THE GOOD; THE BAD AND THE UGLY: Yesterday I read a short "A Review of a Movie I Haven't Seen" over at TwoP. I won't link it because it would be a waste of your time -- whether you loved or hated the old days, the blurb was definitive evidence that the sun has set on the Wing Chun blog empire. I didn't always agree with the old AROAMIHSes when they were posted (on Hissyfit, I think -- which suggests that the Bravo IP acquisition was broader than just TwoP and Fametracker), but at least they staked out a position, made cogent points, and were worth reading. This review, by a contributor whose name I didn't recognize but who nonetheless received featured status on the entry page, basically said "you guys I know the ad campaign and previews suck but give it a chance because it might be funny!!!!LOL!"
Anyway, the review got me thinking about how bad the saturation-marketing for Forgetting Sarah Marshall has been. I understand and accept the premise of the marketing -- the ads are themselves artifacts from the plot that subtly break the fourth wall and engage the audience in the movie. A deliberately amateurish ad campaign is difficult to do well, though. My problem with the Sarah Marshall ads is not the concept, but the execution. If they were to succeed, those plain black words on a white background had to do a lot of work. They had to seem angry and impulsive, and they had to look like they might be the handwriting of an anguished, end-of-his-rope Jason Segel. At the same time, they had to be easily legible and soft enough that they didn't seem like the work of an unlikeable person. I think the ads passed the second test but failed the first -- the copy is too sanitized, the letters too clean and rehearsed. Frankly, the words look stilted, like the work of a graphic designer with very nice Frank Ching handwriting trying diligently, but failing, to deprofessionalize it -- the lettering equivalent of trained actors unconvincingly reducing autistic people to cartoonish soups of tics and catch-phrases (Hoffman, Penn).
It's a particularly bad time for Sarah Marshall's low-fi campaign because it comes on the heels of what I think is an extremely successful faux-guerilla campaign. The Rambo teaser marketing was exceptional. The first of these that I saw were missing all of the text, leaving only the image, which meant that they wormed their way into my brain as I tried to figure out what the point was. The stencil perfectly conveys what Stallone wants us to believe about all of his characters -- that they are men of the people, subsisting in and on the needs, desires, and heroic will of the common folk. At the same time, it paints (literally) John Rambo as a revolutionary by appropriating an iconography from people of a different political stripe (particularly the ubiquitous Che Guevara image, but also Lenin, Mao, and Stalin). I have never seen a Rambo movie and likely never will, but this campaign had me wavering, wanting to join a movement that I knew was fabricated in a conference room high above Madison Avenue. Now that's an ad campaign.
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