Internship crashers

There have been a couple things I've noticed about the advertising for The Internship (opening today) that have bothered me, at least enough to write a post. (Subject matter has to meet a pretty low threshold in order for me to write about it.)

For one, it's pretty obvious that they're trying to make us think of the most recent and perhaps most successful -- and only? -- collaboration between Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, which was Wedding Crashers.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course -- except that I didn't really like Wedding Crashers, and I want to like The Internship.

Anyway, yeah -- the tagline is "Crashing the System," which is one of those felicitous phrases that has both a literal meaning (a malfunctioning computer, appropriate in a movie about Google) and a subliminal meaning (the allusion to Wedding Crashers).

The other thing that "bothers" me about The Internship is the blank looks on the faces of Vaughn and Wilson in all the posters. They owe more than a little bit of a debt to this:

and to this:

Now you might say "Vance, Steve Carell and Matt Damon are smiling, and Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn are not." You'd be right, of course. But I still think there is an intentional borrowing of the same ad campaign.

However, if you're going to go with that campaign, at least do it in a way that makes sense. In other words, Vaughn and Wilson have their mouths open and those vacant looks on their faces because it's ironic to think of them as "fresh-faced interns." Wilson is 44 and Vaughn is 43.

But I've seen this poster on a lot of bus stops around LA:

If you're going to stamp INTERN on a character's forehead, it should represent a disconnect, as it does with Wilson and Vaughn. Right? The other two are age-appropriate interns, so it makes no sense. There's no disconnect.

Now, you could get away with the design above if the bottom two appeared on the top, indicating that these on the top row are your normal interns and these on the bottom row are not. Reading the poster from top to bottom would indeed convey that. However, you can't do that because then you are effectively giving these two unknowns top billing.

Anyway.

The exact price of schlock

One of the reasons I enjoy renting movies from Redbox is because I know exactly how much I'm paying to watch bad movies.

With other plans, like a Netflix or Blockbuster plan, the cost may be nebulous. Depending on your rental patterns and how quickly you turn around the discs you receive in the mail, it's probably not a whole lot. The ability to stream online may cut down the cost further. In most cases, the watching of a single movie would be considerably less than the $1.10 (with tax) they charge for a night's rental at Redbox.

But there's something about knowing I paid only $1.10 to see Jonah Hex that makes it a pretty good commentary on what it was worth.

It's a small enough amount of money that you would describe it as a charge in name only -- we routinely spend $1.10 on a ton of things every day without praying on it to make sure it's the right course of action. That's one of the reasons the Redbox model works so well -- few of its target customers would ever consider it a burden to pay a dollar to rent a movie, and having the kiosks in grocery stores makes it a great impulse purchase. The question doesn't become "Can I afford this rental?" but rather "Is there anything I want to see right now?" or "Do I have time to watch this before it's due back?"

See, if I'd gotten Jonah Hex from the library or borrowed it from a friend, it wouldn't be the same thing. Zero doesn't count as a value, because we receive free rentals of all kinds of movies that we end up loving. Paying $1.10 is a much more perfect way to insult a movie.

I'm thinking of a metaphor related to my dad's perspective on helping friends fix their cars, which was not my dad's profession, just a hobby he loved. When he once told me that he'd rather do the work for free than take a nominal fee, I didn't really understand where he was coming from. He explained that the two options should either be to do it for free, as a friendly gesture that might be returned one day, or get paid the same or similar hourly rate that he'd get paid to be at work. It was almost always the former because the latter would be a) prohibitively expensive and b) somewhat icky in terms of an actual financial transaction. His time was too valuable to be paid a small amount of money. If he did three hours of car work for someone and they paid him $25, it would seem more of an insult than doing it for free.

Paying Redbox prices for Jonah Hex is like paying my dad $25 for three hours of mechanic work.

And perhaps this is why I've come to think of Redbox as my source for all movies schlocky, potentially schlocky, and otherwise unfit to present to respectable company. Now that I no longer have my Blockbuster account, I don't have any backdoor methods to rent movies I don't want my wife to necessarily know I'm renting. Not that I'm actually ashamed of watching Jonah Hex, but what if my wife thinks that I'm renting it because I've got a stiffy for Megan Fox? Yeah, she's an attractive girl -- albeit incapable of playing a sympathetic human being -- but I was in it to see if they could do more with the steampunk sensibilities that inspired the production design than Wild Wild West did with the same ingredients. (They did, but not a lot more, and given how awful Wild Wild West was, that's really not saying much.)

