Yikes! There are three movie plots crammed into this dinky little trailer! How much information do they expect us to process in just three and a half minutes? Adam Sandler’s funny, Seth Rogen’s funny, Adam Sandler’s dying, now he’s not dying, now he’s a home wrecker. Yeesh. It should have ended with a simple Adam Sandler may not be dying, that gives the essential conflict without having the whole film laid out.
This trailer feels cramped, like the editor had some important points to get across to the filmgoers, and a) didn’t trust us to pick up on small hints, and 2) did not have an outline. It’s like one of my high school essays about why I like summertime; the type of essays I would leave off till the very last second. It has no order to it. This does not feel like a cohesive montage with a single point (the plot) clearly focused upon. It’s much more a hack job of the two-hour film. I feel exhausted just watching the preview, and I don’t think I need to bother seeing the film; I know everything that’s going to happen.
Most trailers, not teasers, I’ve seen recently are usually 2.5 minutes long. It seems as though the extra minute the Funny People trailer had could have given us even more insight as to why we should see the film. Instead, that extra minute hurt the trailer, dragging it along like so much dead horse.
Beautifully crafted trailers need to have some sort of harmonic flow to them. They need to leave the audience asking questions that can only be answered by seeing the film. The trailer also needs to whet the viewer’s appetite. While the trailers of films I’m chomping at the bit to see usually end up making me even more hungry for the actual film, the trailer itself is usually so fun to watch by itself, it can usually allay my painful need to see it.
Funny People’s trailer leaves nothing to the viewer’s imagination. Omg, is Adam Sandler going to die? No. Oh. Well, is this woman going to stay “the one that got away?” Probably not. Oh. Is Seth Rogen going to develop and uber man-crush on Adam Sandler? Well, don’t we all? Oh yeah. Pshaw. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve already seen the film. There is going to have to be some major twist in the film to make me shell out $15 to see it.
Rating: 
Despite what my friends will tell you, I was not the only person in our group to say “What are they counting to?” when we first saw the new Friday the 13th trailer. Plus, I figured it out quickly enough, so there. Although these trailers aren’t any longer than other theatrical trailers, for some reason, with them counting to 13, it feels like they go on forever. I get that they are trying to be clever, and I also like the nostalgia it conjures from the original film’s trailer, but it did seem to drag a little.
The new film’s trailer is a little less blatant. It uses some clever editing (i.e. fades, flashes, quick cuts) to try to detract from the fact that they are still giving away the murders…only more creatively. We can still gleen who’s going to bite it when, but it happens in such quick sucession, we tend to doubt what our eyes just saw. The quick cuts are slightly misleading, but essentially we’re shown the murders. 
It’s like when you hear someone yell, “I’m gonna puke,” and you look. You knew what you were about to see; you didn’t really expect anything different. If that wasn’t what you wanted to see, you simply should not have looked. Yeah…that’s this trailer. I don’t know what I was expecting from a trailer of the sequel to Waiting. I guess this is about it.
The Brothers Bloom trailer does not dilly-dally around the point. It hurtles the audience into the plot just as the actual film would. It shows that the trailer author knows exactly what audience the film wants to attract, and how to attract them. The way the characters are presented mimic the “Heist” film style. The sequence of events have the action and questions constantly escalating to the point where the audience is on the edge of its seats waiting to know what comes next.
In Blake Snyder’s book “Save the Cat,” he writes about having read this script in its infancy. My fiance, Dan, and I started speculating on what the poster might look like. I pictured the poster separated into four sections with the same couple standing in front of four different front doors. I only bring this up in order to boast that in the preview, there is a tiny clip where the screen is separated into four sections with four different front doors. Damn straight.
I do not like the narrator in this trailer. I’ve watched the preview a couple times now, and I feel there is no real need for him. I think the plotting of the clips are crystal clear enough without the voice of God being all snarky. Besides, the trailer beautifully sets the audience up in the beginning, showing clips of Bolt the superdog in action. I was tricked into thinking that was the movie. Then the shot of the director yelling cut perfectly demonstrates the twist that Bolt is simply a normal dog, albeit a little confused. 
From Star Trek’s trailer, we get a couple tiny battle clips, a shot of the bad guy, and some angsty Kirk moments, but the preview gives nearly nothing away in regards to plot. Instead, the two minute montage is rife with character development. For those of us familiar with the show, it tugs on those heart-string attatchments we have for these characters, and yet it still presents a little more humanization, particularly in those small peeks into Kirk’s background. I love the blips of Sulu, Uhura, and Scotty. Even more so, I like that the five seconds of screentime Bones gets, he uses to lecture Kirk.
Dreamworks has done it again, and I swear, I’m going to have their babies. Monsters Vs. Aliens not only looks pretty, has a fantastic, star-studded cast, but also promises to be side-splittingly hilarious.
Boo-yah. If I had any interest whatsoever in this hyped-up, drawn-out, steroid-induced, sorry-ass excuse for a franchise, THIS would be the trailer that would make me stand in line (all by my lonesome, by the way) for opening day. The teeniest bit of testosterone I have lying dormant in my body hit a boiling point when I saw this trailer.
