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Woman sues over 'misleading' trailer for "Drive"

Trekker4747 said:
Yeah. IIRC if you have a bunch of coffee beans the higher quality of those beans, after roasting, are sold as whole beans to premium retailers. The lesser quality beans are sold as medium-grade beans. The lowest quality beans are ground up and sold as coffee grounds/"instant coffee." In all of these processes you get some dust and run-off from grinding, shaking and just general flaked off crud. This stuff is bagged up in giant 50-pound sacks and sold to places that make large amounts of coffee and sell it a cheap price. Then there's the stuff that gets caught in the gears and augers of grinders, settles around machinery and mixes in with simple dust. That's the stuff that's bagged up and sold to McDonald's.
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I think you'll find most Instant Coffee makers make a point of using the finest beans they can, Kenco for example claim to use the same quality of bean in Instant as they do for ones that you have to filter/perculate etc..

Might be different in the states however.
 
All of those examples, and many of the examples here, are taking the title of the movie and making the joke from there that the movie didn't line up with what was perceived from the title.

That's not what this lawsuit is about. It's about the trailers and marketing for the film didn't properly sell what the movie was really about or focused on. If you watch the trailer it does seem like a "F&F" type movie with a lot of action driving in it and the actual movie doesn't match-up to that.

The title of the movie only underscores that.

What about "The Last Picture Show"'s advertising delivered the idea that it was the end of all cinema? And is that even a reasonable assumption to make?
 
They could be sued by anyone who made a subsequent movie. "Calling it the last picture show messes up the advertising for our picture show!"
 
Trekker4747 said:
That's not what this lawsuit is about. It's about the trailers and marketing for the film didn't properly sell what the movie was really about or focused on.
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Part of the problem here is that "art," and what people get out of a work of art, is subjective. Two people can view the same film and get different things out of it.

Was Moby Dick a rousing adventure story about a whale hunter or an examination on obsession? Was "to Kill a Mockingbird" a touching film about a child's life in the deep south or an indictment of small town racism in the pre-civil rights era? Etc.

Once you start letting people sue because they didn't "get" the film the same way the trailer was cut you end up with anyone who doesn't like a movie having the right to start a class action lawsuit.
 
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Especially since, as I said before, what we're usually talking about here are just sins of omission or misplaced emphasis.

Take THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, for instance. Yeah, it was sneaky the way some of the ads hid the fact that this version was a musical, but what the ads did show was accurate: the movie was yet another adaptation of Gaston Leroux's novel about a mysterious masked "Phantom" who is obsessed with a beautiful young opera singer. The trailer was completely accurate when it came to the spooky, romantic plot of the movie; it just neglected to mention that there was singing and dancing, too.

Is Star Trek IV a science fiction adventure or a rollicking comedy? Depending on which clips you showed in the trailer, you could make it look like either--and you would be right both times.

Is Witness a romance, a crime thriller, or a culture-clash story? Again, it's all of the above. How you package it depends on what audience you're trying to reach.

I'm editing a horror-western-fantasy for Tor now, and, yeah, I want a cover and copy that plays up the horror-fantasy angle because westerns are a tough sell these days . . . but that won't be "misleading" because those fantasy elements are an important part of the book.
 
Trekker4747 said:
Yeah. IIRC if you have a bunch of coffee beans the higher quality of those beans, after roasting, are sold as whole beans to premium retailers. The lesser quality beans are sold as medium-grade beans. The lowest quality beans are ground up and sold as coffee grounds/"instant coffee." In all of these processes you get some dust and run-off from grinding, shaking and just general flaked off crud. This stuff is bagged up in giant 50-pound sacks and sold to places that make large amounts of coffee and sell it a cheap price. Then there's the stuff that gets caught in the gears and augers of grinders, settles around machinery and mixes in with simple dust. That's the stuff that's bagged up and sold to McDonald's.
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Not quite - what a lot of places do is mix cheaper easier to grow beans with the good stuff. McDonalds doesn't and regularly rates higher than Starbucks and the like in taste tests.
 
I remember going to 48 Hours and being disapointed when it was done in 2. I was really enjoying that movie.
 
