Technically accurate but semantically dishonest

Which of these "award-winning movies" is not like the other?

Awards for Past Lives, according to Wikipedia:

Best Woman Screenwriter - Alliance of Women Film Journalists
Top Ten Films of the Year - American Film Institute Awards
Best Director - Asia Pacific Screen Awards
Outstanding Achievement in Casting - Artios Awards
Best First Feature - Astra Film and Creative Arts Awards
Best Original Screenplay, Best First Film - Austin Film Critics Awards

And that's only the A's. Point proven, I will stop there.

Awards for Prey, according to Wikipedia:

Outstanding Sound Editing for a Limited Series or Anthology, Movie or Special - Primetime Emmy Awards
Best Streaming Film Premiere, Best Costume Design, Best Creature FX - Fangoria Chainsaw Awards
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Editing - Non-Theatrical Feature - Golden Reel Awards
Best Original Score - Streamed Live Action Film (No Theatrical Release) - Hollywood Music in Media Awards

Awards for Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, according to Wikipedia:

Feature Big Budget - Comedy - Artios Awards
Best Supporting Actress - Critics Choice Movie Awards
Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy - Golden Globe Awards
Best Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy - Golden Globe Awards
Best Original Poster - Golden Trailer Awards
Best Supporting Actress - National Society of Film Critics Awards
Best Supporting Actress - Online Film Critics Society Awards
Best Adapted Screenplay - Writers Guild of America

Awards for Movie 43, according to Wikipedia:

Worst Picture, Worst Director, Worst Screenplay - Golden Raspberry Awards

Now, some of these awards may be a bit fringe, but at least you would write home about them.

Not so for the "accolades" for Movie 43.

So I am trying to figure out Amazon's angle here. 

They are promoting four random movies to us that all are considered "award winners" -- a technically true statement. The thing that separates them from being completely random, I would guess, is that perhaps they are all new to the service within the past few weeks, or at least returned to the service after a temporary departure.

But wait -- Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was an Amazon original movie. It debuted there. There would be no conceivable reason it would have ever left, because where would it go? Streamer originals are on the service forever and ever after, amen. 

So that doesn't explain the pairing of these four movies. And surely, if they just wanted four awards winners, they'd have literally hundreds of other movies on the site that would qualify, especially given the number of existing bodies that lavish formal praise on movies that are never going to get an Oscar nomination. (I mean, even the Teen Choice Awards and MTV Movie Awards exist.) 

What possible incentive could Amazon have for elevating Movie 43 alongside these other films, all of which were critical favorites in one way or another, with maybe only a few detractors for Borat and essentially none for the other two? 

The movie was an all-time turkey, and any of their customers who watch Movie 43 will surely know this right away. They may then investigate why Amazon promoted it to them as such, and find out the technical accuracy of the term "award" -- while still grumbling at the deception.

Because technical accuracy only matters in the legalese that comes at the end of an ad for a new erectile dysfunction drug, or a bargain basement attorney. It only matters if you are trying to indemnify yourself against an angry customer who wants to sue you because something happened with your product that you didn't tell them was going to happen. So you tell them what could happen, and wash your hands of it, and basically live with the fact that you may end up burning some of your future customers, because that's the nature of your particular industry. There are enough potential future customers to compensate for the loss. 

There is no good reason to burn a potential steaming customer, given the comparatively small value of encouraging them to watch any individual thing on your service. Streaming content is inherently a crapshoot, and any streaming customer knows that. The streamer's job is to make the content available, to suggest that you might like it if you liked something similar to it, and to give it a certain visibility in accordance with the streamer's own belief in the content, its own advertising philosophy and perhaps its own agreement with whoever leased the content to give it a certain amount of prominence for a certain amount of days. The rest is just caveat emptor.

But then if you go out of your way to label garbage like Movie 43 as an award winner -- and place it next to three other movies that won awards for legitimate reasons -- you are engaging in actual dishonesty toward your customer that could damage your brand. 

And for what? What do you gain if an additional ten thousand people stream Movie 43? (Answer in the comments, if you know. I really want to know.) That is not an exaggeration given the way ads like these tend to flood our devices, likely going to millions of us, if not billions. (Okay, not billions.) 

You're more likely to lose those ten thousand people as customers than to get them to watch another movie that might be recommended according to their interest in Movie 43, or whatever the flimsy value is that Amazon might get out of this. 

They won't leave because they didn't like this one movie. That can happen any time you click play.

