No one asked my opinion of the movie “Smiley”, so I’m not really going to give you one. Instead, this:
Way back in college, one of my friends managed to get himself subscribed to one of the craziest communist newspapers ever published. He never paid for it once, but it kept arriving, not necessarily weekly, but definitely periodically. For all we know, it is still being sent to his mailbox at the university dorms to this day. It was published by (yet another) splinter group of communists whose policies were so far off-base that they had offended every other brand of communism available from your usual newspaper-publishing/labor-organizing variety to the riot-inciting/bomb-hurling variety. If you're a communist, chances are there's a party out there for you and the six others who share the same exact same opinions but not for these guys. These people could not find a single friend at the fringes of the radical left and like so many others before them, chose to start their own organization. Their paper was called something like the Spartacus Youth Observer or something that was probably actually a lot crazier1)
This paper came complete with “unique” typesetting, some of the roughest and nastiest newsprint seen outside of the Soviet Union, blurry photographs that bled into a single gray mass, poorly-drawn cartoons that made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and it didn't particularly matter what it was all about because the ink just poured off onto your hands rendering the entire thing unreadable seconds after opening it. Lacking any semblance of a budget or sane reporters, the stories were generally regional and involved no investigation. Typically, they were random accusations thrown at local industry that included no statements of even publicly-available facts and certainly no interviews with those involved. Otherwise they retold national/international news stories off the wire2) and dragged them so far to the left that they fell off the face of the earth.
Two articles from this paper remain forever etched in my memory. The first accused Ralph Nader, consumer rights advocate, Green Party candidate, and all-around leftist himself, of being a fervent racist. Aside from never publicly stating his policy on killing whitey, there were of course no facts to back this two-page rant. The other article of note is one that defended NAMBLA. You may at this point pause and reflect on what you just read…
Are you done reflecting? Good. Let's review: NAMBLA is the National Man-Boy Love Association which is working hard to bring social acceptance to child molestation. With that in mind, why the fuck would this communist newspaper published daily in outer space choose to defend this organization? Well, the answer to that is actually pretty simple: can you think of any political party happy to have such people on board? Basically, this party needs recruits and there are easily more pedophiles in America than there are communists…
So I guess I have to talk about that movie now even though it doesn't particularly interest me. Oh, the marketing of the movie interests me because it's pretty much like selling communism to members of NAMBLA…
This movie not going to be good but movies don't have to be good to make money3). Film making may not be their strong point, but they are willing to exploit an audience that no one else is willing to touch. Targeting an otherwise bound-to-be-forgotten movie4) to a small audience is better than nothing. There are more people who have now heard of this project through non-traditional marketing than there are people among the diverse masses willing to sift through the low-budget horror films that clog the bilge of Netflix Instant. It's not like this has the budget for a television campaign or anything. They know exactly what they’re doing. Even better, it cost them nothing to do it…
Will it work? We'll see…