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Trailer Review: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - Find the Real One

When I was young, I would channel surf through five TV stations and come to the strangest opening credits for a program. It showed a Russian doll being opened to reveal the full nest of dolls underneath. Being a kid, I was naturally drawn to a show featuring a toy, but when it started it was a bleak affair of old men talking. Talking, talking, talking. With habit, I learned to switch channels when it came on, but never forgot what was BBC's popular adaptation of John le Carre's cold war thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Now thirty years later comes a big movie version with Gary Oldman playing George Smiley, a retired spy asked back into Britian's intelligence service to find the identity of a Russian mole in the top leadership of the agency. The trailer is a great expression of tension and intrigue. With a steady playing of piano cords that builds with strings and percussion, trailer shows files being stolen with black leather gloves, men in trench coats, European locations under rain and fog, microphones and tape machines recording, and men plotting to find out the real identity of each other. I love the scene of chess pieces with pictures of the suspects taped to them. This is a game of strategy.

The real excitement of this movie are the actors. I've noticed Gary Oldman since playing a young punk breaking everything in Sid and Nancy. I think he's doing his best work. More controlled, he's a person who carries the past uncomfortably, and his face shows a weary handsomeness, good looks traded in for his soul. He's supported by Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Toby Jones and Ciarán Hinds (official fan). The other positive hype is this is directed by Tomas Alfredson, who directed the horror classic Let the Right One In. That film was full of quiet menace with bursts of memorable violence, and that style continues through in this trailer with it's spare interiors that mimic the Scandinavian emptiness from his first film. You're anxiously looking into the corners for something to move. I also appreciate the color. It eschews a grey and white look predictive in this genre for earthy browns and yellows. This isn't child's play.

Opening December 9, 2011, Verdict: Must See

Trailer Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo - Present Pierced by the Past

I love this trailer to a book I couldn't finish because I thought the writing so bad, and the original Danish adaptation which was as stale as Larsson's text. After all my failed attempts, it's a shock to feel my blood pulse to Fincher's version.

And what a pitch. Starting with a POV shot from a driver turning his car off a road in the dead of winter (hear the wind) through a gate and down a long drive of a haunted estate. Then starts the electronic beats of an industrial cover of Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" with Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs reaching the high notes in an angry howl. The clips flip by to the scratching beats showing just enough to reveal the players: a scowling Christopher Plummer, a searching Daneil Craig, and a dangerous looking Rooney Mara. Scenes go between stark black and grey snowbound exteriors to warm and muted interiors. All the while touching back to the driver's view approaching an empty home. Rows of trees on either side watching like headstones guarding a secret past.

But as the car approaches a secondary stone wall, and we enter the circular drive of the home, the scenes change from movie clips to broken titles reminiscent of "Psycho" that proclaim "The feel bad movie of Christmas" then ends with the title of the movie to Karen O's shrieks which disintegrate into a final stop.

The landscapes are empty like Kubrick, Craig is an innocent man over his head like Hitchcock, and the menace is of a sadistic evil like Haneke. The trailer is tightly structured, with the house as a symbol and visual bass to the music and fast clips that rush by like top-secret information being illegally downloaded. Can't wait for the leak.

Opening December 21, 2011, Verdict: Must See

Trailer Review: The Ghostwriter - Secret History

"You realize I know nothing about politics," Ewan McGregor tells his agent about a new writing assignment offered to him as a ghostwriter for a retired British politican (Pierce Brosnan). But this is a strange assignment. He has to go to a secluded island where Brosnan lives with two mysterious women played by Kim Cattrall and Olivia Williams. Brosnan has an oily surety of his greatness that you know he didn't earn it. Also, McGregor soon finds out that there was another ghostwriter before him who died on the island. Soon enough Brosnan is being investigated for being a war criminal and documents get found that shows the conspiracy runs deeper.

