Trailer Trash

Yet, horrendous as these trailers were, they were not the ones that most impressed me. That's because it's really no great accomplish-ment to make a bad trailer about a bad movie. Take Jakob the Liar, In a shameless attempt to parlay the mind-boggling success of last year's schmaltzy, Holocaust-denying Life Is Beautiful into a trend, Robin Williams plays a spunky Jew trapped in a Polish ghetto in 1944. Jakob cheers up his seemingly doomed compatriots by pretending to have a radio and manufacturing bogus news reports about the imminent arrival of the Soviet Army. Yes, Mork manages to put a little bounce in everyone's step and make the single worst event in the history of the human race seem just a wee bit less depressing. It is obvious just from watching the trailer that Jakob the Liar is one of the worst movies of the year, and certainly one of the most exploitative, a Holocaust-era There's No Business Like Shoah Business. Making a bad trailer out of a film as transparently stupid as this is not exactly like swimming across the Atlantic in the dead of winter with a famished baracuda stapled to your groin.

The same can be said of the trailer for Blue Streak, in which the disarmingly unappealing Martin Lawrence plays a criminal who gets out of jail, finds that his buried loot is now concealed inside a spanking-new office building owned by the Los Angeles Police Department, disguises himself as a police officer and--bet you won't see this one coming--is immediately mistaken for a member of the LAPD's dreaded Internal Affairs unit! As with Jakob the Liar, the trailer for Blue Streak faithfully captures how thoroughly unwatchable the movie is, even by the abysmal standards of le cinema Martin Lawrence, Yet one is hardly bedazzled by the trailer-maker's efforts, for this one was a layup, a can of corn, a piece of cake. Only an editing genius could devise a trailer that would make a Martin Lawrence film seem good. A child could come up with a trailer making it look bad. For all I know, it was a child who made the trailer.

The previews that most clamor for our respect are the ones where the trailer maker did not have as much raw material to work with but still succeeded in making the coming attraction seem dreadful. A good example is the trailer from the twentysomething coming-of-age, why-can't-any-of-us-ever-get-laid film Body Shots, which does not star anyone as repellent as Robin Williams or Martin Lawrence. In the hands of a lesser trailer maker, the preview would simply have presented an uninteresting montage of actors you've never heard of deal-ing with problems you can't imagine having in cities that are sup-posed to be New York or L.A. but look like Pittsburgh or Toronto. That's where the trailer from Body Shots throws the moviegoer a curve. Rather than allowing the uninteresting images to speak for themselves, they helped us out by plastering a quote from non-critic Jane Pratt of Jane magazine across the screen, praising the film. This is the studio's way of saying: "This movie is so bad we couldn't even get one of the usual quote-whores to go down on it."

The point I am trying to make here is that most movies do not require an especially bad trailer to apprise the public of how awful they are. Usually, they rely on a sort of cultural shorthand: it's a Melanie Griffith movie, get the picture? But movies lacking a Jean-Claude Van Damme or a Jon Lovitz must resort to more esoteric approaches. One such strategy is the use of dire warnings like the one in the trailer from My Son the Fanatic, which reads: "The most satisfying movie of the Telluride Film Festival." if that doesn't put the fear of God into you, I don't know what will. Of course, in some instances, the title of the movie alone has done the job. This is definitely the way I felt when I saw the trailer for a film called Plunkett & Macleane. From what I could deduce from the trailer itself, the film is a rowdy period piece about swashbuckling highwaymen with a conscience, sort of a cross between Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and The Scarlet Pimpernel. But it really wasn't necessary to watch the trailer of a film called Plunkett & Macleane to figure out that this film was not worth paying for. Not since To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar had a movie title so effortlessly made an accompanying trailer seem completely irrelevant.

At this point, a pertinent question poses itself: If movie trail-ers are, almost without exception, horrendous, why does any-body ever bother to go to the movies? To answer this question, we must carefully examine the public's often cryptic reasons for watching movies in theaters. True, many members of the moviegoing public venture out to the theater with some regular-ity because they honestly expect to be entertained. These are the people who go to see films like Runaway Bride and anything star-ring Hugh Grant. Nothing contained in or omitted from a trailer could possibly induce these people not to see films like Runaway Bride or anything starring Hugh Grant, because these individuals are culturally predisposed toward such motion pictures, and are completely impervious to previews, reviews, word of mouth or common sense. These people are, for lack of a better term, best described as our mothers. But mothers make up only a small percentage of the moviegoing public, as do children, another Cartesianly challenged demographic group which is not easily discouraged from going to movie theaters. The truth is, in our irony-minded society, roughly 62% of the habitual moviegoing public consists of people who are there purely to see if the film could possibly be anywhere near as had as the trailer has made it out to be. Let me say, without a moment's hesitation, that I proudly include myself in this irony-fueled coterie. There was a time, true, when I went to see movies in order to be enthralled, inspired, challenged and amazed. But then I turned nine. Today I go to see movies purely for the joy of finding out if Luc Besson's The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (or, Every Witch Way But Loose) could possibly be as pretentious and nutty as the trailer makes it out to be. Or for that matter, as nutty as Joan of Arc actually was. I go to see movies like Stir of Echoes to find out if it is exactly like The Sixth Sense, or if there are slight variations. And when I see a trailer for Being John Malkovich in which a bunch of people find a secret way into John Malkovich's brain, and then find none other than John Malkovich waiting for them in there, I cannot resist going to see the film. The day it gets released. No trailer on the face of the earth could stand in my way. It is the curse of the cynic; there are some things we simply have to do.

By admitting this, am I not in fact accusing some trailers of failing in their sacred mission, of inadvertently creating a desire on the part of the audience to pay full price to see a film? Yes. Not all trailers are equally successful. For exam-ple, the trailer for Random Hearts, the latest Harrison Ford vehicle, effectively gives away the entire story--flatfoot Ford discovers that his dead wife was having an affair with the husband of a congresswoman whom he subsequently falls for--thereby making it pointless to see the film. But I will go see it anyway because of the faint chance that Kristin Scott Thomas will revive her fabulous lipstick lesbian act from the finale of Bitter Moon. For nine dollars, it's worth a shot. For similar reasons, I have every intention of queuing up to see Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley. The other-wise drab trailer informed me that the charac-ter Matt plays is capable of impersonating "anyone" and I'm dying to find out how Matt Damon could possibly impersonate anyone who looks like John Turturro or Wesley Snipes or who stands more than five-foot-eight.

Before concluding this essay, I would like to mention one other socially beneficial feature of movie trailers. For several years, I have amused myself periodically by going to movie theaters and, right in the second or so of complete silence following the trailer, shouting out "Rental!" just to see how other patrons respond. During my seven-day survey of trail-ers, I was reassured that I am not the only moviegoer with this harmless foible. After the trailer for American Beauty, which sought to discourage its potential audience through the tactical use of bad rock'n roll, one impromptu critic in the theater yelled out, "The Who suck!" When I yelled out "Rental!" after the trailers for Stigmata and_ Happy, Texas_, I could tell that most of the audience agreed. The trailer for The Insider was one that seemed to fail completely: it left me and most of the audience determined to see the film at a theater. But the previews for Crazy in Alabama and My Life So Far were extremely effective-- folks were only going to watch them if they came on cable. My favorite reaction to a movie preview was uttered after I responded to the trailer of Body Shots by hissing, "This isn't even a rental!" From a few rows ahead, a young woman chimed in, "That is so not even a rental!"

She was, like, so totally right.

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Joe Queenan wrote about teen movies for the October issue of Movieline.

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