So DeHubby and I finally venture out of the house last night for dinner and a movie. Dinner was great, the movie (The Scorpion King) was campy, but alright…not so wonderful were the commercials we were forced to sit through.
First, the eardrum-rupturing volume of the heavy bass tune that accompanies the glory that is the new Matrix. Yes, it’s probably more the theater’s fault that the volume was so high, but damn it…I am not interested in this crappy little car, and would rather be allowed to anticipate the Star Wars trailer in peace, thank you. Worse than that, though, was the commercial that followed. To the singing of a song that involved the phrase ‘I don’t need…’ we get a glorious sequence of adolescent female crotch shots. True, they’re all wearing undies (or what passes for undies, with as little fabric as possible) but still, I have absolutely no need to watch a procession of boy-slender hips wrapped in thong string wriggling into a pair of stretchy jeans over and over and over and over again.
I realize that a number of people in the audience probably enjoyed it, but I go to the movies to see a movie. If I wanted to watch commercials, I’d turn on my TV, and if I wanted to watch young girls gyrating about, half-naked…well, I guess I’d go to more movies.
:mad:
I should probably throw in a few cuss words to liven up what I know is a pretty lame rant, but my grasp of creative swearing is pretty shaky. I do feel better having gotten this off of my chest though.
I too abhor most of what passes for movies nowadays. Part of that abhorence is based upon the %$^%&$$# that one is forced to sit through. The main reason we bought the DVD player.
I got no problem with trailers before a movie. My wife gets irritated when I squeal “Previews!” as they start, but other than that everything is cool. Trailers today are getting bad about showing you basically the entire film, so I can weed out a ton of clunkers based on trailers. I love doing this.
But now you say they’re showing commercials before a movie? Apart from the usual “visit the snack bar” items? That stinks.
It has become increasingly common in the states to have regular ads before the previews, particularly cars, soda, and tie-ins like Moviephone. However, they are ubiquitous in Europe. When I lived in the UK, they would have 5-6 spots (at least) before the previews, and what’s worse is that they never changed them, which meant if you went to movies even semi-regularly, you’d see them over and over and over.
And naturally, just like you have to turn the volume down on the TV when the commercials come on, the ads are always louder than the movies. However, since there is no projectionist monitoring your film being sure to raise the volume when the ads are over, they keep the volume at the level of the feature, which means the ads preceding are head-bangingly loud. Awful.
I remember when the ads started playing at the theater I used to work at. (They sucked, obviously.) We were told that if a customer complained about them to us, to just direct them to a manager, and also not to comment about the ads in any other way. (Nobody liked the ads, including the managers, but it wouldn’t go well if a representative of one of the companies, coming by to check if the ads really were playing, overheard an employee talking to a customer about how the ads sucked.) While they are played at a louder volume than the movie, the trailers are played at a louder volume also.
I love watching movie trailers. Any other form of “commercial” before a movie pisses me off big time. The price of movies has steadily increase - it’s not like the damn commercial are defraying the cost.
On the other hand, they are great if you are running late. At some theaters you can show up half an hour after the printed start time and still not miss the movie.
I hate the Fandango guy. The commercial was somewhat amusing the first time I saw it, but they show it before every movie at the local theater and I see quite a few movies.
The advertising industry has finally got us. For years they’ve been trying to figure out how to get us not to ignore their commercials. They’ve tried catchy jingles, half-naked babes, clever jokes, bright flashing logos, and frenetic zero-attention-span editing. But it’s always been too easy to tune it out.
Now they’ve finally discovered the ultimate brute force attack – put it up on a 30-foot screen and blast it trough a digital surround sound system at 100 decibels. It cannot be ignored.
I envision future innovations in the field – straps to keep you seated firmly in your chair and facing the screen, special goggles to keep you from blinking your eyes, intravenous injections of mind-altering drugs to make your brain more “receptive” to programming…
Bah - why should the rest of us suffer for you lateniks?
My friends and I agree on the 2 worst pre-movie commercials we’ve ever seen. Aside from the ones that get shown on TV all the time anyway, there’s one for Moviephone that features a guy washing his car with his tongue because “he does everything tho old-fashioned way,” while the cheery wife explains the service over a minute’s worth of slurps and nasty visuals (and most of the audience screaming “then why the festering f*** do you even have a car, you Luddites?!”). The other one is too horrible to mention. Suffice to say, it’s long, boring, and features the Pepsi girl.
I’d rather sit through three previews for Undercover Brother than watch that ad one more time.
Does anyone know how we can get it to stop? I guess everyone in America could refuse to go to the movies unless they promise to cut out the commercials, but I wonder how well that would work.
I, too, love trailers, but the commercials piss me off, especially since the price of movies has also risen.
Yeah, I can see this trend hopping over to DVDs too. Especially given the desire to make the product reasonably priced in order to increase sales.
The seeds are there. We’ve got a (forgive me) Barney DVD that has several studio/producer banner introductions that are impossible to skip or fast-forward through. And a couple of DVDs I own have several trailers plonked onto the disc that will play as long as you don’t actively hit the “play” or “menu” buttons.
Singing belly-buttons are only a few changes away.
What I hate, even more than the ads, are the Will Rogers Foundation/Jimmy Fund begging sessions, where they actually send the ushers around with collection plates. I really don’t like being panhandled when I’m in the mood for entertainment
I wish theaters would indicate in their newspaper listings the weeks they’re going to do this, so I can stay away.
