The sheer emotion of that trailer

[Dream]

I loved the trailer. It was epic.

 

[Australis]

Had an odd experience today, Saw it at the cinema. And wasn't as moved by it as I was watching it at home. Weird. maybe I've watched it too many times.

BTW, it was on in front of Watchmen, which I thought sucked. Badly.

Four word review: flash effects, hollow heart.

Exactly the opposite of what I want from Trek.

Well, SOME effects, obviously, but never a hollow heart.

 

[plynch]

First time I watched it, I had chills, goosebumps, my eyes were welling up, the works. Now, I'm not a particularly emotional person, so it surprised me a bit. I read all the trailer threads on here and trekmovie, and it seems I'm not the only one feeling like this.

Every time I've watched it since, I'm on the verge of blubbing like a baby.

Every time I'VE watched it I have to go take a valium, it is so hyper and noisy. StarWars in sheep's clothing. I hope it has a script with meaningful words and ideas and not just spectacle.

 

[trevanian]

Well since everything about whether or not someone likes a film is opinion, I don't think there is a way to say that people are liking crappier films nowadays. You may not like it, but there is no way to say that in general the bit hit films are of lesser quality, since there is no quantifiable number to measure.

I wouldn't say everything is about opinion, but of course I'm offering one up, and it's shared by film historians, who have been viewing films for decades. The 70's was the last decade of consistent, quality film making out of Hollywood. It's been going downhill for decades, and has just gotten worse. The technical elements have improved, all the rest has just become junk. THE STAR WARS PREQUELS, SPIDERMAN 3, INDIANA JONES 4, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2 & 3, and I can go on and on, are just terrible films--making tons of money and getting fair to good notices. It's just sickening.

Granted, there are what I believe to be horrible movies, but if it helps someone relax, and it makes people happy, why do you care?
Not being snarky, just an honest question. Why does it matter to you?

J.

In case he doesn't get around to answering, I'll throw my two bits in, since I think I am on a similar page.

I think the quality of artistic endeavour is important. And I think it often says something about the times you're living in (even in the 'me' 70s, there was a point where artistic expression seemed to still be building on what came before.) And the nature of that artistic endeavour, even if it fails in some or a lot of ways, is also important.

In some past decades, there seemed to be more attempts at doing something good in a stand-the-test-of-time way, stuff that might also turn out to be commercial, but was no guarantee. You might think that a Robert Evans film in the 70s was a sure thing, based on GODFATHER and CHINATOWN, but he could also be involved with MARATHON MAN (which I happen to like nearly as much but which didn't deliver at anywhere near the same levels critically OR financially) or BLACK SUNDAY (and you'd figure being involved with an often-great like Frankenheimer would guarantee that one, but instead you have a movie that is probably best remembered here only as providing the teaser-trailer-score for TMP.)

I think it really takes awhile to get standards of entertainment lowered; you might have a few quantum moments that lower the bar a ways, but to really bring it way down, you need more than just a few dumb megahits. So you have to have shortsighted management plus easily-pleased filmgoers ... a sort of negative synergy from my POV.

More specific to your last lines ... I give you this example. My mother was an extremely well-read woman when she was younger. It was fun finding nuggets for her in second-hand stores, stuff she had read and lost, like ISLANDIA, or a particular edition of a Lawrence. By the late 70s, she had somehow segued into Sidney Sheldon. Around the same time, even with a job that mandated culturally-sensitive thinking, she started what I can only term the 'Charlton Heston/Dennis Miller slide' toward protecting what was hers (or could be perceived as hers) at the cost of the freedoms she had previously championed or at least allowed. Instead of watching Kubrick, or talking about how valuable it was to see the old George Scott series EAST SIDE WEST SIDE, she watched AS THE WORLD TURNS.

Yeah, everybody's entitled to junk food viewing. But if you get too hooked on that diet, you become diabetic (I'm not even being totally metaphorical here; I am diabetic, and it is from genetics in part, but also from me being for a time the worst french fry vegetarian on the planet) and lose your vision.

