Movies - the next music business?
Having just come back from the movie Bruce Almighty tonight, I was struck by something - it sucked. Jim Carrey plays a guy who one day gets to be God for a couple weeks. How in the world that combination was screwed up, I don't know, but I will say this - even I could have made a movie three times better.
And then I got to thinking, after my Father mentioned one key phrase I'm hearing more and more these days: "The trailer had the funniest bits in it, the rest was pretty boring." Bingo. Is the movie business going to be the next music business, with so many movies with a few good clips, enough to fill a trailer, and the rest just filler to justify dragging people all the way to the theatre or rental store?
Bruce Almighty earned $70+ million over its first 3 days, and I bet that was enough to recover the cost of production and promotion, including Jim Carrey's salary. There were few special effects that required CGI, and the material was poor, trying to mix comedy, romance, and some attempt at a spiritual message, not one of which was done well at all.
And so I'm left wondering - wondering how much writers block the scriptwriter had to make up for, wondering how this crap gets pushed on us when there are far better scripts, wondering how even Jim Carrey missed seeing how bad the content was to earn himself a writing and directing credit, at least.
But this is different from the "summertime" dumbing down we see - this movie attempted to pass a message onto its viewers. It didn't substitute women, sex, cars, skin and teenage actors for quality, it actually had a purpose to it. So despite the fact that I was inclined to lump it into the "summertime" category of movies, it doesn't fit there, it's anomalous. Or maybe, as my father's phrase hints at, it's part of a rising trend - lower budgets, greasing critics' palms, and stuffing the only decent 30 seconds of content the movie has to offer in the trailer and bombing us with that. Jim Carrey was a star in the Trailer of Bruce Almighty, but in Bruce Almighty he stunk.
Will Best Movie be relegated to the pre-show, only to see Best Movie Trailer close out the Academy Awards?
Comments
it's also "the next music business"
in the unsurprising sense that file-sharing can open-up a grey market for new movie releases which cuts into the "addressable audience" for a film.
The tech is clearly there and accessible, with HD camcorders, adequate codecs like XviD, display formats like SVCD, and networks like bitTorrent and WASTE at all our fingertips.
This summer studios have reacted to this increasingly sophisticated trend with globally simultaneous rather than staggered releasing, plus metal detectors and infrared scanning in cinemas. But that won't stem the tide; if you release a movie in over 3000 cinemas worldwide showing 5 times a day, someone will cam one somewhere.
When will they realize that their ticket prices are simply too high? Oh excuse me, studios blame the exhibitors for that.
comment brought about by my seeing high-quality SVCDs of Matrix Reloaded cam'd and bitTorrent'd, which looked as good as some videotapes of yore.
Movie trailers are the way they are,
spoilers, jokes, endings & all, because history has shown that it works:
"...Pretentiousness is not an affliction common to trailer editors. They cringe when you use the phrase "the art of cutting a trailer," because they understand that their craft is about commerce, what (M. Night) Shyamalan himself calls "putting butts in the seats."" (N.Y.Times Magazine, July 28 2002)