I can rent things through Netflix, but my wife and I both have access to that account, she was its original owner, and she receives the email notifications of new rentals. So that's about as public as it gets.

So when I want to see something and I don't really want to have an actual or implied conversation with my wife about why I'm seeing it -- even though it's all in my head that she would actually judge me about it -- Redbox is my place to go. Which means a bunch of schlock gets rented from Redbox, for $1.10 apiece.

What kind of schlock? Well, let's review my Redbox rental history to find out.

Law Abiding Citizen (4/3/10) - This was my first Redbox rental, and I actually wrote about it here. Pretty schlocky alright -- violent, amoral and preposterous. Although not entirely un-fun.

The Informant! (4/4/10) - Not schlock, but not as good as I wanted it to be either. This rental was made the very next night after Law Abiding Citizen, not out of a prurient desire to see something schlocky, but out of excitement with the new rental method I'd just discovered. Besides, this was early, and I didn't yet know how I planned to use Redbox going forward.

Pandorum (5/31/10) - Murder-and-mayhem-in-space schlock. Actually, after watching Outland recently, I wanted to write an entire post about sci-fi movies that involve murder and mayhem in space, but I didn't strike while the iron was hot, so now I'll wait for the next one.

Youth in Revolt (6/21/10) - Not schlock, but this was a free rental as part of some Redbox promotion, so I was happy to tell my wife about it, removing it from the realm of a back-room transaction. She had the option of watching it but chose not to.

The Joneses (9/25/10) - Schlocky, if not out-and-out schlock. A social satire, but I had to admit that my interest stemmed somewhat from my attraction to Amber Heard, so that made this qualify as the aforementioned type of secret and shameful rental. My wife ended up watching it with me when she failed to make it to a baby shower she had been planning to attend. I'd been planning to watch it during the baby shower, but it wasn't like I was going to return it unwatched just because I didn't get to execute my original plan.

The Losers (10/2/10) - Comic book schlock, which actually ended up being witty, visually dazzling and fun. Not great, but definitely better than I expected it to be. I watched it while my wife was at The Social Network, and I was home with baby.

Repo Men (10/24/10) - You'll notice a pattern here -- watched this while my wife was at a bridal shower. However, there was also a football game on I was interested in, and an inconsolable baby to deal with, so the viewing had to continue after she got home. More future sci-fi schlock, this time located on Earth.

Jonah Hex (11/28/10) - The very definition of schlock. I kept urging it to be good. Did it have its moments? I'm sure it did. Did those moments stick with me or have any lingering impact on me whatsoever? Nope.

So only eight rentals in nearly eight months. Surely I must want to watch something secret and tawdry more often than that, right?

But that's where the $1.10 price comes in -- you only get the movie for one night. So when you rent it, you have to be pretty sure you'll have the chance to watch it that night. Before 9 p.m. on the day after you rent it, anyway. When you're juggling babies and trying to deemphasize to your wife the fact that you're watching the movie, this can be difficult. (Incidentally, she found out about all but maybe two of the above titles, and obviously, she didn't care one way or the other. In each case it ended up being true that she didn't really want to see the movie in question, though Pandorum has now made its way onto our Netflix instant queue, even though I told her it's not very good.)

But I may already have my next one lined up. My wife is heeding my advice and seeing Tangled tomorrow night. I may rent The A-Team from Redbox, to watch during that same time period.

Do I care if my wife knows I saw The A-Team? No.

But is it schlock? My yes, I'm sure it is.

And I'm sure it will be worth every penny of that dollar and ten cents.

Into the Red

I've been seeing the Redbox rental kiosks for months? years? now, and a couple weeks back, I decided it was my duty as a film blogger to give one a test drive.

So Saturday night, while shopping for Easter brunch and BBQ dinner in a nearby Ralph's, buzzing on two beers after watching the 20-year reunion of my co-worker's hair band, I impulsively decided to do so.

Before seeing the kiosk, I had been planning to pick something arbitrarily from HBO OnDemand, but why not give myself the power of decision for the cost of a mere dollar? I decided I wanted to see something schlocky and preposterous, so Law Abiding Citizen fit the bill quite nicely.

