June 25, 2007
[Insert Depends joke here]
Posted by pete at June 25, 2007 12:34 AMSo I turned over a new leaf recently: I don't watch trailers for upcoming movies and I don't read any pre-release "on-set reports" or press about same. Call me a crazy insane crazy person, but I'd like to not know how the movie is going to end (or every major plot twist, or the big action sequences, or the climactic one-liner) before I actually go see it.
Naturally, this isn't a foolproof scheme. Trailers air on TV quite a bit, and video game commercials are notorious for sneaking up on you and showing some pretty relevant plot points (I'm looking at you, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the PSP), and sometimes a movie event is big enough to bleed over into so-called "mainstream" media. To wit, this picture - snapped by Steven Spielberg himself - of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones:
Kind of anticlimactic, huh? Really the only surprising thing for me is how much he looks like my dad.
The problem with a movie like Indy IV (or you can go by its cumbersome in production title, Fourth Installment of the Indiana Jones Adventures) is how every simple bit of information about it is going to be topline news on the movie sites. Without any effort on my part beyond scanning headlines, I know that Jim Broadbent and Cate Blanchett are co-starring, Sean Connery will not be appearing, and that producer George Lucas rejected Frank Darabont's script draft. That says something when George "I don't like sand" Lucas drops the hammer on your screenplay.
At any rate, this will be the last bit of advance Indy news I post on APCB. The fourth movie is slated for release in May, 2008, which gives me plenty of time to screw that up.
RE: not watching trailers, not reading pre-release news, possibly being a crazy insane crazy person.
I wish you all the luck with that that I clearly don’t have.
I tell myself I’ll try that exact same thing, at least with the movies that mean the most to me, such as Indiana IV. But I know I won’t make it. With some films I’ll do better than others, but inevitably I find myself spoiling something important that I wish I hadn’t. I feel like I’ve pretty much already seen Die Hard IV in its entirety.
Maybe by the time they get to the fourth movie in a series they figure that we’ve seen it all, anyway, so what does it matter? Or maybe it’s just that Hollywood marketing folk are a bunch of tools.
Your dad’s way better looking than that.
Don’t make me do a side-by-side comparison.
“Don’t make me do a side-by-side comparison”.
I feel strangely calm.
I still jump all over trailers, but yeah….I avoid on-set, script “analysis” (by wannabe jackass “writers”) and most pre-game hyperbole. It’s getting tougher to do though…
Your dad’s way better looking than that.