It is like the Harlan Ellison screed against TV. It is called something like REVEALED: WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS, and puts across the notion that dinosaurs lacked imagination or thought to deal with change and it led to their extinction, and that a diet of TV would similarly kill viewers. I figure a lot of features now, more than before percentagewise, offer scaled-up TV entertainment and we're not the better for it.

Didn't mean to go on, but I just picked up Lebbeus Woods' THE NEW CITY for under $4, which is about $150 less than I thought I could find it for, and I've been happy as can be, which must have triggered off endorphins during posting.

 

[The Academic]

First time I watched it, I had chills, goosebumps, my eyes were welling up, the works. Now, I'm not a particularly emotional person, so it surprised me a bit. [...]

Every time I've watched it since, I'm on the verge of blubbing like a baby...

Exactly the same here... However, I only hope that none of my students will ever read this post!

Why? What is it about the trailer? The music? The epicness? The images?

It's the music (which, unfortunately, is not part of the official soundtrack), the images (Kirk on the command chair for the very first time, the Enterprise flying through the debris field) and the snippets of dialogue ('I dare you to do better...' or 'Fire everything!') that created the epicness you mention, an epicness which had been missing from Star Trek since, well, TMP. This epicness should be standard fare for all fantastic movies (and historical movies, for that matter), but most of them, unfortunately, fall way too short on that account...

P.S.
The only trailer I remember to have had a similar impact on me was one of the 'Episode III' trailers, the one with 'Lord Vader?' - 'Yes, master...'. Too bad this scene was nothing like that in the movie as such! Still, it was the best of the Star Wars prequels...

 

[ST-One]

I think it really takes awhile to get standards of entertainment lowered; you might have a few quantum moments that lower the bar a ways, but to really bring it way down, you need more than just a few dumb megahits. So you have to have shortsighted management plus easily-pleased filmgoers ... a sort of negative synergy from my POV.

What an arrogant statement.
Thank god, it isn't up to you (or me, or anyone else) to decide for others what is good entertainment or what isn't.

 

[trevanian]

I think it really takes awhile to get standards of entertainment lowered; you might have a few quantum moments that lower the bar a ways, but to really bring it way down, you need more than just a few dumb megahits. So you have to have shortsighted management plus easily-pleased filmgoers ... a sort of negative synergy from my POV.

What an arrogant statement.
Thank god, it isn't up to you (or me, or anyone else) to decide for others what is good entertainment or what isn't.

thanks, I guess I had to do something to offset that other thread where my post helped your argument.

 

[the quickening]

Well since everything about whether or not someone likes a film is opinion, I don't think there is a way to say that people are liking crappier films nowadays. You may not like it, but there is no way to say that in general the bit hit films are of lesser quality, since there is no quantifiable number to measure.

I wouldn't say everything is about opinion, but of course I'm offering one up, and it's shared by film historians, who have been viewing films for decades. The 70's was the last decade of consistent, quality film making out of Hollywood. It's been going downhill for decades, and has just gotten worse. The technical elements have improved, all the rest has just become junk. THE STAR WARS PREQUELS, SPIDERMAN 3, INDIANA JONES 4, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2 & 3, and I can go on and on, are just terrible films--making tons of money and getting fair to good notices. It's just sickening.

Granted, there are what I believe to be horrible movies, but if it helps someone relax, and it makes people happy, why do you care?
Not being snarky, just an honest question. Why does it matter to you?

J.

It matters that I, like you, get to express certain views.

 

[the quickening]

Well since everything about whether or not someone likes a film is opinion, I don't think there is a way to say that people are liking crappier films nowadays. You may not like it, but there is no way to say that in general the bit hit films are of lesser quality, since there is no quantifiable number to measure.

I wouldn't say everything is about opinion, but of course I'm offering one up, and it's shared by film historians, who have been viewing films for decades. The 70's was the last decade of consistent, quality film making out of Hollywood. It's been going downhill for decades, and has just gotten worse. The technical elements have improved, all the rest has just become junk. THE STAR WARS PREQUELS, SPIDERMAN 3, INDIANA JONES 4, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2 & 3, and I can go on and on, are just terrible films--making tons of money and getting fair to good notices. It's just sickening.

