50 Greatest Trailers of All Time

IFC (the Independent Film Channel) posted their list of the 50 greatest movie trailers of all time. Interestingly, the top three are all horror films: Alien, Psycho, Cloverfield (number four is Miracle on 34th Street). Perhaps horror films, where the excitement comes from the unknown and the implied, are particularly suited to the short, trailer format.

The list's compilers seem to like meta-trailers (where the trailer talks about the movie as a movie)... Psycho, Miracle on 34th Street, The Comedian (#5 in the list), Citizen Kane (#6) are all self-referencing trailers. I'm surprised that This Is Spinal Tap's teaser didn't make the cut:



(There is another, longer version of the teaser that seems geared towards movie theater operators).


Alien's trailer:



IFC says about Alien's trailer:

Masterfully cut and artful to boot, the first glimpse of Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-horror classic features not a single word of dialogue and begins in abstract: a ride through a star field, a hover above some sort of moon rock, blocky shapes that slowly materialize into the letters of the title, craggy landscape traversed with a macro lens before pulling back to clarify what lies on that cratered surface -- the egg of an alien life form. It cracks open, releasing an ill-omened white light and the high-pitched alarm (an animalistic squeal?) that unnerves throughout the rest of the trailer.

Astronauts tiptoe into an extraterrestrial ship, crosscut with Sigourney Weaver inexplicably running through corridors, with confounding/enticing images flashing almost subliminally in between (a space crew awakening from hyper-sleep, Harry Dean Stanton's bewildered close-up) before all hell breaks loose (an obscured Ian Holm spurting milky blood, a cat hissing, a never-before-seen "face hugger" in a frenzy). From above the planet, an onscreen title ultimately seals the deal, seeming all the more foreboding for the vaccuum of diegetic sound that came before it: "In space, no one can hear you scream." It's one of the most famous taglines of all time, though I'm quite partial to the far less effective "Alien3" slogan that ambiguously referenced either a breeding alien or Weaver's Lt. Ripley, believe it or not ("In case you haven't noticed, the bitch is back"). --Aaron Hillis

[via kottke]

Grand Theft Auto / Whoopi Goldberg mashup

On the way home from the subway today I saw this inadvertent(?) mashup of an old Grand Theft Auto mural advertisement with a new Whoopi Goldberg PSA billboard:

WWF's semi-guerilla art

That's the World Wildlife Federation, not the World Wrestling Federation!

My initial reaction to this to think it's a nice little bit of semi-guerrilla art... but then it occurred to me that it's a bit off. The rain forest isn't being chopped down for paper, it's being chopped down for grazing & crop land. Does misleading people about the problem really help?

More interesting (and perhaps more on-target) is their "ocean-levels rising" billboard: