While I was sitting at the Atlanta
Airport last weekend, waiting for my final flight into PA, I happened to notice
a stunningly gorgeous woman sitting across from me. Now, I’m not one to poke my buddy in the ribs
and point out every woman that walks by, so don’t take this lightly: I really thought this young lady was a
misplaced runway model, minus the too-skinny frame and terrible outfit.
Then I saw her pick up a book! Look at
this, I thought, a woman who can
surely make a living off her appearance, doing something completely against the
stereotype I’d already placed her in!
I wonder, what she could be reading?
While my brain just repeated ‘please
be sci-fi, please be sci-fi, please be sci-fi,’ I craned my head to get a
look at the title.
Atlas
Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
That little, tiny detail within the
big picture convinced my judgmental mind that there was no way I would want to
have a conversation with her. Fairly or
unfairly, I saw a beautiful young lady reading and got my hopes up, but the
more details I took in, such as the book and her weird look of disdain when an
elderly old woman sat next to her, convinced me that I had made unfair
assumptions.
You know what else we make unfair
assumptions about? Movies based on their
trailers!
Just like a runway model, trailers
are made to make the viewer think one thing in particular about a movie no
matter what the truth really is. Yes, it’s
kind of a dick move on Hollywood’s part for packaging a film as A when in truth
it’s actually B, but it’s not really the trailer guy’s fault. It’s the executive’s fault for commissioning
a movie, deciding it won’t sell well because it’s either not what they wanted
or just a terrible film, then forcing some poor shmuck to package it as a good
movie.
Yes, I’m probably being little
unfair to some misleading movies, but the only misleading film I have seen and liked is Adventureland. That one was sold as a coming-of-age comedy but
turned out to be very much a drama. The
entire film contained maybe four or five laughs, and I think the trailer
alluded to all of them. It’s also the
only movie to date in which I actually like Kristen Stewart’s acting.
Horrors are especially guilty of misleading
packaging because of how easy it is to cut the trailer. Simply link together all the ‘jumps’ and ‘scares,’
allude to the plot, throw in buzzwords like spine
tingling or chilling and call it
a day. The Haunting in Connecticut, The
Last Exorcism, and An AmericanHaunting are all recent examples of the decent trailer/terrible movie
dichotomy. (Although in The Last Exorcism’s defense, if you turn
it off before the last 5 minutes, it’s actually a good film. The ending ruins it that much.)
I know there’s not much we can do as
moviegoers other than to speak with our wallets, so I highly encourage everyone
to adopt a method I’ve recently begun using for my non-reviewed films. Check a few review sites before you hit up a
movie and see if anyone is talking about the movie not being what they
expected. If you hear a decent amount of
chatter from everyday theater-goers complaining about the ol’ bait-and-switch,
don’t go see the movie. Wait to give it
a rental.
If
enough of us adopt that practice, the truly bad movies and the ones that are
advertised improperly will eventually lose enough money to convince Hollywood
to do two things: Stop making such
terrible films that they have no choice but to cut a B.S. trailer and have some
faith in the good films by advertising them as exactly what they are.
Now
if you’ll excuse me, I have 9 hours of airport time in my immediate
future. Thanks, Harrisburg International
for providing the free wifi I needed to finish this article!
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