LINCOLN TRAILER IS HERE - Page 2

Very disappointed with this trailer. DDL is fantastic but Spielberg has gone full Clint Eastwood on us. I'm a Spielberg fan and this TRAILER is way beyond his usual (perfect) sentimentality. I hope the movie is much different from this trailer.

War Horse wasn't for everybody.  Did it have old fashioned sentimentality?  Yes.  Of course.  Did it have lazy sentimentality?  Not in the slightest.  It was a purposeful, stylized approach.  We know Spielberg doesn't always do that.  See Munich, just for the most glaring example.  War Horse was basically a movie as a symphony.  It wasn't perfect, but it was hardly schmaltz.  In a way it was kind of experimental, actually.

Has a running time been announced anywhere yet?

 

Without looking into it, I'ma guess 165 minutes.

It's impossible for me to set my expectation level after this trailer. War Horse had an effective trailer that made me anticipate the movie greatly, but in the end that movie turned out to be not just the worst Spielberg movie but one of the worst movies I saw in the theater last year. I hope this movie will be great but I do have my fears.

Give War Horse another chance..but this time watch it in black & white.  It becomes a MUCH better movie.

I might actually like WAR HORSE in black and white with different or no music.

I never saw War Horse, but I might've been more inclined to give it a shot if the whole thing had no dialogue, no music, just stayed with the horse and his experiences -- not literal POV shots, just pure cinema. Oh, and if it were 90 minutes. I was damned if I was gonna sit for two hours and twenty-six minutes about a fucking horse. Motherfuckers need to keep their shit two hours or less. Yeah, I said it.

People who dismiss War Horse outright because "it's about a fucking horse" are being really bad about being a film buff. If you saw it and it didn't work for you, awesome, but hemming and hawing because you're being fucking inconvenienced to be even asked to engage your empathy drives makes you really bad at this game.

Even if Lincoln is the best possible version of itself possible, there will still be people who think it's manipulative claptrap. Why bother trying to convince them otherwise?

 

My objection wasn't to it being about a fucking horse. It was to it being two hours and twenty-six fucking minutes about a fucking horse.

 

Spielberg has a serious-ass bloat problem lately. Jaws, Raiders, E.T.: all two hours. War Horse needs to be almost two and a half hours long?

 

I tend to be grouchy about overlength, don't mind me.

Sorry to say it, Martin, but you're talking out of your ass if you haven't seen it. I'd get that if it was just about a horse trotting around a farm for two and a half hours, but the scope of the flick makes the runtime fly by.

I'll probably give it a day in court one of these days. But again, part of what put me off was the presence of people in the trailer, talking. I'd sort of hoped for what I'd described above, an experimental pure-cinema film. But yeah, I am talking out of my ass. Just sort of explaining why the trailer didn't close the deal with me, I guess. Lincoln isn't really doing it either. It looks so damn boring. I blame Janusz Kaminski. Spielberg really needs to use someone else.

 Too true. Janusz Kaminski is the worst. He's the reason why I prefer War Horse in black & white. His cinematography is so...fucking...loud that it drowns out the actors & the action.

 

Kaminski's style only fits when a film is fantastical like Minority Report or War Of The Worlds. Otherwise, his style is garrish as fuck.

Agreed on Kaminski. This is a film that based on the photography alone looks like a Clint Eastwood movie, and I don't mean that as a positive.

He did pretty well with b&w on Schindler. I'll give him that.

 

Always wondered if Spielberg said "That guy who shot Cool as Ice, I want him to shoot my Holocaust epic." Maybe because he's Polish?

 

Latter day Spielberg bores the shit out of me.  I think some directors should just fucking retire because they're not doing anything I haven't seen already.

It doesn't work in those either.  The only film he's shot that I've liked the look of is Schindler and Private Ryan...everything else makes my eyes bleed.

The only thing I truly didn't dig about Crystal Skull (yeah, I know) was Kaminski's patented washed-out palette. Douglas Slocombe is a terribly hard act to follow, but Kaminski didn't even try. Bill Pope might've come closer to the Slocombe glow.

The part that gets me riled is that Kaminski and Spielberg went out of their way to attest to the fact they were going to attempt to replicate Slocombe's style on Skull. Crystal Skull was the first movie that caused me to get truly infuriated with Kaminski's aesthetic. It was just so radically out of sync with what had come before in the series, or what was appropriate for the film.

I gotta say I am firmly in the schmaltz camp. The trailer is so... needy. Stop trying to make me feel something and tell a story! /black heart

HAHAHA...this is really funny to me because I put off watching "Jaws" for years telling myself that I don't care how good people say it is, there's no way I'm watching a 2 hour movie about "a fucking shark". Not that I'm saying "War Horse" is as good as "Jaws" (I don't know how good it is, as I haven't seen it), just...the point is don't judge a movie by its subject, just as you shouldn't judge a book by its cover.

 

And don't be put off by length either. I'm generally averse to longer movies, but as Roger Ebert once said, "No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough". I just watched "The Ten Commandments" this past week and I was dreading having to watch something that's three and a half hours long, but it was well-paced and went by pretty quickly (and entertainingly).

War Horse sucks because horses are assholes.

