Three-Minute Clipgasm

I’ve recently become aware of a truly wonderful, but little-known corner of the crazy world of movies, and I wanted to share it with you in the hope that you don’t know about it already and I don’t look like the last person in the world to discover it and everybody says, “Oh dear, he’s lost it you know, his blog was much better in the early days when he told us how great Chicago is only seven years after it came out”.

By way of a meandering introduction though, here’s a fact: A great trailer is in no way a clear indication of the quality of a film. Now this is clearly as obvious a statement as announcing that Shia LaBeouf single-handedly renders any film he’s in ghastly, and deep down I’ve always known it. However in my innocence I have for a long time allowed my excitement about a forthcoming film to be entirely dependent on a three-minute clipgasm edited together by an 8-year old with ADHD high on Sunny D and desperate to finish before he wets himself.

Because these little works of art do such a fantastic job of making even the turdiest movies look like the greatest thing since cinnamon flavour Jelly Belly, somebody (who deserves a Nobel prize for being ace) came up with the Golden Trailer Awards, a celebration of all that’s short, flashy and exhilarating, not to mention misleading and ultimately dream-smashing. Held annually, the GTAs celebrate the best of trailers from the world over. There’s even a category for Best Voice Over, recently renamed the Don LaFontaine Award for Best Voice Over after the legend that is this man:


I was very pleased to see that the spectaculous trailer for woeful cackfest Vantage Point won an award last year, because it did a bang-up job of convincing me the film was going to be the next Die Hard, when in fact it was the next Die Hard 4.0. In fact there are so many films that I would rather just re-watch the trailers for than the actual flick that I think film studios should stop all this feature length movie nonsense and just keep making cool trailers, then release compilation DVDs every six months, calling them something like Now That’s What I Call Short, Flashy And Exhilarating But Misleading And Ultimately Dream-Smashing. I mean who wants to sit through 3 hours and 6 minutes of a director’s cut of Watchmen anyway when the trailers are incredible and still leave time for a nice walk in the park or a leisurely browse of a pioneering, soul-enriching blog? Nobody, that’s who.

So hooray for the Golden Trailer Awards. Long may they celebrate all that is brief and erratically edited, and by the way did I mention that District 9 looks absolutely amazing from the trailers?