I stole this from the Office Space thread, but now I’m not sure how to add a link back to that thread.
Angel Eyes! I completely missed all the marketing and went to see it because it was a movie set in Chicago with Jennifer Lopez playing a cop (she was also excellent as a law enforcement officer in Out Of Sight). I loved it. It’s a sweet, slow (but not boring to me), melancholy love story with complex characters. After seeing it I found out that it was being marketed as this big action/thriller/mystery with some sort of Sixth Sense-type seeeecret.
Oh my god!!!
The marketing was so far away from the actual film no wonder it got so many bad reviews and died at the box office. There’s hardly any action (she is a cop, so they do show her doing her job at times), there are no thrills or supernatural mysteries or jolting secrets. It’s a quiet, moving character study about two troubled people and how they get together based on need and longing and happenstance, and is well-written, well-acted and well-directed. It will probably never live down its bum rap, which is unfortunate, since it’s a very worthy film.
Fight Club. The trailer made me think it was a brainless testosterone movie about guys beating each other up. I even had someone spoil it for me since I didn’t think I’d ever see it. I didn’t know it was a smart, hip commentary on consumerism and nihilism that would be one of my all-time favorite movies.
The Man Who Loved Women was marketed as a slapstick comedy. While there are a couple of slapstick scenes (which don’t work all that well), the film is really a dramatic musing on love and the differences between the sexes.
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy was considered by everyone to be a comedy. It’s actually a very serious film about the impermiance of relationships. The ending clearly implies that only in fairy tales do relationships end happily.
The one that always comes to mind for me is The Sure Thing. Everything about the marketing, from the title and poster on up, was aimed at making you think it was a teen sex comedy. It actually was a very well done remake of It Happened One Night, directed by Rob Reiner and starring John Cusack. The party scenes and beauty shots of Nicolette Sheridan that were used in the trailers were all concentrated in a few minutes at the beginning and end of the film, and were utterly different in tone from the rest.
No doubt if Reiner had done The Sure Thing after Stand by Me, he’d have had a lot bigger say in how it was marketed. It was only his second film (after This Is Spinal Tap).
One of my all time favorite movies is The Company of Wolves, written by Angela Carter and directed by Neil Jordan. It is a beautiful dark fantasy, but it was marketed as a horror film in the style of An American Werewolf in London.
Galaxy Quest, Rat Race, and American Psycho. With Rat Race, they made you think it was a real dumb film but with lots of celebrities. It turned out to be one of the funniest films I’ve seen in years. With American Psycho they made you think it was horrendously controversal because of the violence. But that turned out to be a witty satire on the commericalism of the yuppie culture in the 1980s; and most of the violence in that movie is assumed.
The Iron Giant - probably the best animated film, along with the Toy Story movies, to come out in the past decade, yet it went out with barely a whimper. Apparently Warner Brothers simply didn’t know how to market it and who to market it to…which sounds weird…
It is pretty consistently hyped by critics (Ebert loves it, as do the folks at the true-Hollywood-inside-scoop site Ain’t it Cool News (www.aintitcool.com). And apparently the director, Brad Bird, has been working with Pixar on his latest movie - these days an indication that the guy must be pretty good.
If you haven’t seen this - especially if you have kids, but they aren’t a necessity - you HAVE to see this movie.
Nightbreed was marketed as just another slasher horror flick. Clive Barker (it’s based on his story Cabal) remains pissed about this. NightBreed is a fairy tale for adults. After years of rejection and pain, Aaron Boone finds a magical place where he truly belongs. Instead of Peter Pan or Munchkins, this place is inhabited by monsters. “You hate us. But when you dream, you dream of flying and changing and living without death.”
“To be smoke or a wolf, to know the night and live in it forever, is that so bad?”
Bicentenial Man was marketed as a zany kids movie. It’s actually Isaac Asimov’s examination of what makes us human. Robin Williams performs better than he has in years. There are some jokes. But the scene that represents the tone best is set in a cubicle sized hotel room. Andrew, the android who is more than a machine but not quite human, watches someone he met as a child die of old age. Andrew turns to another mourner and says “It’s not fair that you can cry and I can’t.” What couldn have come across as cliches are turned into profound truths.
I guess the studio types figured that with Stallone and Snipes they had to go after the Action-for-Action’s-Sake audience. Who’d a thunk it was a neat tongue-in-cheek comedy?
“Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.” http://www.newsaskiew.com reported Kevin Smith apologizing for the ads (Miramax’s idea) that were run before it came out. “Mallrats” deja vu.
I was expecting a slightly dark -or even very dark- madcap comedy cross between Something about Mary and Pulp Fiction. It was quite a bit darker than I expected.
spoilers…
OK, I could see the dark humor in the hooker’s death, but I pretty much turned it off after they attacked the security guard and left him literally begging for his life, as he lay bleeding to death on the bathroom floor. That was one of the most disugusting movie death scenes I’ve ever watched. Not funny no way no how.