Posted on April 21, 2011 at 3:59 pm
Reposting for Easter — Have a blessed celebration, everyone!
Ben-Hur
For kids, the Veggie Tales have the delightful ‘Twas the Night Before Easter. And while it does not have much to do with Easter beyond the title song, Fred Astaire and Judy Garland make “Easter Parade” a family classic everyone will enjoy.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q77wqDDUDsc
Posted on April 21, 2011 at 2:00 pm
In addition to previously recommended Earth Day movies, take a look at these gorgeous documentaries about the creatures with whom we share this great planet:
1. March of the Penguins This worldwide sensation takes us to Antarctica, where these elegant birds triumph over brutal cold to protect their fragile eggs and tender chicks.
2. Meerkat Manor
3. Winged Migration
4. Microcosmos
5. Growing Up Wild, Vol. 1: Amazing Baby Animals
Jennifer Merin has a great list of Earth Day documentaries, too.
Posted on April 21, 2011 at 8:00 am
Morgan Spurlock took on fast food in “Super Size Me.” He was funny, direct, and at times outraged as he tried to live for a month on McDonald’s “supersize” portions, and I liked his even-handedness in taking on the consumers as well as the providers, calling on us to take responsibility for ourselves. His television series, “30 Days,” had people (including Spurlock himself) immersing themselves for a month in a culture outside their comfort zones. Again, despite tone that seemed highly satiric at times, the show was about the middle, the gray areas, the nuances. His new film is called “POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.” Yes, he made a movie about product placement that is entirely financed by product placement.
Spurlock spoke to me about the movie.
You were right! At the screening you said that everyone there would never look at the world the same way again. We walked out of the theater and the first thing I saw was a banner on a building I had never noticed before.
And it’s going to get worse — and better at the same time!
Advertising is everywhere. Amazon has just discounted the Kindle for customers who are willing to look at ads.
And it’s such a small discount! Shouldn’t it be free if they’re going to send you ads?
I think the most disturbing thing in the movie is the school selling advertising to raise money. It’s especially sad that it is such a small amount of money and yet they can’t get it any other way.
It’s incredible. School districts are getting literally five to seven thousand dollars a year and in exchange they are letting all this advertising in.
What kind of impact does that have on kids? Does it desensitize them or do they stay susceptible to being drawn into the brands that are put in front of them?
That’s what the jury’s out on. There’s multiple layers to that one. You start to believe that these products and these brands are the ones that make things happen. They’re the ones you should trust, the ones that have solutions. That’s the question I have all the time, do we really want to live in a world where everything’s brought to you by some sponsor? That’s the way it seems to be going.
That’s right. Even at the Smithsonian, the flag that inspired “The Star Spangled Banner” is now brought to you by Ralph Lauren. Is POM happy with the results from paying to have their name in the title of the film?
Everybody seems to be. It’s gotten a great response. I think it makes all the sponsors who paid to be in the film look incredibly smart. I called 600 brands but only these 20 were brave enough to be a part of the film and want to pull back the curtain and have a real honest conversation about transparency. It’s very telling.
For me what was telling was that they basically say, “We don’t care what you say about us as long as you get our name out there.”
That’s part of what I love about it. Who was it who said, “I don’t care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right?”
Will you have product placement in your future films?
I think it really works for this one because the satire makes the whole thing work. I can’t imagine shooting an interview for another movie about Darfur or something where suddenly someone is drinking Coke in the middle of an interview. But one of the things I love is what J.J. Abrams says in the film: “I’m about story-telling, not story-selling.” We live in a world where people use products. They drive Cameros. They drink Coke. They wear Nikes. So it’s not like I think we should try to eliminate this stuff from entertainment. It would create a very unreal scenario. But what I don’t want is Ford in the writer’s room, “I want to start with a wide shot of the car and when the guy gets out of the car it would be great if he could say how well the car handled.”
You want the product to tell you something about the character.
Yes, if he drives a Mustang, he drives a Mustang. If he drives a Volvo, he drives a Volvo. But don’t make them show an extreme close-up of the logo just because they gave them a car to be in the movie.
You kept Mane and Tail shampoo in the film even though they didn’t pay.
They were the only ones where we were contractually obligated to say that they did not pay. But there were others in the film who did not pay. But what they brought to the table was not hard cash but soft money in terms of promotions. Big brands do that all the time with studios so they can have Iron Man in the store or Tony Stark wearing sunglasses in their ads. Characters appear on cereal and candy bars and potato chips and then there are lunchboxes, t-shirts, hats, and all that other stuff. I tried to get McDonald’s to be a partner on this film. I really wanted those documentary action figures. Those would have sold like hotcakes!
Many of the companies that were willing to work with you were family-owned, like POM, Sheetz, and Hyatt. They were very big, but they didn’t have the kind of bureaucracy of publicly-traded companies and were more inclined to do something off-beat.
