(JOE.ie)A lot smarter than the trailers suggested, Source Code's false marketing suggests a worrying Hollywood trend - if your clip can't hold a 14-year-old's attention, don't bother.
By Leo Stiles
Traditionally April tends to be a cinematic non-event, with the awards-worthy and diverse films of early February becoming a distant memory and the mayhem of the summer blockbusters waiting in the wings to assault our senses in May.
This is the month when the studios dump the films that they think no-one wants to see as they wait for the sunshine and the chance to make some big money from the summer crowds. Unfortunately it seems that this year, summer has started a bit earlier than expected.
Last weekend two big and very different films opened, the kind of films that you would expect to see in June or July, with both boasting expensive and pervasive ad campaigns and appearing as if they had plots that were written on the back of a napkin. One of them, however, is lying through its advertising and after finding out which one was being honest, a more serious problem emerges
Source Code, if you believed the marketing, is an action-packed rollercoaster of a film that Hollywood can churn out with its eyes closed. Except that it’s not.
What it is is a rather old fashioned and surprisingly deep slice of science fiction and one that will delight anyone with a taste for the more cerebral side of the blockbuster. The film has far more in common with recent genre triumphs such as last year’s Monsters and director Duncan Jones’s own debut Moon.
Source Code - a lot smarter than the trailers suggest
Yet Source Code is unlikely to find the right audience in the cinema because the film was not marketed for the audience it needs to find. It has not been marketed to those that love a well-crafted story with actual character development and it most certainly not marketed to those of us that want to think our way through a film, rather than yawn through the boring talkie bits.
Instead the movie was marketed towards the single most important patron of cinemas, at least if you follow the studios logic - the teenage boy. In doing, this decision damns the film to the obscurity it doesn’t deserve.
The most troubling aspect of how Source Code has been marketed is that the lessons of last year clearly have not been learned. Inception was the single bright light in a particularly vapid 2010 summer and while being every inch the big budget ‘Event Movie’ studios rely upon, the film was a rare case of brain first, brains second, and brawn a very distant third.
If you require further proof that teenage hormones rules the box office, then you have to look no further than the other major studio release of the week; the fantasy action fairytale that is Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch.
The film is what the director must imagine every male adolescent’s wet dream to be if it were filtered through a video game and music video at the same time. Essentially Sucker Punch involves buxom girls in fetish wear take part in arduously overlong action sequences that have all the subtlety that you might expect from the man that brought us the oh-so-macho Spartan epic 300.
The film is a dreary mess and despite its visuals and furiously directed action sequences, it utterly fails to connect with anything other than your eyes and by the time the credits finally roll, you may find yourself with either a headache thanks to its love for strobe lighting or being rudely awoken by the cinema staff as you snored on past the end of the film.
This type of film wouldn’t be such a problem for cinemagoers if there were some decent alternatives but unless you live in Galway, Cork or Dublin, there isn’t much hope that your local multiplex are subtitle-friendly or even independent film-friendly in any way. The current obsession with 3D films is also a problem and despite the likes of Werner Herzog embracing the format (Cave of Forgotten Dreams), 3D screens are still reserved for such dross like Yogi Bear, further reducing the amount of screens available to more diverse films
Dispiriting April schedule
So this month there will be almost no chance for you to see Little White Lies, a witty and enjoyable French relationship drama. There certainly is also no place in regular Irish cinemas for I Saw The Devil, the taut revenge thriller from Korean sensation Kim Jee-woon.
What we do have to look forward to is are sequels (Fast Five, Scream 4), reboots (X-Men: First Class), remakes (Arthur) and yet another superhero film from Marvel (Thor) – is it any wonder that smaller films and their audiences are being squeezed out.
As depressing as this sounds, emergent technologies do offer film lovers a small amount of salvation, with low budget and alternative films finding a home on video streaming services over the internet. For half of the price of a cinema ticket you can now enjoy a massive variety of the films that have been denied access to the multiplexes.
A more recent development is the practice of releasing independent films on the internet on the same day as their limited runs on the art house circuit, with Ken Loach using this approach to find an audience for his excellent new Iraq war drama Route Irish.
Of course, the cost of this is the social pleasure of enjoying films in a theatrical setting but consider this; if people don’t turn up for theses overblown and juvenile films then just maybe the studios might wake up and remember that it isn’t just kids that like to catch a movie and that they don’t have to spend 100 million dollars to make something worth watching. With US box office returns down 20% from last year, perhaps the message is beginning to get through.
It’s unlikely that such a sea change in Hollywood will happen in the short term, but for the sake of good cinema it’s certainly worth a try.
By Leo Stiles
Traditionally April tends to be a cinematic non-event, with the awards-worthy and diverse films of early February becoming a distant memory and the mayhem of the summer blockbusters waiting in the wings to assault our senses in May.
