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48. The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
By IFC
on 06/25/2009
Joel and Ethan Coen’s "The Man Who Wasn’t There" is more than just an homage to film noir -- it’s a dreamlike, semi-abstract distillation of the genre to its core elements. So, too, is its trailer, which highlights the film’s immaculate, highly manicured black-and-white cinematography throughout its montage of period haircuts (narrated with disenchanted deliberateness by Billy Bob Thornton’s smoking barber) and its archetypal noir visions of hands, suit-and-fedora silhouettes and clandestine rendezvous.
Wasting not a single gesture, the trailer is edited with hallucinatory beauty that belies the action’s encompassing mood of misery, treachery and tragedy. Despite being comprised of actual film clips, not a single plot point is overtly explicated. Simply through its combination of in-action dialogue (from Thornton and Tony Shalhoub) and evocative imagery, the Coens’ trailer expresses everything one might need to know about this haunting, self-consciously stylized, resolutely fatalistic neo-noir. --Nick Schager
I guess you guys haven't seen the trailer for The Hughes Bros.'s Dead Presidents, huh? What about Forest Gump? I think those are the 2 greatest of all time. Gump is better than the movie. And Dead Prez is the best ever.
Oh... what about the SW Ep 1 teaser? Maybe you should call this the best film trailers on YouTube! LOL. Dead Prez is probably too hard for you to locate.
I think The Dark Knight, Iron Man, and 300 should be included!
Clerks? No love for the Clerks trailer? Sigh.
Honorable mention for the Grindhouse fake trailers? "Don't" was brilliant.
Great list, by the way. Thanks for including 'Man Who Wasn't There'
Seriously? We have to click 50 times just to get the damn list? No thanks.
Like clicking 50 times is soooo hard, right? But you guys forgot about There Will Be Blood!!
50 PAGES?!!! Get back to work researching how to post an article. No Digg for you.
50 PAGES?!!! Get back to work researching how to post an article. No Digg for you.
GREAT article and flawless pick for #1. I actually did a lil piece on that trailer at our own movie blog, so I'm elated to see as your top pick. Yay trailers!