Lovely Bones Breaks New Ground for Trailers of a Trailer

The promotional cycle has gotten to the point now where, thanks to Entertainment Tonight, anticipation of a trailer is no longer the breathless, calendar-watching slog it used to be. Take its 30-second spot previewing the actual preview for The Lovely Bones, which the show will premiere tonight; it's the first footage available anywhere online, a maze of typically dreamy Peter Jackson visuals and A-list actors emoting in clipped, quick-cut bursts. Which is all fine, I suppose, except that it's probably not supposed to be this hilarious.

After all, the longer footage viewed at Comic-Con was by all accounts (or OK, one account) "simply sumptious" [sic], with lavish attention paid to '70s period detail and the afterlife as viewed by the film's young murder victim (Saoirse Ronan). This has glimpses at some of that, though distilled to a half-minute -- thus smashed against Mark Wahlberg and Stanley Tucci's fantastic wigs, Susan Sarandon's bellowing and a succession of orange-ish interiors -- it kind of screams at the viewer: "Get ready! To get ready! For The Lovely Bones!"

And if that doesn't do it for you, then ET's earnest female narrator will: "The tale of a little girl... murdered... and the killer... she hunts! From the graaaave... Number one! For a reason." It's all quite fantastic -- enough to hope DreamWorks will go with her for the real deal, or that maybe we can get a Serious Man trailer remix with her incomparable play-by-play: "A Jew... smashed... against a blackboard. And the rabbi! Too busy... to seeeeee him." I think it'd work.

· The Lovely Bones -- ET Trailer Preview [Trailer Addict]