Sequential Art, Seventh Art & Other Arts: Trailers Are KILLERS.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Trailers Are KILLERS.

(so can be said about bloopers - or behind the scenes footage?!? KILLERS - all of them! 
Box-office killers!)

Aye - that they are; they really are!
And who else do you think they kill? They kill the moviegoer that lays dormant in you, still, despite all the Hollywood crap and drivel that has been churned out over the last fifteen years, it is still there, yes, laying dormant inside of you.

Only to be fatally wounded by most trailers that insult your intelligence - and finally finished off by those that add extra insult to injury by disgusting the very fiber of your being, the core center where resides class, good judgment, common sense!

Just look at these right here and come right back - y'hear?
Good.. Now look at that:






















Maybe watching the whole damn thing wasn't even necessary. Most probably the mere still image on the screen, that of a truly lame-o (lamer-o than ever before) Johnny Depp in Victorian era regalia, already sufficed at that task. Depp is seen here trying to convey some chivalry before his character becomes even more grotesque and absurd as the 2012 version of Barnabas Collins for Tim Burton's latest complete waste of a film budget, special effects, studio time, cinematic space, damn rotten-to-the-core-celluloid...!!!

These two should have stopped it right there with Edward Scissorhands.

Alas, they did not.
Au contraire - they keep coming back, re-enacting their once-original weirdness (but only because it was theirs and theirs only) by infringing upon the creations of others - others who truly did manage to bottle up lightning, either by sheer accident or mere fortitude, but that they did! While Burton and Depp, in all of their collaborations (now seriously becoming way too numerous - please, congress, try and make it a priority to pass a law, any bill that you want, which could prohibit such a calamitous cooperation to ever reoccur again! Thank you.) they have accomplished nothing but prove that they are indeed singular bizarros that often make no sense whatsoever.

But we may be digressing already at this point...
Let us veer back towards our focal point, hence...

Our original intent and point to make were the following: these days, the number of trailers (those pseudo-funny, often noisy, short little montages, truly nothing more than a quick edit of a lot of key scenes -the most dynamic looking- enhanced by a soundtrack that has nothing to do with the long-form version of this footage and destined to actually entice anyone to want to go out and view the aforementioned long-form version, usually ''in theaters now'' as the formula has it? Yeah - those.) and all the promos verily surrounding the release of any given new feature film actually have the adverse effect on moviegoers.

Indeed - it is undeniably true.

Once exciting and totally apt to entice you into forking over the big bucks in order to see these things in theaters, trailers oftentimes make you just want to vomit these days. Vomit all over the producers, directors, actors and anyone involved as one of the ''creators'' of these atrocities... (We'll spare the technical crew - and the Lucasfilm FX crews. For now.)

Such is the case with the above trailer - verily the perfect example of this ongoing trend here! A trend that is gaining more and more momentum with each new movie release - Tinseltown should be afraid now; very afraid! Just look at the above trailer again: how revolting and creepy is that...! Depp's Barnabas is such a grotesque, repulsive parody of the original magical creation of Dan Curtis and Jonathan Frid, which was honorably frightful, majestuous in its tragic darkness, awe-inspiring in its shadowy opaque quality transcendent of the 1970s themselves...! To turn around and join forces with the braintrust behind a true parodical piece-of-crap (such as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - can it get any worse than that? Let's pray it does not.) and hire this guy in order to make a complete farce out of a classic from television such as Dark Shadows is, at best, deplorable. And, at worst, it is quite lamentable.

Both the original show as the classy 1991 remake starring such an actor as Ben Cross (and it took guts to cast a man named Cross as the vampire Barnabas! But that is another story.) should be treated as untouchable classics - it one forgets the subject-matter for a second, of course. The quality of the treatment of such a subject was there: since Dan Curtis was not a clutz like Burton! The script was written intelligently back in those days, nothing like a Seth Grahame-Smith pens with his crayolas - and for said retard to state that ''there always was an absurdist element to Dark Shadows'' in order to validate his version of it, well, that is the only true absurdism around Collinswood, Hollywood, Bollywood, my hood and your hood as well - you can rest assured of so much!

Dark Shadows is not the ADDAMS FAMILY, for crying out loud: it may have looked, felt and been consumed as any other Munsters by those nitwits the likes of Smith, Depp & Burton, but it was quite on another level than that kind of fare! Dark Shadows was a gothic greco-roman tragedy, with a sorceress (no need to place the adjective "evil" before the title of sorceress, folks - any true sorceror or sorceress should readily be found to be evil indeed: the ones dabbling in so-called "white magic" need not apply in such tales for they make rather dull and bland characters anyways! And, in real life, they do not qualify - period. But that is another story.) so, a sorceress and a man cursed to become a vampire when he was not truly evil at all! Instead of the insufferably long pantheon of gods and goddesses the Greeks and Romans had to weave stories around, the cast of Dark Shadows was rounded up by a strong local flavour in its choice picks of New England representatives - plus the occasional extra supernatural characters making either an extended guest-starring appearance (especially in the 1970s show and the 1990s sequential art adaptations (several of which drawn by my cuz, Jose Pimentel! Shout out to you, bro!) or a simple remarkable cameo.

Taking Dark Shadows and turning it into an "Uncle Fester returns" type of tale (complete with hijinks and other silly shenanigans) is doing irreparable damage to the mythos of this classic creation and, if we dare treat with such respect and high regard inane make-believe fluff such as the Dark Knight, Superman, Tarzan, John Carter, Zorro, Dracula, Frankenstein and other even more recent drivel of the same ilk, we must then give Dark Shadows the exact same benefits.

In simpler terms - Don't B.S. the D.S. fanbase - you may tick off a Barnabas!

The fact is that even if you had narrow a clue about the original material, one single look at this Burton-Smith-Depp piece of crap production will make you roll your eyes and steer clear from theaters for weeks, months, hopefully years!

And, actually, it couldn't have come at the rightest, choiciest time: as this trailer was released (along with other indigestable ones) right in the middle of the event called... Black March.



The month-long call to BOYCOTT the likes of Paramount Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox and Universal City Studios should, verily, be extended indefinitely. To its credit, Anonymous does state that they are ready for "a long, long campaign" to be furthered by a countless wave of boycotters for Anonymous are LEGION. I like that immensely, I must say...! But that is another story, too.

For some reason, the original Black March video, seen late last month, had two more corporate entities on that short list which have since been removed from it: DC Comics and Marvel Entertainment Group. Perhaps Anonymous, in its ongoing effort to be taken seriously, wanted to dissociate itself from geeky comic-booky readers and wished to focus only on big-time movie moguls and media conglomerates? Four-color wonders should not be underestimated just yet, though - nor dismissed as a "non-factor" in any mass appeal to boycott and hurt them where it hurts for real: in the pocketbook. In the final analysis, Anon listed all the A-listers but omitted several more also very worthy of being boycotted forevermore: producers such as TVA Films, DreamWorks SKG, Touchstone Pictures, Rogue Pictures, Tri-Star Pictures, Screen Gems, Pixar, Lions Gate Entertainment... And maybe, just to remain consistent, you could boycott 21st Century Films as well!

In any case, for whatever time it can last or even if it occurs only intermittently, a boycott can be easily achieved when the very enticement for our consumerism -these infernal trailers- turn out to be such strong determinants for us to actually stay away...!

Good job, MPAA & RIAA...!
;-)

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