Secrets and evil. A subject familiar to the great director, Roman Polanski. Putting aside the criminal investigation going on in his real life, Polanski is one of my favorites. "Chinatown" is the perfect movie. "Rosemary's Baby" is one of the creepiest horror films ever made. "The Tenant" is a gothic tale about the insanity of urban living. "The Ghostwriter" revives the paranoia of political thrillers from the seventies. "All the President's Men" set the standard. It was a time when America distrusted everything and everyone in politics. Polanski got further than what was being done in that time by redefining the film-noir and giving it a darkness that has never been outdone. That's what one remembers from the best of his films. The exposure of evil, so dark, you can't erase or wash it out because its essential to the natural order. It exists because we do.

It's hard to know if this film will leave an indelible mark. It's well cast with veteran actors. Many shots are extreme close-ups of McGregor's head in tortured expressions. The camera studies his face as if he's in a vice. The suspense seems to be about him discovering a file and getting it off the island. If that plot sounds too much like office intrigue, it's still worth seeing every film by Polanski. There are moments in all his work that leave a joyful numbness. The pain is there, you just can't feel it.

Opening February 19, 2010, Verdict: Must See

Review: State of Play - Top Secret

A murder of a young woman in an alley being chased by a man with leather gloves and a silencer. Next morning, Rusell Crowe shows up at the crime scene as a reporter bribing police with free coffee for a story. Turns out the girl murdered was dating a senator, Ben Affleck, and newspaper editor, Helen Mirren, sets the deadline to get a scoop in eight hours. Journalists uncovering a political conspiracy the size of Watergate, "State of Play" feels a bit out of date these days with newspapers struggling to stay afloat and criticisms of echoing national politics instead of investigating them.

Based on a BBC mini-series, the trailer shows Hollywood trying to match "Masterpiece" drama with Russell Crowe in long hair and Mirren threatening tough editorial decisions. Ben Affleck looks miscast as a member of Congress. He whines like a ten-year old dressed up not wanting to go to Sunday church. "This is as big and connected as they get," Crowe says. I guess he hasn't used Twitter.

Opening Friday, April 17, 2009, Verdict: Skip

Review: The Da Vinci Code - Unlock the Code

Tom Hanks, in long dark hair, stands before a group of academics and says, "The symbols are a language that can help us understand our past." He has the meek expression of a professor, someone not cut out to save the world. After the lecture, signing books, some people in dark suits ask him to step in their car to look at something. That something is a dead body in the Louvre. Acting like he doesn't know who could do this or why comes the best line in the trailer, "Demons, omens, codes, monks...Da Vinci." Stop smiling. His cell phone rings, he answers and an unknown voice tells him, "Professor Langdon, you're in grave danger." The music picks up and we now follow him being chased and searching for the answers to the mystery of The Da Vinci Code.

But it's not that big a mystery. The trailer not only reveals what the code could be, but also tells the whole story. Ian McKellan appears, at midpoint in trailer, in bathrobe and walking cane inside a castle interior to expel the puzzle to Tom Hanks that there is a secret so powerful and if revealed could devestate mankind. Details of Da Vinci's painting, "The Last Supper," gets spliced in to show how big it is: religious proportions.

The professor gets an attractive younger assistant in the form of Audrey Tautou. They are pursued by a determined muscular man with short bleached hair. These are mostly car chases with pileups. At last, the trailer comes to an end with a chorus rising on the soundtrack to indicate the importance of a small box being flung into the air in slow motion above the good and bad characters that, ultimately, contains the secret of a hidden identity. Who will catch it? Who cares.

I'm shocked that a trailer about mystery and a conspiracy would reveal so much of the plot. It takes out all the fun. It's further disappointing because every scene looks photocopied from so many middling conspiracy films. There's no sense that Tom and Audrey could be in danger. The European locations they dart through look similar to leisurely spreads from travel magazines. A gritty realism would make their hunt more compelling.

This is one of the biggest films of the summer. Based on Dan Brown's bestseller, it will surely have a built in audience, and maybe the trailer is trying to reassure that audience by telling them the production has included every point of the story, but it also takes all the danger and intrigue out of it. Instead of going to this movie to uncover a great mystery, the audience is going to find out it read a mediocre book.

Opening May 19, 2006, Verdict: Skip