Ignorance Is Annoying

If you are reading this, you probably follow me on Twitter.  I can’t think of anyone else who would read my blogs since Twitter is the only place where I say I have a new blog entry.  Anyway, moving on, I’m taking the idea for this one from a twitter post I made yesterday.  Much like the phrase “You can’t judge a book by its cover,” it is my opinion that you can’t judge a film by its marketing.

Films are rarely marketed to truly represent the film.  Most are marketed so as to get the largest number of butts in seats.  Take Inglourious Basterds for example.  The film was marketed as a revenge flick where a bunch of Jewish Americans take revenge on the Nazis.  The movie did have some of that, but was much more.  Most of the movie was in French, German, or even Italian.  This part was not shown in the trailers.  The Basterds were not the main focal point of the film which goes contrary to the presentation made through the trailer.  I guess we all know this by now.

Why did I determine this an important topic last night, you may be asking yourself right now.  The reason is the housemate that was the topic of one of my recent blog entries.  I was watching Buried last night.  Rupert came in, and asked what I was watching.  When I said Buried, he said it was a good movie but he didn’t like the ending.  The issue with this whole situation was not that he was saying the ending would be bad, which I disagree about, but that he has not seen Buried.  Not once.

How can Rupert judge a movie when he hasn’t seen it?  He says that it’s because he has read a synopsis of the film.  No.  That is not an excuse for judging a movie.  A synopsis does not tell you if a movie is good or bad.  The movie does.  All the synopsis does is give you a range of interest for the movie.  But a movie isn’t all about the plot.  It is about the visuals, the audio, the acting, and the plot.  There are a variety of other aspects that will determine whether you will or won’t like a movie.  A synopsis just doesn’t cut it.

This can be equated to books that are translated into film.  Just because a book is good does not mean that the film will be good.  Just because a film is good does not mean that the book that it was adapted from is necessarily good.  A synopsis is like reading a book, except much, much shorter.  You cannot judge the film by one part.  Whether it be the marketing, the plot, or whatever.  You need to take the film itself into context if you are going to say anything about how good of bad it is.

I understand a trailer may lead you to having no interest in a film.  I completely understand that.  You can say that you probably won’t like a film after seeing a trailer, or learning what it’s about.  But you cannot say it is a bad film.  I don’t think I’d like Borat.  I have not seen Borat because of that.  However, I can’t say that it is a bad film without having experienced watching it myself.

When someone says that a film is good without having actually seen the film, it gets under my skin.  It’s just one of my personal pet peeves.  I don’t know what else I can say about it, really.  Just that Rupert got on my nerves with that one last night.