Preview This

I went to see a movie last weekend, and the experience was evidence of a trend I’ve been noticing lately: movie previews are pretty much shitty and they never seem to show anything I even remotely want to see. It seems to me that there used to be some sort of effort by the movie industrial complex to actually match the previews to the sort of movie you were going to see. Like if you were at a cheesy summer blockbuster, there were lots of previews for overblown blockbuster type flicks. And if you went to see something indie or art house, those were the kind of previews they showed.

But lately, the trend seems to be to just show whatever the fuck is coming out in the next month or so. This weekend, I saw The Darjeeling Limited. It’s a Wes Anderson film, and although I guess it’s not technically indie, it’s totally indie in its sensibilities. It’s all kinds of quirky, and it’s leading men all have very un-Hollywood noses. This is not the sort of movie that breaks box office records. So, one might expect previews that have something vaguely in common with it. You know, like maybe the new Ang Lee film or Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

But no, that wasn’t exactly the case. The first preview was for a tired looking romantic comedy with the blonde chick from Grey’s Anatomy. Apparently, she’s always a bridesmaid and never a bride. It looks totally predictable and clichéd, but it does have Cyclops from the X-Men movies and he’s pretty hot, which takes it from the “never in a million years” category to the “maybe if I’m traveling on business and I have nothing else to do and I can charge it to work” category.

Then there was a preview for a movie about a woman who gets trapped in her office parking garage on Christmas Eve because she’s a workaholic*. She’s then systematically tortured by some creepy dude who’s apparently been stalking her. The preview was surprisingly effective. It was so scary that I actually gasped out loud at one point**. It’s now on the “never in a million years list” because it’s basically torture porn, and I really hate those movies. You know, the ones where the filmmakers have somehow convinced themselves that it’s ok to show a woman being tortured for two hours because in the end, she’ll turn the tables on the creepy stalker and end up killing him. The preview played into one of my (and presumably other women’s?) worst fears: being trapped all alone somewhere with some creepy stalker dude who just wants to rape and kill you. The preview did answer a question I had asked recently: Whatever happened to Wes Bentley? I could have lived without knowing the answer.

Movie previews have become somewhat helpful in the sense that they put extensive warnings in the ratings box, basically telling you exactly what you’re going to see. When the warning says something like “perverse and degrading acts of violence,” I know this movie is really not for me. The next preview started out with the hot guy from Heroes, which made me perk up for about 2 seconds, until I realized the movie was about pathology students who are all weird about bodies and start killing people in some sort of fucked-up game. It looks super-cheerful.

The final preview was for something slightly more in tune with The Darjeeling Limited: The Kite Runner. It looks sweeping and epic and heartfelt and all that. The warning label announced that the movie contains “the rape of a child.”*** Seriously? That made me not even want to watch the preview, let alone the movie.

So, out of four previews, there were three movies I will never watch in a million years and one I might watch if I were trapped in a hotel room and had absolutely nothing better to do and there were no reruns of Charmed on. Way to go, movie industrial complex.

*I guess the theme is that female workaholics naturally deserve to be tortured. If she were a better person and didn’t work so late on Christmas Eve, this never would have happened to her.
**Full disclosure: It doesn’t take much to scare me.
***Sorry if I just spoiled the movie for you. But don’t blame me. Blame the MPAA.