Movie trailers are out of control

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 0 Comments

CP; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Sarah Mackinnon

Cultural shorthand keeps getting shorter. There was a time when taking part in the conversation meant saying, “I haven’t read the book but I’ve seen the movie.” Now it’s: “I haven’t seen the movie, but I watched the trailer.” Or better still: “I read the review of the trailer.” These days Hollywood trailers are being premiered like blockbuster events in their own right, complete with reviews. In early October, Disney and Marvel launched the first full trailer for The Avengers, a five-superhero cluster bomb that won’t hit theatres until next May. The Hollywood Reporter jumped on it with a serious and substantial review, criticizing Robert Downey Jr.’s “two lame jokes” and the use of Thor’s Loki as a recycled villain. Although cascading fireballs send a dozen vehicles flying through Manhattan, the critic complained that “we only see one street of cars wrecked . . . Audiences are going to need a greater threat to humanity to get invested in this showdown.” He wished the trailer were more like the one for the last Transformers sequel, “which managed to convey epic drama and conflict as well as great emotional moments.” That trailer, apparently, was an instant classic, even if the movie was utter dreck.

It makes you wonder what Pauline Kael would think. Brian Kellow’s delicious biography of the legendary New Yorker critic, who championed the ’70s wave of American film, reveals that Kael was no snob; her palate included an avid taste for entertaining trash. But by the ’80s, she despaired that marketing was eating cinema alive. Now, a decade after her death, there’s no better example of her worst nightmare than the trailer blight that ravages the ecology of film. It’s the pine beetle of the movie business.

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Crazy Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 23, 2010 at 10:01 AM - 0 Comments

Mark Mainz / AP

Surrounded by acres of pines and jasmine, overlooking a rocky headland of the Mediterranean, the Hotel du Cap is one of the world’s most luxurious hotels. But until a few years ago it didn’t take credit cards. The Cap, which served as a Vichy headquarters during the Nazi occupation, came to favour the kind of clients who travel with wads of cash. Half an hour up the coast from Cannes, it’s where stars and moguls like to stay when they come to the festival, far from madding crowd. Journalists used to be banned. Once I showed up there for a rendezvous with actor Donald Sutherland and found him waiting anxiously in the parking lot, petrified that I’d tell the front desk I was there to do an interview.

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Battleship: not just a game anymore

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Basing a movie on the board game Battleship is no different than basing a movie on Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. At least that’s what studio execs would have us think.

Hasbro and Universal Studios are partnering to put the game, along with Candy Land, Monopoly, Clue and the Ouija board, up on the silver screen. It’s part of a growing trend in Hollywood—studios have fallen in love with the idea of making kids’ toys into movies. Continue…

Bad cartoons, really big bucks

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 6 Comments

Badly animated ’80s cartoons are taking over Hollywood. G.I. Joe: The Rise of COBRA, opening Aug. 7, is the latest movie to have its roots in a cartoon that kept children occupied on Saturday mornings and weekdays after school. We’ve had the two Transformers movies (which owe more to the ’80s cartoons than the toys), and studios are developing films based on The Smurfs, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and even Hong-Kong Phooey, about a kung-fu-fighting dog. These shows reused animation over and over, and censors forbade them to show any violence. But they have a bigger audience than cartoons that were good.

It seems like the more poorly animated an old cartoon it is, the better it sells. Warner Brothers ended its series of Looney Tunes DVDs, but announced plans to market more episodes of Saturday morning cartoons like The Herculoids and The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan. It’s become common for fans and writers of such shows to refer to them as classics, arguing that they deserve to rank with prestigious, well-produced animation. On Shout! Factory’s DVD of the G.I. Joe cartoon, head writer Ron Friedman tells us that the good guys’ fight against poorly voiced baddies from COBRA is symbolic of “the Greek ideal of democracy.” Cartoon history is being rewritten before our eyes, with G.I. Joe and He-Man as the classics and Bugs Bunny or Disney cartoons as forgotten rarities. Continue…