Keeping up with yesterday’s dosage of Boy, The Nineties Did It Wrong On So Many Levels, I thought I’d pick another little something younger generations might just skip on their drama-free way to adulthood: 1994’s S.F.W.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: the Nineties just didn’t work.
The longer trailer manages to do a decent job, though. First 30” function as a subtle parody of the “TV special within the movie” technique that was favored by pop storytelling at the time. Shades of Natural Born Killers are swiftly neutered, and the overall pace/look is pretty close to what they must have thought about while still in pre-production, the biggest clue being a then untested, emotional song as a character/audience bonding tool (hallo, Radiohead), whereas the choppy period-specific editing choices fill the coveted “anything can, and probably will, happen” spot (hallo, monumental spoiler).
And how Nineties are those big flickering words? Aww.
Still, the shorter, raucous trailer is much closer to the actual movie - disjointed as they come, trying to hit way too many targets and laying it all on Stephen Dorff’s alleged leading man potential.
True, I shouldn’t rag on him, since my girl just loved him in Blade. But one exploding vampire can only atone for so much (hallo, Norman Reedus).
Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “1:43 it was for you !”
As Chris Rock put it, “yeah, man, New Jack City was a loooooong time ago”.
One wonders - exactly which type of audience were they after?
The trailer manages to swing both ways: it looks like a straight-to-video genre effort and a Serious Issues message picture.
Bizarre choice of music - the street corner beat followed by one of the faster cuts that dominate the soundtrack followed again by the corner beat - frames the action as if it were a videoclip, which might enforce the “let’s appeal to the MTV crowd” option. Also, Ice-T’s presence is prominently showcased - and rightly so, given that a) he does play a main character and b) he was shaping up to be a star rapper.
On the other hand, Wesley Snipes is the first face/name popping up (and will go on to swallow the whole film, giving it the coveted cool-by-association Tony Montana vibe), but the rest of the trailer presents him as just one element in an ensemble, gunning for the “what’s happening in our society at large” slant.
(And while we’re on the subject - it’s a bit hard to believe that Tracy Camilla Johns was a box office draw, five years after Nola Darling - but then again, neither was Judd Nelson.)
Still, the Van Peebles aesthetic is quite alive throughout the thing: camera angles askew and all that haven’t aged well, but they anchor the film to what would eventually become the main “urban” shooting trend. At least for a few years.
Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “am I my brother’s keeper lol”.
