International Trailer: Woody Allen's 'You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger'
This September, Woody Allen's latest film, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, will be released by Sony Pictures Classics. The comedy already played the Cannes Film Fest, where it didn't quite electrify critics. (Peter didn't love it.) We don't yet have a domestic trailer from SPC, but for now there's a Spanish trailer that suggests the reasons for the Cannes critical 'meh.'
The Playlist was pointed to this trailer, which features Spanish subtitles but English dialogue. Stranger is certainly a Woody Allen movie — all-star cast; upper middle class characters; romantic entanglement and turmoil; dry, urbane black comedy.
The whole mix looks appealingly familiar, if not particularly pointed or challenging. It's like Allen has crafted a big comfy chair to sink into, where you'll be attended hand and foot by pretty faces like those belonging to Naomi Watts, Freida Pinto, Antonio Banderas and Josh Brolin. If this is an honest representation of the film, I can see why Cannes wasn't terribly thrilled with the movie. I'm happy to see a new Allen film this year, but this particular picture currently looks a bit like him falling back on tried and true romantic comedy ideas.
(The film, you might recall, "revolves around different members of a family, their tangled love lives and their attempts to try to solve their problems.")
One question: why doesn't Anthony Hopkins get much play in this trailer? Perhaps it's just that this is Woody Allen, and it's easier to be preoccupied with the women in his films. I'd certainly rather look at Freida Pinto, but I'd figure that Hopkins is enough of an international star that he'd be shown off no matter what market a trailer is being cut to court.