Ode to an Ad: "Little Children" Trailer

THE TRAILER

After rewatching this trailer, I was surprised to find that it did in fact contain some, though very little, dialogue. In my memory, the only sound was the train. This means that the train motif, combined with the other visuals, was powerful enough to make a lasting impression. The dialogue certainly doesn’t detract from it and lets you know outright that the film is about an affair, but I believe you’d get most of that without any words at all.

I didn’t have any strong desire to see this film, but the trailer hooked me. Obviously the pairing of Kate Winslet and Jennifer Connelly helped, though the latter is criminally underused in the film, especially considering how prominently she’s featured in the preview. But all I knew about Patrick Wilson was that he was the guy from Hard Candy, a film I hadn’t seen at the time. (Actually, that’s still pretty much all I know about him.)

The idea of a train suggests a number of things: movement, change, speed, and most importantly, inevitability. Things are going to continue to barrel forward, and they only have one path to take. If another’s path happens to be headed towards your own, a collision is unavoidable.

That goes for both the film’s two lovers and their respective spouses (more so Connelly, since Winslet’s husband isn’t shown in the preview.) At some point Winslet and Wilson are going to unite in something that, while horrible and painful and destructive, couldn’t really be avoided. And together, they will create a new path, one that will eventually lead to an even worse crash with more consequences.

The fact that you do not SEE a train for much of the time adds an ominous tone, especially when the sounds are featured over shots of such quiet moments as a family meal and poolside lounging. It hints at some energy lying right under the surface, which in the film manifests itself first as a desire to give into temptation, and then as a secret that desperately needs to be kept.

I agree with the sentiment of unfortunate destiny up to a point, or rather, after a point. Perhaps after reaching a certain moment in the relationship, their affair is unavoidable, but they made the initial choices to reach that point in the first place.

Regardless of your opinions on the central theme, it’s a great way to hook you and leave you wanting to know more. After all, everyone loves watching a train wreck.

Ode to an Ad: "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" Poster

THE POSTER

This movie has been on my mind a lot recently. First, my friend Aaron cited it as one of the 10 Best Pop Culture Love Stories of the Last Ten Years. Then I mentioned it in correlation with WALL*E, noting that they both feature the theme of love triumphing over technology.

While the trailer is fantastic in its own right, doing a wonderful job of showing the zany fun the film will have with its concept, I like the simplicity of this picture.

Once you've seen the movie (or at least understand the plot), you can spot a number of elements represented in this poster. I'll start with the obvious:
The poster is mimicking a thought bubble, the image of Joel and Clementine on the ice floating above Joel like a memory, just out of reach. The white color of the ice makes the imagery crystal clear. Although it is a great moment in the film, it was definitely chosen for how it would look on the poster, because, if you recall, this actually happens after they meet for the second time, post-memory erasure.

Even the white credits on the right side fit with the thought bubble pattern, resembling the smaller bubbles that lead to the big picture.

While many instances of the thought bubble feature the character "looking" at his/her thought (as in the cartoon image above), there's a longing in Joel's eyes that makes you immediately empathize with him. This isn't a fantasy, some scenario that Joel wishes would come true. It's an actual memory. And it's not about Joel living in the past, wanting the memory to become reality once again. He simply wants to hold onto the memory, to keep it in his brain, as a part of his life and who he is. He's desperate.

But memory is a fragile thing (even if you aren't having it erased), and the image depicts that with the multi-fissured crack in the ice. In the movie, the revelation of the cracked ice is played as a joke. Joel is nervous about being on the frozen lake. Clementine informs him that it's perfectly safe. And it cuts to an aerial shot. It's a pretty good laugh.

On the poster, however, it shows the delicate nature of memory. At any second, the ice could shatter, the memory falling into the water below, never to be seen again.

We hope more than anything that this doesn't happen, and that's why we watch the movie: to find out.

Ode to an Ad: "Unbreakable" Trailer

THE TRAILER

The majority of complaints about movie previews fall into one of two categories:

1. They give away too much of the plot.

2. They don't really give you a sense of how good (or bad) the movie is.

Point number one is well taken, but it's worth noting that in the "olden days," trailers gave away much more than even the most revealing one's do these days. Films were much more of a spectacle back then, and advertisers wanted to get everyone out of their house and into the theaters by showing them EXACTLY what they could expect see.

Times have obviously changed, as theater-going is no longer an event. It's just something you do on the weekend.

Yet advertisers are still faced with the obstacle of luring people out of their homes (or away from other activities) into the theaters. Even when dealing with lovers of film, the advances of home theaters and the convenience of Netflix makes it that much tougher to convince someone to spend an evening in the theaters (not to mention driving, parking, and likely eating somewhere).

Trailers need to show enough to gain the film-goer's interest, but if they show too much, that person will feel as if all of the surprises are gone.

The second argument, that trailers don't always let you know how good or bad a film actually is, is also valid, but it just means that people are doing their job. While I do feel that there is some art involved in the making of a great trailer, it is primarily advertising. When given a bad film to market, it should still result in the best possible trailer.

