Category: Shallow

While it’s long been held that Hollywood’s best and brightest go to work in the studio system’s various marketing departments, never before has this been more apparent than with the onslaught of this fall’s round of catchy advertising taglines for upcoming entertainment productions. Incredibly, the folks in Burbank and Culver City and west Los Angeles are breaking radical new ground here with their ability to reduce the elaborate plotlines of, say, a thriller about a woman calling a cell phone to a simple, high-concept notion that even a third grader can comprehend. And in the wake of far too many two- and three-hour films coming forth from this town, that shows some skillful concision.
What follows is a round-up of some of these slogans and, quite simply, a resulting assessment of the perceived quality of each film or television series…
Cellular: “If the signal dies, so does she.”
Seriously? A movie this bad surely deserves a tagline this reductivistly imbecilic.
The Mountain: “Conditions are about to get nasty.”
OK, judging solely from the one-sheet and various ads, there seem to be a bunch of twenty-somethings doing something adventurous in, umm, the mountains. But this tagline? Does this imply that, in addition to action and adventure and tumult, the show features its bitches getting it on with the dudes in a skanktastic style? Or maybe the characters have some sort of personality problems akin to the castmembers of “Real World Las Vegas”? Fuck if I know, because I’m never going to watch this show.
Wimbledon: “She’s the golden girl. He’s the longshot. It’s a match made in…”
Oh! Oh! Oh! I know this one! Wimbledon! And – I’m totally guessing here – the tennis superstar played by Kirsten Dunst falls in love with the wizened underdog fleshed out by Paul Bettany. Or vice versa. One certainty: this seems to be a fairly conventional tagline structure for what must be a fairly conventional film. Syd Field would love this shit.
Head in the Clouds: “In a city of glamour at a time of decadence they met. An aristocrat, a soldier of conscience, and an entertainer. Together they shared a deep passion.”
Thank you for the summary. Now I don’t need to see this film, and neither does anyone else who read this little novella you pieced together here, Mr. Tolstoy.
The Motorcycle Diaries: “Let the world change you… and you can change the world.”
The story of a young Che Guevara and his youthful travels throughout South America. See, by virtue of his traveling, the world changed him…and he became a leftist rebel. Because, presumably, he saw all the various turmoil caused by economic injustice and military coups and secretive interventions by the U.S. government. Not to mention, it stars that totally hot guy from Amores Perros who looks a hell of a lot like an even handsomer Tobey Maguire. So there.
Shaun of the Dead: “A romantic comedy. With zombies.”
Short and punchy, but sort of…askew, right? Just like this film, I reckon! Well, if Moriarty liked this flick, then that’s good enough for me.
Mr. 3000: “He’s putting the ‘I’ back in team.”
See, star Bernie Mac is a loudmouthed fellow, and he’s arrogant, too. Also, sports are somehow involved in the storyline.
Shark Tale: “The story of what happens when one little fish tells a great white lie…”
So Dreamworks’ animation division decides to rip off Finding Nemo. The very first Shrek had all those adult-oriented digs at Disney at Jeffrey Katzenberg’s insistence. Jeffrey Katzenberg hates Michael Ovitz. And Michael Eisner, meanwhile, is slated to leave Disney by 2006. The two Michaels have historically argued over who prefers flounder and who likes trout, a schism which purportedly lead to the dissolution of their business relationship in the mid-90s.
The Last Shot: “The true story of the greatest movie never made.”
Forgive the Horatio-Sanz-as-Gene-Shalit routine, but…I only wish Alec Baldwin and Matthew Broderick hadn’t made this movie. Ha, ha, ha!
First Daughter: “The girl who always stood out is finally getting the chance to fit in.”
Hmmm…the President’s daughter finally gets to live a normal life? Because her dimwitted, lying, inept father was voted out of office this November? Or is that just wishful thinking?
The Forgotten: “On September 24th everything you’ve experienced, everything you’ve known, never happened.”
How very metaphysical! It’s like I never saw The Butterfly Effect! (Which I didn’t, for what it’s worth.)

