The Muppets (2011)
With Jason Segel, Amy Adams and the Muppets crew.
Kermit, Miss Piggy and co. are finally back! This time with the help of Flight of the Conchords series co-creator James Bobin and writers Jason Segel and director of Forgetting Sarah Marshal, Nicholas Stoller.
Disney's marketing strategy (or more like Muppet Studio's) is to turn out faux trailers that mislead the audience into thinking that the film has nothing to do with the Muppets and turns out to be the Muppets. I like this approach and I think it is a smart one. This helps to gain new audience while enhancing the interest of the former audience.
The first teaser to come out of this is a faux Romantic Comedy film called Green With Envy, it stars Jason Segel and Amy Adams as school teachers who fall in love and move to Los Angeles. It also features the typical heavy voiced narrator, cheesy uplifting score and of course the boy-loses-girl plot.
The second trailer, which is a straight-forward parody of the recently released The Hangover 2, The Fuzzy Pack emulates the anti-promotion critics' quote.
Whether these quotes are fake or real, the sources definitely are. The cherry on top is the hip-hop background music that plays along with the teaser.
50/50
Starring Joseph Gorden Levitt, Seth Rogen and Anna Kendrick
Based on a true events film from writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Superbad) about their friend Will Reiser, a screenwriter, who is told that he has cancer at a young age and finds ways to cope with it as he is being treated.
The trailer is nothing special, very typical of a comedy even if the story isn't. The problem with trailers for comedies give away too much of the film's gold (jokes, punch lines, etc.) They leave little room for the film itself to survive once it comes out. It would be great if the trailer reduces it's running time by including only five funny moments. There is nothing open ended about the trailer, thus we know or can easily assume how the film will finish.
Post-Trailer/Film Review
So I'd like to take the time here to review a film, that I reviewed the trailer to a few weeks ago. It will be an interesting look at how my views of the trailer and view of the film itself differ and how the marketing strategy of studios affect the way we make decisions on going to the cinemas.
Beginners
Starring Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer and Mélanie Laurent
I had the chance to attend an advance screening of this film, director Mike Mills (who also wrote the film) was present for the Q&A after it screened. This is the second film from Mills, Thumbsucker, which came out in 2005 was about a high school kid discovering confidence through the Debate club and pills. Beginners is a more personal film for Mike Mills, he explains in the Q&A that he based it on both his parents' passing and his father's own coming out story. Although laced in with stories of his friends' parents as well as those of the actors, it is easy to tell that the making of the film must have been a hugely cathartic experience for the writer-director.
The film has two stories that intertwine throughout, the first is that of Ewan's Oliver who deals with the passing of Hal, his father. He meets a young French actress named Anna (Ms. Laurent) who shares the same personality traits as he does. The second story is the memory of his dying father, who comes out of the closet months only after Oliver's mother dies. Hal's experiences as a newly discovered Gay man are as wonderful to watch as we see through the eyes of Oliver.
Beginners has a strong sense of sentiment but also looks at the new direction people can take. Peppered into the film are flashback scenes of the strange relationship between Oliver and his too cool for school mother. The soundtrack is heavily composed of signifiers of the past featuring some classical pieces from Bach, Josephine Baker and Jelly Roll Morton (to which Mills explain that the film The Sting heavily influenced the music choice of the film.) It is also shot with a candid eye, the cinematography follows its characters closely, making sure we feel the closeness between Anna and Oliver, that they're not so different from one another. They share the same equal amount of space compositionally.
If you know who Mike Mills is, you would know that he is also a graphic artist. Oliver mirrors that real life aspect of Mills, Oliver works in a graphic design firm as a designer. He illustrates existential cartoons and plays hooky with his co-workers. It is very easy to like all of the characters in the film, performances by the entire cast are undoubtedly real. Oliver, Hal and Anna are just people who eventually learn to love in the later stages of their lives (Hal being the oldest one.) Being aptly titled, "Beginners" presents itself as a beautiful message of "it's-never-too-late..."
Here is a link to my review of the trailer.
Although my review was short, it was dead on with the sentimental aspect of the film. Looking at the trailer again, I would say that the film comes off as if it was directed by both Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums) and Mark Webb ((500) Days of Summer). The trailer easily sets up the storytelling format of the film and it explains the plot without spoiling too much of the touching and funny moments of the film.
Beginners will be released by Focus Features on June 3rd, 2011 in select theaters.
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