I think a more legitimate complaint would be that some trailers fail to give you a sense of the film's tone. That happens more often than you'd think. In order to appeal to a wider audience, a film's true style is sometimes hidden during the marketing campaign.

This trailer for Unbreakable doesn't hide the fact that it's going to be a slow movie. The entire two minute preview is spent giving us one real piece of information about the plot.

The film itself plays out at a similar pace. Some find that frustrating, but I think it's full of rich detail and totally works for the story it's telling. Whatever your opinion, the point is that the trailer lets you know upfront that if you're looking for a fast-paced film, you'd better look elsewhere.

And in this particular case, the slowness of the trailer makes it impossible to reveal too much of the film's plot. While this style wouldn't work for all (or even most) trailers, they could all learn a lesson from it when deciding how much story the audience needs to learn to be interested.

Granted, this is a bit of a special case because it came from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, hot on the heels of The Sixth Sense's major success. Name-dropping that film is all it takes to get a lot of people excited.

But ignoring that for a moment, the trailer gives us a tantalizing bit of information. Bruce Willis' character was in a horrific train accident, was the only survivor, and doesn't have a scratch on him.

It's impossible to hear all of that information and not wonder why. Your mind jumps to all sorts of places. There's lots of possibilities, but we want to know the real answer. And we're shown that Samuel L. Jackson's character knows something about what's going on, which leaves us wondering who he is and how he knows about this.

The answer to this question (at least the basic answer) is actually delivered fairly early in the movie. The rest of the film is Willis' character rejecting the idea, eventually accepting the idea, and finally learning what he must do with this new information.

Many people that make trailers wouldn't have minded showing all sorts of details from Unbreakable, probably stopping just short of revealing the final twist (which, for the record, I'm not a fan of, as it adds nothing to the story).

And really, it wouldn't have necessarily been an awful thing to answer that question in the trailer. (The equivalent reveal would be the "I see dead people" line from The Sixth Sense, which is shown in that film's trailer. And I'm pretty sure Unbreakable's first major reveal happens earlier than that one did.)

But by only giving us as much as was need to pique our interest, it allows that much more of the film to be a surprise. I saw the film because I wanted to know what the deal was with Willis' character, and the film delivered that...slowly and powerfully (which is also what I was expecting, thanks to the magnificently edited trailer.)

Ode to an Ad: "JAWS" Poster

THE POSTER

If you were to look at this poster for too long, you might chuckle to yourself. It is slightly comical, in a way. Luckily, you won't have time to stare at it for very long because you'll be too busy changing your pants as a result of the sheer terror it evoked upon first glancing at it.

It's practically impossible to not think "DEAR GOD!!! LOOK OUT!!!" You know that woman is a goner, and there's nothing you can do about it.

What makes it so bad, worse than most images of a woman in peril, is that she has NO IDEA that she is about to be eaten alive. And that, essentially, is why JAWS is such a terrifying film: The unseen is exponentially more frightening than anything you can put on the screen.

This is why any good horror film (be it slasher, creature, or other) that involves someone/something killing people off knows that the most frightening moments in the movie are when the killer is NOT on-screen. When he/she/it appears, there might be some action in a chase scene or some gore that can disturb us, but it's nothing compared to the suspense of wondering when and, more importantly, WHERE, the killer will spring from.

JAWS has two advantages over most horror films, and both of these are incorporated into the poster. The first is that THIS COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN. We all know there are sharks, and if one wanted to start attacking people, it easily could.

Were it some fictional creature on the poster, it would be pretty easy to not take it seriously. But seeing that shark makes you feel for that woman and wonder what you would do if you were in her place.

Which leads to the second, and more important, advantage. Location, location, location.

Lots of people watch a horror film and criticize the character's actions. It's just human nature. A lot of the time, it's done to alleviate fear. If you can find some lack of logic on the part of the characters, you can disassociate it from real life.

So when characters go into places they shouldn't or run down hallways instead of outside and away, their deaths are almost deserved (in a film sense, that is).

Not so with JAWS. All these people are doing is going swimming in the ocean. Literally millions of people do this year round.

And when they realize they are in danger...there's nowhere to go. You can only swim so fast.

I think this poster encapsulates all of that. The imminent victim is a woman minding her own business, just going for a swim. The attack is coming out of nowhere, so there's no way to prevent it. And even when she realizes something is wrong, there's no escape.

The poster promises that there will be moments in the movie where this happens, making us feel for the characters on screen. What it doesn't necessarily hint at, and what makes JAWS such a great film, is that it ultimately puts us in the place of these people, so that we live and die right along with them.

THE INSPIRATION

The style of the artwork and the leisurely feel of the poster (other than the giant shark, that is) is reminiscent of the types of advertisements used to attract people to beach communities in the 70's, such as the billboard for Amity Island featured in the film that is later defaced after the shark attacks.

