A spoiler-heavy movie review.

Know what really irritates me? Movie trailers containing critic quotes and awards notice. For a long time, I was indignant of this technique, which appears to only be reserved for film festival selections trying to make their way in the Big Scary World of the modern multiplex. I’d be watching a trailer for something that looks interesting, when all of a sudden they cut to a wall of text telling me that someone from the New York Times thought it was good, and so should you. If you can’t sell the movie on content alone and you have to bolster its status by telling us what the “professional movie-watchers” thought of it – before it’s available for mass-consumption – then my expectations of your product immediately drop. But readers, I think I’ve cracked the code. Let’s assume that the average trailer runs 60 to 90-seconds in-length, at least. If this is a Very Important film festival movie, then let’s also assume that you aren’t a big-budget production and you don’t have enough “money shots” in your film to fill a full-length trailer and sell the movie to a mainstream audience (Marvel movies now have nothing but money shots, and a 2 to 3-minute trailer without ruining the movie is entirely possible). Let’s assume further, that your low-budget film is only three actors in a room the whole time. You have enough intriguing shots to build a 30-second spot without spoiling anything, but anything more than that and your movie starts to look dull (like it’s three people in a room the whole time, which it is, but you don’t want Joe Cinema and his Scenetourage to know that). So you have to pad it with filler, and positive reviews are cheap filler.