This is the month when the studios dump the films that they think no-one wants to see as they wait for the sunshine and the chance to make some big money from the summer crowds. Unfortunately it seems that this year, summer has started a bit earlier than expected.
Last weekend two big and very different films opened, the kind of films that you would expect to see in June or July, with both boasting expensive and pervasive ad campaigns and appearing as if they had plots that were written on the back of a napkin. One of them, however, is lying through its advertising and after finding out which one was being honest, a more serious problem emerges
Source Code, if you believed the marketing, is an action-packed rollercoaster of a film that Hollywood can churn out with its eyes closed. Except that it’s not.
What it is is a rather old fashioned and surprisingly deep slice of science fiction and one that will delight anyone with a taste for the more cerebral side of the blockbuster. The film has far more in common with recent genre triumphs such as last year’s Monsters and director Duncan Jones’s own debut Moon.
Source Code - a lot smarter than the trailers suggest
Yet Source Code is unlikely to find the right audience in the cinema because the film was not marketed for the audience it needs to find. It has not been marketed to those that love a well-crafted story with actual character development and it most certainly not marketed to those of us that want to think our way through a film, rather than yawn through the boring talkie bits.
Instead the movie was marketed towards the single most important patron of cinemas, at least if you follow the studios logic - the teenage boy. In doing, this decision damns the film to the obscurity it doesn’t deserve.
The most troubling aspect of how Source Code has been marketed is that the lessons of last year clearly have not been learned. Inception was the single bright light in a particularly vapid 2010 summer and while being every inch the big budget ‘Event Movie’ studios rely upon, the film was a rare case of brain first, brains second, and brawn a very distant third.
[Sucker Punch] is what the director must imagine every male adolescent's wet dream to be if it were filtered through a video game and music video at the same time.At the time, Inception was something of a revelation, with many film commentators declaring that this was the start of a new trend within the Hollywood system. Some commentators posited that now audiences would be offered substance with their spectacle and that a film of mature themes and ambitious ideas did not mean poor box office. Sadly, old habits within Hollywood die far harder than anyone thought.
If you require further proof that teenage hormones rules the box office, then you have to look no further than the other major studio release of the week; the fantasy action fairytale that is Zach Snyder’s Sucker Punch.
The film is what the director must imagine every male adolescent’s wet dream to be if it were filtered through a video game and music video at the same time. Essentially Sucker Punch involves buxom girls in fetish wear take part in arduously overlong action sequences that have all the subtlety that you might expect from the man that brought us the oh-so-macho Spartan epic 300.
The film is a dreary mess and despite its visuals and furiously directed action sequences, it utterly fails to connect with anything other than your eyes and by the time the credits finally roll, you may find yourself with either a headache thanks to its love for strobe lighting or being rudely awoken by the cinema staff as you snored on past the end of the film.
This type of film wouldn’t be such a problem for cinemagoers if there were some decent alternatives but unless you live in Galway, Cork or Dublin, there isn’t much hope that your local multiplex are subtitle-friendly or even independent film-friendly in any way. The current obsession with 3D films is also a problem and despite the likes of Werner Herzog embracing the format (Cave of Forgotten Dreams), 3D screens are still reserved for such dross like Yogi Bear, further reducing the amount of screens available to more diverse films
Dispiriting April schedule
So this month there will be almost no chance for you to see Little White Lies, a witty and enjoyable French relationship drama. There certainly is also no place in regular Irish cinemas for I Saw The Devil, the taut revenge thriller from Korean sensation Kim Jee-woon.
What we do have to look forward to is are sequels (Fast Five, Scream 4), reboots (X-Men: First Class), remakes (Arthur) and yet another superhero film from Marvel (Thor) – is it any wonder that smaller films and their audiences are being squeezed out.
As depressing as this sounds, emergent technologies do offer film lovers a small amount of salvation, with low budget and alternative films finding a home on video streaming services over the internet. For half of the price of a cinema ticket you can now enjoy a massive variety of the films that have been denied access to the multiplexes.
A more recent development is the practice of releasing independent films on the internet on the same day as their limited runs on the art house circuit, with Ken Loach using this approach to find an audience for his excellent new Iraq war drama Route Irish.
Of course, the cost of this is the social pleasure of enjoying films in a theatrical setting but consider this; if people don’t turn up for theses overblown and juvenile films then just maybe the studios might wake up and remember that it isn’t just kids that like to catch a movie and that they don’t have to spend 100 million dollars to make something worth watching. With US box office returns down 20% from last year, perhaps the message is beginning to get through.
It’s unlikely that such a sea change in Hollywood will happen in the short term, but for the sake of good cinema it’s certainly worth a try.
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