Fran Magazine: Issue #77

Pour one out for the Regal movie quotes pre-roll, plus Maestro news

Thanks for reading Fran Magazine, a biweekly blog by Fran Hoepfner (me). This issue is for all subscribers, paid and not, as well as general audiences. I am currently experimenting with making all Wednesday issues free and Sunday issues paid. If you have relevant thoughts on that, feel free to sound off in the comments. Consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription for access to more Fran Magazine. It’s worth it!

Maestro moment

It’s been a minute since we sat together and had a Maestro moment. In case you’re new to the concept of a Maestro moment, Maestro moment is when we sit back and reflect on Bradley Cooper’s forthcoming Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro and consider whether his prosthetic nose is “okay” and what he’s doing with his voice and what’s going on any time Carey Mulligan does an American accent. Maestro premiered at the Venice Film Festival this past week where Bradley Cooper did not walk the red carpet or do a photo op helping Carey Mulligan get out of a boat, but he was in Venice “on vacation” with the mother of his child Irina Shayk. I bet that’s just a coincidence.

Early reviews of Maestro seem promising enough, hovering right around the B- zone that all but guarantee I can milk this bit through the end of the year. In the meantime, there are some new photos from the film. Gaze on Maestro and despair.

making my bf take a pic of me

The Maestro reviews also reminded me of an excellent question from reader Tim:

Often I find myself caught up in the allure and intrigue of the prestige biopic only to be let down by familiar tropes that seem to take shortcuts through good filmmaking in order to satisfy a craving for gossip or - even more simply - the experience of a general cultural recognition. 

I don't mean to knock gossip or a good, long look in a mirror, but the subgenre always seems to leave me wanting for more artfulness. I wonder what you think about these patterns? When is it worth overlooking tired biopic tropes in favor of basking in singular, immersive performances of historical figures? Is there any other appeal that I'm missing? 

I love this question, and I’m grateful to have so many sharp, funny readers of Fran Magazine. The term “biopic” is reaching a point of cultural flatness, like “autofiction” and “hipster,” where — upon seeing this word written out — I have no idea what is actually being said. There are a ton of movies I love and respect that probably qualify as biopic:

• The Lost City of Z (James Gray)

• Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh)

• Benediction (Terence Davies)

• Mahler (Ken Russell)

• Bright Star (Jane Campion)

These films work not only because they are made by “real filmmakers” who are interested in their subject outside of what they are most famous for being or doing, but also because they have all have an artful direction that enhances the themes of what their subject did. Possibly what is most telling about these biopics is that their filmmakers would argue against that label and say something pedantic like, “It’s a film about JMW Turner; not a biopic of JMW Turner.” Leigh actually does say this almost exactly in the director’s commentary of Mr. Turner. He says something similar in the director’s commentary of Topsy-Turvy, which you could also argue is a biopic of Gilbert and Sullivan. Rather than consider it a “movie about musical theater,” Leigh said to look at it as a movie about “men working.”

That said, I first saw Mr. Turner in the mess of 2014 when I also saw movies like The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game, and I would have more willingly bunched them together as movies about “misunderstood male geniuses.” Time and not being 23 has done a lot of good for me, but I think the worth of a biopic really sits behind the camera more than it does in front of it. I tend to be a bit more generous towards biopic as a genre than I am autobiopic or — the worst of these — 90-minute fluff documentary about a cultural figure we all love (supposedly).

That said, however, I think each film listed or mentioned above does occasionally slip and give way to telling-not-showing, eliding “character development” when someone just stating a Wikipedia fact will do. That’s not to knock these films. I just think these are often unavoidable tics. Even in a movie like TÁR (ostensibly also a biopic!), you get that silly Adam Gopnik opening that functions like the most rote part of any biography.

