My favourite awkward moment in Hollywood? Not when a diva exposes herself in an inappropriate dress at an awards night; not when an indie actor chooses to cash in, and later bags whatever commercial tripe he is currently on the media circuit for. No, my favourite awkward moment in Hollywood is the celluloid version of showing up at the same party, wearing the same dress: making the same film. And I mean, exactly the same film.
It happened in 2004, when two teen chick flicks about the President’s daughter were released. In First Daughter, Katie Holmes played Samantha Mackenzie, the President’s daughter who falls in love with her bodyguard (Marc Blucas) who has been assigned to protect her. In Chasing Liberty, Mandy Moore plays Anna Foster, the President’s daughter who– yep, who guessed it– falls in love wit her bodyguard (Matthew Goode, infinitely more appealing) who has been assigned to protect her.
So let’s have a look at the trailers for these two films? How do they attempt to differentiate themselves?
Luckily, there are some differences in plot, and the trailers play these differences up. Where Katie Holmes’ character in First Daughter appears to be a sappy goody-two-shoes, and the plot is entirely about how disgustingly in love she is, the trailer for Chasing Liberty highlights that Mandy Moore’s character is more “sassy” (as sassy as young women get in such films, anyway) and her journey is more one of self-discovery and finding freedom, than love.
More recent examples of this happening in Hollywood are 2011′s sex comedies, No Strings Attached and Friends with Benefits. In both, two young twenty-somethings (Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, and Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake respectively) decide to start having casual sex, without the complication of getting into a relationship. Of course, the course of true love never did run smooth, nor that of lust.
And the differences between these trailers? Well, while the films themselves were actually quite different – in that Friends with Benefits was a lot, well, better than No Strings Attached – the trailers are very similar. Both follow the age old rom-com trailer formula of establishing the premise, including the witty clips, inserting some sort of montage sequence to a catchy pop tune, and closing with a one-liner. What is more interesting about comparing these two trailers is perhaps how difficult it is to tell what the final quality of the film will be. Where No Strings Attached appears from the trailer to be relatively inoffensive, in actuality it was offensively boring. Worse, is that the trailer for Friends with Benefits makes the film look stilted and awkward, whereas in actual fact the natural chemistry between Timberlake and Kunis carried the whole film.
This entire Trailer Tuesday post may have just been a transparent excuse to write about my favourite thing – chick flicks – but dear reader, can you think of any other examples of this phenomenon?