A Dirty Shame, feat. Waters (lower right)…Jersey Girl, feat. Smith (upper left)
Designing movie posters isn’t easy.
Believe me, we’ve done enough parody movie posters around here to know. Trying to sum up a two hour film in one image while tapping into various mutually exclusive market forces—Teenage boys! Adult Women! Down-Low Homosexuals!—is hard work. And even though it’s essentially a marketing medium, there are enough iconic examples of the form to make designers want to aim for the rafters.
But listen up movie poster designers, there are some things that are beyond lame. Like squeezing the movie’s past-his-prime director into the poster like an apparition: These eerie, out-of-context photos are like Banquo’s ghost crashing an otherwise fine party.
Take the poster for John Waters’ latest, A Dirty Shame. What does Waters‘ creepy visage (the director himself is fond of pointing out how closely he resembles a child molester) add to the poster that Selma Blair‘s pneumatic prostheses or Johnny Knoxville‘s Gene Simmons-esque fake tongue don’t? If anything, most young filmgoers have no idea who John Waters is and probably assume he’s just another cartoon pervert in a cartoonishly perverted movie.
And then we have Jersey Girl, the DVD and video box for which shows Kevin Smith looking as surprised as we are that he’d be involved in this sub-PAX daddy-daughter cutie-patootie ‘comedy.’ (The masked bandit over at Defamer already deconstructed this box to great effect in two recent entries.)
It’s only natural to make some connection between the quality of these films (“crammed with wince-inducing contrivances, false notes and fizzled jokes,” The Times Stephen Holden wrote with noble restraint) and the desperate attempt to remind potential filmgoers of the directors’ alleged marks of quality. Does the movie suck?, goes this line of thinking. Then let’s slot in the creator and hope that at least the hardcore fans come out to see it. (And hardcore fans don’t come much harder core than those of Mr. Smith’s: someone somewhere bought this. He—certainly he—may have even watched part of it.)
But what about the early example of Wong Kar Wai‘s excellent Chungking Express, the box for which is marked by the stubbled face of Quentin Tarantino who served as the film’s “executive producer”? (Read: the cool director who convinced Harvey to distribute the film in America.) Adding QT to the design was bad, but hardly a red flag for the film, which ten years after its release is still enjoyable. (Faye Wong dancing around to her own cover of The Cranberries’ “Dreams” and Tony Leung talking to his forlorn bar of soap are still great.)
I just hope we’ve seen the last of this trend. God forbid this chump‘s carb face starts popping up on the posters for his next couple affronts to cinema.

In today’s New York Times, writers Kevin Flynn and Jim Dwyer have assembled one of those contemplative think pieces about the events of September 11, 2001 that will presumably continue to be annual media occurrences for at least the next few years. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but in their “Falling Bodies, a 9/11 Image Etched in Pain”, the authors engage in a multi-page examination of the cultural impact (or lack thereof) of those people who specifically perished by leaping to their deaths from the intimidating heights of the two towers of the World Trade Center. And it is a suitably sad and moving tale, though presented rather analytically.
From a syntax standpoint, however, we have to ask: how did the word “defenestrate” not make one single appearance in this article?

Yes, we’re reusing this picture. How could we not?
And now, the easiest spec script sale in the history of man (from Done Deal):
Title: Untitled Addario-Syracuse Pitch
Log line: Two intensely competitive rivals on the women’s beach volleyball tour must learn to combine their vastly different playing styles to win back their honor.
Writer: Lisa Addario and Joey Syracuse
Agent: Sandra Lucchesi of The Gersh Agency
Buyer: Paramount Pictures
Price: Mid-six figures
Genre: Sports Drama
Logged: 9/9/04
More: Pitch. Preemptive buy. Vincent Newman Entertainment will produce.
No title, stars, or director? I know I’ve bought my ticket already!

Hell just got a little bit more crowded, according to today’s New York Times.
Richard G. Butler, founder of Aryan Nations, died at age 86. (Not to be mistaken with Richard Butler, the former UNSCOM chairman who warned us about Saddam’s phantom W.M.D.’s.)
According to the Times‘s Daniel Wakin (Richard G. Butler, 86, Founder of the Aryan Nations, Dies), Butler, who had congestive heart failture, died in his sleep in Hayden, Idaho. No word on how much drawn-out, agonizing pain the old man endured or his karmic fate as a furrier’s mink in his next life.
The reason I point towards this piece is to address one of my biggest pet peeves: the misspelling of Adolf Hilter’s Hitler’s [Thanks, Matt!] name. According to Wakin, Butler, “lived out his final years in a house adorned with crosses, relics and books about Adolph Hitler and Holocaust denial.”
Sure, we all make mistakes, but this is one that seems to occur so often in publications it’s like a strange, unshakable tick. One possible excuse may be Microsoft Word’s spell-check preference for “Adolph” over “Adolf”: Can anyone explain that?
When “Adolph Hitler” appears on the web or squeaks through at an alt-weekly, you can almost overlook it, but because of its status as “the paper of record” a mistake like this in the Times makes it almost canonical, especially for copy editors who’ll frantically Nexis/Lexis the spelling during hellish, late night closes for their jobs and make the same error. So, hypothetical, overworked copy editors: use The New Yorker, and ignore MS Word, okay?
So, once and for all: It’s Adolf Hitler. ‘F’ ‘im—please.

Teresa Heinz Kerry, New York Observer, Sept. 9, 2004… Hillary Rodham Clinton, SPY, Feb. 1993

*This guy just lives in it.

A Bush supporter in Albuquerque, NM… Maureen Dowd’s books, Bushworld