It can often be hard to tell based on marketing and/or trailer alone whether or not a biopic is “worth it” — e.g. will have something to say and show outside a fun fact about its subject worth rattling off at a party. The things I look for in such films boil down to two points:

1. The director and/or writer: Is someone who I think is interesting/smart/artful/insane at the helm of this? I have to confess I have little interest in Ferrari the man or Ferrari the car, but I love many films by Michael Mann. This is why films like The Theory of Everything or The Imitation Game don’t really appeal to me — who tf are these guys? Why do I care what they think? The more ostensibly relevant any movie tries to make itself, the less I care.¹

2. The POV: Is this movie about the most important thing the director thinks this person did? I (shamefully?) love the movies of Joe Wright, but I can’t stand The Darkest Hour — a limiting, uninteresting biopic of Winston Churchill during WWII featuring a career worst Gary Oldman. Some people think he’s great in that movie. He won an Oscar (lol)! Rarely, however, does a performance transcend a film that can’t live up to its center.

“It’s all happening…” is no longer happening

Over the weekend, I got a startling email from longtime reader Sam:

think we need an emergency ep on Regal movie quotes ad. It is being reported on Reddit and can confirm today I didn’t see it. The Regal movie quotes ad may be over! Would love a breakdown issue: favorite line readings, quotes you would add, what should replace it.

I went to Reddit myself and saw similar Regal moviegoers in a state of relative panic. I put out my own feelers². It seemed things were official: the Regal movie quotes ad is gone.

If you are not a Regal Cinemas moviegoer, then perhaps you’ve lived a pure life devoid of the charmless, quotes-dense pre-roll that plays before each movie at Regal Cinemas. (For those out of the annoying moviegoer loop — why are you reading Fran Magazine, first of all — “pre-roll” is the name for the cinema-centric ad that shows before a movie reminding you to turn off your cell phone, or whatever.) You may be an AMC Stubs member, in which case you’re lucky to have the highly meme-ified Nicole Kidman commercial. “We come to this place to tell ourselves stories to live,” or whatever the fuck she says. I have a theory that the people who love to, like, do the pledge of allegiance or dress up like Nicole and make TikToks have not even seen Birth³ but that’s a topic for another day. The Nicole Kidman commercial, at the very least, grasps for the unknowable meaningfulness of going to the movie theater. The Regal Cinemas quotes commercial, on the other hand, is this thing:

To give a brief background of my Regal Cinemas-going experience, I grew up nowhere near a Regal Cinemas. We had an AMC, we had a Loews, we had a Cinemark. We had the independently owned Arlington Theater (IYKYK) and further out, the Pickwick (where I have only seen once movie in my life — sad). When I moved to Chicago as an adult, I divided my time between the Music Box (<3), the Landmark Century, and Regal Webster Place. I most often went to the Regal with my friend Debi — I lived in Lakeview and she lived in Wicker Park, and it was the most convenient for both of us. Not that you need to know that. At that point in time, the Regal Cinemas pre-roll was the infamous rollercoaster.

When I moved to New Jersey, I started going to all sorts of theaters, from multiplex to Metrograph, but I lived geographically closest to an AMC. I saw my last movie in theaters pre-pandemic at an AMC (The Way Back — pretty good). When we all emerged, kind of, from pandemic living and the movie theaters reopened, I got tipped off to the new Regal location in lower Manhattan which was “new and often deserted.” It was there I began taking part in multiplex culture again, sure, but it’s also where I was first introduced to the Regal Cinemas movie quotes pre-roll.

Anyway: the current ad, posted so far above that it almost doesn’t even matter now, depicts a group of friends and (randomly available) Danny Trejo attending a movie at Regal Cinemas, speaking exclusively in famous movie quotes. It took me at least a dozen times watching the ad to figure out what they were supposed to all be quoting: some of these lines are delivered like exact impressions; others have a more personal spin on it. The ad is beautifully incoherent, neither funny nor iconic, but I think I speak for a number of Regal Cinemas-goers when I say that we’ve all been Stockholm Syndromed into believing that this ad is good. Most everyone I see movies with has this ad memorized, each reciting our favorite deliveries. In light of the ad no longer running, it feels disrespectful to art and film both to rank the performances. That said, I will give you a best and a worst.