The problem is that all that is opinion, none of it is fact. You can certainly think that, and in some ways I agree with you, but you can't state it as fact.

Didn't state anything as fact, but it is more than just my opinion. It is the consensus of film historians and academics that the 70s was the last decade of consistent, quality film making, and the current state of cinema is abysmal. It is your right to accept that as just opinion, as it mine to accept it as truth.

 

[the quickening]

Well since everything about whether or not someone likes a film is opinion, I don't think there is a way to say that people are liking crappier films nowadays. You may not like it, but there is no way to say that in general the bit hit films are of lesser quality, since there is no quantifiable number to measure.

I wouldn't say everything is about opinion, but of course I'm offering one up, and it's shared by film historians, who have been viewing films for decades. The 70's was the last decade of consistent, quality film making out of Hollywood. It's been going downhill for decades, and has just gotten worse. The technical elements have improved, all the rest has just become junk. THE STAR WARS PREQUELS, SPIDERMAN 3, INDIANA JONES 4, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2 & 3, and I can go on and on, are just terrible films--making tons of money and getting fair to good notices. It's just sickening.

I'd agree almost wholeheartedly, with the caveat that the independent film now is carving out a necessary niche that offsets a tiny bit of the overbudget crap. Even some of the smaller studio efforts are decent, like GATTACA, and for awhile HBO was doing very well with smart fare (I'd've paid good money to see BARBARIANS AT THE GATE in a theater.) The tradeoff is that you don't ever get years at the theater now like you did in 1974, which might as well have been 1939 or 1941 in terms of golden goodness (actually, 74 may have been platinum goodness, even though I couldn't get into all of the films yet due to age.)

I also don't see an overriding 'theme' to the films of this time like there was in the mid-70s, where the political paranoia aspect was more than a sub-genre, it was just often a part of the truth in storytelling. You'd figure that with more tools, that there could be greater sophistication in the storytelling, but it seems more like a fascination with the tools than significant exploration using them (I haven't seen BUTTON, but to me Fincher's PANIC ROOM seemed more a DePalma like exercise, a huge comedown from the brilliance of SE7EN, which seems to me to do everything right, kind of like Kubrick's PATHS OF GLORY.)

And I'd add the miserable sequels to MATRIX into your list of big disappointments, for my money those things are so flawed they actually hurt my memories of the first one, which, for all its borrowings, was very entertaining and still had some thought content.

I thought SE7EN was brilliant also. Yes, genre films--which I love--have become nothing more than plot and production design, adding occasional flashes of character quarks, but with little development, and with little to no sub-text (theme) or, "inner life"--as I like to call it. I think the "tools" have made some contemporary film makers lazy, hence the reliance on technology. Of course, it could be they just lack talent.

Because of the deficiency of current cinema, I've gotten into Film Noir. My god, what a discovery! These 30s, 40s and 50s "B" movies are more adult, sophisticated, entertaining and all around better than a lot of the "A" films of today. Give them a try.

 

[ST-One]

Didn't state anything as fact, but it is more than just my opinion. It is the consensus of film historians and academics that the 70s was the last decade of consistent, quality film making, and the current state of cinema is abysmal. It is your right to accept that as just opinion, as it mine to accept it as truth.

You've all heard it, people.
Stop watching the movies you like! Now! Because, you know, some experts have decided they are crap.

 

[the quickening]

Didn't state anything as fact, but it is more than just my opinion. It is the consensus of film historians and academics that the 70s was the last decade of consistent, quality film making, and the current state of cinema is abysmal. It is your right to accept that as just opinion, as it mine to accept it as truth.

You've all heard it, people.
Stop watching the movies you like! Now! Because, you know, some experts have decided they are crap.

You're intentionally being silly, right? They have studied cinema, and understand it enough to make a more educated appraisal.

