5. Minari
If 2020 has a tear-jerking trailer, for me, it’s Minari, Lee Isaac Chung‘s intensely personal film about a Korean-American family buying a small farm in 1980s Arkansas in search of a better life. The whole thing rings with that crystalline force particular to autobiography; the kind of open-hearted portraiture that bowls you over in its tenderness. Emile Mosseri‘s score for The Last Black Man in San Francisco was one of last year’s best. And the small sample of his music showcased here is ample proof he’s worked similar (tear-jerking) magic.
4. The Green Knight
I’m going to lay my cards on the table here: I love sword and sorcery films. Outlandishly stylish medieval shenanigans are, and I cannot stress this enough: my shit. So imagine my delight when A Ghost Story‘s David Lowery kicked the door down with this announcement: a re-telling of one of the most metal Arthurian legends. The story (spoilers for a 14th-century poem, I guess) tells of a Green Knight interrupting King Arthur’s Christmas feast with an incredibly hardcore challenge: one man can hit him with an ax, but he will return the blow the next year. Arthur’s nephew, Gawain, decapitates the Green Knight, who then picks up his own head, re-attaches it, and adds “fuck Gawain up in a year” to his Google calendar. There are permutations of the story, but overall, it only gets more bananas from there, folks. I got nothing to say but hell yeah.
3. The French Dispatch
Honestly, it was only a matter of time before Wes Anderson—an infamous lover of form, process, and precise verbiage—made a movie about a print magazine. The film is rooted in the director’s love of The New Yorker, and its three central storylines pay homage to evocative pieces from the publication’s history. The trailer itself is what we’ve come to expect from Anderson: it’s star-studded, visually exact, and kinetic. We whip between narrative threads, color palettes, and one-liners at a breakneck pace. After the mixed-reception of 2018’s Isle of Dogs, The French Dispatch is an apparent return to familiar footing.
2. I’m Thinking Of Ending Things
Charlie Kaufman‘s projects tend to be pretty high concept: from rom-coms about memory erasure to finding a portal that leads directly into the head of actor John Malkovich. So the trailer of I’m Thinking Of Ending Things had to fill something of a tall order: to convey the film’s uncompromisingly bizarre tone and incessant sense of unease without giving the whole thing away. From the endlessly shaking dog to an aphasic repetition of the film’s title, everything about this trailer is so intensely, intriguingly weird. No matter how you feel about Kaufman’s twisty ways, you have to admit, the trailer’s damn compelling.
1. Dune
Here’s what I tell people when they foolishly attempt to warn me that getting excited for Dune adaptations is a “bad idea”: If this film is a big success, I win. If it is an abject failure, I still win. The mere idea of someone making a big, sci-fi blockbuster out of Dune has sustained me since it was first announced. Regular innocent people are going to be subjected to an unfamiliar, some might say prohibitively dense world with a glossary the size of a phonebook. I think that’s hilarious. I greet the arrival of Dune with unbridled glee. Denis Villeneuve can try and keep things grounded with as many muted earth tones as he wants. This story’s antagonist is still a putrid, floating baron with a penchant for pederasty. Make that normal, Denis, I dare you.
The inaugural trailer for Dune proved that the movie does exist, which is more than some attempts at adapting Dune can say. This is a Big Movie that is also going to be weird as hell. And I think that’s wonderful.
Related Topics: 2020 Rewind
