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 20, 2011 at 12:00 pm
One month from today, Captain Jack Sparrow will return to theaters in “Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides.” Here’s a sneak peek at the first day of location filming.
Posted on April 20, 2011 at 8:00 am
I love Mark and Lindsay Goffman’s new documentary, “Dumbstruck,” which follows five ventriloquists over the course of a year between the two annual conventions that give them their one chance to be with others who share their passion. It is funny, smart, inspiring, and heartwarming, and I had a lot of fun talking to Mark about how it got made and what he learned.
You must have been shocked when one of your subjects became an international superstar in the course of making the film. Terry Fator won “America’s Got Talent” and now has a hundred million dollar contract with the Mirage in Las Vegas.
We set out to look at working ventriloquists in small-town America. That’s where we thought we would find ventriloquism. It harkens back to a simpler time and we liked the smaller venues’ feel. We knew Terry was phenomenally talented from the moment we saw him. We expected to see him in his home city of Corsicana and state fairs and things like that and then he got on “America’s Got Talent” and it just exploded from there.
The other ventriloquists are very happy for him but it also makes them dream bigger for themselves.
It gave a lot of people hope. They’re a really tight-knit community and think of themselves as a family and that was something I really wanted to capture in the film. There are very few ventriloquists in most towns so they feel a bit isolated. They feel like they’re on their own and as you can see in the film their families don’t always support this vocation they have chosen so they have this very strong sense of community. Really, when we stared we thought cruise ships was the pinnacle — that was a great living. Dan Horn was seen as achieving about as much success as you can get with this art form. And Terry comes out of nowhere and explodes onto the screen and it was really quite astonishing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVtNcrhLClUHow did this project get started?
At our wedding my mother-in-law got up to give a toast. Her lips didn’t move and she held up her hand with a white glove on it like a sock puppet and words started coming out and her hand started delivering a toast. It was incredibly endearing and charming and really funny and certainly unexpected to the 150 guests. It turned out she does ventriloquism primarily in schools — she’s a second grade teacher and she does it in her classroom. But she has learned that she can express herself very differently and it makes her feel a lot more comfortable in front of a crowd. She told us about the ventriloquist conference in Kentucky and Lindsay and I knew that this was a community we wanted to see. We found 500 people with their dummies talking back and forth and really bonding. We fell in love with these five people that we wanted to follow.
Some of the family members you spoke to were embarrassed or even hostile about their relatives’ interest in ventriloquism.
We wanted to know what their lives were like outside of the convention where they feel welcome and very supported. And we found that most of the time their families didn’t understand. We hope that’s something people can relate to, whether it’s any hobby or career path, some people have families that are very supportive and others have to find the courage and determination to pursue their dreams and their loves despite what others around them think.
That’s why they are so happy to be together — they feel understood and accepted.
The people who run the convention say it’s like a family reunion. They keep that kind of atmosphere and it’s a very welcoming environment. You see that when Wilma needs help, the people are there for her.
Is it true that you had to remind the sound guys not to mic the puppets?
It was true of the boom mics — when the dummy starts talking, we had to remind them to keep them over the person, not the puppet.
Have you tried ventriloquism?
I have tried it; it’s incredibly hard. I have enormous respect for anyone who can do it. It’s an instrument. You have eyes, ears, mouth, you have to synch with the voice. That’s one of the reasons we showed Tim Selberg; he is like the Stradavarius of figure-makers; they can cost up to $20,000. These things are finely-tuned instruments. Not only do you have to manipulate this and make it behave like a human being but you have to create a character, a persona. And then, on top of that, you have to come up with a routine that’s essentially a stand-up routine, and that’s a talent in itself. It’s a combination of a lot of different skills. It’s very hard.
Yes, one of the most interesting scenes is where one of your ventriloquists gets some advice from a consultant about how to improve her act because you see how much has to go into it.
She was looking for some guidance and the man who came in and helped her is very well known and respected and he advised her to give her puppet a huge makeover. He was mining the comedy out of who she was and trying to give her puppet a counterpart to play off that. The successful ones create a character who can say the things they wouldn’t normally say or aren’t comfortable saying.
The puppets are a contrast to the ventriloquists, especially then-12-year-old Dylan, a white boy with an African-American dummy.
Dylan told us there are very few minorities in his school and he’s a showman and he thought he could get a lot of shock value and mileage out of it. At the same time, he told me on many occasions that Reggie is his best friend and he hopes they are together for the rest of his life. It’s an amazing attachment that they have.
