A permanent solution for tinnitis…

Quietus. I’m sure it works—but isn’t a bit extreme?

“For who would bear the whips and scorns of time / ... When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?”

Life lessons from The Men Who Stare at Goats

On my birthday a couple of years ago, Jenn and I went out to see The Men Who Stare at Goats, which had just come out. Now that movies are $13 a pop, we see a lot more of them on DVD than in the theater, but I was taken by the title of this one, and the tagline: “No Goats. No Glory.”

The movie is pretty loopy, but it contains some grains of genuine wisdom. Here’s Lyn Cassady, the US Army psyops officer played by George Clooney:

“Bob, have you ever heard of optimum trajectory? Your life is like a river and if you are aiming for a goal that is not your destiny, you will always be swimming against the current. Young guy who wants to be a stock car driver—it’s not going to happen. Little Anne Frank wants to be a high school teacher—tough titty, Anne, it’s not your destiny. But you will go on to move the hearts and minds of millions. Find out what your destiny is and the river will carry you.”

There’s a lot of truth in that. Euell Gibbons wanted to be a novelist, but his book was gradually taken over by detailed accounts of wild foods and how to prepare them. Before long he had written Stalking the Wild Asparagus. Alexander Graham Bell thought the telephone would be used mainly to listen to music (and there is a wonderful description in Proust of the narrator listening to an opera on the new device). Avon’s Skin So Soft was intended to, well, make your skin soft, but someone discovered that it also made an excellent insect repellent. Rather than bury that fact, Avon started running commercials promoting it for that use.

Letting the river carry you is just another way of saying: Listen to the customer. Promote the uses and the benefits that are important to the customer, not to you. Because when it comes to the customer and her problems, she is smarter than you are.

Giant heads in the clouds

Marketing is a craft, not an art. One proof is that you don’t always have to be creative or original. In fact, that can even be detrimental.

Why? Because marketing is all about getting results, and marketing professionals have been testing different methods for getting results for generations. Can you do better than they do based on the idea you had in the shower this morning? Well, maybe, but the odds are against it.

If you’re a movie studio that has just spent tens of millions of dollars on a movie, you really want results—and posters are one of your most important ways of doing that. So it’s not surprising that studios have fallen back on a variety of tried and true formats. (This one has been dubbed “Tiny People on the Beach, Giant Heads in the Clouds.")

What can we learn from this? We could conclude that the more money is involved in a project, the more formulaic it is likely to be. But on the positive side, we might note that these formulaic movie posters actually do a good job of conveying what the movie will be like. And at least for me, seeing these dozens of posters grouped by category makes me realize that I have a high tolerance for formula. On some level I’m aware that I’ve seen this format dozens of times before, yet I still find myself wanting to see some of these movies.

50 documentaries to see

Yes, I know that’s not the complete title. But the title is what I like least about Morgan Spurlock’s project 50 Documentaries to See Before You Die. A title like that creates not only a sense of obligation but a sense of impending mortality. It’s not really necessary to say “before you die.” I’m not going to see them after I die, am I?

The upside is that, at least for most us, seeing 50 documentaries is not an impossible task. A motivated person could do it in a month while holding down a full-time job. The same could not be said for projects like the one posed by the book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die.

Various people have complained about notable films that are missing from the list, or about the fact that nearly all of them are American, and quite recent. Like some of the critics, I would have liked to see Hearts and Minds, Harlan County USA, and the 7 Up films included—not to mention Burden of Dreams, which I haven’t seen anyone else mention. But like this PBS reviewer, I think that the interest and discussion the series stirs up makes it more than worthwhile.

The complete list of 50 films is at the New York Times. Although I don’t consider myself a documentary buff, I’ve seen 16 of them, including Hoop Dreams and the rest of the top five, plus some memorable films like Grizzly Man, The Fog of War, The King of Kong, Waltz with Bashir, and Inside Job. I look forward to seeing more.

Crazy, Stupid, Title

Am I the only one who is bothered by this? (Well, no, as it turns out.)

A poster recently appeared at the Clinton-Washington stop on the C line, informing me that Steve Carell is starring in a movie called Crazy Stupid Love.

So far so good. I like Steve Carell well enough, and the movie is getting good reviews.

Then I learn that the actual title of the movie (despite the lack of commas on the poster) is Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Why? Why? Why? Why is it that a studio can spend millions of dollars making a movie and not spare a few bucks to hire a reasonably bright middle-school student to check that the title doesn’t violate basic rules of American punctuation?

It occurred to me, as the article linked above suggests, that some might say that “crazy” and “stupid” are not actually adjectives modifying “love” but that all three words are just jumbled together because of their associations. It’s possible, but it would be weird. And I doubt it.

I have not been this annoyed by a movie title since Jacknife with Robert DeNiro.