from a NJ movie critic:
Now you see it...
Posted by sjwhitty April 16, 2008 12:55PM
T. S. Eliot was right -- April is the cruelest month. At least for moviegoers.
Too late to be part of the winter's widening-release season, too early to count as part of the summer-blockbuster crush, it's a time when studios clear off the shelves.
Sometimes it's a genre movie that just isn't big enough to compete against the May franchise pictures; sometimes it's a smaller, more intimate picture that needs to find its own audience.
And sometimes it's a movie like "Deception," which its studio is releasing next Friday -- with two big stars, but hardly any major advertising and no screenings for critics at all.
This is, obviously, not a good sign -- the sort of quick throw-out-the-trash release usually reserved for gigantic misfires like "Aeon Flux," or scuzzy horror films like the "Halloween" remake. But why treat "Deception" like this?
It has two fairly major and attractive male stars -- Hugh Jackman and Ewan McGregor -- and co-stars Michelle Williams. The bare outlines known of the plot -- a businessman is drawn into a sex club, and then pressured into becoming part of a multi-million dollar theft -- is intriguing enough. So why is a picture slated for thousands of screens opening so thoroughly under the radar?
After all, this month already saw the release of the lethargic "Leatherheads" and punch-drunk "Street Kings." This week brings the debut of "88 Minutes" and "Expelled," and next week re-introduces audiences to the continuing adventures of "Harold and Kumar." None of these movies were exactly the sort expected to be critical darlings -- some of them, in fact, already have been (or can expect to be) pummeled pretty badly.
And yet every one still screened in advance.
So why is "Deception" being treated like a red-headed stepchild? Why is the studio releasing it as secretively as they can, so that when you stand in front of a marquee next Friday night you know next to nothing about it? Is there something about Williams' character in the movie, or the plot itself, that execs worry is just going to dredge up tasteless Heath Ledger gossip again? Or is the movie simply -- unutterably -- lousy?
I'm not sure. But I'm willing to predict, whatever the studio knows and we don't, their eagerness to keep it from us is not a good sign -- and a good indication that anyone who ends up innocently wandering into a theater next week to see this movie will have already given in to a deception of the studio's own.
http://blog.nj.com/whitty/2008/04/now_you_see_it.html
