Trailer for Fair Game, based on the true story of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA agent whose cover was blown by Bush administration officials in order to punish her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, for revealing that the story Bush told in his State of the Union address about Saddam Hussein attempting to purchase nuclear materials from Africa was known to be untrue.

Here’s The Tillman Story, a new documentary about Pat Tillman, who walked away from a multi-million dollar NFL contract in order to enlist in the Army Rangers after 9/11. He was an outspoken atheist and progressive who was killed by his fellow soldiers in Afghanistan under extremely suspicious circumstances. The military covered everything up and turned Tillman’s funeral into a propaganda exercise, and it’s only been through the dogged determination of Tillman’s mother that any of the facts have come to light.

It occurred to me that someone out there still might not have seen the trailer for Sucker Punch, the film I’m currently most looking forward to checking out.

Sort of like my last trip into Manhattan, it involves an insane asylum, cabaret, dragons, bombers, Nazi zeppelins, and giant chaingun-wielding samurai monsters. And it’s directed by Zack Snyder. I don’t know anything about it besides that … and I don’t need to. You had me at “dragons.”

Here’s the awesome trailer for the new film Inception, which I hear is quite good. I haven’t gotten a chance to see it yet, since I’ve been busy with Alpha.

It seems to me that the emotional center of this trailer is the part where Leonardo DiCaprio says fervently, “I think I found a way home, and this last job … that’s how I get there.” Without that, the trailer would just be a lot of guns and exposition and gravity-defying stunts — which is all cool, but it’s that emotion that really makes the whole thing click. I’m reminded of one of Kurt Vonnegut’s rules of writing, which is, “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.” I almost talked about that rule in my lecture at Alpha, but in the end I left it out because I had too much material already and that rule wasn’t really relevant to the topic under discussion, but now I sort of wish I’d mentioned it and showed the Inception trailer and said, “See? See how much more powerful that one line makes it? Characters who want something are compelling.”

Anyone seen Agora? It’s directed by Alejandro Amenabar (The Others, The Sea Inside) and stars Rachel Weisz as Hypatia. (“A Greek scholar from Alexandria, Egypt, considered the first notable woman in mathematics, who also taught philosophy and astronomy. She lived in Roman Egypt, and was killed by a Christian mob who falsely blamed her for religious turmoil. Some suggest that her murder marked the end of what is traditionally known as Classical antiquity.”) The film looks interesting, but seems to have gotten a pretty limited release, and I’d have to go into Manhattan in order to see it. Here’s the trailer: