Precious Movie Trailer Review

By our guest blogger, Eva Medoff

About once a year, some independent movie comes floating down from the mountaintop that is the Sundance Film Festival and, despite its grim topic or seemingly nonexistent marketability, travels into the mass market to dazzle and stun an audience made complacent by slick production and cookie cutter scripts. This year, that movie is “Precious.”

The trailer should be a lesson to all studio execs who deem a film too serious or complex to be presented to the viewer honestly. Rather than spoon feed us, the “Precious” trailer looks us straight in the eye, unblinking, and dumps its despair, its trauma and its stray rays of hope directly into our brains--where it will be sure to sear its message.

“Precious” is about a pregnant, obese, illiterate and poverty-stricken teenage girl (Gabourey Sibide, in a stunning debut) who is abused by her mother (the comedian Mo’Nique, generating Oscar buzz as the mother from hell) and helped out by a social worker (Mariah Carey, sporting a wig and mustache, and giving one hell of a performance). It’s Harlem, 1987, and we are escorted along as the 16-year-old Claireece “Precious” Jones attends junior high and is taken under the wing of her teacher, played by Paula Patton, looking like loveliness itself. And yes, you did spot Lenny Kravitz in there, playing a supportive nurse.

The film itself looks slightly dingy, cast in a yellowish light that makes her house look like a dungeon, and everything else, appropriately, look like an '80s music video. We get some narration in the beginning, some music, and some quotes, but the elements are perfectly timed to get the maximum emotional response. I dare you to watch this trailer and not experience chills. Regardless of the caliber of the film itself, the “Precious” trailer is a lesson in potency, to which all other dimly inspirational indie films must now live up.

View the trailer for "Precious" below. Thoughts?