I don’t often read (much less quote) Youtube comments, but the title of this post was taken from the comments on this video, the theatrical trailer for the 1969 version of True Grit
Compare that trailer to the one for the new Coen brothers version of the same story and you begin to see the commenter’s point:
If nothing else has improved over the past 40 years (I tend to think quite a few things have, of course), we can all agree that movie previews are far more sophisticated and engaging than they used to be. There is a whole vocabulary of how images and sounds, words and actions are to be combined to hint at (or often give away quite a lot of) a much larger story. That vocabulary is what makes things like this possible:
Here’s another example. Would you rather watch this movie…
…or this movie?