Nothing Personal is this week's most ridiculous movie trailer

Given that the task of the initial 30 seconds or so of any film trailer is to provide some setup for what's going on, the first couple of lines of dialog in the trailer for Nothing Personal come off almost like an omen: "I won't ask you anything, and I...

By Jef Otte

November 19, 2010

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Given that the task of the initial 30 seconds or so of any film trailer is to provide some setup for what's going on, the first couple of lines of dialog in the trailer for Nothing Personal come off almost like an omen: "I won't ask you anything, and I won't talk about myself," the male lead says. It's true: The rest of the trailer basically refuses to ask anything of or talk about its central characters at all, and one gets the sense that the film will do roughly likewise.

Alright, we get it. It's an arthouse film. It's supposed to be quiet, restrained, eschewing the frenetic action and overblown drama of Hollywood for the subtle, aching tension of benign acts, the arbitrariness of real life. Ironically, though, this trailer commits exactly the sins of its big-budget brethren; with its general lack of dialog or any action whatsoever, in the way it cuts from ponderous shot to ponderous shot -- oh look, now she's sad, oh look, now she's, what, melancholy? -- it basically becomes a grouping of arthouse cliches, to the point where when it finally does give us a little action, it's just baffling. Think about that money-scene at 1:50, and then change up the context. If this trailer were somehow set up to be interpreted as a parody of an arthouse trailer -- which, Jesus, it very well could be -- you would laugh at that. It's absurd.

YouTube commenters as a general whole are not known for their eloquence, but the first commenter for this trailer pretty much sums it up: "okay these olive films make no fucking sense."

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