comment #1

p.Vice says ...

How can NYC be considered "bluer-than-blue" when they've had a Republican mayor since 1994?

comment #2

Rob says ...

I'm really, really skeptical of people who claim to be able to "read" an audience's reaction to a trailer. Most non-developmentally impaired adults can react to something with pleasure, disgust or indifference without making noise or, say, clapping or stomping their feet.

comment #3

Breedlove says ...

People go to the movies for escapist entertainment, not to have their noses rubbed in a painful national tragedy. But we're never going to collectively heal as a nation and as a people until we deal with Reese and Ryan's divorce, and Ryan's alleged infidelity, head on. What better way than through art?

comment #4

EDouglas says ...

You should see the Democrats that have gone against them...

THey're already doing long lead screenings of Stop-Loss and a person I know who has seen it seemed to like it. (Though he seems to like anything that he gets to see early... like that never happens.)

comment #5

Sean says ...

Rob - all I can say is, any filmmaker worth his salt can sit in a preview audience and tell you when the movie is playing and when the movie is failing to reach the audiences, and can do so better than the 1-10 scorecards being given out after the fact.

If what you're saying is true, then there is no difference between watching a movie alone and watching a movie in a theater full of people, but we all know that's not true. If you've never been in an experience where your opinion to a movie was not partially shaped by the people you were with, and even the audience you saw it with, then I would say that you are a very unique person.

Here's an example: the first time I saw 'No Country', the entire theater was silent for the last ten or fifteen minutes. The second time, people were audibly shifting in their seats, munching popcorn, etc. Both the second and third time, people started whispering to each other, unsure of what to make of what was going on.

The first time, everybody walked out of the theater loving it. The other two, there were a lot of people who liked it less.

Anybody can read a crowd if they try. Your skepticism is misplaced.

comment #6

Sean says ...

"How can NYC be considered "bluer-than-blue" when they've had a Republican mayor since 1994?"

Vice - Bloomberg's not a Republican anymore.

Beyond that, though, if you just break things down to "Republican" vs. "Democrat", then, sure, you're right. If you break things down based on actual ideology, though, you're talking about two pro-choice, pro-gay rights people who ran campaigns which appealed to liberals. Bloomberg gets a lot of credit for being a liberal and, while I think that's patently absurd and that the City has been made incrementally worse for every day he's been the mayor, I accept that people think they're voting liberal when they vote for him.

comment #7

Rob says ...

I agree with you, Sean.

My point was specifically about reading an audience during the trailers. The crowd hasn't settled in yet. People are still finding seats and taking off their coats. At a lot of theaters, the houselights haven't even come all the way down.

p. Vice claims that the audience was repelled by the trailer, but how many people in the theater were even paying attention?

comment #8

Rob says ...

Oops, I meant tophertilson, not p. vice. Sorry.

comment #9

Sean says ...

Rob - you make a good point, and I think "repelled" would be a strong word, but NYC theaters are a little different than other places. Because virtually every movie is packed, the audiences make sure to get there with plenty of time, and the theaters *tend* to lower the lights on time. Not always, but usually.

I do agree that a lot of audiences don't pay much attention to trailers. But I would also say that this is a trailer which does its best to grab your attention at the beginning. The problem with it is that, once it gets past the HEY LOOK AT ME shit [I honestly thought it was a trailer for 'Redacted'], it looks like an extremely pedestrian soldier story that we've all heard a dozen times before, but specifically applied to Iraq.

Operationally speaking, there is no difference between that trailer and a trailer for a movie about the draft in Vietnam. He has to go back but doesn't want to vs. he has to go but doesn't want to. Very generic.

Everybody always knocks Hollywood movies for being cookie-cutter, but 'Stop Loss' looks like the most generic cookie-cutter pseudo-indie movie of the year by the trailer. So I do believe that that's why nobody wants to see it.

I would go so far as to say that every Iraq movie so far has had a trailer which downplayed anything which made it specific to Iraq and played-up all the most generic and obvious story-points. Even Charlie Wilson's War, I haven't seen an ad which shows anything taking place in the Middle East. The marketers don't know how to sell these things. I can't say the movies are no good, but I can definitely say the ads are shitty.

