything you’ve seen before:  Colin Farrell being strapped into the same machine Arnold Schwarzenegger was 22 years ago, Kate Beckinsale looking hot and carrying a gun, futuristic cars flying around, some stunt guy leaping out a window.  Even worse than this is the teaser for Breaking Dawn – Part 2, the ultimate Seinfeld of a trailer whose big draw is a shot of Kristen Stewart wearing the same facial expression she’s used in the previous four Twilight movies, only this time with red eyes.  Oooh.  (Of course this movie is ad- and critic-proof as its legions of worshippers will show up at theatres even if the movie is just Stewart and Robert Pattinson staring at each other for two and a half hours – oh, wait, that’s exactly what it is!)

Naturally, we have only ourselves to blame.  Collectively we’re like the kid shaking his presents three weeks before Christmas listening for the telltale rattle of the Lego set inside, in our obsessive need to know every last detail of a movie before it ever opens – who’s in it, what changes they made from the book, what the characters look like, what stars are actually dating off the set, the shape and substance of every major action sequence down to a beat-by-beat plot description and excerpts of dialogue.  There is a theory among movie marketers, the people who actually cut the trailers together, that audiences won’t go to a movie unless they’ve already seen the best parts.  But thanks to entertainment magazines and Internet gossip sites, we already have, before a frame of actual film crosses in front of our eyeballs.  We know exactly what’s coming, because we don’t want to be surprised – the potential of a surprise carries with it the equal potential of disappointment, and who wants that on a summer night at the theatre?  So the natural response by the people selling these things is to reassure you that you’re going to get exactly what you’re expecting, and it’s why they make trailers for trailers.  It’s a mere taste of the pablum cooking on the stove before Mom spoons out an entire bowl for you; warm, comforting and utterly without flavour.  There is no there there, so all they can sell is hype.  And if you lap it up and buy a ticket to the movie anyway, two hours later that’s all you’re going to come away with.

Beyond this place, there be dragons

Inception is one of the coolest movies I’ve seen in a long time.  Dreams can be a dodgy subject for Hollywood to tackle; directors tend to immediately reach for “the weirder the better” when conjuring the dream state on film – for reference, see any of the works (or better yet, don’t) of the late Ken Russell.  You expect now that any movie depicting dreams will be incomprehensible at best, or worst, a tawdry realization of fantasies that were best left in the director’s bedroom.  On the other hand, Inception was the first movie, at least in my memory, to construct dreams as straightforward narrative.  I know a minority critics saw that as indicative of a lack of imagination – I think those few naysayers were hoping for the impenetrable, pretentious ravings of David Lynch a la Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway.  The discussion is more or less beside the point, as all movies are essentially dreams.  Inception was refreshing enough to acknowledge this off the top rather than wrapping its imagery in a veneer of perplexing metaphors, decipherable only by the hipster with the shrine to Truffaut in his basement.

That we dream is a wonderful gift.  Every step of our progress as humanity has begun in our dreams.  Are they random flare-ups of neural energy, the brain dumping superfluous data, or are they a form of precognition?  The German chemist August Kekule claimed to have discovered the ring structure of the benzene molecule, after years of studying carbon bonds, in a dream about a snake swallowing its own tail.  He certainly wasn’t the first to derive specific inspiration from his dreams.  For a writer, the unpredictability of dreams is an invaluable resource.  A block over a story point, agonized over days in the waking state, can resolve itself in the simplest manner within sleep.  It’s almost like those Chinese finger-traps, where the solution is not to pull harder but to relax your grip.  The freedom of the unconscious can untangle the most Gordian of story knots.  And on occasion, it can conjure a brand new idea, seemingly out of nowhere.  Such a dream came to me the other night.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of what the exact idea was, as I would like more time to develop it (and may wish, someday, to transform it into something that people would have to pay me for).  Like the dreams in Inception, I suddenly found myself in the middle of a place with no concept of how I’d gotten there.  Tom Hardy, one of the actors from Inception, was present, as were Charlize Theron and Tom Hanks.  I was pitching them a movie idea.  Hardy and Theron were already attached to star and we were trying to persuade Hanks to sign on for a supporting role, which he did after hearing the concept of the movie boiled down to one line.  Cameron Diaz was also involved but would only be producing.  Following Hanks’ commitment the dream swirled into random scenes from the movie itself involving Hardy and Theron.  And I remember smiling as I watched, thinking this could grow into something tremendous.  I ensured that after I woke I spent some time recording the details so they wouldn’t be lost in the fog of the morning commute.  As for its origin, I can definitely see traces of different things that had been on my mind, even some of the stuff I’ve blogged about this week.  My brain took the various pieces and rolled them into a clean concept worthy of further exploration.  So thank you, almighty Hypnos, or whomever or whatever else, for cultivating those seeds, and for the bountiful crop that sprang forth.  Dreams continue to be the reliable reserve tank when waking imagination runs dry.

Now if you’ll pardon me, I have to go check and see if a top is still spinning.