Tetherd Cow Ahead

I’m bound to get bored with this sooner or later, but for now it makes me laugh.

I’m partial to a good piece of musical theatre. Call it nostalgia, or call it sentiment, but like the idea of dramas brought to life with song. I grew up in a home where my mother was constantly rehearsing for one part or another so by osmosis I know all of West Side Story, the King & I, Oliver and numerous other stellar productions of the musical theatre ouvre. Later in my life I discovered the witty brilliance of Cole Porter and then the extraordinary talent of Stephen Sondheim, who became my favourite writer of musicals. ((Sondheim did of course work with the incomparable Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story, but he really began to shine when he started to compose music for his own lyrics.))

I’ve seen a few Sondheim works performed on stage – Into the Woods; A Little Night Music; Sweeney Todd – and heard most of them as recordings. I’m always intrigued when I hear that a musical is slated for a cinema treatment because I think they can work quite well in this form. I’m especially interested when it’s Sondheim. You’ll all no doubt remember that Tim Burton made a version of Sweeney Todd for the screen some years ago, starring the inimitable Johnny Depp. It’s not one of my favourite adaptations, but I didn’t hate it either.

What was kind of bizarre about the launch publicity for that film was that the initial few trailers didn’t portray any of the characters singing. Since Sweeney Todd is closer to an operetta than a musical – that is, the whole thing is pretty much sung – to produce such a trailer is not something you achieve without a great deal of contrivance.

People who weren’t expecting the film to be a musical were widely pissed off at this piece of disingenuous pretence and there were even official complaints made about it.

Now Disney is about to release a cinematic version of Sondheim’s Into the Woods – and they’ve done the exact same thing!

WHYYYYYYY?

I find it hard to imagine the kind of discussion that must have gone on in the Disney Marketing Department’s offices to arrive at this lumpen, meaning-challenged amputee of a trailer. Nevertheless, I will give it a try.

Disney Uber Marketing Boss: What we need is a trailer that will get EVERYONE to come see the film!

Disney Uber Marketing Boss’s Executive Researcher: But our data shows that everyone except senile old people and children hate musicals.

Disney Uber Marketing Boss: Then we have to FOOL people into coming into the cinema! ((Because that always works out well.))

Disney Uber Marketing Boss’s Executive Researcher: I guess so…

Disney Uber Marketing Boss: I know! We could make a trailer that has no singing in it! Make it look like a normal film.

Disney Uber Marketing Boss’s Executive Researcher: But it’s a musical. It’s all singing. Everyone sings. All the time.

Disney Uber Marketing Boss: Surely there are some bits where they don’t actually sing?

Disney Uber Marketing Boss’s Executive Researcher: Well, yes, there are three moments in the film where the words are sort of half-spoken… and I think once or twice there may be five or six seconds where Johnny or Meryl are about to sing but haven’t quite opened their mouths…

Disney Uber Marketing Boss: Excellent. Chuck in a few special effects and a guy saying ‘In a world beyond your imagination…’ and it’s sorted! Let’s get our editor onto it!

What I don’t understand is who, exactly, their lame, half-baked, non-singing trailer is aimed at? Into the Woods is a work that is based entirely on fairy tales – do they really believe that taking the music out will give them a chance with the vast goldmine of 14-25 year olds who rock up to see Guardians of the Galaxy? Do these daft studio executives think that they’ll somehow get an opening weekend of those people who’ll be sitting there in the dark and have some kind of popcorn-infused epiphany: ‘Hey, this singing instead of dialogue is THE BOMB!!! And then text all their friends: ‘Hey G!! This musical opera thing is cray sick. I totes can’t believe I thought it was gay!’

Even more perplexingly, if the studio isn’t committed to the idea of a musical, why the fuck did they make one in the first place? It’s not exactly something you do by accident. It’s almost like they’re embarrassed by it or something.

And the thing is, I reckon you could make a really great trailer with singing – it is after all almost a music video clip. I’ll even go one step further – I believe singing should be introduced into ALL movie trailers! You have to admit – for most of them it would improve things immeasurably. And it’s not like trailers are concerned anymore with giving you any idea of what the film is like.

This season, from the people who brought you ‘The Early Bird Get’s the Right Size‘ (catapostrophe intended) we are treated to an exciting new adventure in language mangling with their wholesale invention of the word ‘giftorium’. So confused and befuddled by this word was I, that I had to look it up just to make sure there was no obscure Latin usage with which I was not familiar. This is typical of about the first hundred Google hits: ((There’s nothing quite like seeing all these search results in one long stream to help you understand how marketing press releases get used in the wild…))

Oh my fucking absinthe-addled maiden aunt. This should be a crime against humanity. Think of the poor children.

The person who has just been appointed to the head of Australia’s once ((I say ‘once’ because, like everything else in this country lately, it seems that the idiotic buffoons who aspire to be some kind of ‘government’ here, are hell bent on making it the laughingstock of the educated world.)) world-admired science organisation, the CSIRO, ((You know WiFi? The CSIRO invented that. Yeah, WIFI!)) believes in magic.

Yes dear Cowpokes, Dr Larry Marshall, a man whose scientific credentials barely cast little more than a dim glow from within the deep shadow of his business escapades, and whose tumbling grammatical trainwreck of a biography uses expressions like ‘leverage’ and ‘serial entrepreneur’, wants to create water dowsing machines.

Larry says he would…

…like to see the development of technology that would make it easier for farmers to dowse or divine for water on their properties.

“I’ve seen people do this with close to 80 per cent accuracy and I’ve no idea how they do it,” he said. “When I see that as a scientist, it makes me question, ‘is there instrumentality that we could create that would enable a machine to find that water?’

You know what, Larry? When you see that – as a scientist – you should actually ask yourself why no real scientists believe, for even a nano-second, that dowsing works.

You have no idea how they do it? My suggestion is that you look up the ideomotor effect and watch this video. Several times, if you don’t get it on the first run through.