MEDIA OVERLOAD !!!!

At the start of this month, a cinephile friend of mine suggested that I watch the documentary Where To Invade Next by Michael Moore. I had no idea what the documentary was about and i trusted my source and gave it a watch the same day. I must confess that it was one of the best and most informative documentaries I had seen for a while. As I finished my viewing , a thought crossed my mind

"would I derive the same amount of pleasure out of this documentary if i already knew the subject of the same???"

 I am sure that I would have enjoyed the content nonetheless, but the surprise element of the subject  itself drew me on to the piece in its initial moments and there was a sense of anticipation of what to expect next.

In the age of the World wide web, we have data overload and Films are no exception. The medium of Films and the media content surrounding it have increased exponentially over time and we being the slave of the medium try to gobble up as much as we can. During my childhood, we possessed a VCR and that was my introduction to movies and particularly foreign (majorly Hollywood) movies. The guy from the video store would reach our house each Thursday with a suitcase full of the latest Cassettes and he served as our movie guide who recommended the latest blockbusters or a hidden gem which must not be overlooked. We used to put our faith in his words and more often than not we were satisfied. The only other way to know about a movie was through word of mouth from fellow film lovers around us. Then the Cable TV revolution happened and there were a few channels which started to air Hollywood movies. The newspaper carried a list of movies which were to be played each month along with the timings. I used to watch the promo for the films on those channels and decided which one to watch. That started the film buff in me to raise its head and slowly I had been exposed to a library of films from my childhood to understand the basic genres in film making, to have a favorite Hero/heroine/Director/Film (It has changed over time as has the realisation that there can’t be ONE favourite in any form of ART ) and to revel at the storytelling and the magic of presenting it on celluloid. One of the major contributing factors in all of this was that there was very little media or Noise surrounding the movies I watched and I judged them as I saw it. The thrill and excitement of watching a Dinosaur  for the first time in Jurrasic Park or the sheer dread of of watching the climax of Pshyco were genuine emotions which can never be replicated as no media or no reviews prepared me for the same.

The world moved on and the online media started to gain more importance and we were subjected to the INTERNET. Right from the crappy dial up days of internet in our home, I went about reading about movies and expand my horizon. There was so much to choose from. I could easily read multiple reviews for the same movie from different sources online and maybe even coming from different countries. How cool was that???? Then came Youtube. Suddenly everybody and anybody who had a webcam and even a remote interest in movies started to discuss movies online and review them. So there were the professional critics and the enthusiasts who posted their video reviews and we had to judge for ourselves who could be right. Then came the most volatile of media – Social Media – and everyone had an opinion about a certain movie and expressed them in their walls or Tweeted them to the universe. Thus , within a span of less than a decade, I was already having countless opinions and reviews for a particular movie which clogged my head and somehow started to make me biased towards it either in a positive or a negative way even before I had watched the film.

The studios are not far behind in adding to this Media overload either. Films today are an expensive affair and studios pump a lot of money in their films and it is natural to expect them to have a decent return on their investment. The only way – other than merchandising-  to do it is by marketing the film as much as possible. A trailer of a film used to be the first look at a film and it used to help at arriving at the first impressions of a movie. But a trailer took time to make and it required the studio to shoot a reasonable part of the movie to get the trailer form. But we already are an insatiable lot and nothing is enough for us. Thus, the studios came up with the ingenious idea of TEASERS. Just as the name suggests, it teases the audience with just a bare glimpse of the movie to pique the interest of the masses and ensure that the Netizens would do the rest for them. There would be whole 30 min videos on these teasers and what to expect of the film and we would hear them and start building anticipation for the film. Then a few months later, there would be the 1^st trailer and then the 2^nd and then the FINAL and by this time we almost have watched the movie and built up the story a few times in our head before we arrive at the theatre and actually start to watch the opening credits. We are already expecting stuff to happen and feel disappointed if the actual result is not as grand as we built it to be. We are not satisfied even if the movie is not really that bad and even if something grand happens , we are not really as thrilled as we should be as we had already been expecting it after watching the latest Video review on the internet. The charm is all but lost. The charm of really WATCHING a film for what it actually is rather than for what we built it up to be.

As I started to introspect further, I realized that the best movie watching experiences I had in last few years– Inception, Incendies, Ex Machina,Sleep Tight etc were those where I knew practically ZERO before starting to watch it. Thus it begs the question

HOW MUCH MEDIA IS TOO MUCH MEDIA AND ARE WE LOSING THE CHARM OF WATCHING A MOVIE??