![]() Bridges was so irritated by the tell-all marketing that he complains about it on the DVD’s audio commentary. ![]() But there’s no room for that kind of build-up in a trailer instead, all but the film’s final twist are revealed, and they might as well show Robbins twirling his mustache for all the mystery that’s left about his true identity and intentions. Mark Pellingon’s 1999 thriller spends most of its first two acts on a slow boil, and Jeff Bridges’ terrorism expert becomes convinced that his blandly polite neighbor (Tim Robbins) is, in fact, a terrorist himself. But the reveal of old (and maybe new) girlfriend Debbie’s father as hitman Martin Blank’s target was buried deep in the third act, yet freely dispensed here - along with most of the action and gags from the film’s climactic shoot-out. In interviews, Tarantino said he liked the idea of a movie that goes from The Desperate Hours to Evil Dead 2 without warning, but the trailer gives that turn away completely - as if the idea of a Tarantino-and-Clooney crime movie wasn’t enough of a sell point in 1996.Īs you can guess from the trailer, this 1997 comedy from co-writer/star John Cusack was firmly in the Pulp Fiction mold of chatty hitmen and ironic action. This early Quentin Tarantino screenplay, revived after his Pulp Fiction success with Robert Rodriguez directing and Tarantino co-starring, motors off of a clever pivot: it begins as a straightforward crime picture, with two career criminals kidnapping an all-American family, and then unexpectedly transforms itself, midway through, into a gory vampire flick. Zemeckis’s dollar-menu sensibility even more egregiously harms What Lies Beneath, a vaguely Hitchcockian thriller which lives and dies by its twists - all of which are inelegantly revealed in what amounts to a two-and-a-half minute spoiler. In the case of Cast Away, we basically get a Reader’s Digest Condensed Books version of the movie, up to and including our hero’s escape from the island, rescue (“You were on the island for four years”), and reunion with his lady love - so anyone who saw the trailer before the film (which is, y’know, most people) had no worries whatsoever, through the middle hour and a half or so of the movie, that he was going to make it back to civilization. Everybody knows the menu.” So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that both of his 2000 releases show the entire film. ![]() You know exactly what it is going to taste like. ![]() The reason McDonald’s is a tremendous success is that you don’t have any surprises. To me, being a movie lover and film student and a film scholar and a director, I don’t. Here’s director Robert Zemeckis on the purpose of trailers: “We know from studying the marketing of movies, people really want to know exactly every thing that they are going to see before they go see the movie. That said, it’s far from the first movie to be marketed with a trailer that gives away the entire game here are a few of the most notorious examples (and consider yourself warned, spoiler-wise). The new remake of Carrie came out Friday, and as we discussed last week, the genuine mystery of its need to exist is multiplied by its spoiler-iffic trailer - which basically reveals the entire film, beat by beat, up to and including its blood-soaked finale.
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