Wish I Was Here – UK Trailer

Presented to you with a healthy dose of morbid curiosity and trepidation we have the UK trailer for Zach Braff’s upcoming second feature Wish I Was Here. It is a decade since his first film Garden State made hipsters worldwide, myself included, experience emotions and want to be rescued by an epileptic Natalie Portman.

Over time Garden State has lost its title as the greatest film of all time but does remain an indie touchstone for the twenty-first century and I won’t be getting rid of my DVD any time soon. I have a sentimental attachment to the first film I saw that wasn’t wholly mainstream. Ten years, and a controversial Kickstarter campaign, later and Braff appears to be on familiar territory.

While the protagonist may be appropriately older than before there is still a mid-life crisis, parental woes, and total uniqueness to be dealt with while The Shins play on perpetually in the sweet but angsty universe indicative of Zach Braff.

Will the film be any good? Was it right for Zach Braff to use Kickstarter to fund it? Will they invite me to a press screening to help me decide? The trailer below can only begin to answer some of these questions but there’s a version of me down inside, roughly ten years younger, who is very excited about Wish I Was Here and wants it to be good. Four stars at least please.

Godzilla – Trailer, Trailer, & Trailer

As a Friday afternoon distraction I’ve been watching Godzilla trailers and enjoyed the varying tone, special effects quality, and typeface that typifies the era they were produced in. The 1954 trailer in particular has some gorgeous lettering while the 2014 edition has the prettiest visuals overall. As for the class of 1998… well it certainly entertained me at the time.

Enjoy the journey through a very selective, and admittedly Western, view of Godzilla history.

Godzilla – 1954 – Ishirô Honda

Highlight: “Dynamic Violence!”

Godzilla – 1988 – Roland Emmerich

Highlight: The bouncing cars as Godzilla approaches.

Godzilla – 2014 – Gareth Edwards

Highlight: The red flares. The music. The whole damn thing.

Veronica Mars – UK Trailer

Finally! We have been sent the UK trailer for the Veronica Mars movie which gets a limited UK cinema release on 14th March 2014 and will be available for digital download on the same day.

For anyone unfamiliar with the Veronica Mars universe please read my previous ramblings, and that time I got statistical. For the die-hard fans I give you the trailer, enjoy:

Excuse me while I get inappropriately excited.

The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable – Trailer

You may or may not have heard of Punchdrunk, they are an award-winning theatre company who take over locations to creative a fully immersive theatrical experience. In a Punchdrunk performance you are free to wander about and discover story threads at your own pace and perhaps go into rooms nobody else will find and have an evening unlike any other member of the audience.

Their latest piece is their biggest yet and they have teamed up with the National Theatre to take over an entire four storey building next to Paddington Station. This performance has particular intrigue for us at Mild Concern as it is set in a film studio in the 1960s, the official blurb explains more:

Amidst the fading glamour of 1960s Los Angeles, stands Temple Studios – a crumbling monument to the golden age of film, seducing wide-eyed dreamers with the promise of wealth and fame. Here, movie stars mingle with hungry young upstarts, while beyond the gates lies a forgotten hinterland where the many rejected by the studio system scratch out a living. Inspired by Georg Büchner’s fractured masterpiece Woyzeck, The Drowned Man explores the darkness of the Hollywood dream.

Intriguing no? The trailer below gives a greater sense of the style and atmosphere of the performance.

Tickets can be bought online and the show runs until 31st December 2013. Fingers crossed we’ll be going soon and will share the experience with you.

Trailers, Advertising or Content?

Here’s a question for you, is a film trailer a piece of advertising or is it content that we film fans actively want to see? Content is the media we want to consume, every article we read online, every TV show we watch, and every podcast we download, this is all entertainment and information that we seek out and pro-actively watch/read/listen to. Advertising is the other bit. Advertising is almost our way of paying to get the content we want. If you want to read an article enjoy this animated ad at the side. If you want to watch a show then prepare for a third of it to be adverts. If you want to download a podcast for free please listen while they read a message from their sponsors.

In a world where the internet is everywhere and we are constantly keeping our eyes transfixed to a minimum of three screens at a time we want constant streams of media and we want it for free. Advertising means that we can continue to get it for free no matter how irritating it can be at times.

But where do trailers fit in?

This question occurs to me from time to time, normally when I am trying to watch a trailer on YouTube. When a trailer is shown on TV or played on the radio then it is clearly just another form of advertising. They are paying lots of money to shove a product in front on your face in the hope that you will buy it. Whether it is Will Smith peddling After Earth or Barry Scott pushing Cillit Bang it is a simple advert to raise awareness and sales. YouTube is an entirely different matter. On YouTube trailers get to be both advertising and content.

