Trailer Week, Day Three - Being John Malkovich, 1999
By Burbanked on Aug 23, 2006 in Movie Marketing 101, Movies, Trailers, Views and Reviews | 973 views |
Honestly? I didn’t really like this movie the first time I saw it. Maybe I didn’t “get” it, maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind (mine or anyone else’s), but I just didn’t enjoy myself all that much watching it. As the years go by, however, and I find myself revisiting Malkovich, it just gets better and wierder and better.
Charlie Kaufman is that rare Hollywood beast: a wildly acclaimed screenwriter who also happens to make movies people want to go see. He has this clever little habit of taking conventional screenplay rules and breaking them up into tiny little bizarre pieces, and he creates truly original works of cinematic wonder pretty much each time out of the gate. And of course director Spike Jonze deserves a lot of the credit, too, if for no other reason than he’s directed the only performance of Cameron Diaz that I’ll probably ever enjoy. Ever.
There’s a note-perfect, low-rent quality to this trailer. The texture, the grain, even the smell of the trailer - if such a thing is even possible outside my own head - create an atmosphere that it’s hard to look away from. It’s so distinctive not just because of how very unlike most studio movies it is, but also because it’s totally unlike the independent movies we see as well! It defies easy description; it’s a little uncomfortable, a little wrong.
And it absolutely compels you to want to see the movie.
Watch the Being John Malkovich trailer.
Remember, The Movie List has a dandy page with a big list of great trailers, old and new. I’m getting this week’s picks from that list, but there’s a whole lot more there to see. Take the afternoon off work and go take a look.
Coming up tomorrow in Trailer Week: so you think today’s action movie budgets are high?
My blog-love affair with cartoonist Doug Savage’s terrific daily Savage Chickens (
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because clearly Cage has decided to become action/thriller cinema’s first Polish great-grandma. (
Well, that’s too bad. Back a year or so ago when I heard that they’d be making a movie out of Judi and Ron Barrett’s terrific kids’ book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I hoped maybe it’d be made live-action. Handled well, the idea of seeing an actual town where it rained hotdogs and baked beans in an open-roof restaurant, as well as the bit where sanitation trucks clean up all the leftover rain/snow/food and feed it to the pets would be, I thought, a bundle of CG-imbued cinema fun. 
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