At the Movies

I'll judge a movie by its trailer all day long. This is one of the ways I decide which movies to see at the theater. I'm usually right. Sometimes I'm wrong.

The last two movies I saw at the theater were relative indies, The Road and Antichrist. The trailer for Antichrist lured me in with strange moments in slo-mo juxtaposed with anguished characters in a writhing wooded setting. The movie was the same, except more beautiful, more shockingly sexual, and more boring as hell. I mean c'mon! I get all the metaphor and statement crap, gimme some of that freaky deaky you promised in the trailer. Slooow and precious, beautiful and well-acted. I knew it! I was sucked in by the promise of Willem Dafoe, but left the theater feeling intellectually inadequate. Partially because I didn't get the talking fox part, and partially because I was totally entertained by the closeup depiction of a woman slicing off her own clitoris with a pair of rusty scissors. Art films... they're so artsy.

And The Road trailer promised a harrowing tale of grim and violent post-apocalyptic future. Viggo Mortenson is a low key bad ass and this movie's trailer underscored that. But at the same time, the trailer hinted at a fair amount of action. Not so in the actual movie. It was sloooowww... and painful and grim. As a man whose wife had bailed to her own death, Viggo played the role of the desperate father simply trying to not die. There were a few nasty marauders in the pic, but for the most part it was father and son narrowly evading lonely oblivion on a day-to-day basis. Pretty entertaining, but definitely could've used some more action.

I didn't see the trailer for Precious. Just a couple clips online here and there. That's all I needed. This movie made me a fly on the wall in the rotted suffocating heat of bleak ghetto life for one severely abused, undereducated, obese black girl. Wow. What a jaw-dropping performance by all, particularly M'onique who played the main character's ragingly abusive and equally neglectful mother. Where she pulled that performance from I can only guess. But if she doesn't win an Oscar for that, I'll be as pissed as the year Denzel won for Training Day.