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Columns
Reviews
Original Material
H A I R Y G R A V Y
-by
Erich Schoeneweiss
That
Stuff That Just Irks You!
“Rosebud”
is the sled that Kane owned as a child in Citizen Kane. Bruce Willis is really one of the dead people in The Sixth
Sense. The hot chick in the Crying Game is really a guy.
If
I’ve just ruined some movie for you, get over it.
You should have seen it by now.
But
what if these movies had just come out, or were about to be released and
someone had told you the “big secret”? Well, than gosh darn it all,
you’d have a pretty good reason to be pissed.
So
where does Lisa Schwarzbaum, one of Entertainment Weekly’s two film
critics, get off revealing (and I mean she showed the full Monty on this
one) the ending to Pay It Forward in her review?
Who does she think she is? Sure,
she tells us right off the bat she hated the movie and plans to reveal
the ending:
“Pay
It Forward gladhands so brazenly-for awards, for publicity, for
love-that although the press materials request critical collusion in not
revealing the ending, I am going to reveal the ending. Later, in my own
contribution toward paying it forward, however, I’ll give fair warning
before the spoiler.”
Well,
at least she warned us first, right?
We could have stopped reading, right?
Wrong. How many
times have you looked at something you were told not to look at? She had no right to reveal this to us. What she did was wrong and unethical, regardless of whether
she liked the movie or not. Her
job is to give us her opinion of whether the film is worth seeing. It is
our right to determine whether we will see it or not.
Frankly, I think she’s the worst critic in the country.
She gives a film a great review (The 13th Warrior?!)
and I stay away, she gives a film a bad review and I generally go.
I love the Top 10 list at the end of the year when her list can
be compared to fellow EW critic Owen Gleiberman, and it’s just a
testimony to what a great critic he is and what a hack she is.
Alas,
I stray from my point…I’m sick and tired of critics and studios
revealing major plot points before a movie is released (and us web-heads
are as guilty of this as anyone). Four
major movies this year are guilty of revealing two much in an attempt to
get us to see a movie we would have probably seen anyway.
Scary
Movie: Wow, how many gags
did they give up in the trailer? Carmen
Electra’s Baywatch spoof, The Matrix scene, and “Scream” mask’s
ability to change expressions to name a few.
Luckily the funniest gags couldn’t be shown in the trailer, but
I saw a commercial a month ago that came extremely close to letting the
cat out of the bag on several of them.
What
Lies Beneath: A
suspense/thriller from the director of Forrest Gump and Contact starring
Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford.
That’s all we need to know and we’re there.
Fox and Dreamworks did not need to tell us that Ford’s
character was having an affair and that the girl he was having an affair
with had died and was now back haunting his wife.
Again, there are further twists that they did not reveal but,
this was a pretty major plot point and ruined much of what would have
been early suspense and intrigue in the movie.
And worst yet, as I said, it wasn’t needed.
The pedigree of the film alone would have sold it.
Autumn
in New York: Made no effort
to hide the fact that Winona Ryder’s character is suffering from a
terminal disease. Considering
that the woman dieing at the end of a romance is key to a good
tearjerker (English Patient!), don’t you think it would have been
smart to not reveal this three months before the film opened.
Meet
the Parents: I chose to
pass on seeing this film because everyone I know who saw it said all the
funny stuff was in the trailer (and the trailer was like 5 minutes
long!). Again, Ben Stiller and Bob DeNiro in a comedy are about all
you need to tell us and we’re sold.
It’s
become such a major epidemic that I’m at the point where I want to
stay away from the trailers all together.
Sure some movies you know what’s going to happen.
I don’t think yelling out “The boat’s going to sink!” in
the middle of Titanic would have ruined the movie for anyone. Studios are so absorbed with being #1, getting that huge
first weekend’s gross and beating out everyone else that they’re
missing the point. Too much
info is hurting them. It’s
driving us away from films that we would have probably seen otherwise.
Why should we pay $10 to see what we saw in the trailer, already?
There
are films coming up that look interesting.
Unbreakable is one. They
give you just the right amount of set up so that we now have all of
these questions in our head and need to see the movie for the answers
(Andrew has made it his mission to know the story before the movie is
out). Matrix and Sixth Sense did the same thing (Interesting…both
cleaned up at the box office). People
wouldn’t have gone to see Sixth Sense in the droves they did had we
known the ending before hand (Thank God Lisa Schwarzbaum didn’t hate
that film!).
My
plea to any studio executive or PR person who is reading this (it’s
OK, you can admit that you are…the studio audience is waiting) is to
stop showing us the whole movie in the preview.
Tease us, entice us…that’s what we like.
That’s what we want.
PS:
The most egregious trailer of all time?
The teaser trailer for Men In Black…which actually showed us
the film’s “money shot”!! Unbelievable!
Copyright©2000 Erich Schoeneweiss