Halfway through the trailer for Disney’s game-changing, genre-bending, high-concept comedy, Bedtime Stories, a title card appears against the backdrop of a mystical harp arpeggio, posing a timeless question that has kept me awake on more occasions than I'd like to remember and doubtless continues to boggle even the greatest minds: “What if you told a story…and the next day it came to life?”
Well, Skeeter - Adam Sandler - is about to find out when he baby-sits his sister's children: your typical all-American kids, mildly endearing with a healthy dose of naiveté and comic enthusiasm, lisp sold separately. He begins to tell them a bedtime story and is shocked the next day when part of the story begins to come true: it starts raining real-live gumballs. But then there’s a twist that nobody could have seen coming – I know I sure didn't: the only parts of the story that come true are… the ones added by the kids! Talk about a scenario rife with comic potential. As you can imagine, Skeeter gets himself into some pretty hilarious situations, like when the kids propose that an angry dwarf kicks him, and then the next day, it happens!
In short, this is a pretty terrible piece of work. Not only is the concept mundane and poorly executed, but the trailer's tactics are downright insulting. First, they try to hook you with a quick comic subplot – the kids have a guinea pig with huge eyes popping out of its head. Let me just say that it's going to take a little bit more than that to convince me to sit through two more minutes of garbage. Needless to say, the guinea pig is completely dropped from the plot of the trailer, prostituted for a quick laugh. Then, they start to bombard the viewer with scene after over-the-top scene of Skeeter's stories, as if they could shock you into forgetting the actual asinine concept of the film.
At least the trailer ends on an exciting note when the narrator leaves us with a thought-provoking proposition: “This Christmas… every day… is a new adventure.” Not only does that seem just wildly unsupported by the trailer itself, but the more I think about that sentence, the more I realize that it actually makes zero sense.
Waltz with Bashir
The preview begins with some atmospheric percussion over a black screen: it sounds like the Blue Man Group going through a period of teenage-angst. Then comes the title card, a quote from the Chicago Tribune: “One man's personal experience with the 1982 invasion of Lebanon becomes a stimulating and provocative meditation on responsibility and morality. It's an animated drama whose visual style feels just right.”
The preview itself delivers on the film’s early promise. The animation is pseudo-realistic, like those American Express ads, and it completely works, allowing for some compelling cinematic sequences. The first scene shows an enraged, seemingly rabid dog racing towards the viewer against an eerie yellow sky. The story revolves around an Israeli man who fought in the first Lebanon War and is now haunted by nightmares. “After the 1982 invasion of Lebanon,” he explains, “I lost my memory. Now, in order to remember, I'm looking for those who can never forget.”
Shocking images of war are depicted in animated hues against a remixed version of PIL’s “This is Not a Love Song.” The surreal visual style complements the intense subject matter. In fact, the animated nature of this trailer is probably necessary to provide a little bit of detachment from the powerfully graphic subject matter.
The Waltz With Bashir trailer packs a surprising amount of power into such a short medium, a result of its skillful editing and pacing. Through the second half of the trailer, the cuts get shorter and shorter, building the intensity and anticipation. Then the pattern breaks. The soundtrack cuts out as we flash back to the initial dream imagery of the snarling dog running against the yellow sky, bringing the trailer full-circle. The next cut is accompanied by a gunshot; a subtitle reveals the narration: “And then the horrific silence of death.” The trailer concludes with a conventional move – a tightly edited sequence of unrelated action clips ending with a longer clip with some kind of dramatic dialogue summarizing the movie’s main sentiment. However, the beauty of this trailer is not in its originality of form, but in its masterful execution.- Andrew Gross
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