Valkyrie Trailer

With new still photos and a fine-looking poster a full-length trailer was bound to be released soon. You can see it below courtesy of JoBlo or you can check it out in high definition at Yahoo! Movies here.

Now that is a great trailer. It portrays a compelling story, it's beautifully shot and it definitely gives me more hope for the movie coming in December.

If Tom Cruise's love interest in the film looks über-familiar, it is because the beautiful Carice van Houten had a starring role in another recent big-budget World War II film, Black Book, which, again, I loved. Granted, it is probably a safe bet that the percentage of Americans who saw Black Book is probably quite small, it her casting in Black Book awfully trite. Yes, she was amazing as the bold character, Rachel Stein in Black Book and I understand why Bryan Singer wanted to cast her, but it does not seem "natural" in my mind as what we have seen of the character is too close to her role in the Dutch film. I just hope van Houten's career is not permanently intertwined with Nazi infiltration/World War II films in the same way Keira Knightley is locked in a perpetual cycle of period pieces.

As a side note related to the casting of van Houten in these films, there was a great discussion on the topic of "Intertextual Casting" at Slayage Conference 3 in June which touched on some very interesting career choices by actors and casting decisions by producers in television and film. One of the examples was the casting of Amber Benson-who played Willow's witchy companion Tara on Buffy The Vampire Slayer-as a Vampire on Supernatural.


Intertextual Casting is a bit like textual poaching in its attempt to make the performance evocative of previous "texts" the with which the actor was involved, inevitably drawing comparisons with a similar character or set of actions or serving to intensify the contrast between the actor's prior performances and this new role. Either way, it is clear that producers recognize the narrative potential of association and see the strengths those kind of decisions can add to their show.