Trailer Trash

I went to see Snakes On A Plane the other day. It was very good, but watching the trailers beforehand made me a bit worried about what kind of person they reckoned would go and see it.

First up was some Tenacious D film, featuring that annoying cockfarmer Jack Black. I think this Is meant to be a comedy. There is nothing funny about this trailer; it probably features the least unfunny bits of the film.

Then there was this film in which some attractive young women do martial arts stuff and take people out with swords. It looks amazingly bad, but it might appeal to those who still dream about the women in Hai Karate ads.

The third film was Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette. I have Coppola’s number - she makes nice-looking but ultimately vacuous films. This film about the life and death of the France’s 18th century queen fits the model – nice art direction, lovely Kristin Dunst in the lead role, but it all looks like the usual French revolutionary nonsense, with fancy looking toffs having their world overturned by the revolting masses. The trailer suggests that Coppola’s big innovation is to go for anachronism by having modern (or modernish) tunes in the film’s soundtrack; the Gang of Four’s ‘I Found That Essence Rare’ storms through the trailer. I imagine this must make the film look like a sequence of music videos.

I was glad to see the trailer for Talladega Nights – The Legend of Ricky Bobby, the latest Will Ferrell vehicle. I might actually go to it, as it gives the impression that the film will actually be funny. Comparing the trailer with the Tenacious D film is instructive. In and of themselves, the Talladega Nights trailer’s jokes are not all that, but the trailer is still very chortlesome, I think because Will Ferrell and John Reilly are funny in and of themselves in a way that Jack Black is not.