This month, Hollywood Jesus examines why various parties are concerned about how the movie’s promotion is being handled, and conclude with some thoughts about how marketing considerations are likely to affect our experience of the film we finally end up seeing.
The essay is titled, “Previews and Coming Distractions; or, The Art of Marketing and the Marketing of Art.” Here’s a snippet…
Just yesterday, I ran across a “Noview Review” of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “This is a review of a movie that I haven’t seen,” says writer Fred Stesney, “because they haven’t even released it yet. Really, with all the advance publicity that they do these days, do you really have to see a movie to know if it’s any good? I say, no.”
I had to laugh, and even agree with his point of view somewhat. I must admit that, in the past, I have once or twice “prewritten” movie reviews based on advance publicity and then almost literally “filled in the blanks” with details from the actual screening.
Stesney’s own quasi-informed assessment of the upcoming Narnia film? “The awesome spectacle runs roughshod over any objections to hammy acting, the liberal use of movie clichés, and a lack of suspense as to the outcome. ” As to the meaning of the film, Stesney remarks, “If Jesus isn’t your thing, don’t worry. Lewis created the series to be a light-handed way of getting the message to kids, and Disney, needing audiences in blue states, goes easy on the salvation. Non-believers will still get an exciting story where good and evil meet on the battlefield to hack each other to pieces.”
Stesney’s secular cynicism is not unique. At the Past Watchful Dragons conference at Belmont University in Nashville last week, I presented a Christian-oriented paper in which I mused that “Disney’s massive and unprecedented publicity campaign for this film almost guarantees that the world of Narnia will surprise few of us, though delight us it may.”
[Read the rest at Hollywood Jesus]