They'll leave because you told them they would like this movie because it was an award winner, when the only awards it won were named after that universal gesture you make with your mouth and tongue, expelling breath outward and creating that farting sound that unmistakeably indicates your disgust.

Leave technical accuracy to the pharmaceutical companies.  

And starring ... everyone on the planet

Before there was the spectacularly unfunny film Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, it had always occurred to me to wonder what it would take to make the most expensive movie ever made. Not to accidentally make that movie through epic mishaps and extremely poor planning, but to set out to do it.

A huge number of special effects and pricy locations would undoubtedly be part of it, but I also figured you'd have to hire every prominent actor you could think of, even to play the bit parts, at the full salary it would cost to get them.

That's kind of what Movie 43 did, though I suspect it didn't cost a billion dollars.

Think Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve had big casts? They've got nothing on Movie 43.

Here, why don't I list the names of the people who appear in this movie, just to stagger you:

Dennis Quaid
Greg Kinnear
Common
Will Sasso
Seth McFarlane
Hugh Jackman
Kate Winslet
Liev Schreiber
Naomi Watts
Anna Faris
Chris Pratt
J.B. Smoove
Kieran Culkin
Emma Stone
Richard Gere
Kate Bosworth
Jack McBryer
Aasif Mandvi
Justin Long
Jason Sudeikis
Uma Thurman
Bobby Canavale
Kristen Bell
John Hodgman
Leslie Bibb
Katrina Bowden
Christopher Mintz-Plasse
Chloe Grace Moretz
Patrick Warburton
Matt Walsh
Gerard Butler
Seann William Scott
Johnny Knoxville
Halle Berry
Stephen Merchant
Snooki
Terrence Howard
Elizabeth Banks
Josh Duhamel
Tony Shalhoub

And that's only the people I had heard of.

So, will there be anyone left to see this movie? Yes, there'll be you. Unless you are also in the cast and I just don't know it.

Is there any way that a movie like this can be anything but a disaster? If the critics are to be believed, no.

But it's not like all these people are part of one big plot. This is a sketch movie, not unlike sketch movies we used to get in the 1970s (Kentucky Fried Movie) and the 1980s (Amazon Women on the Moon). Neither of those movies were big hits with me, so I don't expect this one to be, either.

But I'd by lying if I said I weren't intrigued merely by the fact that all these people were willing to participate in the first place. KFM and AWOTM didn't have casts like this, not even close.

The actual making of this movie is not as hard as it may seem. Each actor had to commit to only one of 11 directors, and many of them probably shot for less than a week. It's kind of similar to how Cloud Atlas was more a feat of editing than a colossal exercise in logistics. 

Strangely, though, the 11 directors are not made up of more than a couple superstars. Again going only on the names I recognize, these 11 directors include Elizabeth Banks (debuting in that role, I believe), Steven Brill, Steve Carr, Griffin Dunne, Peter Farrelly, James Gunn, Bob Odenkirk and Brett Ratner. That leaves three names I don't recognize at all. And of these eight I do recognize, only two would be considered big names in comedy: Farrelly and Odenkirk, though Odenkirk's best appreciated career achievement may be the role of Saul Goodman on Breaking Bad, which is either a straight drama or the blackest of black comedies.

So I can only conclude that all these people were in it for the experiment. The chance to throw heaps and heaps of spaghetti against the wall, and if it flops to the ground like a wet mop, not to have to absorb any of the blame themselves.

Or maybe they collectively commiserated the loss of the sketch movie that was at least somewhat more prevalent in their childhoods, and decided to conspire to bring it back.

Or maybe they just wanted to cut loose. Two cast members in particular strike me as odd choices for this movie: Kate Winslet and Naomi Watts. In fact, less than a month ago, in a post about The Impossible, I commented that I didn't think Watts had ever appeared in a comedy. Let's hope this movie doesn't do for her Oscar hopes what Norbit did for Eddie Murphy's.

The pushing up of the release date of this movie (I'm pretty sure it was once slated for February) is the first thing that doesn't bode well for Movie 43. The second is its 18 Metascore. Yikes, that's a low score. It'd be the dog of the week if Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters didn't have the exact same score as of this writing.

So maybe I won't make this one of my first movies of 2013, as I had once thought I'd do. When I've got the resounding hatred of critics and a personal history of not really enjoying such movies to inform me, that's a pretty good reason to wait for DVD.

I'll set this meager bar for the movie, and see if it can exceed it: Just be better than Gary Marshall's aforementioned movies, with their ridiculously large casts.

And Naomi Watts? Be funny.