One inescapable fact of movie attendance in the late 2000s is that if you show up 5-10 minutes before the film starts, you'll be treated to a substantial pre-show, featuring "exclusive" looks at the marketing campaigns for upcoming stuff. It used to be that most of the advertisements were for theatrical releases, and took the form of longer trailers and/or star interviews swiped from the EPK. However, as the major TV networks have increasingly begun to feel the icy hand of Bittorrent at their throats, there's been a corresponding upswing in the amount of pre-movie advertising for upcoming sitcoms and dramas. (Irrelevant aside: the movie theater in Kirksville, MO, where I went to undergrad, actually didn't have any of this; rather, the pre-show consisted of a looped slide show that was usually one ad for a local furniture company and three poorly-conceived movie trivia questions). Anyhow, since I don't watch much television (I'm far too busy with more intellectual pursuits, like playing Gears of War 2), movie pre-shows are about the only exposure I get to what's going on in the world of television, until I catch up with a sampling of the more culturally ubiquitous shows 2 years after the fact on DVD. So I'm glad that I got to see the awesomeness that is the sneak peek at NBC's upcoming show Trauma, which probably would have been more aptly titled ER 2: The Retardening.
The version I saw in the theaters was probably about half the length of the video above, and it left out the part where it introduces the characters with onscreen titles summarizing their respective cliches, which I think makes for a better promo. What I like about this promo isn't just that it's ridiculously over-the-top, but the way that you can just envision the meeting that led to this show's creation:
NBC Executive 1: We need Axe Body Spray to buy $50 million worth of ads this fall, or else we'll go bankrupt. How the hell do we make a show about paramedics appeal to the 18-34 year old male demographic?
NBC Executive 2: Add helicopters?
NBC Executive 3: Add explosions?
NBC Executive 1: Get the producers of Trauma on the phone and tell them that there better be an explosion or a helicopter for every thirty seconds of their show!
NBC Executive 2: Also, each episode should have a bare minimum of one exploding helicopter!
Lest the ad for Trauma lead you to believe that American cinema is going to pick up the creative slack of the television networks, I also was privileged enough to see (twice) the trailer for the new Gerard Butler movie. I think this movie was an attempt to prove that the fatal flaw of prior entries in the revenge movie genre (e.g. Death Wish, Taken, The Brave One, Death Sentence, Double Jeopardy, Eye for an Eye, etc.) is that they were too intelligent and not reactionary enough. Behold, the upcoming Law Abiding Citizen (yes, that's apparently the real title of the movie).
I think further commentary on that trailer is pretty redundant; if trying to be intense and serious and succeeding only in looking completely goddamn ridiculous were an Olympic sport, Law Abiding Citizen would have been crowned its Michael Phelps based solely on the two-and-a-half minute span presented above. I have only two real questions:
1. Whatever Gerard Butler's super-secret Black Ops work for the government was, it must have had a lot to do with blowing up cars, because there's approximately twelve car bombings in this trailer.
2. Why is it that the lenience and inadequacy of the justice system is such a prevalent artistic theme in a culture which leads the entire world by a stunning margin in both incarceration rate and absolute number of imprisoned citizens?
No comments:
Post a Comment