Loosely, I'm defining these as movies where so many of the salient details are known by people, even those who haven't seen the movie, that they've entered the cultural lexicon. That includes major spoilers. (Thinking things like The Sixth Sense, The Crying Game and one of the movies I actually watched for my Audient Zeitgeist series, Old Yeller.)
Can a movie released only earlier this year already have reached that point?
I say this as something of a prelude to discussing Sinners, whose second half was dutifully hidden by people like me when they reviewed it, not so much by others. The prelude is necessary so I can be sure you've seen my SPOILER ALERT before I reveal the images from Sinners I'm about to reveal.
Have you left yet, if you need to?
Good.
I just received an email from Cinespia, the organization that holds movie screenings in the famous Hollywood Forever Cemetery, two of which we attended when we lived there. Only two? Yes, I guess only two. Lolita and The Philadelphia Story. They no longer show movies that obscure -- I guess really I mean old, not obscure -- but that's a topic for another time, one I've actually been dying to write about. But not today.
Anyway, the latest movie they've announced showing is Sinners, and they've advertised it thus:
You can read the text or not as you choose. It openly mentions vampires. I'm more concerned about the images.
The first, of Jack O'Connell's character, is not much of a spoiler, if you are already discussing vampires in the text. This character is introduced as a malicious entity and if there are any vampires in the movie, he makes a logical first candidate to guess if you were guessing.
But as you go clockwise, three more images over you get to Hailee Steinfeld's character, who is presented sympathetically for the most part, after an introduction to her character where you're not sure that will be so. And maybe you only know that's Hailee Steinfeld's character if you've seen the movie -- Vampire Steinfeld looks different from regular Steinfeld -- but I think it's quite the spoiler to reveal that one of your supposed protagonists ends up turned to the undead, even though of course you know that some characters you like will turn in any vampire movie.
So there are three options here:
1) It's sloppy work, and they should have thought about it more before producing these promotional materials.
2) They just didn't care.
3) They think Sinners has already entered the zeitgeist, and the only people attending this screening will be people who are seeing the movie for the second time anyway.
That last may be a reasonable assumption. Sinners is one of the most praised and talked about movies of the year. If you haven't seen it already, what's wrong with you?
And I guess you face a dilemma here. If you don't talk about the second half of the movie -- which I guess is not a surprise at this point -- then you aren't revealing why this particular movie makes a good showing in a cemetery. It would be like if you were trying to say "Oh, From Dusk Till Dawn is just about a couple criminals on the run."
So I get it. It's just that any time people with the sacred responsibility of protecting us from spoilers play fast and loose with that responsibility, it gets my hackles up a bit. Next time, it could be a movie I haven't seen that gets spoiled.
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