So I went on a very impromptu way to see a movie this morning. I won’t bore you, but it turned out there was an anime film playing that I was only vaguely aware of but got an email announcement for this morning. So I went to see it. I will say this…IT WAS 90 MINUTES LONG. 90 MINUTES. A MOVIE THAT WAS 90 MINUTES LONG, NOT TWO AND A HALF HOURS LONG. 90 MINUTES. IMAGINE!!! I sat there and enjoyed a movie and never felt (literally) pressured to jump up and make a bathroom run two-thirds through the film.
Before this 90 minute film started, though, I first had to sit through 20 minutes (!!) of trailers and commercials. I especially hated the trailers. Again, Hollywood is in the process of cutting their own throats…and certainly the throats of movie theaters. Although the gap in the production pipeline meant we didn’t get an unless stream of boring looking “blockbuster” sort of films, every single trailer felt the same. 15 minutes of eight trailers that all felt like they were for the same movie. Is your film a comedy-laced action film like every other comedy-laced action film of the last 15 years? A blast from the past for nostalgic seniors? Animated kiddie film? Cynical historical / Romcom flick? Adult-themed dramedy (clocking in at 2 hours and 44 minutes)? Didn’t matter. All the trailers were basically the same. What a turn off.
First, they were all too stupidly, ear-bleedingly loud. Turn down the freakin’ sound on the trailers already.
Second, they ALL used old pop songs for ironic / cool effect, just like (the films that have ruined a generation of movie trailers now) the Guardians of the Galaxy films. The first trailer it wasn’t that bad, because it was an ethereal version of Day-O playing over Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and that makes sense. Although I think it’s been quite a while since a card reading “From the Mind of Tim Burton” was a selling point. After that, though, it was all Eurythmics and Rolling Stones and ELO and an ethereal version of What a Wonderful World and so on. Only the final trailer, for another anime film, thankfully lacked an old pop song blaring on the speakers.
By the way, the trailer for the historical astronaut romcom Fly Me to the Movie used (I think, I’m not really a music guy that much) T-Rex’s Bang a Gong, instead of, oh, I don’t know, Frank Sinatra’s…World on a String. Or, oh, his rendition of Fly Me to the Moon. I guess that might have worked too. However, that’s not the kind of song James Gunn made popular in trailers, so nope. Anyway, enough with the freakin’ old pop songs already.
Finally, of course, they all featured super-fast editing, as if they were afraid we were ready to bolt from the theaters if there was a micro-second were we became bored. That’s not true. I got more bored (and nettled) as another and another and another trailer played, yet I managed to stay in my seat in the hopes that eventually the film I paid to watch would actually begin. In any case, the cumulative effect made each trailer worse then the one before it, and starting reducing interest in the earlier ones as well.
So a bunch of different kinds of movies that they made all look like on big undifferentiated blog. Good work, Hollywood. I can imagine theater owners watching one of these blocks and just breaking out in tears. Good grief.
