We’ll keep working on this list as time goes on, but here’s just a taste at some of the ways we approach critical analysis of the films we see:
– Sometimes a Trailer can set up expectations that a movie subverts, sometimes the trailer kills jokes by overplaying them and revealing the three old people in the theater who have either come to the movie without seeing the trailer or laugh at an old joke anyway because they’re monsters
– Sometimes trailers are just one part of a larger publicity campaign hyping a big (or small) film. Had a friend who said that he didn’t like blockbuster movies anymore, because they’re about the spectacle of hype more than the film itself. This can work well with movies like District 9, Super 8, which had weeks and months of world-building teasers on sites and Dark Knight Rises [2012], which had the crowd-sourced code embedded in music, and it can be done poorly with movies like It Comes at Night and Mother!, whose poor box office performances and caustic audience reviews were explained by one writer as the result of misleading marketing campaigns.
– Is the movie an important because it’s signposting something about its cultural moment? Is it playing into a theme for movies this year unintentionally (like poison mushrooms last year [The Survivalist, Lady Macbeth, Phantom Thread, The Beguiled], or foul-mouthed high school this year [Love Simon, Blame, Flower, Blockers; Riverdale])? Or the woman-powered reboots (Mad Max: Fury Road, Ghostbusters, Oceans 8)?
– Does your personal relationship with a movie change over time, after you’ve rewatched it, because of stuff in the news (think of #MeToo movement and how it changed how some audiences felt about Baby Driver), or maybe even before the movie has come out?
– By what Criteria are we judging the film: Would you see it again? Would you drive to SF or Palo Alto to see it (You Were Never Really Here, Shape of Water)? Is it quotable (District 9)? Is there memorable music (see youtube channel on the lack of recognizable musical themes in Marvel movies)? Does it do anything as memorable or as ground-breaking as the first in the series (this is where Kingsmen 2 fails)?
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