Trailer Park Tuesday: Anna Karenina and Keira Knightley's Bulldog Underbite

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies. Unless their last name is Grisham or King, authors will probably never see their trailers on the big screen at the local cineplex. And that's a shame because a lot of hard work goes into producing these short marriages between book and video. So, if you like what you see, please spread the word and help these videos go viral.

(With apologies to Mr. Leo Tolstoy:) All period-drama movie trailers are alike; but each eye-popping, brain-dazzling movie trailer is eye-popping and brain-dazzling in its own way.  Into a summer already crowded with spidermen, batmen and All the President's Vampires, we get a fresh blast of cinematic promise.  Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright and written by Tom Stoppard, is scheduled for release in November and if the two-and-a-half-minute trailer is any indication, we're in for a real treat, Keira Knightley's underbite aside.  My feelings for Miss Knightley are....complicated.  She has the kind of facial beauty I should fall for--bowl-of-cream complexion, pert nose, black-jellybean eyes--but....but yet, I'm distracted by her mouth.  It wasn't until five movies had gone by and I reached Pride and Prejudice (also directed by Joe Wright) that I realized what was bugging me about her performances.  It was her underbite which gives her mouth a steely determination as fierce as any bulldog's chomping at the script.  This is especially troubling when it comes to her role as Anna K.  I could be proved wrong come November, but I just don't know if Keira Knightley is right for the role of the insecure, unstable wife of Count Alexei.  Maybe I'm just stuck on the perfection of Greta Garbo's performance in the role and maybe KK will be great as AK.  We'll see.  One thing of which I'm pretty confident, however, is the beautiful staging of the movie.  From the stylized, theatrical scenes we're given in this trailer, I'm expecting great things to come from Wright's camera.  Horses thundering across a stage, dancers frozen in a tableau, drawing room doors opening onto an outdoor pond with ice skaters--this is the freshest of cinematic dreams.  Wright is, after all, the maestro behind the incredible five-minute, one-take, Steadicam tracking shot near the end of Atonement (whose script Knightley didn't chew up too badly).  So, I'll be going to watch Anna Karenina for the visionary beauty and will do my best to ignore Keira Knightley's bulldog mouth.