g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Tuesday, January 4, 2005
09:21 - There's a wild Fandango loose in the theater

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Would someone care to explain to me exactly what Fandango thinks it's accomplishing with those ads they place in front of movies in theaters? Because I'll tell you what they have accomplished: they've ensured that I will never use Fandango to buy movie tickets, ever ever ever.

I mean, okay: there you are, sitting in the dark for as much as twenty or thirty minutes of previews and trailers. You're getting ready to watch some movie like Alexander or Titanic or The Passion of the Christ, and the trailers are all appropriate to the tone of the movie—great. A somber movie gets mostly somber or grand epic movie trailers. Lots of big booming rolling ocean-wave effects, lots of period costumes, lots of wide panoramic establishing shots, lots of string music. You're already swept up into another world. You're perfectly prepped for the feature presentation.

...And then, just before the movie's about to start, this Fandango ad splatters onto the screen: those horrible, horrible paper-bag puppets, with their high-pitched screeching voices and inexplicable patronizing Indian accents, performing bizarre little skits about going to the movies and using Fandango, or just chanting the word Fandango over and over. The characters are obviously intended to be as deliberately annoying as possible—and for what conceivable purpose? Especially when you've spent all that time getting all relaxed and comfortable, ready for a decidedly non-comedy movie. Is there anything that has been scientifically proven to grate away more nerves than the one guy's wife's supposedly "infectious laugh", or the woman trying to teach her dog to howl FANNNNN... DANNNNNN... GOOOOO!

It's even worse than those moronic old ones with the Ryan-Stiles-looking guy trying to sneak into the sold-out movie, trying to convince the usher to let him in by muttering the magic overheard word Fandango. I mean, that ad series was ingenious and restrained compared to this infuriating nonsense. Those were stupid; these are apparently engineered to be as caustic as possible. I mean, has anyone ever heard anyone laugh at one of these ads? They're aggressively unfunny, loud, and impossible to tune out. I guess they've done their job in that they've ground the word Fandango into my head, but not in a good way, dammit! There's no other way to explain it: the Fandango ad agency hates the moviegoing experience and wants to ruin it as actively as is in their power.

In fact, I have a problem with that whole aspect of the pre-movie experience, an aspect I find more irritating than people crumpling candy wrappers, talking, or even using cell phones: the obliviousness of movie theaters to the necessary tone of the pre-movie programming. Theaters fail to account for the tone of the movie they're showing, and break the mood with that ridiculous computer-generated THX logo with the flying maintenance robot, or some ad for the SpongeBob movie, or a dorky reminder from the moose characters from Brother Bear not to use cell phones (oh, and go see Brother Bear, eh?) The AMC theater chain, in fact, has a little "filmstrip" mascot character, and the whole chain identification bump they do before the feature presentation is comedic in tone. This is vaguely stupid and distracting even in front of a comedy movie... and for a drama or historical epic or romance, it's downright insulting to have the mood broken by that stupid filmstrip guy conducting musical notes that crash into a heap with cut-rate Warner Brothers sound effects, or stumbling into a heap of film canisters before pleading for quiet in the house. (This is why I always go to the Century theaters, and won't go to an AMC unless someone else is doing the organizing. Century's bump has spotlight lamps rotating and spelling out the chain's name: marvelous. Perfect. Restrained. Grand. Classic. Maintains tone under any type of movie. Don't frickin' change it.)

Please, movie theaters: put your moronic comedy bumps at the beginning of the trailer process, with the Will Rogers Institute guy and the actors asking you not to use KaZaA and the plug for the theater's frequent-viewer card. It'd make a much smoother segue from the Coca-Cola-sponsored ad slideshow in which the gathering crowds get to bet enthusiastically on whether Coke, Diet Coke, Cherry Coke, or Sprite will win the race to the end of the screen.

Oh yes: and if you've seen The Aviator, you might find this page fascinating. Holy hell, I guess that scene wasn't some kind of bizarre dream/hallucination sequence... and probably wasn't even exaggerated.


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© Brian Tiemann