I’m not totally convinced that this is not a joke, but the Huffington Post claims that the Weinstein Company is going to start running this TV ad for Under the Same Moon today. The immigration drama broke the record for the biggest opening for a Spanish-language film in the States last week, and essentially became TWC’s first Miramax-style success (acquire small/foreign film; identify and laser-target natural audience; use success with that audience to push film as general arthouse hit) since the Weinstein brothers divorced Disney in 2005. Apparently, Harvey thinks the way to maintain that success is by going after the segment of the audience that gets off on the idea that their movie choices could turn CNN pundit Lou Dobbs into a weepy little girl.
Each of the ad’s three pullquotes––from TIME, the Christian Science Monitor, and Entertainment Weekly––claim that Moon’s portrait of one family’s border struggle could wring sympathetic emotion from hardass Dobbs, who preaches almost nightly about how immigrants should be rounded up and launched into outer space, our agricultural and service economies be damned. And maybe that’s true––maybe Dobbs has been waiting his entire professional life for the indie film that would turn his schtick around––but with the three references lined up consecutively, the ad plays like an unfunny spoof of mainstream film critic laziness. Is “Lou Dobbs will cry” such internationally recognized shorthand for “this is a good movie about immigration that will appeal to your liberal sensibilities and change your conservative asshole friend’s mind”, that 90 percent of the print film critics who still have jobs simply could not conceive of stating the matter any other way?
Oh, and an Impending Snake Eats Tail media alert: TWC has apparently booked the ad on CNN in five major markets.
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