This Week In Trailers: My Life Without Air, Hounds Of Love, Raising Bertie, SCORE: A Film Music Documentary, Machines

Trailers are an under-appreciated art form insofar that many times they're seen as vehicles for showing footage, explaining films away, or showing their hand about what moviegoers can expect. Foreign, domestic, independent, big budget: What better way to hone your skills as a thoughtful moviegoer than by deconstructing these little pieces of advertising? This week we hold our breath until we turn blue, get snatched while trying to get home, try to make something of ourselves, talk movie scores with film's best and brightest, and get a real lesson in slave labor.My Life Without Air Trailer

Hell. Yes.

One of the first real cinematic experiences of my youth didn't really come in the form of seeing something sweet and cuddly that forever was washed in a halcyon patina. I was 13 and the movie was The Big Blue and was introduced to it by a friend, interestingly enough, who would later open my third eye when he showed me Spinal Tap. The Big Blue, though, is a vision. Honestly, if you haven't checked it out it's Luc Besson's best work. It's about, among other things, free divers who go down deep into oceans without oxygen tanks. The movie's a straight up masterpiece but understanding why anyone would submit themselves to this kind of endurance has always held my fascination. This documentary, by filmmaker Bojana Burna?, immediately grabbed my attention. Whether this is a short or a full length feature I could not be more in the cheering section for this as the trailer captures that sense of intense physicality one has to possess in order to dominate in a sport that could end as tragically as this could.

Hounds of Love Trailer

Disturbing.

Sometimes you come across a trailer like this and you hope, pray, that the person who made this got a raise. Director Ben Young isn't treading on ground that's particularly novel or fresh, after all we had Room come out about a woman who was kidnapped, held against her will, but, like any good story, how you position it and how you sell it is what can make or break a release. Fortunately, here, this is just maddeningly intense. I love the energy, the slowing down of the action on the screen, the music that pulsates beneath it all. The pain and misery index is off the chart as our antagonists simper and saunter to and fro without impunity. That's what makes this so dangerously delicious. Pain is perfectly captured before our eyes.

SCORE: A Film Music Documentary TrailerInterstellar.

Interstellar has been my go-to soundtrack for getting work done that I've somehow managed to make that movie even greater inside my mind's eye simply because of how much I embrace Hans Zimmer's score. Director Matt Schrader might be playing a game of inside baseball by talking on film scoring but who cares if this gives us a glimpse into the world where it's all about musical orchestration and not so much about the most current pop hits you can turn into a montage. The use of film clips and accompanying insights from the people who made moments even more effective by improving scenes through careful musical accompaniment. That's what's being sold here and I couldn't be more thrilled at the concept of getting these titans to talk. I mean, you have Zimmer, Reznor, Cameron, Williams, Elfman, Newman, Shore, Desplat, a veritable all-star team. Stoked, to be sure.

Machines Trailer

Slave labor.

One of the things that made the revelations about Apple's use of labor inside the walls of Foxconn in China wasn't so much that low wage workers were being used to help manufacture the very luxury items consumers tout as representations of mankind's advancement, intellectually, but that the stories that came back were represented in one-dimension. They were reports, they were news stories. Horrific as some of them were, there's something of a visual/aural/kinesthetic component where the use of visual storytelling could have made it that much more devastating. Director

Rahul Jain's documentary here, then, takes that step towards visually contextualizing the conditions some people find themselves in as they find a way to feed themselves, their families. The trailer is stark in how it doesn't present any of this narrative information but it does make you want to find out more about what we're seeing and what we're witnessing. Somehow just being reminded that there are stories out there like this that need to be told is reason enough to at least put it on one's personal radar.Raising Bertie Trailer

Purposeful.

When it comes to stories about people trying to make it in America today, I'm always wanting to hear the story. I don't know what it is, what makes me so attune to the narratives of individuals who are looking to make their lives better, or are down on their luck in life, somehow there's a quiet part of myself that wonders if that could have been me. Director Margaret Byrne seems to have taken a very personal look at three young men's lives after their alternative school closes in North Carolina. It's compelling viewing when you cut through the chaff of our collective experience. When you dial into a person's essence you are seeing them the way they deserve to be seen and this trailer is more dramatic than I would give some other fictional films credit for being. It's a little depressing but speaking truth to one's own situation and letting that narrative bubble up can be life-altering if you're listening the right way.

Nota bene: If you have any suggestions of trailers to possibly be included in this column, even have a trailer of your own to pitch, please let me know by sending me a note at Christopher_Stipp@yahoo.com or look me up via Twitter at @Stipp

In case you missed them, here are the other trailers we covered at /Film this week: