Trailering: NYC, Chinatown, the RAF and Auschwitz.

By Alison Willmore on 08/25/2008

Here's the teaser for "New York, I Love You," Gotham's answer to the 2006 anthology film "Paris, Je T'aime." It's still unfinished, but the trailer -- which includes both a Regina Spektor song and one from Feist, surely breaking some kind of indie waif proximity rule -- does contain an irritating abundance of characters generalizing about the city. "This is the capital of everything possible," declares one, not realizing that any true portrait of New York would involve far fewer frou-frou proclamations like that and more dollars and cents discussion of real estate. Fatih Akin, Yvan Attal, Shunji Iwai, Scarlett Johnansson and Brett Ratner are among the twelve directors contributing, as is Shekhar Kapur, who took on the installment left unfinished by the late Anthony Minghella. The film's screening as a work in progress at Toronto, and won't reach theaters until February 13th of next year.

There's a trailer for "Year of the Fish," David Kaplan's rotoscoped, Chinatown-set reinterpretation of Cinderella, here -- it opens this Friday.

Here's a German trailer for Uli Edel's "The Baader-Meinhof Complex," a film about the Red Army Faction starring "The Lives of Others"' Martina Gedeck, "The Downfall"'s Bruno Ganz and "Youth Without Youth"'s Alexandra Maria Lara. It hasn't yet premiered, but has still been a source of controversy due to the studio and PR firm's attempt to block what would presumably be bad buzz by imposing a 100,000 euro fine on any post-press screening journalist caught writing or talking about the film before the week of its opening. David Hudson at Greencine Daily explains; the film opens in Germany on September 25th.

John Boyne's children's book "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" is told from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy living in Berlin during World War II, whose soldier father moves the family to "Out-With" after being promoted by "the Fury," a location change that prompts the bored narrator to befriend a lad living beyond a fence with a group of others wearing identical striped pajamas. The trailer for the film, here, by nature has to be a lot less coy than its source material with regards to being about the Holocaust. The novel, a bestseller, has been accused by some of being, well, twee, which isn't a desirable quality in films on the subject -- though the trailer, which offers glimpses of Vera Farmiga and David Thewlis as the mother and father, seems to indicate that fable quality has been toned down. A.O. Scott, reviewing the book for the New York Times in 2006, made the Benigni comparison: "Like that film, this novel uses a child's perception -- tinged with wonder and never entirely alive to the reality of evil -- as a way of manipulating the emotional tone."

[Photo: "New York, I Love You," Palm Pictures, 2009]

+ "New York I love you" Teaser (Dailymotion)
+ Year of the Fish (Apple)
+ Stunning Full Theatrical Trailer For DER BAADER MEINHOF KOMPLEX! (Twitch)
+ The Boy In the Striped Pajamas (Apple)