Even a lot of educated lawyers and people who understand the law will often tell you lawsuits are a big waste of time, and you usually don’t have to look too far to find laughable litigation someone’s filed somewhere.
The McDonalds hot coffee suit often comes to mind in these situations, as does Geffen Records suing Neil Young because he didn’t come up with a hit record.
At the time, Young was going through a very experimental phase musically, and David Geffen thought he was making bad albums on purpose to make him look stupid, and it’s a lawsuit Geffen now regrets.
Now a woman’s suing the distributor of the movie Drive, because it wasn’t Fast Five? Apparently this is true, and according to reports on IndieWire and The Hollywood Reporter, a woman named Sarah Deming in Michigan is suing FilmDistrict because was expecting a Fast and Furious style movie, and it obviously wasn’t.
The suit is claiming that FilmDistrict “promoted the film as very similar to the Fast and Furious, or similar, series of movies. Drive bore very little similarity to a chose, or race action film… having very little driving in the motion picture.”
She’s also suing on the grounds the film is anti-Semitic, and it “substantially contained extreme gratuitous defamatory dehumanizing racism directed against member of the Jewish faith, and thereby promoted criminal violence against members of the Jewish faith.”
She’s seeking a refund on her movie ticket, and is apparently also going to lead some crusade against false advertising in movies, hoping others who’ve been similarly duped will be part of a class-action lawsuit.
IndieWire showed trailers for Fast Five and Drive back to back in response to this nonsense, showing the clear difference between the two in case there’s still any confusion here, and as far as the anti-Semitism, a character in the film uses a racial slur once, which “doesn’t make [director] Nicolas Winding Refn the next Leni Reifenstahl.”
It’s doubtful any of this nonsense is going to go anywhere, in fact, FilmDistrict should sue Deming back for being an idiot, but if that was truly against the law, half the population would be on death row right now.
I’ve seen a lot of god awful movies in my day, but I’m not gonna sue Michael Bay, Joel Schumacher, or Brett Ratner because deceptive advertising would lead anyone to believe their movies were good.
What can I sue for anyways? My two hours back? Having my intelligence insulted and my braincells wasted? If I could do this, no Hollywood hack would be able to make another movie again, they’d be too tied up in court.
IndieWire also added the hilarious comment, “In the meantime, might we suggest that Deming lower her blood pressure by checking out Pixar’s latest charming family tale, The Human Centipede?”
