say NO to deceptive fim advertising
Part 3 of the ongoing film rant… and today’s whinge is about deceptive film advertising and editing. People used to worry that the best scenes from a film were all in the trailer or in the television advertising, meaning that seeing the film did not provide sufficient further entertainment. Now you get even less.
After seeing Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby at the Hoyts cinema in Melbourne Central on Tuesday night, I mentally went through the advertising I had seen for the film and the film itself, and noted several scenes that feature in the television advertisements and online trailers but NOT in the film. These include Jean Girard shaving his legs in the bath and the scene when Ricky Bobby is lying on the ground next to his father’s car wresting a wild cougar. In the tv ad we see more of this scene than we do in the film.
I wonder if the edit of the film being screened in Australia is different to the US version. Perhaps the trailer and advertising was made before a final edit of the film was approved by the studio, which resulted in this inconsistency. In current film practice, however, I suspect something even worse: deliberate manipulation of the marketing collateral by using the best scenes ONLY in the advertising and not in the film. This makes the trailer funnier than the film, and undermines the value of the film. This makes you walk out of the cinema thinking you got less than you paid for. Cheated.
I got better value by downloading the various US trailers from the internet for free than I did seeing the allegedly ‘whole’ film in Australia, albeit on cheap night Tuesday for $9. It certainly wasn’t worth full price.
The film itself is very funny if you like that style of humour. After his role as Mugatu in Zoolander, I have found Will Ferrell extremely funny, and Sacha Baron Cohen is brilliant as Jean Girard, who has the most bizarre and inconsistent accent. I’m keen to see the Borat movie.
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- mare nero, 26 September 2007
- Last Tuesday Society plagiarism edition, 9 November 2009