I love movie trailers – come deconstruct them with me!
(Don’t cloud your judgement! Watch the trailer then read my rant.)
Rubber (April 01 2011* |Magnet Releasing)
*US Release date. Shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 2010.
(Advanced apologies for the sailor cussin’. It is necessary, as you’ll see in the trailer above/review below).
My first exposure to this movie was the poster. Very different from the orange and blue movie posters currently dominating the walls of cinemas these days. The thumbnail on the Apple trailers site was so small, I couldn’t see the tagline. I simply assumed that it was some sort of documentary on the millions of tires choking landfills and making our planet a sad and dirty place to live. For a split second prior to this I also thought of condoms (rubber, condoms, geddit?! Mind perpetually in the gutter, or just feeling horny these days? Hmm….*rubs chin*).
But assumptions make an ass out of the person doing the assuming, and I felt like an idiot thinking that this was some sort of environmental wake-up call to the materialistic masses. This is not a documentary.
My first clue was at the very beginning of the trailer, when the fucking tire spins and gets up and starts rolling itself down the fucking road going on his merry way whatthefuckisthisfuckeryhisnameisRobert?!?!
So yeah, colour me confused. And really, really fascinated. Because he gets pulled over. By Babylon – *cough* I mean, the cops. The tire turns around and fucking blows the head of one of the cops to fucking smithereens ohmyholyshitiamdyingthisishilarious!
Just give me a sec while I catch my breath and wipe the tears from my eyes.
Okay! So this is a horror movie about a killer tire. If that isn’t the higher heights of brilliancy, I don’t know what is. And so, on the movie’s premise alone, I know that this is a must-see film. But does the rest of the trailer hold up to my heightened expectations? I mean, what are you supposed to expect from a movie about a murderous car part?
I suppose this could be a horror-comedy hybrid that the filmmakers, after puffing up some high grade hydro spliffs, though would be good for a laugh, not realizing that you’re not supposed to go through with any ideas you come up with when you’re high. Or it can a serious avant-garde film with deep themes and other bullshit that would just go over my head.
A brilliant idea then occurred to me and I tried a little thought experiment: re-watch the trailer again, but pretend that the tire is a person. How would I perceive the trailer then? Turns out, it was kinda hard to do. The film does look like a mixture of camp and artistic, though. The camp definitely comes from the tire itself, as well as the numerous jokes such as the briefing with the cops (“Is it black?” HAHAHA!) and the obligatory horror/suspense movie shower scene (around the 1:14 mark). But the cinematography and editing look like top notch indie film material.
I actually feel sorry for the damn tire when he forlornly stares at the fire at the 1:54 mark. Did he see the injustice of it all and then turn on mankind à la Falling Down? Is this a complex character study of a good tire gone bad? And just who the hell is this ‘visionary’ filmmaker Quentin Dupieux and his composers Mr. Oizo and Gaspard Augé? (Hint: one of these things is not like the others.) This is so confusing! Movies as ridiculous as this should look and sound shitty and have terrible, cringe-worth acting. And yet, it doesn’t seem to have any of these traits.
My final judgement is that it probably doesn’t matter; I will be seeing this (if I can) whatever the filmmaker’s intentions. Do you think the trailer sold you on the movie? Because it surely fucking did for me!
If you missed them, read the previous installments of Reel Previews here (The Mechanic) and here (Winnie-The-Pooh).
