Trailers that are Better than the Movie - Rules of Attraction
So, I have this habit of gathering movie trailers off the Internet, and much like the previously written about Cliffhanger trailer, it's amazing how many seem to be more kinetic or emotionally involving than the movie itself.
One such trailer is for Roger Avery's incredibly frustrating, occasionally brilliant Rules of Attraction. Here's a movie filled with an abundance of fantastic moments, but that's held together by some of the most excruciatingly offputting characters ever put in a motion picture.
Avery is trying to explore the moralistic cesspool that forms when teenagers run off to university and are bombarded by drugs, sex, alcohol, independence, and a different party every night of the week. It's shocking, sometimes true to life, and occasionally disturbing, but when Avery isn't stylistically pushing new ground (and Rules of Attraction does have an incredible opening), he's giving screen time to a group of hyper-sexed, obnoxious characters who seem more like aliens from another planet than even the most drugged up students I've ever met.
So, in order to promote the whole messy affair, the trailer focuses on style over substance, and manages to say everything about university life in 1 minute and twenty seconds that the movie says in an hour and fifty minutes.
You can find the trailer on this page in the top right corner.
http://movies.virginmedia.com/synopsis/default.asp?filmid=2395&sec=syn
First off, yep, it's a takeoff of the trailer for A Clockwork Orange; classical music, this time Russian Dance from The Nutcracker, interspersed with white words on a black screen, and in-your-face imagery. And much like that trailer, this one is trying to engage the audience, letting them know that the film is provocative and contains an abundance of ideas.
What makes this trailer work so well, is that by hinting at how depraved the movie will be, complete with suggestive, but non-explicit images, the audience members have already thought of at least ten things that are more disgusting or button-pushing than the movie could possibly focus on. Since the trailer offers little in the way of character, the possibilities for the plot are endless. All we know is that moral lines will be crossed, and personal comfort levels will be challenged. The trailer works like a Rorschach Inkblot Test automatically taking our brains to the most primal places of our subconscious, getting us to imagine the worst possible things that could occur on a university campus.
Unfortunately, the movie isn't half as provocative as the trailer. Having these ideas visualized is more akin to having obnoxious teenagers screaming, "look how messed up my life is" for two hours than offering anything resembling though-provoking material. It's shocking at first, but then you just go...yep, another sex scene...yep, more drugs....yep, violence. Avery seems to be interested primarily in bombarding the audience with shocking moments, but after a while the shock fades away, and with no characters to connect with, the movie loses its footing. It all becomes numbing, and a case could be made that that is the point - to bring the audience to the same emotional level as the characters, but by the end I had lost interest.
The trailer manages to accomplish everything the movie cannot - it's thought provoking, shocking, provocative - and it manages to do it all in a comfortable time limit that doesn't wear out its welcome.
