Tonight will be a Dark Knight

that is very punny.

Yes I finally off to see the Dark Knight, not only because I have been a huge Batman fans since Burton's classic but also because I can't let my geek cred' slip by not seeing it. I have tried to avoid as much info as possible about the film because I do want it to be at least a bit surprising. I watched the trailers and picked carefully the movie reviews out there to read just to see if anyone had really bad things to say about it. So far I have not encountered any and I have avoided as many spoilers as possible.
This got me thinking though on how hard it is nowadays to actually NOT hear about an entire movie before it hits the screens.
When I was kid back in the day ....damn kids get off my lawn... sorry. Anyway back in the day when there was no new fangled thing called the internet and I was still saving up to buy that cool new intellivision version of Burgertime, we got our information on summer popcorn movies the old fashion way... reading a monthly magazine that had outdated information and very few pictures. The brave movie fanatics sat through the pain that was Entertainment tonight to catch the "First Trailer" or "a Glimpse" at the upcoming movie. It was painful but worth it...sometimes. Movies had alot more mystery to them back then I think. Especially the highly anticipated summer block buster which were fewer in number. Back then if a movie made a 100 million dollars it was a HUGE accomplishment and it took more than a weekend to do.
I remember when I was a teen and saw a banner stating "Who is the Darkman?" and thats all it said. My curiosity was truely peaked especially since the accompaining poster on display said " from the director of beetlejuice" aka Tim Burton my all time fav director I will proudly admit. Besides the silouhette of a man in a trench and hat , thats all the information the poster provided. Guess you could say that it was old school viral marketing. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.
I knew I had to find out about this movie. course I couldn't just hop on the computer and see what other movie geeks on the forums had to say about it. No I had to wait a couple weeks before the latest edition of fangoria was out to read what it was about. When I did see the magazine there was limited information. There was enought to peek my curiousity to go see it. Which I did and it was good...not groundbreaking but a good movie.
Nowadays most films you know everything about it months before its actually release...or atleast enough to make you not want to pay full admission for it.
Now before people start yelling ...."Oh yeah well you still have that today...what about cloverfield...what about Quarentine" and I will say "What about them?"
Cloverfield was an exception to the rule but only to a point. Think about how quickly information hit the web about it soon after the first mysterious trailer hit the screens. within a month the internet was on fire about what it could be and within two months people figured it out... course the Cloverfield mysterious websites helped but still.
You could say ....well movieman just don't read anything about it on the interweb and just watch the trailers. Which would be great IF they actually made "Trailers" for the movies instead of a CLiffs notes version of the movie.
Sorry to say but most movie trailers nowadays give so much of the movie away that you don't have to see it. Rather than a short 30sec clip you get sometimes a min and a half trailer showing the main plot points of the film. case in point look at the trailer for "The Guardian" now granted I would not pay full admission for most of Kevin Kostner's films anyway but with the trailer for this movie I would not have had too. I got 90% of the film from just the trailer...the dramatic points, the key events etc. Maybe its just because I have seen so many movies but I could put the entire movie together from just the clips they showed...course with shear amount of the movie shown and the length of the trailer my 8 year old could probably have connected the dots to the film.
Or for example look at the full trailer they released for the Hulk remake. I mean in the olden days .....dammit I said off the lawn you punks... anyway I think the trailer would have been different for the movie 15 years ago. you wouldn't have gotten but maybe just a short glimpse of the Abomination if at all. There would have been more mystery. I think thats what we have lost with this " instant information" world we have, the mystery of a movie and the exceitment of not know what you were going to see when the lights went down in the theatre.
I will leave my "instant information is not always a good thing discussion" for a later post.
I would say that I will give you my opinion of the movie when we are done seeing it...but I think I will leave it a mystery.