【Weekly Update] Over Advertised Movies

First half of the year is almost done. How are you all doing? Any plan for the summer? Or if you are from down under, how's winter?

CHANNEL UPDATE

Next videos:
Our next video (How Moms Became the Backbone of Chinese Cinema) is complete and is currently waiting for sponsorship approval to go live. It should be available on Tuesday.
The video after (Japanese Urban Legend Horror Films) is still being worked on. Really hoping I can get it out before July. We'll see.

Next Big Project:
I started working on a new multi-part series, in which I'll introduce Chinese geography using movies. It'll be similar to our Chinese history series. It'll not be as comprehensive, however, and not every province will make the list. Obviously, there is no need to introduce Hong Kong or Beijing. Instead, I'll be talking about Yunnan and its old villages, Guangxi and its mountains, and the Northwestern plains of China, among other landscapes and cultural tidbits.
This is still in the early stage of brainstorming. If you have any movies you'd want to include, any interesting locations you'd want to highlight, leave a comment and let me know!

MEDIA TALK

If you watch our channel and support us on Patreon, I assume you are just as much of a hipster as I am. And if you are like me, you hate it when a movie over advertise itself.

I'm talking about F1, the Brad Pitt movie that has a trailer in front of every single movie I've watched in the past 3 months. That's no exaggeration, by the way, it literally crams itself onto every trailer slot. Now, I had no interest in this movie to begin with, and I don't know how many F1 fans are in the world. But even if you are a big F1 fan and likes Brad Pit, the predictable trailer on a cliche old man plot has to kill some of your enthusiasm, right?

I'm saying this because, I'm a fan of Superman. I literally made a video about Ip Man, using it as an excuse to talk about the character. I was excited for James Gunn's Superman, but after the same two trailer getting spammed over and over, my passion for it is hanging by a thread. My interest maintain's only because Nicholas Hoult is in it, and he is always fantastic even in very mixed movies, like Renfield, or X-Men Dark Phoenix.

It's bad enough that Hollywood movies are advertising themselves like the US election, sending out promises years ahead of the actual event. But many of the movie trailers are also just spoilers. One recent example is Speak No Evil, where the trailer seems to be advertising a thriller about escaping from a kidnapping. But no, it is a mystery film where you try to deduce the intention of the party host... The host who, in the trailer, are trying to kidnap the main characters.

Yep, the entire plot is contained in this one single trailer, including all the scary reveals, and the answer to the movie's own mystery. I know it is a remake, and I myself am familiar with the original. But like... come on.

Another example is Abigail. The film is about a group of kidnappers holding a little girl hostage. But slowly, they realize something is off about this little girl. The first 40 minutes of the movie is spent on this mystery, and it is the most fun part of the movie. Both the trailer and the logline spoils this entire portion of the movie.

It's for this reason I appreciate Sinners, even if its trailer was spammed pretty hard from January to its release. Sure, the trailer tells you very little, and the poster is just as non-descriptive. But it was enough to let me know the movie exists, and let me keep an eye out on its reception later on. Understandably, it doesn't work as well for a horror movie with no bankable lead actors. But maybe just set up the mystery, instead of telling me the answer?

Anyway, the only trailer that I find acceptable to be spammed is the new Naked Gun trailer. I don't know why. Maybe Liam Neeson really is funnier than I can imagine, but every time its trailer appears, I'd watch it with a smile. It just puts me in a good mood.

Anyway, that's my rant about movie trailers. Not the most cohesive topic. How do you feel about movie trailers being shown so far ahead of its release, and shown so frequently? I'll see you with a new video soon!