Some things get worse as time goes on. Others get better.
Over the past five years, Cinema Victoria has somehow improved its marketing strategy. Rather than just have an old film, they put the film in a group.
A few years ago, you could watch well-known classics like China Town and Mad Max and old films like Forrest Gump, with hardly anyone else in the cinema. If you were free on a weekday afternoon, it was like being in film school again, except you’d wonder where all the students had gone. Today, we look at films for next week and see that almost all tickets have already been purchased. Even films three weeks from now have had quite a few tickets sold.
What did Cinema Victoria learn, and can we learn it too?
Last month, the theme was “April Fools.” They showed Dumb and Dumber, Borat, and something else I forgot what.
This month, it is meant to be “Brainy” comedies. I put intelligent in quoatation marks.
But is it just that more people want to go to the cinema? No. When I go to see a film that hasn’t received cinema Victoria’s dose of marketing hype, I can sit anywhere I want. The films that aren’t bracketed into a theme do not get as many views. Perhaps they decide to not hype a few films, just to assure themselves that marketing is neccessary.
It isn’t simply a theme, the design of the website, the layout of posters, the way films are expressed on social media all form parts of a marketing strategy that took Cinema Victoria from a quiet cinema that was hardly ever full except for special screenings and festivals (and sometimes even then it was almost empty) to one where if the lines are ever short, it’s mostly likely because all the tickets were already purchased online.
Okay, now why did I put “Brainy” in quotation marks? Let’s look at the films that are showing.
Snatch, I don’t remember that. It’s a Guy Richie film. The guy is most famous for being married to Madonna. I watched a couple of his films, and was bored with the bad acting by athletes and the 12 year old jokes in the script. The guy must be related to the mob, because I can’t see how he gets money to make films after making so many stinkers. Brainy? On a braininess scale of one to ten, ten being the highest, I’d give it a minus three.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Okay, here the director is known as intelligent. Terry Guilliam was one of the Monty Python troup, and they often make references to philosophers like Schopenhauer, base a lot of their jokes on classic writers like Moliere, and have a grasp of literature. Fear and Loathing is about drug addicts who hallucinate due to their highs, and is probably the least brainy film I’ve seen by TG. “Brazil” was brainy. Fear and Loathing is like being on an acid trip. (And, if you want some great colors, I’d recommend the Beattles’s superior “Yellow Submarine.”)
You missed The Big Lebowski. While I wouldn’t call them “brainy,” I think the films of the Coen Brothers are normally considered artsy. Maybe high brow. Raising Arizona had kidnappers as a hero. Big Lebowski is about some middle aged bowling buddies. It does use a few words like “nihilists,” while any first year student of social sciences or history should know, but you don’t need a high IQ to appreciate it. You do learn how to pronounce some brainy words, I suppose, and it is a fun film. I’m sorry I missed it.
Then there is Clerks. Like Blair Witch Project, Man Bites Dog, the Hollywood Shuffle and El Mariachi, it was famous for being cheap. These are the days when you couldn’t just make a film on your phone, you had to use big bulky cameras and buy expensive film stock. At the collapse of the Eastern Block, at the end of the cold war, suddenly a lot of cameras and film stock that had been used for propaganda were no longer needed, and came cheaply to the West.
Being low budget does not mean its not brainy, but come on, Clerks is literally just conversations of some guys who worked at a convenience store. It was famous because it was so cheap, and there was controversy over its NC-17 rating. There was no real violence or nudity, and not as much swearing as a lot of other films, so a lot of people didn’t think it deserved such a high age rating (which almost amounted to being banned in those days, as normal cinemas wouldn’t show NC-17 films).
A film like Clerks probably wouldn’t even get noticed these days, as gross out jokes and talk about things with dead people are now tame compared to what modern films throw at us. Mostly, however, there have been so many films made on phones that low budget is no longer a novelty. We can see better films than Clerks made by independent filmmakers from New Zealand, Western and Southern Africa, all over Asia, as well as throughout Europe and the United States. (It’s probably the hardest in Europe, with all the business regulations.)
If you want a brainy low budget film, try Pi, or one of the other microbudget sci-fi films shot over the years.
But anyway, a look at ticketing for those films show that quite a few seats have already been sold. The marketing is working.
The only danger is overhyping. I hope that people who feel misled by the brainy label on “Snatch” and “Clerks” don’t get turned off the cinema because of it. (Some people like those films, but not the same who would like brainy films.)
But yeah, the improved marketing is good news for those of us who like cinema. We want to see movie houses succeed, to have to opportunity to watch old classics again. Even if we can’t personally recommend every film that shows there, we can recommend learning from the marketing strategy that Cinema Victoria has employed.