Quibi, to put it politely, had an unstable start and for the worst of all possible reasons. Yes, he was unlucky enough to jump into the beginning of the pandemic, not exactly a time when people clamored to watch short films on their phones while traveling to work. However, more than that, the concept itself was based on a fundamental market miscalculation. Do people in 2020 watch a ton of short content? Of course. Is much of it, at least, by any civilized standard, corny, nasty, degraded, and sensational trash on YouTube? Absolutely. So Jeffrey Katzenberg, using the leftover logic of the 20th century, thought that if people now consume entertainment in short bursts, and a large part of that is “bad,” wouldn’t they turn to a video streaming platform to search for shorts? form content which is Okay?
Uh no. On YouTube, people I like it looking at the trash They’re not necessarily immune to something of quality, however there is an addiction to junk food, the dimension of “America’s most disgusting home videos” to a host of things that are now going viral. The short films shown by Quibi are equivalent to a boutique selection of craft content. And while it would be foolish to say that there is something wrong with that, it may be foolish to pretend that there is a more voracious hunger for what exists.
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But Quibi is now showing a bright and shiny portion of fun that amounts to a bait and a switch, and, perhaps, a paradigm that could point the way to the future of short film application. “The Princess Bride,” a celebrity remake in-house of the 1987 fantasy-adventure classic, filmed by dozens of famous actors who step in and out of the film’s iconic roles, all directed by Jason Reitman, May Try A ideal antidote for Quibi Who wants to see a short film?? blues.
The new “princess fiancee” is that good old thing, a long movie … but shown in short pieces. It is a film transformed into an insta-pop series, all based on the idea of getting used to and addicted to the rhythm of short films. “The Princess Bride” will reach its audience in small chapters, with a new one released every day for two weeks.
Can you help rescue Quibi? It certainly won’t hurt. Is there something good about it?
Based on Chapter One, which premiered today, I’m hooked enough to want to move on. It’s not that he’s in the business of judging long-lasting entertainment based on its four-minute opening, but here’s what you can already say about Quibi’s “Princess Bride”. It takes something we’ve seen during the coronavirus, beginning with the broadcast of the “One World: Together at Home” benefit concert on April 18, and turning it into an impromptu art form. Stars, all in disguise, at home, against domestic scenarios that sometimes look elegant but generally look like … at home, doing antics in an informal way that is both “active” and not active, professional and after hours. In quarantine, these actors have never been more like us, albeit in a subtle, shaggy way that allows us to feast on all things about them that are not like us.
“The Princess Bride” is the perfect vehicle for this pandemic aesthetic of hair-pulling celebrities (or, in the case of Jack Black, his medieval beards), because the original film was itself an elaborate fantasy game, in that the actors embraced the romantic innocence of their storybook roles and, at the same time, undermined them as if they were engaged in a cunning vaudeville parody of the old movie’s sincerity.
In a strange way, the original “Princess Bride” also looked like a home movie. William Goldman’s novel was published in 1973, four years before “Star Wars”, and he spent the next decade trying to make the film. When it all came together, Hollywood had entered the era of advanced visual effects. All of which made “The Princess Bride” play as a winky version of “Star Wars” minus the FX.
The Cliffs of Madness set, where Mandy Patinkin’s Iñigo Montoya, with his desperate kitsch accent and musketeer hair, first challenges the masked man of Cary Elwes in a duel to the death, looks like it was built with Styrofoam rocks from coal that wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1940 series. Intentionally tacky? Hard to say However, part of the idiosyncratic wonder of the film is that the sets, or at least many of them, are not magical enough to transport us, so we depend on being transported by something else: the power of our imagination. . (This is how many studio system movies worked. When you watch “The Wizard of Oz,” you know you are not in a real forest, and as a result it seems more creepy than any other forest.)
Quibi’s “Princess Bride” takes this aesthetic to its logical extreme, to the point that the thing would not look out of place … on YouTube. In the first four minutes, here is the opinionated Adam Sandler, doing a very good impersonation of Peter Falk’s grandfather who reads storybooks, with Fred Savage, now 43, repeating the role of the grandson, which he then passes to Josh Gad . . Princess Buttercup and Westley are now Chris Pine and Annabelle Wallis, and a moment later they are Tiffany Haddish and Common, and while this sounds freaky and pranky and a bit postmodern, and something like that, as soon as Haddish and Common arrive, the two of them Eyes look at each other with a burning devotion that flipness fades and we are … immersed.
Perhaps not so completely in “the story” (at least, not yet, although this is not a bad level of immersion for three minutes), but in the other story Quibi’s “Princess Bride” is telling: the story of why How a lot of us love this movie so much, and how we love it, like a fairy tale for a world that no longer believes in fairy tales. When Hugh Jackman appears as Prince Humperdinck, he wears a dim sum vaporizer as a crown.
Play dress up and pretend to be someone you are not. That is the definition of acting, it is the definition of a lot of children’s games, and it may be one of the key definitions in life. (Shakespeare thought so). Quibi’s “promised princess” appears to be a threadbare mosaic of role-playing games of the most exuberantly exhibitionist type. But will it all add up to something? I will inform later if it seems like a unique novelty or a way that I can live happily ever after, or at least enough to inject life into Quibi.