JoeZhang said:
Trekker4747 said:
Yeah. IIRC if you have a bunch of coffee beans the higher quality of those beans, after roasting, are sold as whole beans to premium retailers. The lesser quality beans are sold as medium-grade beans. The lowest quality beans are ground up and sold as coffee grounds/"instant coffee." In all of these processes you get some dust and run-off from grinding, shaking and just general flaked off crud. This stuff is bagged up in giant 50-pound sacks and sold to places that make large amounts of coffee and sell it a cheap price. Then there's the stuff that gets caught in the gears and augers of grinders, settles around machinery and mixes in with simple dust. That's the stuff that's bagged up and sold to McDonald's.
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Not quite - what a lot of places do is mix cheaper easier to grow beans with the good stuff. McDonalds doesn't and regularly rates higher than Starbucks and the like in taste tests.
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I can believe that. A few months ago I got a McDonald's coffee out of "necessity" and was very pleasantly surprised at just how good it was.
 
the G-man said:
Trekker4747 said:
That's not what this lawsuit is about. It's about the trailers and marketing for the film didn't properly sell what the movie was really about or focused on.
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Part of the problem here is that "art," and what people get out of a work of art, is subjective. Two people can view the same film and get different things out of it.

Was Moby Dick a rousing adventure story about a whale hunter or an examination on obsession? Was "to Kill a Mockingbird" a touching film about a child's life in the deep south or an indictment of small town racism in the pre-civil rights era? Etc.

Once you start letting people sue because they didn't "get" the film the same way the trailer was cut you end up with anyone who doesn't like a movie having the right to start a class action lawsuit.
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Agreed, people can percieve and infer different things from a trailer.

A trailer is designed to get people interested in seeing the film, so it always plays up the parts of the movie that will appeal to a target audiance.

A movie or even a TV series generally has many aspects to it, action, comedy, drama, romance etc... So a trailer plays up the action part of the film, doesn't mean I go in expecting a film made up of action and nothing else, even if action was the only thing they showed in it.
 
It's all about misleading the viewer though.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmkVWuP_sO0[/yt]

Was that trailer misleading? Knowing what The Shining is really about, does that trailer mis-lead a potential movie-goer on what they're getting into when they buy a ticket?

Would someone seing that trailer (were it real) be rightful in feeling mis-lead going into "The Shining" expecting a touching family drama/comedy and finding something very different when the movie got going?

Trailers are cut and built in a such a way all of the time to mis-lead people into thinking the movie is about or like something very different than it is. I've not seen "Drive" so I cannot personally say how much the trailer deviates but from this woman's reports what looks like a Fast and the Furious type of driving/action movie is apparently something that is neither.

I think it wouldn't be too much to ask if trailers were a little bit more honest in how they present a movie.
 
Does this mean I can sue the back-cover blurb writers for every paperback novel ever written?
 
ToddPence said:
Does this mean I can sue the back-cover blurb writers for every paperback novel ever written?
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No, because nobody knows who we are. :)

Seriously, though, almost every back cover blurb I've ever written has gotten the plot right. The only exceptions being a few times when the book was rewritten after the covers were printed. Or when I was working from the author's original outline, which ended up bearing little resemblance to the final book.

Now when it comes to the hype part, "An unforgettable masterpiece from the world's greatest writer!", I plead the Fifth . . . .
 
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the G-man said:
Voice of God said:
CarbonCopy said:
I remember McDonald's coffee back in the day before the lawsuit. . . . I could never figure out why they always served it so undrinkably hot. Just putting your lips to the shit was enough to let you know it would burn you.
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Apparently, it was served so hot in order to cover up the truly shitty quality of the coffee itself.
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Actually, a few months ago I found myself getting a cup and it is quite good these days.
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I heard the reason they served it so hot was to cut the cost of refills for sit-down customers. By the time the coffee cooled down to a drinkable temperature, the customer would be halfway through his meal and wouldn’t have time for more coffee.
 
Actually the only things that bother me about trailers are:

One showing the best part of the film in the trailer.

Two: Showing things that aren't apart of your movie at all.

I mean I understand material gets cut, but look at Trek for example, they have made trailers that have footage that was never a part of the film in question.

ANd htey aren't the only ones, but its something that of course everyone here should know without having to double check.

That actually does piss me off. Because it literally is false advertising.
 
I got another misleading trailer. "I Am Number Four" looked like a Michael Bay looking action movie starring the guy and the hot blonde chick fighting with super powers. I actually went to see this in theater because I was bored <:-/ Turns out there is like NO action until the last 15 minutes and the blonde chick doesn't show up until the final 10 minutes of the movie! It was like a frickin' high school drama. I thought I was watching Roswell :p
 
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