4 Vital Details Concering the By the Sea Trailer

Last week the first trailer for "By the Sea", the new Angie Jolie Joint, dropped. It's a film in which its director (and writer) will star with her semi-famous husband, Brad Pitt, as an American couple on holiday in Italy. Per the preview, it emits detectable aromas of de Sica and notes of Fellini. Is that how the finished product will appear? Or will it appear more like "A Walk in the Clouds" with more frowny faces, curse words and angrily downed Campari cocktails? Who's to say? I'd say more but Film Twitter Police would lock me up for speculating about a trailer! So instead let's simply focus on the trailer's most striking images as individual pieces, like cinematic paintings in preview form, shall we?  

Even if you can't see the face, you can see the lips, and because you can see the lips, you know that a certain Movie Star walks among us.

The trailer makes it clear that something is rotten in Denmark but this shot apart from all that is simply dazzling to behold, an opulent frame of wish fulfillment that leaves me mentally writhing around in a pool of "If Only!" tears. To sit in an open-aired osteria along the Mediterranean coast with a notepad, a pencil and a glass of beer and nothing more to occupy your mind than nothing at all is the most beautiful dream.

Face to face, out in the heat

Hanging tough, staying hungry

They stack the odds 'til we take to the street

For the kill with the skill to survive

Smoking's bad for you. Yes. I know. I get it. I mean, that's why I don't smoke, why I've never smoked. Yet in defiance of Film Twitter's outlawing of the phrase Magic of the Movies, I still believe in illicit cinematic sorcery, and nowhere is it more palpable than cigarettes smoked on screen, where they can't and won't kill, where they merely intoxicate. And so rarely has it appeared more intoxicating than the heaven sent frame above.