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'Valentine's Day': De-gayed or just spayed for moviegoers surprise?
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It's not exactly a secret that Bradley Cooper and Eric Dane play a gay couple in "Valentine's Day." Unless you're watching the trailer.Marketing for the movie, an everybody-in-the-pool romantic comedy opening Feb. 12, has conspicuously underplayed -- OK, not played -- the relationship between their characters. Dane is barely present in the trailers, which run the misdirection of having you suspect that Cooper and Julia Roberts -- as his seatmate on a cross-country flight -- are destined for one another.
New Line Studio, for its part, has said it wants the Cooper-Dane coupling to be a surprise for moviegoers. Unfortunately, the gay plot point is the worst kept secret on the web and has already been spoiled around the blogoshere. (Zap2it also now included in that mad spoiler list, so if you've reached this point in the article and are peeved at us then we apologize. The popcorn is on us.)
But we get that with a huge cast and a running time of just 90 minutes, "Valentine's Day" isn't going to devote a ton of screen time to any of its half-dozen or so love stories. And we also understand that the default position for a movie trailer is "misleading."
But the scrubbing of the gay story line -- as noted by The Frisky, Cinematical and others of late -- from previews is being cited as a piece of a larger trend in which gay themes are downplayed in selling movies to audiences. Heck, it even happened with the trailer for "A Single Man," which is about Colin Firth's character mourning the loss of his lover, played by Matthew Goode.
Why does it happen? We have no idea, other than the to our minds outdated notion that gay = scary to a lot of people. Might some people be turned off by playing up (or even acknowledging) a gay story line in a big-studio rom-com? Sure. It happens. But we'd also bet that just about as many people would welcome it.
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'Valentine's Day' countdown
Photo credits: New Line
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you ever think it was surprise in the movie's plot and now its spoiled? the less given away in the trailer the better i say
Oh look... another in a long line of things that have been SPOILED for me by Zap2it. Thanks, as usual, for nothing. When will you learn to warn people of spoilers? I need to stop coming to this stupid website.
'Will and Grace' Obama as president, can we finally get rid of the "most people are afraid of minorities" story lines!
I'm much more likely to see it now that I know that it does have queer characters in it. I wasn't going to see otherwise.
Definitely want to see the Colin Firth one, now, too.
Why the hell is the existence of queer characters in a film a spoiler in and of itself? What happens to them, sure, but their existence? Give me a break.
I was pissed when the movie ended without a single gay kiss. But then again, a guy in the row in front of me started to walk out while spewing gay pejoratives when he realized the gay sub-plot-line. His girlfriend stopped him and brought him back. This was in the uber-liberal village of nyc.
After a lot of thought, I realized I would actually rather have a bunch of homophobes get ambushed at the movies. At least that way they get exposed to it. After a while, they'll get so used it that pretending to want to walk out of a movie will seem almost as stupid as it does to me.