I hate spoilers. I don't understand people who say they aren't bothered by them. I won't even spoil movies for people when they want me to. Especially if they say they're never going to watch the movie, so it doesn't matter if I spoil it. If you want to know what happens, watch the fucking movie yourself. I'm not your own personal CliffsNotes for movies. Having said that, I have learned to regulate my disdain for spoilers. They are simply a fact of life in this day and age (fuck, that phrase makes me sound like an old man). But some spoilers are unavoidable. And, largely, they don't really matter. But other times spoilers do exactly what their name implies: they spoil otherwise fine entertainment. Case in point: when I graduated from high school, I got my first job as an usher at a new movie theater. Aside from getting to wear a turquoise bow-tie with a burgundy vest to work every day, I also got to go to the movies for free. Now, this was 1999, which was a fantastic summer for movies. Check this out: The Matrix, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense, The Green Mile, Eyes Wide Shut, The Phantom Menace (which was exciting at the time), Fight Club, Toy Story 2, Sleepy Hollow, American Pie, Being John Malkovich, Girl, Interrupted, The Talented Mr. Ripley, The Insider, Magnolia, The Iron Giant, Girls Don't Cry, South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut, The Cider House Rules, The Blair Witch Project, Office Space, The Straight Story, Dogma, Summer of Sam, The Virgin Suicides, Election, Three Kings, Man on the Moon, The Ninth Gate, Deep Blue Sea, Mystery Men, Wild Wild West, Any Given Sunday, Cruel Intentions, Big Daddy, The Mummy, Notting Hill, Galaxy Quest, She's All That. Granted that list gets pretty bad by the end, but all of those movies came out in 1999, and I got to see them for free. As many times as I wanted. I watched The Matrix nine times that summer. I watched Fight Club six times. I watched Forces of Nature, with Ben Affleck and Sandra Bullock. Just because I could and it didn't cost me anything. Now, I'm not just bragging here. There is a point. A couple of weeks before its official release, there was a special screening of a movie that was flying way under everyone's radar. Hoping to generate some word-of-mouth buzz, it did pre-release screenings all over the US, including one in good old Arnold, Missouri. This was before the internet was such a force for generating buzz (something The Blair Witch Project helped change). After the screening, as people were leaving the theater, I was standing there with a basket of mints. People really seemed to like the movie, which up to this point I had never heard of. They say they never would have guessed that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time. Are you fucking kidding me? Weeks later, The Sixth Sense was all people were talking about, and I was left out because I saw no reason to bother watching the movie. I already knew too much. I saw Unbreakable (and loved it) before I ever saw The Sixth Sense. And it was never as good as it could have been if people could learn to shut the fuck up sometimes. But that's not even what I'm here to talk about today. It's one thing for people to spoil movies. It's something altogether different and more insidious when the studio who produced and released the movie goes ahead and spoils it for you. I'm talking about spoilers on movie posters and box art. For example, the DVD covers for The Bridge on the River Kwai that show the bridge exploding. That one's not even that bad, really, even though the plot of the movie involves trying to blow up the bridge. That's what the whole movie is about. You think they pull it off? Some other similar examples are Planet of the Apes covers showing the Statue of Liberty and The Wicker Man covers showing the burning wicker man effigy. But those are all iconic movies from way back in the day. They are ingrained enough in our collective unconscious that most people probably know how those movies end without having seen them. The one that really gets to me is the DVD cover for another movie released in 1999: Takashi Miike's beautifully torturous (or is it torturously beautiful?) Audition. The movie is a slow-burner if there ever was one. It's the story of a widower whose friend sets him up with a fake movie audition as a chance to meet women and hopefully find a new wife. He makes what can only be called the worst choice ever. It is shockingly deliberate in its pacing, especially to those familiar with Miike's other work (Just look at the plot keywords on IMDb for his 2001 movie Visitor Q). Audition works diligently to lull you into complacency so that when it does finally pull the rug out from under you, you are sure to hit your ass hard. What's a shame is that the movie works so hard to make the ending memorable only to have it spoiled by its own art department. Is a little subtlety too much to ask for? Really? It seems to me that they would want to leave some mystery for the people who actually want to watch the movie. I don't know. Maybe people just don't care about this stuff like I do. I tend to get worked up about these things.
You know what else I don't like that's kind of spoilery? MPAA ratings that give away too much information. Blue Velvet contains "strong aberrant sexuality including an assault"? Thanks for ruining that surprise, MPAA. -Dustin
2 Comments
Marven
10/1/2015 09:57:18 pm
Audition should have been marketed as a RomCom. It's really the only way to do it any justice; I want to see that trailer.
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