The advertisers for I, Robot and The Stepford Wives have made essentially the same trailer. Compare and contrast: exhibit A and exhibit B.

They both start with the sexy-cool nature of luxury technology, then one of them emphasizes the cool and the other the sexy, not all that different really, sides of a coin.

Curious.

Neither trailer includes scenes from the movie — which is common for a teaser — favoring instead a high concept, in this case a riff on that most familiar form of communication, the advertisement.

In more typical trailers, the ones that aren't dramatically withholding glimpses of the movie, the scenes that advertisers leave out speak volumes. The trailers for mainstream movies exaggerate how exciting or funny or spooky the movies are, that's for sure, but it's the trailers for the art movies that often go out of their way to obscure the nature of the movies they advertise.

Take the Dogville trailer as an example. The movie has an Our Town feel, like a filmed play. It has a very minimal set and uses a handheld camera almost exclusively. Stylistically these are some of the movie's most compelling features, so I wonder why the trailer hides them completely? The trailer uses superimposition and compositing to form a collage of close-ups. It studiously avoids shots that obviously reveal the chalk lines and facades, and it avoids any shots that are long enough to show a shaky camera with a point of view. It's not a bad trailer, just odd.

Dogville is in English, so it escapes the more typical treatment of foreign films, the hiding of the movie's language, which now seems like the norm. These trailers use an English voice-over, naturally, and avoid showing scenes where people talk. The goal isn't usually to hide the fact that the movie is foreign, because that has a certain cachet, but just to gloss over any language barriers.

The techniques have become more sophisticated in recent years. It was weird in older trailers to see people talk but not hear anything they say, the speech having been covered up by something more familiar, so nowadays the editors scour the movie for every laugh, cry, and burp they can find, looking for any sound made by a human that they can include in the trailer without betraying the language of origin. Something resembling "hello" can stay or a character calling out another's name. Take a look at the trailer for Kitchen Stories (not yet online) as a current example. "Oah?" It's the kind of thing — "oh ho ho" — that drives you crazy once you notice it. "Huh!"

Here's my theory: masking the language isn't about tricking people; it's about trying to keep pace with mainstream movies. Mainstream movie trailers are edited so quickly that the words people say on top of the images are important and presented as economically as possible — there's really no time to read a subtitle. More and more trailers for independent movies are trying to convince us that their movies are just as thrilling as what we might see at the multiplex. And smarter, too! So the trailers look the same, except for this one problem.

In trying to keep up with the Joneses, aren't these distributors neglecting the value of the differentness of the indie movies? These trailers therefore reflect the fundamental problem of the post-Pulp Fiction indie movie industry. Voila!

(This struggle to find the difference between indie movies and studio movies, and the difficulty of shoe-horning one into a slot meant for the other, is a recurring theme in Biskind's new book about Miramax and Sundance, which I'm half through. More on that another day.)

In the multiplexes, the trailers that are supposed to be exciting — the ones that go "blam!" every 10 seconds, which I used to think was a sledgehammer on a stainless steel table but now think is just a computer sound effect — aren't. The ones that are are exciting, or at least noticeable, are the ones that break the pattern, like the robot/wives teasers, although in this case the familiar ad-like structure makes them also seem mundane. An ad parody? Ho hum.

Sometimes an exhilarating montage of an ensemble cast can break the monotony, like the trailers that PT Anderson did for Magnolia, or the similar one for Angels in America. Or sometimes a series of shots presented at a provocatively different pace will do the trick, like Kubrick's trailers for Eyes Wide Shut.

If a trailer held a shot for 30-60 seconds, I'd remember it forever.

You'll notice that I've mentioned three trailers featuring Nicole Kidman — because you're always keeping score, for crying out loud — but who can blame me? Even if she is an icy robot, wouldn't you rather have Marionettes Inc send over a Nicolebot than a James Coco?