 

[darkwing_duck1]

Didn't state anything as fact, but it is more than just my opinion. It is the consensus of film historians and academics that the 70s was the last decade of consistent, quality film making, and the current state of cinema is abysmal. It is your right to accept that as just opinion, as it mine to accept it as truth.

You've all heard it, people.
Stop watching the movies you like! Now! Because, you know, some experts have decided they are crap.

You're intentionally being silly, right? They have studied cinema, and understand it enough to make a more educated appraisal.

Even rectal thermometers have degrees...

Let me guess...you're a graduate of the "J Evard Pritchard" school of art criticism...

 

[xortex]

I just hope the 'he' in heart is Gene Roddenberry. not J.J..

 

[Borgminister]

I hate arrogance.

 

[pookha]

Didn't state anything as fact, but it is more than just my opinion. It is the consensus of film historians and academics that the 70s was the last decade of consistent, quality film making, and the current state of cinema is abysmal. It is your right to accept that as just opinion, as it mine to accept it as truth.

You've all heard it, people.
Stop watching the movies you like! Now! Because, you know, some experts have decided they are crap.

You're intentionally being silly, right? They have studied cinema, and understand it enough to make a more educated appraisal.

and some of these film historians /critics believe the trek films were junk food cinema.

 

[M'Sharak]

Didn't state anything as fact, but it is more than just my opinion. It is the consensus of film historians and academics that the 70s was the last decade of consistent, quality film making, and the current state of cinema is abysmal. It is your right to accept that as just opinion, as it mine to accept it as truth.

You've all heard it, people.
Stop watching the movies you like! Now! Because, you know, some experts have decided they are crap.

You're intentionally being silly, right? They have studied cinema, and understand it enough to make a more educated appraisal.

Even rectal thermometers have degrees...

Let me guess...you're a graduate of the "J Evard Pritchard" school of art criticism...

Ahem...

* Person A may cite the opinons of a group of people presumably qualified or credentialed to be offering opinions on a given subject. That's fine.
* Person B may then make a statement which is apparently dismissing those opinions. A bit brusque, but fine.
* Person A may then question that dismissal and offer the qualifications of those whose opinions he first cited. Also fine.

And then Person C chimes in with a remark about rectal thermometers. I'm not quite sure whether that's fine or not, but when followed by a line like

Let me guess...you're a graduate of the "J Evard Pritchard" school of art criticism...

well, I don't really know who "J Evard Pritchard" is supposed to be, but the tone is beginning to sound unnecessarily insulting and personal.

Less of that, please.

 

[Hyperspace05]

Ahem...

* Person A may cite the opinons of a group of people presumably qualified or credentialed to be offering opinions on a given subject. That's fine.
* Person B may then make a statement which is apparently dismissing those opinions. A bit brusque, but fine.
* Person A may then question that dismissal and offer the qualifications of those whose opinions he first cited. Also fine.

And then Person C chimes in with a remark about rectal thermometers. I'm not quite sure whether that's fine or not, but when followed by a line like

Let me guess...you're a graduate of the "J Evard Pritchard" school of art criticism...

well, I don't really know who "J Evard Pritchard" is supposed to be, but the tone is beginning to sound unnecessarily insulting and personal.

Less of that, please.

New to the thread here... But I think it needs to be pointed out to the "film school crowd" (or reminded) that film is art. Art is subjective. You can have an armada of expert telling me that a piece of art is bad - but if I still like it, does it really matter??? No... And that's where the "arrogance" claim comes in. There are some technical aspects of films that can be more objectively judged, but even there one can find many exceptions.

Both sides need to be more understanding of this.

 

[Amaris]

In case he doesn't get around to answering, I'll throw my two bits in, since I think I am on a similar page.

I think the quality of artistic endeavour is important. And I think it often says something about the times you're living in (even in the 'me' 70s, there was a point where artistic expression seemed to still be building on what came before.) And the nature of that artistic endeavour, even if it fails in some or a lot of ways, is also important.