Which is a much bigger problem, actually. I have realized that I can't judge movies by their trailers, because, whoever those trailers are meant to appeal to, it sure ain't me.

comment #10

Sean says ...

And, specifically in regard to what topher said, I have seen exactly what he describes happen several times in theaters in NYC, so I have less trouble believing it than you do. It may just be a New York thing, I don't know; maybe when you spend upwards of twelve bucks on a ticket, you soak in every moment they want to show you.

I have also seen the reverse happen; the crowd I saw 'Blade Runner' with at the Ziegfeld seemed angry at the 'Enchanted' trailer for a minute... and, by the end, it had clearly won them over.

comment #11

Bocephus says ...

I saw the poster for Kung Fu Panda when I was walking out of Sweeney Todd this weekend. It made me throw up in my mouth a little.

comment #12

Sean says ...

When the Kung Fu Panda "don't talk during the theater" message came on, my friend leaned over to me and said, "How is texting during a movie more annoying than that talking panda?"

Coincidentally, the panda pointed right at a person who spent the whole movie unobtrustively texting.

comment #13

adorian says ...

Sometimes it's very easy to read an audience's reaction to a trailer. When I saw the "Erin Brocovich" trailer, people were laughing at the obvious laugh-lines, and then when the preview was over, I heard dozens of people all around me loudly telling partners, "I wanna see that!" or "I gotta see that!" or "That looks good!" When you hear that kind of reaction, you know it's going to be a hit with the audience.

In San Francisco, there was a period when people would either boo and hiss after a preview or they would applaud. It was interesting that you would seldom hear a mixture of the two responses. People would usually boo and hiss the big popcorn epics. They would applaud what looked like serious little art-house dramas.

comment #14

scooterzz says ...

sean -- there's no such thing as 'unobtrusively texting'...... the very fact that you were aware of it makes it 'obtrusive'....and if you were aware of it, probably others were too.....

comment #15

Sean says ...

scooter - it was 'I Am Legend'. Since the movie itself was so unbelievably dull and poorly made, I found myself watching the kids in front of me, and being more entertained by their interactions with the screen than with the movie itself. (If I'm not enjoying a movie, I try to people-watch and see if people are enjoying it; in this case, nobody seemed to be.]

In watching them, I noticed that one kid did not look up at the movie but once [one of the Tower Records scenes, he looked up and said, "Aw shit, that nigga's gettin' some porno yo!"] as far as I could see. But I never heard a sound from his system, and the light was not distracting, per se; I just kept looking for it to see if he was still going.

So, yes, I would say that he was unobtrustively texting. I was curious why he spent $12 to sit in a darkened theater and text, but I didn't get a chance to talk to him on the way out.

comment #16

parttimesaint says ...

The audience probably felt disconnected because it's a terrible trailer. From the music (Drowning Pool? Seriously?!?) to the cliched dialogue, there's nothing in there that makes me want to see the movie.

comment #17

rocco says ...

Please stop perpetuating the myth that NYC, or any big city, is "blue"...that's an accurate label if you use the term properly to describe voting habits, but in the vernacular sense that Jeff and most others use it, it means educated, affluent, and white. Sure, there may be a greater concentration of affluent and educated film-lovers of all colors in NY, otherwise it is comprised of blacks, hispanics, blue-collar whites (mostly irish, jews, greeks, and dagos), and immigrants of all kinds who guzzle miller lite, shop at target, and love football...they may vote democrat but they also love Julia Roberts and thus are not anyone Jeff would sidle up next to had he actually been invited to a new year's bash.

comment #18

BurmaShave says ...

It could be that Ryan Phillipe is doing such a poor and exagerrated Southern accent. Still, the worst I've seen a trailer go over in recent times would be DEFINETLY,MAYBE in front of CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR. The blue-hairs just weren't having it.

comment #19

christian says ...

I can't think of anything that illustrates our culture's present idiocracy more than people texting during a movie they paid ten bucks to see.