Thursday, January 04, 2007

Focus Groups: Why Movies Suck

The LA Times has a regular feature called The Focus Group. They ask a random but diverse group of four or five people what they think of that weekend's new movies and whether they'll go see them. Frankly, I just never bothered. Who cares? But for some reason today I looked at it and it was even dumber than I expected. Their comments were stupid, the LAT didn't even bother to edit the quotes to keep the people from sounding ignorant and ungrammatical the way they would for most movie stars and the opinions expressed were so idiotic it's amazing ANY decent movie gets made in Hollywood when they use focus groups and it's even more amazing if any of those movies make money. Read it and weep.

2 comments:

priv8pete said...

That's what happened to the 3 hour rough cut of The Four Feathers. After the screening when we sat around and gave our thoughts, there were more than a few teenagers that had no idea when the film would have taken place or what countries were involved. They also said the movie was boring and slow, so the final product ended up being no better than a turd on a plate.

Michael in New York said...

Oh don't blame their age. I'm sure their parents were just as clueless. I jusdt watched the 39 version for the first time. Okay, but not very satisfying either.