Saturday, August 28, 2010

Movie Meme Day 28 - Most Overhyped movie


There are a lot of reasons a movie could be considered over-hyped.  Either it's the newest movies from a actor/director who hasn't worked in a long time.  Or perhaps it's the final movie by a beloved actress/director before their death.  Perhaps it was just a huge movie that got lots of buzz and everyone knew it was coming.  And then there are the movies that get described as over-hyped because they failed to live up to the promise of all the hype.  In today's Hollywood of mass-marketing, constant trailers, hints, gossip, etc., lots of movies are misrepresented in those trailers and thus cannot live up to that promise, because it wasn't what they were created to be.   I describe them as "marketing mistakes".  I think Brothers, Catch and Release and Leatherheads all fit into that category.  Here's my previous review of Leatherheads and why it couldn't live up to the hype.

So George Clooney's Leatherheads is many things. It's a one-minute buddy comedy, a one-minute screwball comedy, a one-minute romantic comedy, with one-minute about the old rules of the NFL, two minutes about the new rules of the NFL, and two minutes about being a war hero. By my calculation that means the movie should be about eight minutes long. The other 90 minutes don't seem to do much. This movie was marketed, right in the tagline, as a story about football - the original professional football players and how they became legitimate. This is NOT a sports movie. And then it was supposed to be about the love triangle with Clooney, Renee Zellwegger and John Krasinski (totally inappropriate for this role, still channeling Jim rather than this character). That doesn't happen, except for the lipstick scene shown repeatedly in the commercials. The war-hero story line was interesting, but kept losing it's focus between other non-plot points. So basically, this is a terrific 8-minute movie, but I wouldn't bother with the rest.

1 comment:

Rachel said...

I liked it at the time, but I can't remember a thing about it and have no desire to revisit it.