SpoutBlog on spout.com

I’m all for appropriate trailer positioning, but the debut last night of a teaser for something called Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief may have gone a little overboard. Actually, I change my mind: a lot overboard. The movie, based on Rick Riordan’s fantasy novels, is about a 12-year-old boy who finds out he’s part Greek god. Sounds a bit like the story of an 11-year-old boy who finds out he’s a wizard. But in case that’s not enough to be marketable to Harry Potter fans, the first trailer for Percy Jackson notes that the movie is directed by Chris Columbus, who kicked off the Potter films by helming both Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets. What else could Fox 2000 do to exploit the other franchise? Hmm, how about a logo that looks exactly like the one from Sorcerer’s Stone?

Certainly such a teaser should be positioned in front of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince right? Well, actually, I think it could hurt the upcoming potential franchise starter, which doesn’t hit theaters til next February. Potter fans aren’t dumb and they’re sure to see that their beloved character is being completely ripped off and exploited. And with a record-breaking midnight box office for Half-Blood Prince last night, this teaser probably struck a bad chord with millions of moviegoers. As observed by Alex Billington of First Showing during one screening, the New Moon trailer obviously garnered huge cheers while Percy Jackson was met with “confused silence.” Meanwhile, the movie doesn’t seem to be getting a whole lot of attention online save for negative postings by film bloggers who agree that it’s a blatant Potter wannabe.

Check out some of those negative reactions after the jump:

• Kyle Buchanan at Movieline calls Fox out on its marketing thievery:
  

  …from Christopher Columbus, director of the first two Potter movies, it’s a film entitled, Waitwaitwait Don’t Go Anywhere, We Have, Like, An American Harry Potter Coming Out Soon. My bad, that was the working title. Apparently, it’s now named Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief. Almost as long!

• Elisabeth Rappe at Cinematical also points out the familiarity:
  

  Olympus has happily borrowed its exterior design from that ancient English institution known as Hogwarts. In fact, I think they may have just copied and pasted our beloved School of Witchcraft and Wizardry right into the film. Even kids will snicker at the blatant Potter name-dropping that merges straight into that shot, and then into a title card that might as well have lightning bolts in it.

• Somehow Cinematical readers are in complete denial and disagree with Elisabeth, but fortunately a comment from “Moses Monster” has a comparison of screencaps to help her out:
  

  I can see the resemblance. The atmosphere, the lighting, and the “Hill” are all reminscent of The Sorcerer’s Stone.

  http://img190.imageshack.us/i/pjvshp.jpg/

• Devin Faraci at CHUD.com agrees with the Hogwarts resemblance and notes that the footage in this teaser was probably completely shot exclusively and specifically for the occasion Potter release:
  

  It’s hard to make any calls about the film based on this teaser, which could be all footage shot specifically for the trailer and nothing from the real movie. There’s the Empire State Building, shot in a gooey golden hue for some reason, and then a magical elevator trip to the top of Mount Olympus, which looks quite Hogwartsian. I imagine that the book series upon which the movie is based was heavily influenced by Harry Potter anyway.

• Ross Miller at ScreenRant points out that the books are obviously heavily influenced by Potter:
  

  The incredibly long titled film is an adaptation of a series of books that bare more than passing resemblance to the Harry Potter series. The film follows a teenage boy, Percy, who discovers he is actually the son of the god Poseidon. Percy then sets out on a quest to settle a war between the Greek gods.

• Dustin Rowles at Pajiba recognizes the massive fail in one of the Potter exploitations:
  

  …they’re even marketing it as a movie from one of the directors of the Harry Potter movies. Unfortunately, that director is Chris Columbus, and his two entries into the Potter series were the weakest. The man has no bite, no edge, and no discernible talent (see I Love You, Beth Cooper, which is single-handedly destroyed).

• Hmm, Owen Williams at Empire observed similarities to another movie entirely:
  

  We found ourselves half expecting a voice to go “Zuuuuuuullll” at the big reveal when he emerged from the elevator, but what the hey.

• Mark at I Watch Stuff adds to the elevator comparisons. I guess the Potter movies don’t have anything like it:
  

  When I think about it–remembering Willy Wonka’s Great Glass Elevator, the proposed space elevator, Star Trek turbolifts, the classic arcade game Elevator Action’s elevators, Doogie Howser’s freight elevator in the later seasons when he lived in that sweet loft–I’ve seen some pretty great elevators in my time. It’s going to take a lot for an elevator to impress this elevator-jaded eye. It would have to be something really amazing. Something like, I don’t know, an elevator that shoots THROUGH the fucking Empire State Building to FUCKING OLYMPUS!