 

I would have watched the shit out of War Corgis, though.

 

Because no schmaltzy movie has ever been made about worthy subject matter!

 

My biggest problem is that aside from Day-Lewis avoiding the old baritone voice cliche, there doesn't seem to be anything the least bit surprising or adventurous about this. It looks like an utterly conventional biopic: you've got the soft focus, noble swelling orchestral music, reverential tone, and big prestigious cast all done up in their best wigs, somberly pontificating on the historical significance of everything just in case anyone watching doesn't get it.

 

It'll probably be passably entertaining and I'm sure the DDL showcase performance will be nice, but this needs to be more than a drippy episodic retelling of history to make for an interesting movie.

 

I'm totally sold on seeing and enjoying Lincoln, but I can't disagree with this as a trailer reaction. It exists as a possibility. It's how I feel about a lot of movies that come out this time of year, and Spielberg is far from the worst offender. You've essentially described King's Speech and Milk there as well, and unless Spielberg really biffs it, I think we can expect something of at least the caliber. 

 

There are certainly a couple reasons to hope for more. First is DDL, who I'm guessing does not give two shits about awards at this point. Second is Tony Kushner, who is most definitely not a timid writer, and his last collaboration with Spielberg just rocked this shit out of everything. And finally, I doubt Spielberg could ever make enough bad movies to stop me from seeing his next one. He's the rosetta stone for my understanding of movies and storytelling.

 

It's a rare film that I feel confident I'll love. I don't think there's a single one coming out this Fall that qualifies, except Django, and just saying that makes me aware of how great it will have to be to meet my Bastards-stoked expectations. But is Lincoln a Must See, that I can't wait to finally check out? Yeah, that it is.

Remember too, these trailers aren't cut for discerning filmgoers like us (and I mean that with zero sarcasm, seriously).  This is purely for the crowd who probably didn't know this movie existed until they saw the trailer.  And big emotions are an easy sell.

Without getting political, I don't buy into the Lincoln myth. That said, I would watch DDL play him in a movie.

Maybe I'm just weird, but I've never disliked the more recent turns Spielberg has taken as a filmmaker. He's never going to be the king of the 70s and 80s again, but he's still a very interesting, terrific director for the most part. There have been some stumbles (Crystal Skull, War of the Worlds, which is well put together but emotionally hollow), but there were stumbles even in his "golden age"; I'm looking at you, HOOK.

 

Here, I think the dissonance is that while I love what I'm seeing material-wise, the trailer itself is kind of typical. Like that's gonna stop me. If it's at least half as good as Schindler's List (still one of the only movies that can flat-out reduce me to a sobbing wreck), that will be good enough for me.

 

 

Agree with this almost entirely. The cast list does get me hot but the vibe of the trailer does next to nothing for me.

 

I saw that in theaters five times, introducing different friends/family to it, and with each successive viewing I would cry earlier and earlier to the point that I was crying in the previews, just cuz I knew what was coming.  It definitely wrecks me too.

 

I get the complaints about the trailer, it wasn't exactly what I was hoping for either. But the thing that keeps my interest, besides the subject, is Spielberg's heart has been into this project for years.   

Scorsese's heart was into Gangs of New York for just as many long years ...

And you know what? I fucking love Gangs of New York. So here's to hoping.

 

He totally looks like Bill Nighy. 

 

 

He looks like if Ed Harris, Robert Duvall and Bill Nighy fucked and had a really old dude for a baby.

 

That's one of the greatest sentences I have ever read.

 

GONY isn't that good.

GONY is one of my favorite films of all time, though I acknowledge the Weinstein mandated shorter cut probably doesn't help the film. Also while DiCaprio is a fine actor, maybe someone else in the lead might have been a better choice.

 

If Gangs had anyone other than Cameron Diaz playing that part the movie would jump from a "very good" 7 to a really great 9 out of 10. Every time she's on screen I am slightly annoyed by the choice.

 

As for Lincoln... the trailer is cut and scored into an  Oscar bait cliche'. If the Onion released this trailer absolutely no one would have trouble getting the joke.  

I've seen a few people compare it to a tropic thunder trailer...

GONY has its plus points but it doesn't particularly feel like anyone's passion project, except maybe DDL and the set designers.

 

I would have liked it quite a bit better had Scorsese cast someone else besides DiCaprio as the lead.  He's a fine actor, but he just doesn't inhabit the role very well.

 

Same goes for Diaz, who just doesn't work at all and brings the film down in most of her scenes.

Well, the relative success of Gangs as a film is definitely debatable (I love the score, I think the final shot is maybe the best ever in a movie, I quite like the actors, except for Token Black Guy, which is just an infuriating thing to throw in there...)

But my point was more that Lincoln and Gangs were both long-time historical passion projects from Hollywood royalty starring Daniel Day Lewis. I think its an interesting parallel, especially considering that Lincoln is immediately dividing people in the much the same way. Can't say much more than that till we actually get to see the flick. 

Yeah I'm sold, looks like a solid little flick.

 

Well jeez, thanks for clearing that up for everyone.  

 

Shockingly, some people find alot to enjoy with the film , despite some flaws.

 

I didn't say it wasn't enjoyable.  Lots of weak flicks are enjoyable.