they give you déjà vécu when all you wanted was jamais vu
I watched Déjà Vu yesterday, because nothing else was starting at four and I have a soft spot for time travel movies. I will say this. It's a lot more solid than I'd expected (justification for letting my all-nonpirate-Bruckheimer-movie boycott slip), not without some sloppy plotholes that could have been easily trimmed up without changing the story or anything, and I'm not a huge fan of Tony Scott's cinematic spasticity, but the movie was all right. I actually feel like, if they'd given the script to someone else, not Bruck/Scott, it would have been a damn hot action film. But even so, it didn't annoy me to watch.
Well, mostly.
I do have one beef on this one. I want to know who the fuck made the trailer. I would like to talk to the editor(s) who sat down and said, "I know, let's use all the big key scenes that happen in the last ten minutes of the movie and make a trailer by combining those with all the big mystery scenes from the first ten minutes of the movie." I'd like to be in the meeting when they said, "Let's repeat key lines and actions characters don't say or take until the climax of the picture, because if you repeat them maybe people will feel like it's déjà vu, and then they'll definitely remember. And even though we are making a $75M budget film, and our trailer will be shown at every movie in every theatre and every ten minutes on every channel for the two months leading up to our film's release and every moviegoer will have the whole thing practically memorized before they even sit down to start our film, surely if we ruin the whole last half hour of this twist-taking time-travel movie, it won't ruin the experience of the audience! They're too stupid to get it anyway, right?"
I imagine hearty laughter and "Hollywood fat cats" (only instead they're emaciated, dolled up like aging Metrosexuals, and possibly wigged out on designer drugs) grinning at the idea that any of them care if their audience enjoys a movie once they've paid for the ticket.
Here's a rule, everybody. If you have a story with a couple of twists before the end--and I don't mean Sixth Sense Mindfuck twists, I just mean your typical tension-building "will he make it?" or "but what about such and such..." twists--THEN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T SPOIL THEM FOR PEOPLE BEFORE YOUR STORY IS OVER!
I step down from the soapbox now. I really did sort of enjoy the movie, up until I realized it'd all been spoiled for me two months earlier.
Or maybe it's just too clever for me. Maybe this was a case of meta-storytelling; maybe I was supposed to say to myself, "Wait a second, I've seen all this somewhere before... it's like I knew the ending before we got there! Whoa, man! Déjà vu!"
Well, mostly.
I do have one beef on this one. I want to know who the fuck made the trailer. I would like to talk to the editor(s) who sat down and said, "I know, let's use all the big key scenes that happen in the last ten minutes of the movie and make a trailer by combining those with all the big mystery scenes from the first ten minutes of the movie." I'd like to be in the meeting when they said, "Let's repeat key lines and actions characters don't say or take until the climax of the picture, because if you repeat them maybe people will feel like it's déjà vu, and then they'll definitely remember. And even though we are making a $75M budget film, and our trailer will be shown at every movie in every theatre and every ten minutes on every channel for the two months leading up to our film's release and every moviegoer will have the whole thing practically memorized before they even sit down to start our film, surely if we ruin the whole last half hour of this twist-taking time-travel movie, it won't ruin the experience of the audience! They're too stupid to get it anyway, right?"
I imagine hearty laughter and "Hollywood fat cats" (only instead they're emaciated, dolled up like aging Metrosexuals, and possibly wigged out on designer drugs) grinning at the idea that any of them care if their audience enjoys a movie once they've paid for the ticket.
Here's a rule, everybody. If you have a story with a couple of twists before the end--and I don't mean Sixth Sense Mindfuck twists, I just mean your typical tension-building "will he make it?" or "but what about such and such..." twists--THEN FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON'T SPOIL THEM FOR PEOPLE BEFORE YOUR STORY IS OVER!
I step down from the soapbox now. I really did sort of enjoy the movie, up until I realized it'd all been spoiled for me two months earlier.
Or maybe it's just too clever for me. Maybe this was a case of meta-storytelling; maybe I was supposed to say to myself, "Wait a second, I've seen all this somewhere before... it's like I knew the ending before we got there! Whoa, man! Déjà vu!"