By Vivian Kane | Miscellaneous | January 2, 2015 |
By Vivian Kane | Miscellaneous | January 2, 2015 |
It’s For Your Consideration season, that time of year when a new slew of ads pop up, attempting to re-market every movie as The Most Important movie. Looking at these award-based ads, the posters for The Imitation Game stand out as being unusual among their competition. Looking at the movie’s marketing campaign, initial ads were the standard fare: pull quotes about how great the movie is, how Cumberbatchian Cumberbatch is.
But as we move into the dark heart of awards season, professional Oscar winners The Weinstein Company is taking a different approach: focusing on Alan Turing himself.
This makes sense. The Oscars are all about perception of Importance. It’s not at all unusual for a movie to be spun after its release to hit a better angle. As The Wrap points out, this re-skewing is where Weinstein is a viking.
In the past, Weinstein has been a master at finding a resonant message in the later days of a campaign, positioning “The King’s Speech” as a universal story about finding your voice, turning “The Artist” into a grander statement than it initially seemed and repositioning “Silver Linings Playbook” from a crowd-pleasing comedy to a highly personal drama about mental illness.And while The Imitation Game is a fine, perfectly serviceable movie, it’s nothing compared to the man himself. What do we think? Is this a cheap, manipulative ploy, or is it worth giving awards to the memory of Turing, even if the movie doesn’t necessarily deserve them? Or is it both? I’m going with both.