I went to the cinema last night for the first time in an age, seeing Black Snake Moan, of which more later. It it perhaps not quite as weird as the poster suggests.I also caught trailers for the following films:
Atonement - based on the Ian McEwan novel. This looked very overblown and features Keira Knightley, a mark of quality.
1408 - not a film about the the Prince of Wales' capture of Aberystwyth from Own Glndwr, but a film about a haunted hotel room. The trailer suggested the film would be rather scary, but in a somewhat by-number kind of way.
Edith Piaf - the trailer carefully hid any suggestion that this film features people talking in foreign.
Vacancy - a film in which a young married couple check into a bracnch of Bates Motel empire and discover the hard way that the inbred locals plan to have them star in a DIY snuff movie. This looked UNBELIEVEABLY SCARY. One great thing about the trailer was that it scared the audience into silence.
It was interesting to see how Black Snake Moan bombed. I thought it would do pretty well, since who doesn't like to see women in underwear and chains?
ReplyDeleteI'm not being wholly ironic here. The reviews suggested there was an interesting movie to be seen and I was really keen on seeing it (this was before I twigged the cinematic conspiracy that rules the Niagara region). When you see it let me know if you think it's lack of US box-office success was because it pandered too obviously to male masturbatory fantasies, or because it only pretended to.
Dude, I saw those trailers when I saw the film, so I have seen it. But Frank's APA comes first, so expect to see the review here some time in July. That said, my reading on the film suggests that part of its failure commercially may have come from its not actually delivering on the schlock value of the poster (for all that it does feature Christina Ricci in her underwear chained to a radiator). I can't really comment on why it would not have succeeded with a mass audience as my own film tastes are a bit outré.
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