Maplecrest Trailer Home

Sometimes at my job I have the distinct pleasure of working with Gawker media’s finest video dude, Alex Goldberg. Alex is a recent film school grad and shamelessly (in a good way) asked me if I’d feature the trailer for his senior thesis film, Waiting in Abandon. I was not put off by this because I know Alex to be a nice, funny, patient soul who never gets openly irritated with me for being a crap interviewer or for not knowing how close to hold the mic to someone’s face. And on top of that his trailer is actually pretty good! He himself describes it as “super emo,” which it is, in that Funny Ha Ha/Hannah Takes the Stairs kind of way, but I can already tell just from the trailer that it’s superiorly scripted and shot on a higher quality camera, so I bet it’s way better than those movies! And don’t even try to tell me you don’t get super emo yourself sometimes. Just go with it.

Here’s what I like: whiny guitar music stops abruptly for a montage set to the Strokes. Is that one of the songs off their first album? Anyway, it’s good. I like when trailers do that abrupt music/tone change. The montage is appealing, though the return of the mumbly guitar song worries me. I haven’t seen the movie, so I can’t make any real judgments here, but I’m going to go ahead and put you on Braffwatch, Alex. This trailer leads me to believe that the John Darnielle-looking main character is somewhat of a sensitive, yet oddly self-centered pout monster who can’t decide for the life of him what the hell he wants, much to the dismay of the bewildered females in his life. But aside from some questionable content, it’s a very impressive trailer. Gives just enough story information, dutifully includes a montage, makes us wonder, “What did this bitch ass do to screw up so badly that he ‘can’t fix it’?” And kicks out at least one decent jam. Job well done!

Update: Alex informs me that this movie “is actually 50 percent breakup and 50 percent I think I might have AIDS so it’s not all crying about unimportant stuff.” So now much of what I said can be construed as very insensitive. That’s about par for the course, I’d say.