Best (tied): “It’s all happening…” girl, quoting from Almost Famous. I love her. She nails it. Automatic charisma. It’s all downhill from there. That said, I have great affection for “Which is nice/beautiful friendship” aka “The Regal Employee” character, if only because he’s responsible for pulling it all together and he does a strong job.

Worst: “She’s beauty and she’s grace…” Charisma vacuum, sadly.

For a long time I thought about filming an alternative version of the Regal movie quotes ad with quotes from movies and trailers that I find particularly memorable, if not inane. The list I came up with looks something like this":

• “We gotta get over on all these guys.” — Amy Adam is American Hustle. I wrote about this in a Sunday Dispatch a while ago, but I remained a stalwart, if not ironic defender of American Hustle for far longer than necessary, and then I tried to make Phil watch it over the winter and we both found ourselves consumed with second-hand embarrassment. It might really be one of the worst movies of the past decade. But “We gotta get over on all these guys” continues to live rent-free. Maybe this could be used in the pre-roll during a little scene in which a couple has to climb over a whole family to get to their seat.

• “What are we, some type of Suicide Squad?” — Will Smith in Suicide Squad. Speaks for itself. Remember when Will Smith hit Chris Rock at the Oscars? That was so crazy!!! I don’t know where this goes in the pre-roll. One of you can figure that out for me.

• “It’s been a wacko day… a wacko few weeks, actually.” — Eddie Redmayne as whoever he was in The Good Nurse (he was not the titular Good Nurse). I’m not even sure this is actually what he says, but the feeling behind it really left an impression.

• “Including my son?” — Elizabeth Debicki in Tenet. This line is mocked relentlessly by Tenet-haters EVERYWHERE. It occurs during a scene when the main characters of Tenet learn that if they fail at their job, the world will end and everyone will be killed. Debicki goes: “Including my son?” I can’t remember if that’s a question, but either way she seems unclear as to whether “everyone” means “everyone,” including her son. People are like, “This is a great example of how Christopher Nolan is stupid.” WRONG — this character has just been SHOT in the STOMACH and you want her to be able to understand the concept of “everyone on earth”? Grow up!!! I’d like to see you do a pop quiz after being shot in the stomach.

• “I love lamp.” — Steve Carell in Anchorman. I don’t care for this movie or this performance, but I do think it was a “better time,” all considered, when people were saying this constantly

I have no big ideas about what should replace the Regal ad, but here are my last thoughts on it, seeing as how I didn’t know it would be my last time seeing it when I went to go see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. The Regal movie quotes pre-roll was bad in a way that was not “iconic” or “memeable” — it was simply not good in a way that felt profound. Was this thing market tested? Did people ever find it charming? Valuable? I have no idea. In a combination of jealousy and skepticism, I find myself altogether repulsed by both the Nicole Kidman AMC ad and the fervent culture around it. Now that is something that feels market tested to death. The Regal movie quotes pre-roll was so dire and uncool that it briefly returned the concept of “going to the movies” as a regular thing in life, neither trendy nor Letterboxd-core. It was a graphic t-shirt of an ad. It was embarrassing, and while I love going to the movies, sometimes going to the movies is embarrassing. Even when heartbreak feels good in a place like that. Whatever replaces it is going to feel much less like a mistake, and I will mourn the movie quotes pre-roll which was nothing if not regrettably itself.

1. By my count, there is only one movie worthy of its own importance in the past few years, and it’s Laura Poitras’s All The Beauty & the Bloodshed.

2. Asked Phil, who saw Equalizer 3 this weekend and confirmed there was no Regal ad.

3. Okay, I only just saw Birth this year, but I am not an AMC Stubs member.