Joaquin Phoenix attacks a heckler

This publicity stunt has run it's course, everyone knows it's an act. People have been saying it since he started this hip hop "career change." He's a good actor but he's no Andy Kaufman, he just needs to hang it up and get back to making movies. Don't even mention it, just shave the beard make a movie and pretend all this never happened.

It's time to stop letting Frank Miller talk

In the new issue of Maxim they have a small article about The Spirit. "You bet your ass it's crazy!" is the first line, which is a quote from Frank when asked about the movie. The article goes on to say that The Spirit was created by Frank's mentor Will Eisner, explains the premise of the character and his villian. He goes on to explain that the process of making a movie is scary but then dismisses it by saying "But it's the same old game, telling a story with pictures." The quote regarding Sam Jackson's Octopus is "I said to him, 'Let's make you the scariest supervillian who ever lived.'" The last paragraph is the worst.

"The shift from the more innocent tone of Eisner's original strips to Miller's balls-out style -epitomized by switching the hero's trademark suit from bright blue to midnight black- has offended some Spirit fans. Miller doesn't think much of the nostalgia-mongers. 'If Eisner thought I built a dusty monument to what he did, he'd come back from the grave and throttle me. I owe him. I don't owe the fans a goddamn thing.'"

Considering how much effort Rodriguez put into Sin City, to make it look like the source material, to cast people that fit the parts, and the fact that he had to drop from the DGA, due to Miller not being in the WGA, to get it made. Then Miller turns around and makes a movie based on the material of someone he calls his mentor and basically says "Fuck the fanbase, fuck the original concept, I know what's right, I know how it should be done". As a comic writer you would think he has enough sense to know that the fanbase likes something for what it is, not some deranged mash up of bad one liners, Sam Jackson screaming in various assortments of ridiculous wardrobe, and a backdrop that looks just like Sin City. Personally, I find it surprising that he doesn't look back to the fan backlash of the Daredevil movie. He was on the receiving end of having his work publicly sodomized and now he feels he needs to do it to someone elses work that he says he admires? That's just stupid.

Bike Hero and Viral advertising

A question occurs to me: what does viral marketing sell to us? The easy answer is the advertised product, but advertising has been about, for the last eighty years or so, selling not the product but emotions. It has been about convincing the person that they want the thing because it gives them X. Status, security, comfort, completeness, the selling of things in a want-based economy is less about the thing it self and more about how it makes the consumer feel. So what does viral marketing do? Consider Guitar Hero, a recently exposed viral marketing campaign by ad agecy Droga5. We see in this video a fairly creative and original treatment of a familiar game, and in it are numerous post-media forces: democratized film making, application of beloved content to new mediums, mashup, and irrational or unusual visual representations. But what is this selling to us? Group identity? That can't be it because as soon as the ad is discovered as a fake, the group turns of the advertisement. A slick, vacuous purely aesthetic image? Not likely because such "art" has to be evaluated by a group, and i dont think favoriting it on youtube is evaluation enough.


These are just thoughts, but this is a much larger idea i don't have time at work left to consider. Your thoughts?

I'm usually open to outside the box casting...

But really, this story has me scratching my head. Appearently Beyonce wants to play Wonder Woman in the upcoming movie. Story here. This is one of those things that would have people who have no idea what the back story to the character is flocking to the theatre to see Beyonce as a super hero. Meanwhile, from the confines of the internet, purists would be screaming that it is an affront to the character. That will in turn have racially motivated accusations as to why people say she shouldn't play the part. The problem is taking a long running character with a backstory steeped in Greek Mythology, discarding it and starting from scratch. It would have the same backlash if they decided to do a Black Panther movie and cast Antonio Banderas as T'Challa. It just seems to me that she just sees a female comic book charcter and the dollar signs attached to comic book movies with little regard for the comic culture and more for herself. That, or she's still a little sore that McG lost Superman a few years back and with it went her role as Lois Lane. It could be okay, like Micheal Duncan Clarke as Kingpin in the flaming pile of shit that was the Daredevil movie. Sure the movie was awful, but he fit the part fairly well and was one of the only redeeming qualities of it. On the other hand we could be facing the equivalent of Will Smith as Jim West, remember that? Well in case it slipped your mind have a little taste of this.

Interesting

This is from a NY Times article from 1999. It explains that the whole housing crisis goes back farther than most people want to mention.

~Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people and felt pressure from stock holders to maintain its phenomenal growth in profits.~

~In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's.~

The whole article is here

I'm not implying that blame falls squarely on the democrats, more that both parties are equally to blame.