Lincoln Full Trailer

Wow, this is looking just as good as I was hoping. Daniel Day Lewis looks amazing in the role, and I love the more historically accurate high voice he's using. For once it feels like you're watching a real human being and not just a larger than life icon.

Hopefully Spielberg will resist the urge to get overly sappy and sentimental though, as he did with War Horse. That was the first movie of his in a while that I just couldn't finish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiSAbAuLhqs&feature=player_embedded

 

I'm deliberately NOT seeing the trailer to keep myself in the dark as long as possible. But I'm still curious what role Tommy Lee Jones will play, and if he's included in the trailer....

If he were in Ford's Theater watching J.W. Booth do the despicable deed, would he yell ''STOP THAT MAN!!!''

Or if he were the coroner, would he yell a singsong ''THAAAA President IZZZZZ da-yed!!!!''

At least he's not Lincoln. If Jones were doing the Gettysburg Address the audience would be blown off their feet by his
''FOURSCORE AND SEVENYEARSAGO!!!!!!!''

I just can't help myself.

 

Interesting that they went with the more historically-accurate higher pitch for Lincoln's voice.

Also, Tommy Lee Jones' historically-accurate horrible haircut.

 

Lincoln dies at the end.

HA! I just spoiled it for all of you!

 

That looks like it's going to be amazing. I can't think of a director more suited to the task and an actor more suited to play Lincoln. Might as well just give them their Oscars now and save the time. This is right up there with The Hobbit in terms of films I'm most looking forward to seeing.

 

What I didn't like was the tendency in the trailer to have so many fades.. that we can't watch more than three seconds of action play out before we are enveloped in total darkness. This trend happens all the time in trailers and is not limited to this film, but it usually happens in trailers for movies that think of themselves as somehow more important or more deserving. I hate it. Are they afraid to just let us watch something? Are they afraid of brave trailer editing that I think was actually much better five years ago than it is now?

 

That looks terrific! But yeah I agree about the fadeouts, is that Speilberg's answer to lense flares and shakey-cam?

I'm even more curious to see Straitharn's performance as Seward.

 

More important than Spielberg's direction is Spielberg's production. And more important than that is Tony Kushner's script. No one should be shocked that Kushner isn't left enough to earn my adulation but the man has a clue about reality. I have to see this movie in a theater.

 

The trailer looked prety standard. The cast looks more interesting.

 

Does he kill any vampires in it?

 

What would you have preferred, a techno soundtrack with cuts every half second?

 

Obviously, no. But I would have preferred to actually see something. I'm sure that probably one quarter of the actual running time of this trailer is a black screen or a screen that is almost black. These scene transitions take precious seconds away, and they are more precious because we are only talking about two minutes or less of screen time - and some of that is taken away by titles and all of that. But it seems that the current strategy is to show a shot, one shot, to give us merely a glimpse of it, then fade it into black, then fade in another single shot, face that into black.. the actual time for fading is not only wasted time (I will saw that fading can be a useful tool in a trailer but like all tools it should be used sparingly and wisely) but even fading back to another shot is also something that takes a lot of time. What's more disturbing is that these fades often don't lead to more than a few seconds, may a single shot or two shots, of screentime. My eyes are just adjusting to a shot and then it fades out. These trailer editors are trying to hurt my eyes or something.

 

To be fair, this is one instance when I think the subject matter kind of deserves to be treated with some weight and importance-- and I think the trailer reflects that.

I mean, we're talking about Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and the emancipation of the slaves here.

 

Of course it deserves to be treated that way.. but treating it that way doesn't mean that we should have a quarter of the trailer... and every succeeding shot be draped in fading darkness... it might actually be more powerful to show us something, to let our eyes focus on what's going on!

 

Speilberg edited those scenes out in a big hurry when that other movie tanked.

 

So you weren't annoyed and distracted by all the fadeouts? There were so many of them, it's like they were trying to be funny! I usually don't notice stuff like that, so when I do notice it, there's a problem. I shouldn't be consciously aware of fade-outs, it's like when the music is so bad that you notice it.

 

It's probably an artifact of the type of movie this is. It's not one with action set pieces, probably not one with lots of great one-liners. It looks like it hinges very much on specific conversations between the people involved, and I can see how it would be hard to form an interesting trailer from out-of-context quotes like that.

Besides, this doesn't strike me as the kind of film where the trailer is going to make or break it. It's Spielberg, it's Lincoln, it's Daniel Day-Lewis. Either you're into that or you're not, trailer be damned.

 

By and large, I'm fed up with Biopics, but this does look like a must-see.

With the current US Presidential campaign being in full swing now, it's interesting to consider how well a plain (at best) man with a high-pitched voice like Lincoln would fare in today's race. Not too well, methinks.

 

It would be worse without the fade-outs. They're trying to show it's a big film with pretty disparate parts: human drama, battlefield action, political infighting, crowd scenes &c. The fades to black allow them to cram all that in without becoming a jarring jumble.

Jared Harris from Mad Men looked pretty bad-ass as General Grant.

Justin