I've been fascinated by the idea of the unmanned video kiosk for some time now. But the closest I ever came to actually patronizing one was on our recent trip to Australia, in Sydney, when we considered winding down one evening by renting a movie to play on my portable DVD player. (I now realize there was a flaw with that plan, because their DVDs aren't compatible with our stuff. But we didn't consider this at the time, so it's a good thing we ended up saving our money.)

I have always considered Redbox to be fairly limited in its offerings, especially considering that it was being positioned as an alternative to Blockbuster and Netflix. From what I had gathered, only the three dozen titles pictured on the front would actually be available, half of which had always seemed to be dopey kiddie fare that had never been in the theater. (Which is probably a smart business model, but doesn't hold much interest for a person like me.) I'd also thought it was kind of a populist enterprise intended only for "dumb" film fans, who only wanted to see Twilight New Moon or Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.

But as it happened, I was interested enough in one of those three dozen "dumb" movies pictured, so I decided to make Law Abiding Citizen happen. (And had to admit they were not only "dumb" movies -- Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces was one of the featured posters on the kiosk.)

And here's where a very enjoyable phenomenon comes in to play with Redbox, one that my wife and I like to call "pushing the buttons." I can't really describe why, but we both think there's something very satisfying about pushing buttons on a computerized transaction machine. Not necessarily something basic and everyday like an ATM, but your slightly more exotic machines -- your movie theater ticket vending machines, your airport check-in machines, even your can and bottle recycling machines, though that involves more feeding than button-pushing.

Redbox carries that same satisfaction. You touch the screen to begin the rental process, touch the screen to select your movie choice, touch the screen to confirm, then swipe your card. (I guess "screen touching" is a synonym for "button pushing.") Most satisfying of all, the machine ejects an actual physical product to you when the DVD emerges a few moments later. Much more satisfying than a boarding pass or a ticket stub.

I left the store feeling somewhat invigorated by the whole rental experience. And the movie ended up not as bad as I'd expected, though it was as preposterous as I'd expected.

We had a fairly busy Easter Sunday with the two meals I had to prepare, a trip out to see How to Train Your Dragon, and the opening night of the baseball season between my Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees. I had to get the movie back to the Redbox kiosk by 9 p.m. or else pay an extra day's rental -- instead of $1.10, it would be $2.20, or possibly $2.10, if the 10 cents tax is only charged once. I'm always eager to save a dollar when I can, but because I'd picked up my groceries on the way home from the rock show, it wasn't the closest Ralph's to my house. I knew I'd be able to get back to it on Sunday, but as the day got busy, it was starting to seem like a hassle to fit it in.

Which is when I realized another benefit of Redbox, in addition to the cheap rental cost: You can return the movie to any Redbox location. I thought I'd remember that being the case, then went on the website to confirm. (A moment later I also saw it written on the Redbox customized packaging.) So I checked to see what was the nearest location, and remembered that there was a kiosk outside a 7-11, just a mile down the road from me. Which is where I headed around 8:25, with more than a half-hour before my deadline.

There was a girl standing at the kiosk when I got there, and from her experience, I got a preview of how quick the return was. You literally just touch the screen on the large red box that says Return Rental, insert the movie, and see a confirmation on screen that the return was successful. They also email you this confirmation, in addition to your receipt when you first rent the movie. I'd typed in my email address the day before, to receive my receipt, and the system remembered my address.

The way I knew Redbox had really won me over was that I couldn't just do the logical thing and walk away. Nope, I impulsively decided to rent another movie, even though that hadn't been the original plan. The Informant! was also available, and I'd had a desire to see it building up in me, ever since I first missed it in the theater, then missed watching it on the plane back from Australia. So I went in for a second straight rental. Now it was no longer just a film blogger's experiment -- it was a customer's patronage.

And in this process I discovered another exciting thing: The offerings on Redbox are not as limited as they appear. I searched by title for The Informant!, but didn't see it among the other I titles, so I assumed that this particular kiosk must be sold out of the movie. By this point I was determined to make a second rental, even if it wasn't the movie I originally wanted, so I scanned all the offerings by title. And it was here that I discovered that the offerings are not limited to the three dozen posters on the display. In fact, not only did I find obscurer titles -- like my favorite movie of last year, Moon -- but older titles, like Major League, released in 1989, made available in Redbox for the start of the 2010 baseball season.

