This Week In Trailers: Don’t Break Down: A Film About Jawbreaker, The Pathological Optimist, Rabbit, A Fantastic Woman

By Christopher Stipp/Sept. 23, 2017 9:00 am EST

I’m in love, I’m in love and I don’t care who knows it…

So many times, so many hard times, I sit and watch trailers like Miss Shields grading themes in A Christmas Story. I’m ornery, I’m prickly, I openly criticize the many shades of lipstick that are trying to disguise a large amount of swine that is out there, but, there are times that I just stop. I’m stopped. Hyperbole aside, for someone like me it’s like being paralyzed while still awake. Director Sebastián Lelio, whether he’s made something great or grave, has given us this trailer which plays out like a small, compact play all unto itself. It’s dramatic and sweeping and, at times, emotional, but the experience of watching this is just pure joy. I hope all the promises it makes here are kept when I’m finally able to see it.

Trailer

You’ve never heard of this one but I’m thinking you should.

The pull-quotes absolutely act like great character references because while the trailer just hums along and just gains steam the closer we get to the end reading other publications’ reactions to this are what really anchor what is already a fantastic trailer. Even if directors Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza have their work compared to something like Pan’s Labyrinth, and you can see some of that peeking out here, that’s a comparison I’d imagine they’ll take any day especially when it comes to a foreign film like this that needs a little attention.

In a little Sicilian village at the edge of a forest, Giuseppe, a boy of 13, vanishes. Luna, his classmate who loves him, refuses to accept his mysterious disappearance. She rebels against the silence and complicity that surround her, and to find him she descends into the dark world which has swallowed him up and which has a lake as its mysterious entrance. Only their indestructible love will be able to bring her back along.

Rabbit Trailer

I’ve got nothing. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I do have this description:

Still, that tells me nothing and the trailer isn’t helping. Director Luke Shanahan, who has decided that confusing a plebe like me with his first feature trailer is an adventure worth undertaking, certainly has a story he wants to tell and he’s going to tell it in his own way. To that I say congrats but, again, I’m still wondering what it was I just watched.

After a vivid dream, Maude Ashton returns to Adelaide, certain she now knows the whereabouts of her missing twin sister.

The Pathological Optimist Trailer

On one hand I think Andrew Wakefield is a reprehensible twit who deserves all of life’s slings and arrows and, on the other, director Miranda Bailey is responsible for being a producer on a wonderful list of movies like Swiss Army Man, Diary of a Teenage Girl, The Squid and the Whale and scads of others. I’m here for her talents, not his. Even putting that aside, to have had the chance to film a modern day pariah is something that we do not get very often and to have it in a form like this is just irresistible. If not for just the schadenfreude it manifests in many of us then seeing how the explosive repudiation of Wakefield’s assertions either busts apart those who fervently held onto what he was selling is worth the price of admission into this carnival of lies and deceit.

Don’t Break Down: A Film About Jawbreaker Trailer

Here’s the thing about music festivals: It’s a crap shoot when you find your way to the front rail.

Nota bene: If you have any suggestions of trailers to possibly be included in this column, even have a trailer of your own to pitch, please let me know by sending me a note at Christopher_Stipp@yahoo.com or look me up via Twitter at @Stipp

In case you missed them, here are the other trailers we covered at /Film this week: