Thursday, January 3, 2008

Trailer Tease

by James McNally on January 3, 2008

in Web Sites

New York Times tech­no­logy colum­nist David Pogue writes about the frus­trating exper­i­ence of seeing a movie that seems com­pletely dif­ferent from the trailer that made you want to see it in the first place.

This is becoming more and more common as films are edited right up to the date of release, while mar­keting plans (including the trailer) must be pre­pared months in advance. I exper­i­enced this “trailer tease” most mem­or­ably with the Will Ferrell comedy Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Almost nothing we laughed at in the trailer was in the fin­ished film. According to the IMDB site, there were so many dis­carded sub­plots and unused scenes that the film­makers made an entire second film, Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie and included it on the second disc of Anchorman’s DVD release.

Can you think of any other examples of trailer teases that failed to deliver?

Tagged as: trailers

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Free True Films Book

by James McNally on January 3, 2008 · 1 comment

in Books,Documentaries

True Films

I’ve been reading Kevin Kelly’s True Films site for a while now. Kevin was the founding exec­utive editor of Wired magazine and is a former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He’s well-known for his incred­ibly useful Cool Tools weblog. So he’s a smart guy, and he loves doc­u­ment­aries. He’s also a gen­erous guy, and has just announced that readers can down­load a free copy of the third edi­tion of his True Films book in PDF format. The book con­tains 200 reviews of doc­u­ment­aries that have appeared on his site, and it’s free because there are some ads embedded in the PDF.

The book is avail­able from Kevin’s site, but if his band­width runs out, com­ment here and I can host it as well.

Thanks to Kevin and Andre for the tip.

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