Dancin' Dan here, ready to play our favorite trailer game with a bit of a twist. Those of you who saw Catching Fire this past weekend were treated to what is surely one of the weirdest and worst trailers in recent memory... although you might not have realized the full extent of its awfulness until the very end, when the title flashes across the screen.
Let's break it down... chronologically this time.
YES
Things start off well enough... a pretty poor boy (Alex Pettyfer) and a pretty rich girl (Gabriella Wilde) meet-cute/creepy as pretty music plays...
Things get darker. That brooding, haunting cover of Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" kicks in, the hand-scrawled text starts talking about saying goodbye to innocence, and you're suddenly thinking there might be more to this than meets the eye. You're just waiting for the other shoe to drop (like in that killer trailer for Wes Craven's Red Eye, remember that one?)...
NO
...but it never does!
Instead, there's lots of vague, vague talk from the girl's father (Bruce Greenwood, paying his mortgage) about how he just knows this boy is hiding a wicked past - in other words, what every rich girl's father does in every movie ever.
More vague, vague talk from the boy about how that's all behind him, and hey, it wasn't a crime anyway (Okay, that wasn't quite what you were expecting...)
Cue every standard teenage romantic drama beat: slow undressing, "I've Never Done This Before", running through fields, "You Drive Me Crazy", curling up in the back of a pickup truck, "I Only Want To Be With You", punching, "Stay Away From My Daughter!", crying, "WHY DO YOU HATE MY BOYFRIEND, DADDY?!?", more crying, "WHY WOULD YOU LIE TO ME?!?"
And finally... the title.
*needle scratch*
WHAT? Endless Love? The Brooke Shields/Martin Hewitt-starring, Franco Zeffirelli-directed cheesefest from 1981 that we get to call "The Oscar-Nominated Endless Love" because of that earworm Diana Ross/Lionel Richie duet?
THAT Endless Love?
And all of a sudden, everything about the trailer seems even more miscalculated than before! For the first minute, there's that thrilling sense that this isn't going somewhere expected, and then not only does it go everywhere you might expect, it turns out this is a property that we already know...
MAYBE SO
But... um... Alex Pettyfer is pretty?
Basically, I got nothing. If I wasn't a NO before seeing the trailer, I sure as hell am now!
However, compliments are due to the people who put this together. See, I had only a vague knowledge that this film existed before seeing this, and now, it's all I can think about.
What say you?