I’m going to go ahead and preface this by saying that when it comes to movies and TV, I’m a special kind of snob. I watch what I like, and I like what I feel is “good”, high quality entertainment based on a personal rhetoric of critique. This rhetoric can be very different from most critics and most audiences, but it encompasses the things I enjoy and appreciate; I rarely will admit to liking a “bad” movie, as I almost only enjoy movies I feel are “good”, even when that is vastly disagreed upon by almost everyone else. With that out of the way, let’s continue.
One trend in cinema and television that I am growing restlessly tired of is shortcuts. In what once was a market where capitalism demanded making good movies to achieve audience support, filmmakers have been looking for, and finding, easier ways to get to all that cash. Like professional athletes turning to drugs to enhance their performance, audiences are falling victim to the effects of cinematic steroids. Here I am going to list some of the most insidious examples.
"What Have We Got To Lose?": Probably the oldest and easiest trick in the book is to simply put so little effort into something that the slightest gain results in inexplicable profit. The Scary, Epic, Date, Dance, and Disaster Movies are proof of that. Why hire writers when all you need is other scripts, scissors and hot glue? Why hire actors when all you need is people dragged off the street who maybe look like famous people when you squint. Epic Movie was, economically speaking, a huge success because of its $80 million gain over a comparatively low budget. The very fact that there are more on the way, means this trickery is working.
"Look At Me! Look At Me! Look At Me!": A snappily edited trailer can go a long way into making something not funny look funny:
Some folks just don’t rely on being low spenders. Despite the fact that they actually spent money and effort, they still ended up with nothing but crap, and now they have to sell it. How do you do that? With the trailer, and any other alluring aspects that come out before the film does. Case in point, Year One. With that trailer and that cast, there was no way it couldn’t be hilarious. Yet there I was in the audience, wondering how so many funny people got together and couldn’t think of anything funnier than ample use of the word foreskin. It didn’t take long for people to realize just how bad it was, as it dropped off the charts by the end of its first weekend. But the opening made enough money to be considered a financial success. What put it in that category was the fact that they spent far more time and effort making enough funny bits to look good in a preview, than trying to make a good film. Between casting and trailers, and any other non on screen choices that will trick people into thinking something will be good long enough to make them pay for it, one can still make a success out of the snakiest of oil.
Also, remember this still works on a week by week basis. The revival of “V” has contained a dream sequence almost every episode, the entirety of which manages to be incorporated into every next week preview.
Also, remember this still works on a week by week basis. The revival of “V” has contained a dream sequence almost every episode, the entirety of which manages to be incorporated into every next week preview.
You left your gun in my promo material.
"Indie Darling":
Tricking people with a stunning trailer for a bad film is still strictly small fries, though. The end result will be a good opening weekend with little else; to get a good long run requires tricking people on a larger scale to think something is good even after they’ve seen enough to know otherwise. How to do this? Enter the hipsters. As someone who’s taken three High School art classes, I’ve had firsthand experience with people who think Juno is a legitimate film. Few social groups are easier to trick into liking something ridiculous than hipsters. Anything with the words Indie in it originates from somebody who knows this, and is determined to make money off of them. But what really takes the cake is the career of Wes Anderson. I’ll be the first to admit that the trailer for Life Aquatic looked hilarious. And now that I’m older, wiser, and not trying to impress my art class friends, I’ll also be the first to say the actual movie was very much not hilarious. Wes Anderson, the kind of jokes you’re not supposed to laugh at, who I’m certain has blank parts in his scripts that he convinces his producers are jokes only smart people can see, managed to make a preview that appeared like it was a mainstream, laugh out loud comedy. After the opening weekend crowds realized it wasn’t, there was always the ever reliable hipsters there to back it up for the rest of its theatrical run. Clever, Mr. Anderson, very clever indeed. But when it comes to long running, career spanning trickery, there is truly only one master.