Some of them make more than Fortune 500 companies. And MiniCooper is part of a giant corporation. Old Navy is owned by a gigantic conglomerate. But they didn’t come on until they saw the film at Sundance. Eight partners came on after Sundance. That happens all the time with big Hollywood movies, too. They wait to see how the film comes out and how audiences react and then say, “I want to be a part of this.”
What do you advocate? Better disclosure?
It’s already at the end of a movie, where it says, “promotional consideration by…” but by then you’ve stopped watching. The BBC has just started to allow product placement. Like we have TV-MA, they have P for product placement before the show.
Do you advocate different rules for children’s programming and programming intended for adults?
You have to look at them different. They’re two entirely different audiences. They consume media in very different ways. Kids recognize brands at a very young age, as young as four years old. I don’t think you should have placement in kids’ shows but it goes beyond that. The character becomes the toy, the lunchbox. The argument for that is, “I can’t have free enterprise?” The problem I have is the targeted advertising around programming. My own son said, “I want to get that wrestler set! But the pieces are sold separately.” I said, “Time to turn off the TV. We’re done.”
Posted on April 19, 2011 at 9:59 pm
Reposting — Hag Sameach! Passover is not just about remembering the story of the Exodus from Egypt. It is about telling the story. Thousands of years before people talked about “learning styles,” the Seder included many different ways of telling the story, so that everyone would be included, and everyone would feel the power of the journey toward freedom. The Haggadah makes the story come alive through taste, smell, and touch as well as sight and hearing, and through the example of the four sons it presents the story to the wise, the simple, the skeptic, and most especially to the young — one of the highlights of each Seder is when the youngest person present asks the traditional four questions, beginning with “Why is this night different from all other nights?”If they had known about movies back in the time of Moses, they would have included that form of story-telling, too. For younger children, The Prince of Egypt and Joseph – King of Dreams
Posted on April 19, 2011 at 8:00 am
A cringe-inducing catastrophe with all of the appeal of fingernails on blackboard, this movie’s first early warning sign should have been the omission of Jonathan Swift from the opening credits.
I thought at first it was an arrogant oversight. Now I think it is more likely his ghost showed up and threatened to haunt the film-makers and their descendants forever if they did not remove any mention of his name. Swift is the man who wrote the book, with satire so biting and fantasy so thrilling that it has endured for almost 300 years. It will survive this, too, but just barely.
The story has been updated so that Gulliver, like every other aspect of the story, is downgraded (and degraded). In Swift’s book, he is a surgeon. Here, played by a doughy and lusterless Jack Black, he is a guy who works in a newspaper mailroom, too insecure to try to get a promotion or ask out the beautiful editor he adores (Amanda Peet, who does her best to pretend she is in a better movie).
In order to impress her, Gulliver plagiarizes some travel pieces. She gives him an assignment to investigate the Bermuda triangle. I know this is a fantasy, but since when can newspapers afford a mail room staff and what appears to be a bountiful budget for investigative travel pieces?
Gulliver gets trapped in a vortex that lands him in a kingdom called Lilliput, populated by people who are just six inches tall. As in the book, at first he is captured, tied down while he is asleep on the beach. He stands up, ripping the ropes open. But there was noting in the book about his pants falling down, and then having him fall backwards with a poor Lilliputian apparently smothered by his, uh, tush separation.
And then it really gets disgusting. Gulliver has to rescue the king from a fire and, finding no water within reach, pees on everything to douse the flames . As dispiriting as that is, it is not as bad as the flaccid torpor of the script, which shows utter contempt for its audience in every line. Every reference, joke, and plot development is tired and predictable. Gulliver collects — guess! Yep, “Star Wars” action figures. At work, he slacks off by — guess! Playing “Guitar Hero.” When he persuades the Lilliputians that he is known as President Awesome back home where he comes from, we see posters all over the city with Gulliver appearing as the hero of every movie or play from “West Side Story” to “Wicked.” Those are hardly recognizable, much less knee-slapping references for anyone under 40.
Even worse, Gulliver is a thoroughly unpleasant character. He reflexively lies to everyone. He is selfish, incurious, and thoughtless. There is a dull storyline about a Lilliputian commoner named Horatio (a sweet Jason Segal) who dares to love the princess (a regal Emily Blunt), but it is ineptly handled. When the princess challenges the bad guy (Chris O’Dowd, the movie’s sole highlight) to come up with a reason for loving her, predictably, he can’t. But then, shouldn’t Horatio demonstrate some understanding or appreciation of the princess to show his fitness? The script and director Rob Letterman cannot be bothered to follow through. It just keeps desperately throwing stuff at the audience, finally including a killer robot.
Letterman, who showed he knows better in “Monsters vs. Aliens,” blows all the possibilities of the book’s shrewd (and still very relevant) commentary for silly sight gags like Gulliver’s using the Lilliputians to re-enact video games and DVDs. A “Titanic” joke! Stop!
A lump of coal in the stockings of everyone behind this mess.