• Brad Brevet at RopeofSilicon thinks the movie should have latched onto a better means of marketing
  

  Considering the timing of this debut I am surprised to see Percy Jackson isn’t part of Fox’s presentation at next week’s Comic Con, which I will be attending and briefing you on next week in preparation as RopeofSilicon will be going uber-geek for a week.

Here’s the trailer so that you can now judge for yourself: blatant rip-off, or good marketing?

As what used to be called The Entertainment Media melts down into one big, incestuous, pageview-mad morass, occasionally something happens that reminds us of why The Good Old Days — when the people who gossiped about startlets and their cocaine habits were not the same people assigned to even half-seriously analyze trends in cinema — were So Much Better. Today the movie nerd contingent on Twitter is piling on The Pool Movies That Ruined a Generation’s Greatest Directors, a Gawker listicle in which author NatashaVC cites where and when a number of “90s directors” (such as Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher and, um, Jonathan Demme) sold out by making movies obviously intended to pay for their luxurious lifestyles, embodied by new swimming pools. Even if we’re to take this post as being tongue-in-cheek, the author’s lack of long-term perspective and number of casual errors are fairly stunning. A refutation of points follows after the jump.

1.  “Remember the 90’s? The decade when America ran out of cocaine and was forced to go to the movies instead?”

I don’t think Quentin Tarantino, whose claim that he’ll never subject audiences or himself to “the movie I made to pay for my pool” ostensibly inspired NatashaVC’s post, ever ran out of cocaine.

2.  “Movies like Usual Suspects, Pulp Fiction, Memento, L.A. Confidential, aw hell, even Fight Club were a great mix of pulp and substance.”

Memento started appearing at film festivals in the fall of 2000 and was released in theaters in mid-2001. Its inclusion in a piece about films of the previous decade is thus dubious; its also a little weird that NatashaVC cites both it and Suspects without going into the further careers of either Christopher Nolan or Bryan Singer, both of whom have done almost nothing since their breakout hits but make movies that could pay for many, many swimming pools, many times over.

3. “If you remember all that then you certainly remember the sense of betrayal you felt when you heard something, like, say Robert Rodriguez was directing Spy Kids 2?”

Those movies may not be hip, but the Spy Kids franchise is a really bad example to use when talking about filmmakers betraying their roots, being that they’re total auteur projects that Rodriguez basically made in his garage.

4.  “Fincher was a decorative filmmaker with a pretty morbid vision.”

I just can’t for the life of me figure out what “decorative filmmaker” means.

5.  The entire Jonathan Demme/The Truth About Charlie section.

Jonathan Demme simply does not belong on this list: as Filmbrain points out, his career began decades before, with Roger Corman-produced shlock. But also — The Truth About Charlie as a big cash-in? A French New Wave-influenced remake of Stanley Donen’s Charade? Seriously? And to the assertion that “Demme has not made anything not-awful since!” … Rachel Getting Married’s worth may be up for debate, but the three documentaries he’s made in the last five years (The Agronomist, Jimmy Carter Man From Plains, and Neil Young: Heart of Gold) are all far from awful, and his Manchurian Candidate remake was undeniably one of Demme’s biggest hits, grossing about 12 times what Charlie made and earning mostly positive reviews.

6.  Citing Rex Reed as an authority, without apparent irony.

Curtis Hanson shouldn’t really be grouped on generational terms with Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, either, but I won’t argue that his Lucky You *wasn’t* an “undredeemableIe flop.” Still, NatashaVC goes too far with five little words: “Rex Reed put it best.”

7. “When Soderbergh made Ocean’s 11 in 2001 you could fill an Olympic sized pool with the art house tears.”

To quote Filmbrain once again: “What is (s)he talking about? A collective cry from art house types worldwide would barely fill a hipster’s baby pool.” Also: the first film in the trilogy carries an 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it far more critically beloved than one of the films NatashaVC cites as a Soderbergh “hit,” Che.

8. “Soderbergh’s real paycheck flick was The Good German . An updated noir vehicle for George Clooney that mucked the line between homage and mockery.”

I’ll ignore the horribly fragmented sentences and respond in blogspeak: LOL.

9. “Way to go, Ang! Just when we were starting to believe that you were as good as your as all those Oscars said you were, you go and make The Hulk.”

I’m tempted to let [sic] speak for itself, but I’ll bite: doesn’t the fact that Ang Lee squandered his big payday on a movie that satisfied his personal vision at the expense of kowtowing to mass tastes render him ineligible for the “Back The Cash Truck Up Here, Boys” Club?

Less than an hour after publishing the Pool Movies post, NatashaVC was back with this post, typical Gawker fare in which the news of a Lindsay Lohan movie premiering on cable opened the door for copious coke jokes. Maybe, then, she’s already learned the only lesson we can offer from the movie nerd blogosphere: stick to writing what you know.