Although your eye is immediately drawn to the giant shark, which forms an arrow pointing up to its victim, if you were able to address it from top to bottom, it has a calming feeling that is interrupted by the presence of the shark. That's what the film does. It takes a regular summer activity and ruins it with the appearance of a vicious beast.

Also, the people behind the movie and the poster obviously did their research on how great white sharks charge straight up to attack creatures on the surface:

THE HOMAGE

There's a soft spot in my heart for Tremors. As far as ridiculous horror-comedies go, it might be my favorite. A lot of that has to do with Kevin Bacon's performance. I think the other part might be that it absolutely TERRIFIED me as a kid, and only when I checked it out during college did I realize how hilarious it is.

The films have the common theme of a creature attacking from below where you can't see it, so it was a great choice to recreate the JAWS poster out in the desert with the creature rushing up through the dirt.

But I think this poster more than proves my earlier point about how a non-existent creature would be hard to take seriously. Thankfully, Tremors only asks you to take it seriously to a very small extent.

THE KNOCK-OFF

It might be unfair to accuse a poster for a film's sequel of knocking off the original. After all, this could very well be done by the same artist.

While it's a great tag-line, this poster takes everything that was intensely unnerving about the original poster and makes it comical. Water skiing? Her being oblivious to the fact that an enormous shark has just surfaced behind her, likely creating a huge splash?

And think about this: The shark just MISSED her. He came up BEHIND HER her. It's not a dolphin. It can't scoot forward on its tail with its mouth gaping open in order to eat her. It has to land back in the water and then chase her.

THE KNOCK-OFF OF THE KNOCK-OFF

If you're making a movie about sharks, it's a given that you're going to be compared to JAWS. So it's probably not a good idea to invite more comparisons by copying the poster.

But if you ARE going to knock-off the poster, AT LEAST knock off the far superior original and not the one for the sequel.

Also, there is NO FEASIBLE WAY that woman could get out of the depicted scenario alive. In the JAWS posters it doesn't matter because the women shown aren't even real characters. But this is the main character in Deep Blue Sea, and they just killed her in the poster.

Finally, take a look at that tag-line. "Bigger. Smarter. Faster. Meaner." As if I needed convincing that sharks were scary or something.

Ode to an Ad: "The Silence of the Lambs" Poster

THE POSTER

After looking at this poster, you're probably confused and disturbed. That's the effect it goes for, and it achieves it with flying colors. It might not tell you anything about the movie, but it does leave you feeling as if you just got some horrible news about a loved one.

This poster asks a lot of questions: Who is this woman? Why is she so pale? What is she staring at? And most importantly, why is there a freaking moth where her mouth should be?

The image has little to do with the film. The movie DOES feature moths. And the mouthless image conjures the idea of "silence." But that's it. It's all conceptual, based on making you feel a certain way instead of telling you anything about the movie.

What you might not have noticed (and probably can't see in this particular picture) is that the "skull" image on the moth is actually made up of a bundle of naked women. Perhaps one of the only instances in history where a group of naked women have made something creepier instead of sexier.

THE INSPIRATION

While you may not have known it, it should still come as no surprise that the inspiration for the poster was Salvador Dali. After all, he's basically the king of images that are breathtaking, confusing, and unnerving all at the same time.

The "skull" image on the moth is actually a minaturized version of the above Dali portrait, In Voluptas Mors. Somehow it gets even creepier once it's shrunk down.

Though moths are featured in the film, its use on the poster is most likely a reference to images in Luis Bunuel's and Salvador Dali's surrealist film Un chien andalou, which is most famous (or infamous, really) for the scene where a razorblade cuts open a woman's eyeball. (Second would be the scene where ants come out of a man's hand.)

It was a totally natural fit for the creepy, disturbing content of The Silence of the Lambs to be advertised in the vein of Dali and his love of bizarre creations that make you feel weird inside.

THE HOMAGE

I wasn't a fan of The Descent as a film, but I have to admit that this poster is extremely intriguing. To be fair, it's a straight-up reproduction of the Dali portrait with no real ties to The Silence of the Lambs, but I think we all know that they would have never thought to do this without that poster's existence.

In particular, I like what they did with the face of the one woman that we can see. In the Dali portrait, her mouth and eyes are closed in a feeling of contentment. In the above poster, it's a scream of pure terror.

There's also the idea that something is lurking just out of view, in the shadows on the corners of the poster. But you'll have to see the movie to find out what.

THE KNOCK-OFF

When I first saw this poster I laughed to myself, but that laughter immediately became uncomfortable laughter because there's something profoundly disturbing about this image. I've since decided that it's somehow simultaneously completely idiotic and chilling to the bone.

Clearly this was borrowing heavily from The Silence of the Lambs poster. At first glance it seems normal enough, but after a moment you realize that what you're seeing isn't actually what you're seeing.

I haven't seen this film, but I still feel confident enough to say that I'd rather stare at The Silence of the Lambs poster for an hour and a half than watch One Missed Call.