Mar. 2nd, 2005

johnstonmr: (Default)
One of the few things worth learning that I got from La Vada Davis was the recipe for spaghetti sauce. It took four to five hours to cook, and smelled wonderful. By family tradition, it was never written down, and I'd be willing to say that of the three kids she raised, I'm the only one who knows it these days.

When I was a kid, there was nothing I liked better than coming up the hill from the bus stop, rounding the back of the house, and smelling that spaghetti sauce cooking. It got me hungry, made me want dinner to be ready as soon as possible, and promised that I'd love it like nothing else. It was my favorite thing for dinner back then.

Movie trailers work the same way. They whet my appetite for the movie, get my blood flowing. Despite the unfortunate tendency in hollywood to showcase the best lines and some of the best visuals in the trailer (how much cooler would it have been if we hadn't seen Darth Maul open that second lightsaber blade in the trailer, and seen it only in the movie itself?), I still love them.

Even better, trailers are becoming an art form in and of themselves. How many of you got teary just from the trailers for the various Lord of the Rings movies? I know I did. The way the text cards, visuals, and music combined to make a tiny little mini-movie made me happy and also broke my heart. I'll never forget the text cards in the Return of the King trailer; they broke me when I first saw it. The thing has that much power. Or, alternately, I'm just an emotional wimp. But then, I fight cannibals atop flying jets, so go figure.

I also love Battlestar Galactica's trick of showing several fast-cut scenes of the show you're about to watch. You get no dialogue, you get only scenes without context -- but they make me even more eager and in-the-mood for the show.

I understand why others don't like them -- but I will always love the damn things.

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