Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Marketing Cenorship



I realize it's contradictory to say this but I'm a huge Philip K. Dick fan and I just read We Can Remember It for You Wholesale last week.  I don't know how they managed to make a movie out of that the first time around but they did and even though they made a lot of stuff up it was really good.  Unlike the adaptation of The Running Man.  After watching the 2012 trailer it looks nothing like the story I just read.  Its like a remake of the movie only with toned downed sex and violence.  I don't know if I'd go so far to say Total Recall is a cult film since it is so popular but I think it deserved better treatment than this.  If you were going to water it down to a PG13 for a wider audience why not make it less action packed and more cerebral?  I'm tired of seeing movies were Wolverine slashes at everything that moves but doesn't have a drop of blood on his claws to prove it.

Does anybody else remember the action movies of the 80's where someone got shot a squib would explode out their chest or back?  Why doesn't that happen anymore?  I think I'm going to start calling it Jason Bourne Syndrome.  The reason why action flicks, dumb as they were, were almost always rated r was because they catered to adults.  The kids got their cutesy cartoons and we got blood, guts, explosions, and sex.  It seems like movies nowadays censor themselves in order to cater to an audience they are inappropriate for and I'm guessing for the most part aren't even interested in seeing.  When Terminator 2 came out my aunt took me to it and I was just about as old as John Conner in the movie, maybe less.  Don't ask me why she just did stuff like that she just did and to this day I adore her for it.  Back then they didn't card or even ask for permission.  If you took a kid with you to the theater to see an rated R movie all they cared about is that you paid for your ticket.  Actually I thought it was pretty cool because I got to play adult for a day.  I remember seeing news bites that summer talking about how violent movies were getting and about how their audience was getting younger and they used clips from T2 to illustrate this.  I grew up in the days of premium movie channels, no v chip, and no way to block mature content so I watched whatever the hell I wanted and for the most part my parents didn't care.  If it had boobies in it well that was one more thing they didn't have to explain to me later on.  While other kids were more interested in Disney films I was watching Hellraiser and Freddy Kruger.  Now somewhere down the line someone said that material wasn't appropriate for me.  My parents didn't care and its not like I was so stupid and impressionable I went to school and repeated the things I saw and heard.  But my point is part of what makes such material appealing to kids is the same thing that makes it appealing to adults and when you water it down both audiences lose interest in it and now no one wants to see your movie.  When a character points a gun or knife at another one and then it cuts or pans away and we see said victim fall down you aren't eliminating the violence you're merely muting it.  It's like going to a heavy metal concert with earplugs.  You might not hear all the satanism and obscenities but they're still there.  Or better yet it's like watching Japanese porn or as I like to call it porn without the porn.






360 = White People with Problems The Movie.  It's another one of those movies with an ensemble cast none of which have a dilemma interesting enough to care about.  Does this movie remind anyone else of Babel?  Yeah that movie sucked too.

If you've seen this somewhere else or you think I'm ripping off Geek Juice you're right and you're wrong.  This started off as trailer park comment but then turned into a really long rant so I decided to post it here.  If you haven't heard of Geek Juice go here and see what they have to say about these movies.

Geek Juice Trailer Park

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