"Looks Can Kill": J. J. Abrams is a genius. An evil genius. For starters, he is the man who made Cloverfield. Cloverfield can be called many things; “good” and “a movie” are not among them. Having taken a camcorder and ran around New York on any given Friday night for an hour and a half, he released it into theatres and told people that if they look hard enough, there might be a monster in there. People didn’t go to see it because it was a good movie, because it wasn’t a real movie. They saw it because of the huge network of viral marketing, and the countless unanswered questions that would all be explained in the film itself. There was more effort put into the advertising; there was more plot put into the advertising. But people ate it up, and still are; just check out the buzz surrounding his newest trailer, Super 8. Basically it’s Cloverfield 2 except with a different blur for a monster, and a different group of presumably attractive teenagers. And also because the Cloverfield 2 is its own thing.
But on the subject of unanswered questions, how can we overlook Lost. He made another claim, slightly less incredulous than saying Cloverfield was a real movie, that Lost was real sci-fi. But it got people watching. And kept them watching for 6 years. Pretty much the best thing to get and keep people watching (that is allowable on network television) is curiosity. Lost had curiosity in spades, and refusing to answer any question asked along the way really just lead to even more curiosity. It filmed in Hawaii, thus winning over all the crowds who would otherwise be watching the Travel Channel on any given Wednesday night. Several main characters (like Kate and Sawyer) were played by former models, and it doesn’t take 12 seasons of America’s Next Top Model to tell you why folks tune in to watch those people. And when all else fails, there was always the good old fashioned soap opera storylines. This is in fact a show where the decision to change the course of history via nuclear proliferation fused with time travel on who was in love with who at the time (a status which changed about 15 times in that episode). When using this conglomerate method of storytelling, it didn’t really matter what actual plot events happened, as nothing actually happened on Lost. This wasn’t plot, this was formula and trickery and every aesthetic choice possible made with the goal of getting people to watch week after week, and never question until it was all over. For 6 years. In perspective, the popularity of Lost outlasted the reign of presidents and the existence of certain countries, despite every episode consisting of attractive people moping in Hawaii, and occasionally some goes out to murder a teenage girl or pregnant woman. Because J.J. Abrams really, really hates pregnant women.
Honestly, audiences, if we keep letting ourselves get bamboozled like this, we deserve it by this point.
"Looks Can Kill": J. J. Abrams is a genius. An evil genius. For starters, he is the man who made Cloverfield. Cloverfield can be called many things; “good” and “a movie” are not among them. Having taken a camcorder and ran around New York on any given Friday night for an hour and a half, he released it into theatres and told people that if they look hard enough, there might be a monster in there. People didn’t go to see it because it was a good movie, because it wasn’t a real movie. They saw it because of the huge network of viral marketing, and the countless unanswered questions that would all be explained in the film itself. There was more effort put into the advertising; there was more plot put into the advertising. But people ate it up, and still are; just check out the buzz surrounding his newest trailer, Super 8. Basically it’s Cloverfield 2 except with a different blur for a monster, and a different group of presumably attractive teenagers. And also because the Cloverfield 2 is its own thing.
But on the subject of unanswered questions, how can we overlook Lost. He made another claim, slightly less incredulous than saying Cloverfield was a real movie, that Lost was real sci-fi. But it got people watching. And kept them watching for 6 years. Pretty much the best thing to get and keep people watching (that is allowable on network television) is curiosity. Lost had curiosity in spades, and refusing to answer any question asked along the way really just lead to even more curiosity. It filmed in Hawaii, thus winning over all the crowds who would otherwise be watching the Travel Channel on any given Wednesday night. Several main characters (like Kate and Sawyer) were played by former models, and it doesn’t take 12 seasons of America’s Next Top Model to tell you why folks tune in to watch those people. And when all else fails, there was always the good old fashioned soap opera storylines. This is in fact a show where the decision to change the course of history via nuclear proliferation fused with time travel on who was in love with who at the time (a status which changed about 15 times in that episode). When using this conglomerate method of storytelling, it didn’t really matter what actual plot events happened, as nothing actually happened on Lost. This wasn’t plot, this was formula and trickery and every aesthetic choice possible made with the goal of getting people to watch week after week, and never question until it was all over. For 6 years. In perspective, the popularity of Lost outlasted the reign of presidents and the existence of certain countries, despite every episode consisting of attractive people moping in Hawaii, and occasionally some goes out to murder a teenage girl or pregnant woman. Because J.J. Abrams really, really hates pregnant women.
Honestly, audiences, if we keep letting ourselves get bamboozled like this, we deserve it by this point.
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