Someone commented on my list of Avatar comparisons last week noting that such a practice could be done with any movie. He/She is correct, though it doesn’t really matter since the point of that exercise was to respond to the certain expectation that came with that film’s hype that it would be unlike anything we’ve seen before. With the teaser for Christopher Nolan’s Inception, however, the similar claims of derivation are simply a normal thing we film bloggers to do trailers, particularly those that give us little clue as to what their movie is about.
But deep in our hearts, we all trust Nolan, right? We don’t think he’d make a movie that people would say is just like The Matrix or Identity or Fight Club or Jurassic Park or whatever. Just like the illusionists in The Prestige and also like Batman, I guess, Nolan has a lot up his sleeve. The fact that nobody knows anything about the plot of Inception makes its trailer even more cryptic than it would seem otherwise to just the regular moviegoer who doesn’t follow script reviews and production developments. I wish I knew so little about Avatar — and about pretty much any upcoming movie, for that matter.
Check out what the film blogs are saying about the new Inception trailer after the jump.
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We’ve known for months that absolutely nothing was wrong with Valkyrie, and now we’re just a few days away from watching this tiny independent feature storm the box office, redeem United Artists as a production entity and make Tom Cruise a respectable household name again.
Of course, there is the slight problem: he’s portraying Nazi Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who may have disagreed with the party politics, but still rocked the swastika and straight salute. How exactly did Cruise, one of the great symbols of the “Blockbuster Film” and American culture, wind up so perfectly suited as a crippled, over-zealous Nazi embroiled in conspiracy? We’ve excavated evidence from his filmography to track the transformation.
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Product placement in movies is now so overdone that we may not even notice it unless a particular film or TV show really hits us over the head with a blatant in-your-face product shot. Otherwise, seeing commercial goods everywhere merely seems like everyday life in capitalist America. Just look at any of the websites that tally up products spotlighted in mainstream movies and you’ll probably be surprised (though not shocked) at how many brands appear in each new release. Did you notice that Blades of Glory contains 38 separate products? Probably not. Many of those products couldn’t have gotten their money’s worth, because the movie doesn’t allow the audience to walk away recalling any one particular item.
At a time when TV’s Top Chef and 30 Rock show us how lame blatantly whorish and ironic product placement can get, and while moviegoers are being subjected to more subliminal, suggestive and unintentional advertisements (Speed Racer, Wall-E and Beverly Hills Chihuahua respectively have us thinking about McDonalds, Apple products and Taco Bell, though some of these associations are not necessarily the movie’s fault), it’s good to remember that not all product placement is superfluous or despicable. Some of it is actually funny, smart and beneficial to mankind.
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In the new issue of Entertainment Weekly, Mark Harris declares that sci-fi movies are in trouble, that they’re not giving us any new ideas and are in fact too nostalgic and derivative. Harris himself is saying nothing new — Blade Runner director Ridley Scott expertly stated this last summer at the Venice Film Festival — but I applaud his solution and his call for someone to rise to the occasion and save the genre from itself:
Perhaps science fiction needs to be saved from the very people who love it the most. Nostalgia for a form can be annihilating to creativity, so while its devotees are swamped in their own canon, trying to mine now-sacred texts for any new material, I wish a great writer or director with no particular affection for the genre would let his imagination loose and see what it yields. It happened 40 years ago, when Stanley Kubrick, following his own ice-cold muse and his fascination with science itself, decided he wanted to create something that ”extended the range of science fiction,” a genre that didn’t particularly impress him. What nerve! The result was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which changed the game so completely that in movies, the sci-fi genre immediately vanished for a few years while everyone surveyed an irrevocably altered landscape.
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