Points of view put out there to be agreed with or shot at. Your move, babe.
From time to time, the staff here at The Lint Screen gets lazy and allows someone else’s work to take center stage.
Here is a spot that could put goosebumps on a goose. A little bit of encouragement to us all: to create, to dare, to dream, to do.
In short, not to be lazy. Enjoy.
Have you heard the scuttlebutt about this ad created by DDB Brasil allegedly for the Worldwide Wildlife Federation?
The clever agency created this shocking image of many planes targeting the NYC skyline and married the following inane copy to complete the picture: “The tsunami killed 100 times more people than 9/11. The planet is brutally powerful. Respect it. Preserve it. www.wwf.org” All anchored by the cute panda bear WWF logo. Awww, I just wanna cuddle with it!
Now get a load of this: the WWF never approved the ad, yet it somehow ran once in a small newspaper making it eligible for entry in award shows, then it “accidentally” was entered in The One Show where it won a merit award. Yee-haw!
Oh, and oops, a little video was made of the same concept and entered in Cannes, where fortunately it was little noticed or awarded.
This is exactly the kind of crap that makes our industry a joke to legitimate businesses and why clients happily pay outside consultants and question every invoice we deliver. It’s not just the chasing of awards, but it’s doing it with lame in-your-face concepts with loopy logic. “The planet is brutally powerful”— curse you Mother Earth, you and your untimely earthquakes underwater! I will respect you! I will preserve you!
It’s an asinine ad. The video is even worse since it brings the bad taste comparison to inglorious low budget life.
If there is any justice, this agency will suffer for their boneheaded grab at a little glory, business will leave and bodies will fall.
The planet will smugly giggle. She’s brutally powerful that way.
Julie & Julia meet Inglourious Basterds. One movie features Nazis, the other Beef Bourguignon. One has sadistic scenes, and to stay engaged with the other can be a sadistic challenge at times.
Yes, Meryl is phenomenal as Julia, but Meryl is always terrific and this performance is more impersonation than character creation. Stanley Tucci brings a nice performance as Julia’s hubby and Jane Lynch steals every scene as Julia’s sister. But, the story of making a French cookbook for English speaking people is hardly interesting and rarely entertaining.
NOW, gently fold that story in with another story about a frustrated writer who cooks the entire Child cookbook over a one year span and blogs about it, and well, you have an odd stew of a film.
Julie is played by Amy Adams, who is usually fun to watch. Her character here is an insecure narcissist in an apron. She’s married to a milquetoasty guy played by Chris Messina who is supportive but frustrated by the blogging project. Wah wah wah.
The movie written and directed by Nora Ephron, usually a gifted writer. The screenplay was based on two separate books, Julia’s memoirs from 1949 and Julie’s book of recent time recounting her blogging project. But just because the subject matter is common to both, the flavors do not belong together. This movie is like vanilla and vinegar. A disappointment, a bad taste. Pity.
Now let’s cleanse our palates with a sorbet of Basterds.
Like the Coen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino makes films you have to see for no other reason than to get his unique perspective on whatever the film’s about. This time it’s about Nazis and a history re-write with a band of Jewish American soldiers (Inglourious Basterds) giving the goosesteppers what-for behind enemy lines. Even ol’ Adolf gets his comeuppance.
Like any Tarantino film, the dialogue is terrific in developing memorable characters as plotlines intertwine like origami figures. Like any Tarantino film, there’s tension built to keep your eyes riveted to the screen, followed by hyper-violence that begs you to look away. Like any Tarantino film, it is a celebration of film genres, movie magic, cinematography and interesting camerawork.
Yes, it’s chatty at times, but with Tarantino dialogue you won’t mind. Brad Pitt is wonderful as the Tennessee Basterd leader, Lt. Aldo Raine. He lays on a southern accent thick as cold molasses on dog fur. The powerhouse performance comes from Austrian actor Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa. Waltz may be shaking hands with Oscar for this gem.
While not Tarantino’s best film, the Basterds are worth spending some time with and will give you plenty of images to replay for a long time afterwards.
The economy’s ugly and it’s hurting a lot of people. Political pundits point fingers and flap their yaps endlessly about who is at fault. Not to worry, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
The little film does a brilliant job of explaining the entire sorted stew in just over 11 minutes. The staff of economists at The Lint Screen vouch that as far as we can tell it’s pretty spot-on about who did what, when, where, how and why.
Spend a little time and learn a lot. Let’s hear your reactions. Accurate? Bull? Fluff? And how do you feel about these same scumbuckets still getting paid bonuses out the wazoo? Sorry, that was neither fair nor balanced…
The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
The king is dead. Walter Cronkite gave earth 92 years and now has left it.
Back in the days before a 24-hour news cycle, before Ken and Barbie dolls learned to read Teleprompters, people like Cronkite applied the rules of journalism to their craft. They did the legwork, the homework and the back-breaking work of getting the story right, then presented it in as unbiased a manner as possible.
Back in the day, Cronkite was the heart, soul and face of television news. He was “The most trusted man in America” because he gave us the straight dope. He told us JFK had been shot and killed in Dallas and he paused for a moment, took off his eyeglasses, brushed aside tears, collected himself, returned his glasses to his nose and soldiered on. The only other time I saw him get teary eyed was the tears of joy he had reporting Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk 40 years ago.
He was the man who gave us weekly casualty counts from Vietnam. When Uncle Walter concluded that after so long and so catastrophic a casualty toll we should pull out, LBJ knew he had lost middle America’s support. He would not seek office again.
Whatever Cronkite told us we took as gospel. We thought and felt he would only tell us the truth. When he signed off each broadcast with “and that’s the way it is” we believed truly believed that’s the way it was.
Today we have pretty boys and girls relaying sound bites and pundits spewing talking points. We sensationalize everything and glamorize anything. But once upon a time, journalists roamed the earth, gathered the news and fed the masses truth. Cronkite was such a dinosaur and I am thankful he appeared in the magic box and talked to me.
I’m in the neighborhood supermarket innocently shopping when it happens– the PA system plays one of my most hated songs: “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” by that terrorist group calling itself “Chicago”.
I am crippled as the inane lyrics of “walking down the street one day” bebop along accompanied by sunny horns blaring and toot-toot-tooting me down an emotional rathole. The melodic line worms its way into my cerebral cortex and takes root, infesting my brain with its horrible poison. The virus spreads. The horns, the stupid lyrics, the incessant evil background singers– they all roost in my consciousness and permeate my very being. Surely this is the soundtrack of hell.
I am infected.
I am ill.
I am a hostage under siege.
Ironically, only one thing can dissipate the effect: time.
Does anybody really know how much time it will take?
Does anybody really care? I do. I really do.
What is your most hated song? Let the discussion begin.