If you look at the image at the top of the page you can see that I was trying to watch the trailer for The Road on a YouTube channel dedicated to trailers. Before I could watch the content I wanted to see I was show an advert which just so happened to be a trailer for Tower Heist. Somewhere an advertising agency was paying so that I would watch a trailer before I was allowed to watch a different trailer. Content is our end and advertising is simply a means to an end.

Even over here at Mild Concern we are guilty of blurring the lines a little. Many, many times in the past we have featured a trailer as content. 99% of the time this was either because the trailer really excited us or because we wanted to give it a proper dissection. On only two occasions, the other 1%, we have featured a trailer because somebody paid us to do so. It’s not necessarily something we like to do but we’re open about it and it pays for the hosting but if we’re honest the trailer for Johnny English Reborn probably wasn’t going to make it here on its own merits.

For the most part I would say that the different between a trailer as advertising and a trailer as content is that a trailer can only really serve as content when it is for a film that people either already want to see, a Twilight trailer used to be an event in itself, or for a film that was not previously on your radar but presents a film so intriguing you want to share the two and a half minute preview with the world, Upside Down for example. I quite often seek out trailers and watch them in a way I wouldn’t watch other advertising. I want to see them and don’t need the reward of an episode of Coronation Street to make me watch.

However…

I don’t see how agencies tasked with promoting a film can really justify trying to monetise the trailers themselves. I recently sought out the trailer for Upstream Color after having been baffled by it at a press screening. I found the trailer on the film’s official YouTube channel which is normally the best way to watch a trailer; it will be the best quality and won’t feature any advertising. And yet it did feature advertising! Amazingly it isn’t enough that you want to find out about a small independent release. You still have to earn the right to watch their advert by watching another beforehand. Trying to profit from your advertising itself is baffling. The film should be the product and not the trailer, you can’t really expect to make money from both.

Trailers in the pre-internet age were forms of advertising pure and simple but these days they are just as likely to be found posing as the main attraction in an article as they are simply preceding the main feature at the cinema. At their heart though trailers will always simply be an advert, a commercial. As much as you might want to see a trailer the advertising agency wants you to watch it even more and so we should never be made to watch another advert first.

Advertising is a necessary evil, but let’s not get carried away. OK?

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa – Trailer

Need I say more?*

*I hope not…

The World’s End – Trailer

The Cornetto Trilogy is nearly complete. The journey started in 2004 with Shaun of the Dead which introduced the zom-rom-com. Then in 2007 we got Hot Fuzz which took Midsomer Murders and filtered it through Tarantino’s brain. Now after Simon Pegg’s detours with aliens in Paul and Star Trek and Edgar Wright blowing my mind with Scott Pilgrim we are only two months away from the July 19th release of The World’s End.

And there’s a trailer at last!

From the looks of things we are dealing with an alien invasion during a pub crawl. So far there is no sign of a cornetto but we do have the classic fence jump. Visually the film reminds me more of Scott Pilgrim than Shaun or Fuzz and there’s a hint of Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block too.

Colour me excited. Whatever that means.

Bloody Cuts

Bloody Cuts is a 13-part anthology of horror film shorts, made by a team based in East Anglia who showcase different ways of creating horror. And they’re very good. The sixth in the series, Dead Man’s Lake, was released this weekend and is a callback to 80’s slasher films.

Now, I’m probably one of the last people to comment on the quality of horror films, given I watched Dead Man’s Lake at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning with one eye covered by the corner of a pillow (and then had to cover up the second eye at points). Still, the fact that I made myself watch it is a testament to how much I enjoyed their previous films. Which sounds backhanded but is a genuine compliment.

I especially like episodes four and five: Mother Died is creepy, brilliant and surprisingly emotional (and I love the poster), while Suckablood is my favourite, being a dark fairy tale of what happens to children who suck their thumbs.

Watch the Suckablood trailer below and for all six films, visit the Bloody Cuts site.

One Might Call Marnie a Sex Mystery…

During all the Hitchcock fuss we’ve been having lately I stumbled across a real gem that had me giggling at my desk. Below is the trailer for Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie. The film may be a romantic thriller but Hitchcock has somehow managed to put together a trailer that is nothing short of hilarious. Allow yourself a few minutes distraction and let Alfred Hitchcock introduce you to Marnie in his own unique style:

I can’t decide what my favourite moment is; Hitchcock seeming slightly disapproving of the characters or him claiming to not understand what is happening in his own film.

Excuse me while I watch it one more time…

Guess Who’s* Back This Month…

Cancel your plans for all foreseeable Saturday nights; the Doctor is on his way back to us nerds.

I’m no Dalek fan so the image above doesn’t get me tingling nearly as much as the new trailer below:

*Half an hour later and I notice the fabulous pun I made. Excuse me while I pat myself on the back.