Jack Attack Tuesday – 8/25/15 – How To Handle Hype

Jack Attack Tuesday

How To Handle Hype

These days, it’s unavoidable for something to not have at least some moderate hype behind it.  In the age of TMZ, Twitter and the dominance of fucks like Justin Bieber in pop culture, everyone needs to know everything yesterday.  Hype is a funny thing.  It’s a feeling you get that can sway you dramatically one way or another when it comes to a piece of entertainment.  We’ve all fallen victim to it at one time or another.  You have a situation where you hear nothing but shit about a movie like The Chronicles of Riddick, thereby making you avoid it.  When you finally do get around to seeing it, you’re judging it with a handicap and, sometimes, tend to give something a little more of a fair shake than if you had seen it blind.  So, I ask, is hype a bad thing?

In the case of Marvel Studios, the hype is starting to kill it for me.  Ultron was supposed to be the second coming of christ and it was less than epic while the less-anticipated Ant-Man kicked a lot of ass.  Jurassic World was the biggest movie of the summer thus far, and that was AT BEST a 7/10 with the director’s next project being Star Wars.  Overhype isn’t anything specific to this year, however.  I remember seeing 300 in the theater and walking out wholly unfulfilled.  While I expected a stylish recreation of the Battle of Thermopalye, I instead got a visually stunning but vapid story about macho guys doing macho shit.  Of course, if there was a king of overhype, it would have to be Spider Man 3.

Spidey 3 was, in my mind, probably the biggest theatrical letdown I’ve ever witnessed.  I remember going to a midnight showing with all my friends, getting great seats in the center of the theater and preparing for what was certain to be the triumphant third entry in Raimi’s (at the time) brilliant Spider Man series.  I still maintain that Spider Man 2 is a benchmark comic book movie but we all know what happened with 3.  I specifically remember a kid who wore a spandex Venom suit and sat a few rows behind us in the theater.  By the end of the movie, said fan had removed his spandex, probably out of extreme shame.  The hype got to him, as it did my friends and I, we just had the good fortune of not dressing up in skin-tight spandex for a fucking movie.

So this leaves us with the inevitable dilemma of how hype effects the things we look forward to.  Is it good?  Is it bad?  Does it matter?  I know some people say they pay it no mind, and I think that’s conditional.  Hype, to me, is almost subconscious.  For instance, no matter how many times I hear about how great the new Woody Allen flick may look I know I’ll never watch it because I have no interest.  Transformers 5 could be directed by Martin Scorsese and I don’t think you could get me into the theater for it.  With a big holiday season coming up for us movie fans, it’s easy to lose sight of where Star Wars and The H8ful Eight should fall on our hype scale.  I, for one, am all in on Star Wars, but The H8ful Eight, to me, had a pretty lackluster trailer.  Not that it’s not what I was expecting or anything like that but the trailer itself just seemed to represent 5% of the movie and, to me, was missing a little bit of that hype factor (Disclaimer: Nothing will stop me from seeing a Tarantino movie opening night).  

I guess at the end of this my question is where do you fall?  Are you someone who jumps on board the hype-train without regrets or do you like to restrict your exposure to coming features as much as possible ala Kupka?  Let us know below and be sure to mention some of your own personal let-downs.  Binge On!