Movie Trailer Review: Is Anybody There?

@TheJames recently tweeted that content is a commodity, which got me thinking: cliches and retreads in fiction are just variations on commodities.

When you say “I feel like seeing a movie,” you are really saying that you feel like consuming a piece of content, and you probably have an idea of what type of content you want to consume. You may say you want something “original,” but that’s really like saying that when you buy bread at the bakery, you want it to be fresh. It’s true that if you get served something that tastes like it was baked a long time ago, you’re dissatisfied. But that doesn’t change the fact that what you really wanted was bread. And you already know what bread tastes like… that’s why you wanted it.

There was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where Scotty comes back from techno-purgatory and teaches LaForge how to be swarthy. The idea is that death is okay, because old people still have value, and that value is to teach what they know to the young, and so on. It’s a worthwhile story, but it’s not very new, so I’m just going to go ahead and use this image instead of an image from the movie I’m reviewing.

Here’s the Quicktime trailer for Is Anybody There?

Movie Trailer Friday: Easy Virtue

This is the wrong time to peddle a movie built on the idea that brash, declassé Americans are going to break down those stodgy old European walls and set the people free from prisons of their own making, etc. Even if the stodgy people in question are another Imperial power.

I watch this, and I think, how nice it would be too hang out on that elegant country estate, as long as that annoying bitch on the motorcycle wasn’t there to mess it all up.

Quicktime trailer for Easy Virtue.

Movie Trailer Friday: The Escapist

Doesn’t the popularity of prison break movies indicate that we, as a society, should be imprisoning fewer people? I can’t tell you how eager I am to break out of prison, and I’m not even there.

In Kansas City, where I grew up, drivers who have just passed a speed trap flash their lights at oncoming cars, to warn them. It always seemed strange to me (and I did it too). If it was understood that the goal of the majority of the populace was to circumvent the law, then why not change the law?

Maybe it’s because many people operate from a different moral perspective depending on the circumstance; the sanctity of the voting booth and all that. Also, our desire to be sympatico with someone coming toward us in a big metal machine on an empty stretch of asphalt is greater than our desire to respect the wishes of the more anonymous person who drafted the law, much further away in space and time.

Here’s the Quicktime trailer for The Escapist.

Movie Trailer Review: Rudo Y Cursi

This movie actually looks pretty good. But the main reason that I’m going to see it is that I really have no idea.

I think that, hundreds of years from now, scholars will look back at this point in history and say that it was right about now that Americans started to get tired of living day and night steeped in their own self-generated irony.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m going to slip back into it with my next post – but let the record show that I acknowledged the turning of the tide.

Here we have a feel-good non-artsy Mexican movie being marketed with a trailer that celebrates subtitles. The Apple Quicktime trailer site is, as of this writing, featuring the trailer for Rudo Y Cursi at the top of the page. And white middle-class people are, in a way, going to want to see Mexican movies this year since they liked Slumdog Millionaire last year. It’s as if we collectively saw the beginning of our imperial decline kick in, and realized that it wasn’t going to be very interesting if we didn’t start introducing a bit more variety.

Here’s the Quicktime trailer for Rudo Y Cursi.

Movie Trailer Friday: Fast And Furious

I once met a mystic who explained to me that time is speeding up. You see, there time as we know it, and then there is another construct outside of time, which we shall, for the purpose of this discussion, call super-time.

Super-time remains constant, but time bends within it. We can’t actually prove that this is happening, because we are unable to measure super-time. So, for example, an hour goes by faster today than it did twenty years ago. We know it’s true, but only through little hints, little intuitions here and there throughout our lives.

Could one such piece of evidence be the consolidation of movie titles? After several sequels, the franchise that began with The Fast And The Furious now presents a film simply called Fast And Furious. Similarly, the franchise that began with First Blood, followed by Rambo: First Blood Part II, eventually presented a film called Rambo. Stallone did the same thing with the Rocky franchise, which came to a close with Rocky Balboa.

There’s something going on here worth paying attention to. Tighten up your communication, because pretty soon, you won’t have a choice. After all, that’s how I came up with “miconian.” It’s a preemptive consolidation of my name, so that when The Change happens, I’ll be ready. I think you know what the fuck I’m talking about.

Some suggested movie titles for sequels yet to come:

• Super
• Spider
• XYs
• Trek
• Stars
• Twlght

Here’s the Quicktime trailer for Fast And Furious.