Trailer Alert: The American and Never Let Me Go

Since I will be gone this weekend and won’t have a chance to watch or write about today’s episode of Burn Notice for a while and since I didn’t want to leave my blog empty for over a week, I decided to post a couple trailers for you guys to check out and let me know what you think.

The American

This trailer has been out for a while and I have been meaning to post it, but it never really inspired me as much as some other trailers.  The plot is pretty basic and has been done many times before with varying degree of success.  George Clooney plays a hitman who wants out and his boss asks him to do one last job before he leaves.  What I like about the feel of this film though is that it doesn’t appear to be a comedy or a big bombastic action film like most of the other films that I can think of with this plot description.  It appears to be a somber look at the life of a man who is close to retirement who is dealing with the emotional consequences of the life that he has lead.  I think that is a pretty big and universal theme, even if the man’s job happens to be that of a hitman.  I like the look of the images in the trailer, it reminds me a bit of another great Clooney film, Michael Clayton, so I will be hoping that The American can transcend a slightly cliché premise and find something new to say about this place and time and aspect of life.  Also, I am very curious as to why this film has the title The American and I hope that the director, Anton Corbijn, has a good reason for it and can use that as a jumping off point for some of the themes of the film.

Never Let Me Go

I hadn’t heard about the book that this film is based on before I watched the trailer or about the film period, since it isn’t exactly in the wheelhouse of films that I follow through the filmmaking process.  I suppose that the genre of this film might throw some off, but my favorite genre of films is “good films” and this looks like it might fall under that heading.  The trailer takes a very minimalist approach to the premise of the film and instead puts much more emphasis on the romance portion than the sci-fi portion.  I hear that same approach is taken in the book, where the sci-fi trappings are only slowly understood as the book moves along and as the book builds the characters and the romance first and foremost.  I like that kind of a slow-build in films and think it could be really effective here at getting under my skin and making me care about these characters.  Not a whole lot of “romance” movies are on my list of films that I must watch this year, but with an intriguing premise and solid cast, Never Let Me Go, just might be the one that I am excited about.