The Movie So Good, You Don't Need to Know the Plot

Lately on the radio, I've been hearing many commercials for Lust, Caution,a movie by director Ang Lee. The film is apparently winning worldwide acclaim. The film is apparently "breaking box office records from New York to Hong Kong." The radio commercial features several positive comments about the film from various critics. The commercial says everything you can possibly say about a movie - except what the plot is.

Apparently, this movie is so good, so acclaimed, so dominant at the box office, that the studio feels that they don't even need to tell us what the movie is about. They expect we will be so dazzled by the glowing comments, that we will just stop everything and go "Holy crap! We need to go see this movie right away, to be part of the phenomenon!"

There was another movie that was advertised much like this. It happened to be another movie by Ang Lee, called Brokeback Mountain. Sometime after the movie had been released to theaters, I called my parents. They told me about their weekend plans, and how they were going to go see Brokeback Mountain, because of all the good things they heard about the movie. I then proceeded to tell them what the plot of the movie was (by then, it was somewhat widely known what the subject matter was). After several seconds of silence, my parents decided that probably wasn't the movie for them.

So to you, studios, we don't need commercials blindly telling us how great the movie is and how we really need to see it. We also don't need commercials telling us every detail about the movie and its plot. As always, audiences will make their own decisions. Critically acclaimed movies frequently bomb at the box office, and critically reviled movies frequently hit number one at the box office.

Be sure to watch for my next blog entry. My friends tell me it's one of the best entries I've ever written. My co-contributor writes, "he weaves a spellbinding post that places him in the ranks of the masters." Pre-releases of the post are being read by the thousands. My next post, coming soon.