Trailer of the Year: DEAD ISLAND

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I am a huge fan of movie trailers. A great trailer, like the Coen's for A Serious Man, is capable of not only getting you excited for the film it is promoting, but somehow gets you emotionally invested in the characters and their plight. Video game trailers are a different beast altogether. They not only need to set up the game's plot and style, but also intercut with in-game footage giving the player an idea of what he or she will be doing. Very rarely do video game trailers illicit the same guttural reaction that a strong movie trailer can. In fact, the only one I can think of was the teaser for the original Gears of War. It was pretty brilliant, showing footage of the game's protagonist Marcus Fenix kicking tons of ass while Gary Jules' cover of Tears for Fears' "Mad World" softly hums in the background. The makers of the upcoming zombie-horror game Dead Island have taken a similar approach to their trailer, achieving an even more powerful result. It is beautiful and terrifying, showing in reverse chronology the horrible results of a zombie outbreak. If you play video games or not, you should watch this trailer! After you watch it let me know what you guys thought! It left me floored and excited to see where the gaming industry is going to go next.

#96. The Country Doctor, #97. Her Crowning Glory - Review

With over a century’s worth of sophistication and context behind us, viewing the silent pictures of the early 20^th Century is more an experience judged by the emotions evoked, not by the mastery of the filmmaker. Even so, after watching D. W. Griffith’s The Country Doctor and Laurence Trimble’s Her Crowning Glory, I would dare argue that while modern cinema has matured, the art of visual storytelling is still very much the same.

Griffith’s tearjerker is a short, but effective examination of the Hippocratic Oath, and just how far a doctor must go to care for his community. Watching it with modern-eyes, the film’s silent build-up and execution is as powerful as it is quaint. While very much limited by the technology at his disposal, Griffith was able to craft a compelling cinematic passage, defined by a singular sorrow that can be universally understood. The Country Doctor is not an example of simple storytelling, but drama at its purest.

Equally entertaining but filled with a welcome tone of irreverence was Trimble’s Her Crowning Glory. The film provides a glimpse into the sweetly dysfunctional relationship had between a loving widower and his young, imprudent daughter. When he begins to fall in love with her Rapunzel-esque nanny, the jealous daughter sets out to clip the blossoming relationship. The nanny’s treatment is cruel and often hilarious, but what is most disturbing is the father’s lack of empathy for the poor woman he once loved; perhaps a brief look at the blatant inequality between men and women in the early 1900s.

While understandably dated, both films display a mastery of the basic three-act structure employed by the majority of filmmakers working today. Without the benefit of a century’s worth of sophistication and context, directors like D.W. Griffith and Laurence Trimble laid the groundwork for all of the visual storytellers that followed.