And wouldn't you know it, I ended up finding The Informant! after all -- categorized under "T" instead of "I." I'll let Redbox off the hook for the poor alphabetization logic -- maybe that really is for the dumb people.

So tonight I'll be returning The Informant! to any convenient kiosk. And will be doing my best to avoid making a third consecutive rental.

It's just one more reason for Blockbuster to watch its back. As I've written about ad nauseum on this blog, I may be close to canceling my Blockbuster subscription. The main reason I haven't yet done that: I still like going to a physical location to randomly choose a movie I had no premeditated interest in seeing. It now appears Redbox can help me do this, albeit on a necessarily limited scale.

With a tag-team of Netflix for my targeted rentals and Redbox for my random rentals, Blockbuster's death warrant may indeed be just weeks from being signed.

The 40 Year Old Informant!

Am I the first one to notice a similarity between the posters for The Informant! and The 40 Year Old Virgin? (Shown with one hyphen in the title here, but most often represented without any hyphens.)

Yep, there's something to be said for making us think of doofuses from the late 1970s or early 1980s when advertising a comedy.

I'm not sure what it is, exactly, but when a movie poster mines nostalgia from this era, it really works for me.

However, it's not quite as simple as that. Neither of these movies is actually set in the era its poster invokes. Despite his cheesy mustache, Matt Damon's informant is based on a real person from the early 1990s. And despite his unironic striped polo shirt and neatly parted hairdo, Steve Carell's virgin is straight out of present day. (The present day of 2005, when the movie was released, anyway.)

Likewise, I think a poster that uses signatures from the late 70s/early 80s, for a movie also set during that era, would not stand out to me -- would not have the same impact. In that case, it would just be realism/period appropriateness. In the two cases above, it's pure artifice, deviously designed to rope us in. Instead of feeling manipulated, however, I recognize what it is, and love it all the more.

Put simply, the era in question speaks to us right now. And by "right now," I don't mean September 15, 2009. I mean it speaks to Generation X, the generation expected to add the most to these movies' coffers, even if younger audiences will be heavily represented as well. And it has been speaking to us for some time now, at least as far back as the 2005 poster for Virgin.

Consider another poster I found for Virgin. Would you have been quite so interested in the movie if this is what they'd circulated to advertise it?



I think not. It looks no better than any dumb T&A comedy from the last two decades. You've got a cheeky pun in the tagline (the harder it gets -- heh heh, huh huh), and then you've got the V in Virgin doubling as a zipper on a pair of pants. Plus, a garish and totally unimaginative title font. What a crap-ass poster.

But throw a little 1970s/1980s irony in there, and you're prepared for the movie you'll actually get -- something hilarious yet sublime, something highbrow even in its most lowbrow moments. Who knows how adversely the box office would have been affected by this other poster, or whether the movie would have even reached the audience that has elevated it to among the best comedies of the last ten years.

I can tell you that the poster they did use was a factor in ratcheting up my excitement tenfold for Virgin. It was original and striking.

And I have to admit, even though I've enjoyed the trailers for The Informant!, it was that funny poster with the giant-sized, twice hyphenated "unbelievable," and the cheeky delight in Matt Damon's eyes, that really made me think this could be something special. It's just a poster, of course, but there's something avant-garde about it, something that suggests a whimsical outside-the-box quality to the whole production.

This is "fun Steven Soderbergh" we're getting rather than "serious Steven Soderbergh," so it's hard to know how far outside the box he was allowed to stray during this, his every-other-movie debt to the studios. If you've followed Soderbergh's career at all, you know he follows a "one for me, one for them" system, almost pathologically alternating pet projects (Full Frontal, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience) with easily accessible, mainstream product that rakes in the dough (Oceans Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen). This is a topic that's worth exploring at length some other time, but let's just say another aspect of the Informant! ad campaign is to leave no doubt about the Soderbergh you're getting here. The trailer trumpets "From the director of Ocean's Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen!" And, probably of equal importance, The Eurythmics' "Would I Lie to You?" plays manically throughout the trailer.

But I'm not saying I want the serious Soderbergh all the time. I just want the guy whose movie poster gave me a nebulous sense of optimism, that same optimism I felt when I first looked up at those billboards and saw an earnest Steve Carell grinning back down at me.

You know, an earnest Carell who would have seemed perfectly at home in, say, 1981.