There was a weird glut of fake-documentary trailers this week; it's not my favorite genre, so it wasn't an easy choice. I had heard some buzz about this Catfish trailer, but I still don't really know what's going on. For one thing, I can't even tell if this is a real documentary - I didn't think so, but a little poking around online suggests it is real. So what is it about? Obviously there's the Internet love story, which leads to something mysterious and exciting. If it were fiction, I would want to see it, but if it's true, I'm even more intrigued. How do you structure a genuine documentary with two such seemingly disjointed narratives?
I have to admit, while the story does interest me, I didn't like the trailer. Movies in recent years have trained their audiences to expect specific things - sci-fi and horror movies will have a big twist, for example, and movies with attractive, young hipsters filming each other with camcorders usually end with Blair Witch-y or Cloverfield-style disaster. So I'm watching the trailer, anticipating something unexpected (if that's even possible), and yep, there it is - but it's real? For some reason, I can't get to grips with that.
More importantly, whoever created this trailer does a huge disservice to the film with the blurb, "The final forty minutes of the film will take you on an emotional roller-coaster ride that you won't be able to shake for days." You know what that means to me? That it begins with nearly an hour of crap I don't care about. All of the stuff with the Facebook chatting and the painting and the texts? That's meaningless. Surely that's not the message you want to be sending about your film. Brad Brevet at Rope of Silicon suggests that watching the trailer might actually spoil the film. I don't know if it ruins the ending or gives away some big plot points, but it kind of spoiled my anticipation.
More importantly, whoever created this trailer does a huge disservice to the film with the blurb, "The final forty minutes of the film will take you on an emotional roller-coaster ride that you won't be able to shake for days." You know what that means to me? That it begins with nearly an hour of crap I don't care about. All of the stuff with the Facebook chatting and the painting and the texts? That's meaningless. Surely that's not the message you want to be sending about your film. Brad Brevet at Rope of Silicon suggests that watching the trailer might actually spoil the film. I don't know if it ruins the ending or gives away some big plot points, but it kind of spoiled my anticipation.
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