Another Blah Movie Weekend

September is just the worst time to be a film critic.  It feels like a slow day at Wal-Mart all month long, where every time you hope something interesting is going to happen, and yet nothing does.  So far "Salinger" has not appeared in any of my local theaters and I didn't get an invite to "Riddick," so I've pretty much been at home working on Oscar related books and reviews.  I did manage to rant about Disney's "The Little Mermaid: Second Screen Experience" that they are releasing next week over at Examiner, but so far nothing new to see.  I mentioned this enough times on Twitter that a couple of teenage girls tweeted me that "One Direction: This Is Us" is actually being re-released this weekend with twenty additional minutes of footage which will include four songs that weren't in the first cut of the film.

I assume these girls (who I'm pretty sure I know personally) brought this up because they want another review of the movie.  One that hopefully is more positive this time around.  Well, sorry to disappoint you two young girls, but unless the ticket is paid for I'm not seeing that movie again.  In fact, I want to take this moment to point out that such a release actually makes me like the movie even less.  It just makes it so obvious what "One Direction: This Is Us" REALLY is: A product to sell!  Alright, yeah, in a sense all movies are products that are sold, but this one has a specific audience that the studios knew wanted to see this and they planned the whole release around them.  Since this is essentially a promotional film they released it on opening day to those fans screaming fans, waited a couple of weeks so that kids could save their money once more, and now they are going to sell the movie to those same exact people.

If this were a real movie it could remain in the box office top ten without having to resort to cheap marketing tricks like this, but since it isn't a good movie this is the only way to make more money off it.  Heck, the studio for the Justin Bieber movie did the exact same thing in the exact same time frame.  The only time a new cut of a film is worth while is when several years have gone by and the director has had time to reflect on the film and make some new tweaks which he/she hopes will make the movie better.  In the case of George Lucas we know that sometimes its best to leave well enough alone, but in the case of Peter Jackson we also know there are some clear benefits to going back to the original work and tweaking it a little.  But "One Direction: This Is Us" is not going to benefit from that extra twenty minutes nor does the two week span give Morgan Spurlock any reason to revisit it.  This is a studio marketing ploy, plain and simple.

In fact, because it's a slow weekend I'll upload a review of a REAL music documentary you can watch this weekend as opposed to seeing "One Direction: This Is Us" again!