In Contention

Tag: Independence Day

  • WTF with the giant fireball thing??

    With “The Social Network” picking up yet another award last week (for Best in Show at the Golden Trailer Awards), Ryan Adams at Awards Daily asked for personal picks for favorite trailers.

    There are a number that spring to mind for me. I maintain that the first “Pearl Harbor” trailer (link), with the score from “The Thin Red Line,” was absolutely masterful. The “Alien” trailer (link) is in many ways more unsettling than the actual film, while just two years ago, whoever pieced together the tease for the Coens’ “A Serious Man” (link) knew what was up.

    Even more recently, the trailers for “Black Swan” (link) and David Fincher’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” (link) dazzled, while the “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” trailer that dropped last week reminded me of how tightly constructed the one for “A Single Man” (link) was. But the truth is, when I think of movie trailers and their power to seize your attention, I’m taken back some 15 years to a sci-fi film and a tease that had me more intrigued than whatever film I was about to watch. And it contains the single greatest image ever used to sell a film, in my opinion (the final shot). Since it ties in nicely today, I figure I’ll offer it up after the jump.

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  • Red glare

    Happy Independence Day to my fellow Stateside brethren. I was trying to find something nifty on YouTube, but this map from the folks at Hollywood.com is pretty cool. Click on the image to head that way, where you can hover your mouse over your state and find out what movie set there the editors consider tops. My two stomping grounds — Virginia and North Carolina — got “Donnie Darko” (boo) and “Blue Velvet” (nice) respectively.

    And oh, why not a couple nifty YouTube clips after all (on the jump).

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  • Happy ID4

    One of the greatest teasers ever.  Knocked me on my ass back in the day.  Fire up the grill, throw back a cold one and watch the Fresh Prince make bitches out of some invading chumps.  Happy Independence Day.

  • Put this in your pipe and smoke it

    Rod Taylor in The Time MachineI love watching the end of the world unfold on screen.  It’s just something I enjoy.  And sue me if I was a little bummed at a certain caution on the part of Hollywood to offer up the apocalyptic imagery it had serviced to the masses in the action-packed summers of the 1990s following 9/11.

    Go back and take a look at “Armageddon,” for instance.  Hardly great cinema but I got a kick out of it just as I did “Independence Day” or anything comparable.  The shot of the Chrysler Building being sheered in half by meteorites as people plummet to their death — the imagery is obviously prickly in the post-9/11 environment.  And everything from “War of the Worlds” to “The Dark Knight” has gone out of its way to comment toward the disasters of that year, to put forth the sense that a thought process is being injected into blockbuster entertainment, that the mayhem actually means something on an artistic level.  And I’m all for that.  But I prefer not to be held hostage by it, either.

    I remember talking with a colleague in New York last month who was bemoaning the failure of Alex Proyas’s “Knowing.”  I had not seen the film yet at the time (though I have sense, and it’s certainly a…lesser accomplishment, shall we say, but it also deals with interesting ideas that really should be in mainstream Hollywood cinema).  I rebutted with the notion that maybe a good, spectacle, end-of-the-world trip to the movies is just what Hollywood needs to shake out all the cobwebs.

    When my list of the year’s most anticipated films hit on New Year’s Day, more than a few people raised an eyebrow at the inclusion of Roland Emmerich’s “2012.”  I should come clean with the admission that Emmerich’s films, more often than not, work for me on some primitive, Neanderthal level.  But I have to also admit to being fascinated with all of the speculation over the year 2012, which I wrote about nearly a year ago.

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