In some past decades, there seemed to be more attempts at doing something good in a stand-the-test-of-time way, stuff that might also turn out to be commercial, but was no guarantee. You might think that a Robert Evans film in the 70s was a sure thing, based on GODFATHER and CHINATOWN, but he could also be involved with MARATHON MAN (which I happen to like nearly as much but which didn't deliver at anywhere near the same levels critically OR financially) or BLACK SUNDAY (and you'd figure being involved with an often-great like Frankenheimer would guarantee that one, but instead you have a movie that is probably best remembered here only as providing the teaser-trailer-score for TMP.)

I think it really takes awhile to get standards of entertainment lowered; you might have a few quantum moments that lower the bar a ways, but to really bring it way down, you need more than just a few dumb megahits. So you have to have shortsighted management plus easily-pleased filmgoers ... a sort of negative synergy from my POV.

More specific to your last lines ... I give you this example. My mother was an extremely well-read woman when she was younger. It was fun finding nuggets for her in second-hand stores, stuff she had read and lost, like ISLANDIA, or a particular edition of a Lawrence. By the late 70s, she had somehow segued into Sidney Sheldon. Around the same time, even with a job that mandated culturally-sensitive thinking, she started what I can only term the 'Charlton Heston/Dennis Miller slide' toward protecting what was hers (or could be perceived as hers) at the cost of the freedoms she had previously championed or at least allowed. Instead of watching Kubrick, or talking about how valuable it was to see the old George Scott series EAST SIDE WEST SIDE, she watched AS THE WORLD TURNS.

Yeah, everybody's entitled to junk food viewing. But if you get too hooked on that diet, you become diabetic (I'm not even being totally metaphorical here; I am diabetic, and it is from genetics in part, but also from me being for a time the worst french fry vegetarian on the planet) and lose your vision.

It is like the Harlan Ellison screed against TV. It is called something like REVEALED: WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS, and puts across the notion that dinosaurs lacked imagination or thought to deal with change and it led to their extinction, and that a diet of TV would similarly kill viewers. I figure a lot of features now, more than before percentagewise, offer scaled-up TV entertainment and we're not the better for it.

Didn't mean to go on, but I just picked up Lebbeus Woods' THE NEW CITY for under $4, which is about $150 less than I thought I could find it for, and I've been happy as can be, which must have triggered off endorphins during posting.

I can understand and empathize with that. I do have my moments where I like to watch what would be considered a "junk food" movie. For example, "Dumb & Dumber". That movie has no redeeming artistic value whatsoever, but there are times when I want nothing more than to pop that DVD into the player and sit back with a popcorn and soda and laugh my ass off.

Then again, I love movies that push boundaries. Have you ever seen the independent film "Europa Europa" (Hitlerjunge Salomon)? I love that movie. I consider it a well made and powerful film.

I like movies that make me feel a new level of understanding, movies that make me really laugh and cry. I love movies that make me think long and hard, way past the end of the reel, just thinking. I will give almost every movie an opportunity to sway me, with some exceptions. For example, I despise the "Date movie" type movies. OK, I did laugh during "Scary Movie", but because it felt like a Abrams-Zucker brothers movie, which I love to watch. After the first, the rest went downhill.

Another favorite movie? "BladeRunner", and I only watched it for the first time this past week. I was enthralled by how well written and nuanced the movie was for what seemed to be a pop sci-fi flick.

You mentioned books. Now books are far easier for me to criticize, since there is no budget, there is no actors to pay, no technical demands beyond the ability to put pen to paper and write. However, I do see what you're saying and I understand that point.

So to swing it all around, one of the reasons I am so positive about this movie is that it is an unknown for me. I have watched Star Trek for the past 24 of my 28 years, and have loved it. Now I get the chance to see a new take on an old favorite, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If I end up disliking the movie, and believe me if I don't like a Trek movie I will tear it to subatomic confetti, I have DVDs, books, video games, comic books, action figures, all inviting me back into what is familiar and loved. It's a personal choice, but I can live with that. I just want to give the movie a chance.



J.

 

[DBR]

I love it! One of my favourte trailers ever!