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- An old Lempicka take and what I'm looking forward to at the movies
An old Lempicka take and what I'm looking forward to at the movies
Also I moved again, sorry
I’m on Beehiiv now
I really am sorry to do this again, though hopefully you didn’t even notice a difference. I just could not deal with Buttondown’s footnote function. It’s the glitchiest thing on the planet and it would constantly mess up the formatting every time I toggled between writing the main post and adding the footnotes in Markdown. I thought I was stuck with it because when I was first thinking of moving off of Substack, Beehiiv didn’t seem to have a footnotes function at all, or at least not one that was immediately obvious when I tested it out. Since then, however, they seem to have added one1 and it’s pretty good! It’s a little glitchy in some cases but nowhere near as bad as Buttondown’s. This should be the last time I move, at least for a good long while. Thanks for sticking with me ❤️
Lempicka’s real legacy, at least to me
Lempicka closed on Broadway yesterday after what looked like a pretty lackluster run. It’s a bummer that people are out of a job now, but it did make me think about the show’s real legacy: that you should check pull quotes from critics used in advertisements.
It’s very common to use pull quotes from reviews in your marketing material, and a lot of marketing teams cherry-pick the most laudatory claims in otherwise middling to negative reviews. Lempicka did this too; for example, Jesse Green at the New York Times was pretty lukewarm on the whole project, praising the vocal ability and visuals while criticizing the actual story at heart and the characterization of the eponymous Lempicka. This is what the marketing team highlighted:
Sleek. Powerful. Like motorcars. #LempickaMusical
— LEMPICKA (@LempickaMusical)
3:38 PM • Apr 27, 2024
But here’s the full quote (I highlighted the bit they cherry-picked):
That “if” is doing a lot of work in the original quote—it sets up that despite the vocal ability and sleek set, the story itself isn’t believable. The emphasis of the sentence is on the negative part of the show. But by doing something so simple as capitalizing the “there’s” and adding a period in the place of a comma, Lempicka’s advertisement eliminates the context of not just the rest of the review, but the rest of the sentence. It’s a marketing team’s job to isolate the good and ignore the bad, and I know that marketing teams are held to different standards than critics or journalists. But taking a chainsaw to a quote like this would be a huge faux pas in any reported piece at best.
It’s honestly insulting, but that’s not even the farthest they went. About eleven days earlier, they made this… masterpiece:
The reviews of this show have caused a stir, but here's a good reminder that without criticism what you're left with is...marketing. And, in this case, deceptive marketing. Neither of these phrases appear in the reviews as written. Scroll for context.
— Michael Schulman (@MJSchulman)
12:39 AM • Apr 17, 2024
It’s a completely unnecessary middle finger not only to these two NYT critics, but the idea of theater criticism. If it’s not clear, reviews aren’t a jar of words that marketing teams can mash together as they please. Apart from the service of helping a potential audience member decide to spend a lot of money on seeing a show or not, a good theater review is a snapshot in drama history. If art is in conversation with its contemporaries and predecessors, a comprehensive review gives us a way to listen in. In Green’s review, he compares the show with Sunday in the Park with George to make a point of how deviating from history might make a stronger show. In Ben Brantley’s review (the guy who, while liking the show, did not describe it as “a stirring blockbuster”), Lempicka’s portrayal of difficult women in difficult political circumstances is made richer by comparison to Evita. I haven’t been able to see Sunday, Lempicka, or Evita, but I feel like I have a more complete understanding of what Lempicka is going for because of these critics. It’s a tremendously important and difficult undertaking.
Advertisements like this show no respect or even courtesy for the work and effort put into these reviews that they’re turning around and using to sell tickets. It’s not plagiarism, but it is dishonest, and I can’t help but think of HBomberguy’s observation that this kind of manipulation has its roots in contempt for the people whose work is being twisted. The work of critics means nothing to marketing machines, so it means nothing to them to chop and screw someone else’s words into a sellable package.
I’m not happy Lempicka closed, but I am a little grateful that this stunt apparently didn’t get enough butts in seats.2 So goodbye, Lempicka. May the marketing teams of your successors have a little more integrity.
What I’m excited for/planning on seeing in the nearish future
I’ve become more sympathetic to the idea that this year will be kind of a letdown at the movies compared to last year (most people blame the strikes and I additionally blame last year for setting the bar absurdly high). I was initially skeptical because we’ve had three stone-cold classics3 in the first half of this year alone, and that’s before we get closer to the fall when a lot of the awards contenders start coming out. Then again, that might have just been the peak and it’s all downhill from here—I’m already feeling a little starved for choices just because I tend to avoid Ryan Reynolds.
Nevertheless, there are still some movies I’m genuinely excited for:
Furiosa. It’s coming out less than twelve hours after I leave the country, but at least it was easier to get IMAX tickets for when I come back.
Twisters. Looks so stupid. I’m so game.
Hit Man, which is also coming out the day after I leave the country. I don’t want to talk about it.
Kinds of Kindness. The reviews say it’s more like Yorgos’ pre-The Favourite work, and the only earlier movie of his I’ve seen is The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which literally gave me a headache. But I am a big Jesse Plemons fan so I guess I’m bringing Tylenol.
And what I’m not champing at the bit to see but will probably still give my time:
Blink Twice. I’m just sad they couldn’t keep the Pussy Island name, though I knew deep down it was never going to make it to theaters branded like that.
The Bikeriders, mostly on principle (Disney dumped it4 and I bet on losing dogs).
Sing Sing. I haven’t actually seen anything with Colman Domingo, and he’s about to be overtaken by a slew of biopics (one of which is a very bad idea on basically every level) so this is probably my last chance for a while.
1 Or I completely missed it the first time. That’s entirely possible.
2 I would say that I’d hate for this to set a precedent, but Schulman is also right that this is nothing new, just a recent and egregious example. Also I realize I’m VERY late to this discussion, but at least now we know for sure that hacking reviews apart didn’t save the show?
3 Dune 2, Challengers, and I Saw the TV Glow.
4 In the spirit of nuance, it’s not really a cut and dry case of “Disney is evil and hates artists.” New Regency, which produced the film and partners with (but is not actually a sub-company under) Disney for distribution, pulled it from the 2023 calendar because the actors involved couldn’t promote it. But the reason they couldn’t promote it is because they were on strike, which actually is because of Disney as part of the AMPTP. So it is because Disney is evil, just in a more roundabout way.