Through one of the smartest film promotions I’ve seen in awhile, Disney has already sold 500,000 advance tickets to its little nature doc-for-kids, Earth, by promising to plant a tree for each audience member who pays to see the film during its first week (starting tomorrow and ending Tuesday, April 28). Never mind that all those people could just plant a tree themselves, and that families may ultimately be disappointed to find the movie is less focused than the ads would have them believe (the “three animal families” narrative is often abandoned for a broader look at the planet’s ecosystems) –– the fact that Disney managed to come up with such a successful marketing gimmick, and incentive, that has no necessary web-related elements is extremely commendable in these mostly viral-campaign-obsessed times.
Of course, there’s nothing at all wrong with online movie marketing, and it’s worth pointing to another new film opening this week, Obsessed, which has a fun little gimmick utilizing personalizing technology we’ve seen in plenty of prior viral promotional tools. It may not help save the planet, but we actually had more fun making this video, in which we made Ali Larter seem to be obsessed with SpoutBlog editor Karina Longworth, than we did watching Disney’s Earth. Then again, we at least saw the documentary, primarily because of its promotion, yet we probably won’t be seeing the very banal-looking Obsessed.
Ignoring whether or not they were successful, we picked ten other favorite viral gimmicks, many of which were more enjoyable than the movies they promoted: …Read more
2008 was not the banner year that ‘07 turned out to be, but there were still plenty of movies worth watching. Sometimes end-of-year lists look like straight Oscar predictions, with little deviance from critic to critic, not so this year. Some of our favorite stuff was not playing in a theatre near you, some of it was. For the record, our complete lists are after the jump.
But first! Wholphin 7 is out now! The geniuses over at McSweeny’s have once again curated a delightful collection of rare and unseen short films. We share our thoughts about a few favorites. One film we both loved, Glory at Sea, is available for free here.
A call with Michel Gondry clears up our misconceptions of Be Kind Rewind–a movie I think is deceptively amazing but Kevin’s on the fence about–and both of us decide he’s a fascinating director. This Sunday, Diablo Cody will be crowned greatest screenwriter of 2008 at the Academy Awards (I predict) for Juno and I also predict it will crush her (and I’m not just saying that because I’m bitter there’s only a minute worth of interview to play here).
*Transcript of Michel Gondry interview after the jump
I should say first that I am about to wholeheartedly support the world viewing Be Kind Rewind in the face of what I believe will be a lot of poopooing over this movie (it’s currently “rotten” over at Rotten Tomatoes). I will also say I am not a Michel Gondry fanboy or, even, somebody who could pass for a hipster (that segment of the population making Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Puma economically viable). I saw Be Kind Rewind at Sundance 2008 thinking it would be a pallet cleanser from long nights of editing interviews and watching the really challenging stuff. But Be Kind Rewind was the most subversive movie at Sundance this year. So much so, I question the programmers even knew it.
The premise is straight from a sub-genre of comedy that has brought us such classics as Ski Patrol and One Crazy Summer (a perfect ball of ice cream for Gondry to hide his medicine in). Two slackers who while away their days in a hole-in-the-wall hangout–owned by a kindly old proprietor–have to raise more cash than they’ve ever seen or the hangout gets the wrecking ball. Antics ensue. The antics are brought to us by Jerry (Jack Black) and Mike (Mos Def) as they remake a library of hit Hollywood movies with a VHS camcorder when Jack Black inadvertently erases all the tapes at their neighborhood video shop (the hangout). The montages of their backyard productions are the stuff people will go to see this movie in droves for, and they are fall-down funny. However, these montages end partway through the story to make room for the proverbial “plot.”
In case you haven’t been following the promotions for Gondry’s latest post-modern surrealist fantasy film and have no idea what “sweded” is, it refers to the cheaply produced remakes of Hollywood movies that Jack Black and Mos Def’s video clerk characters create in Be Kind Rewind in order to restock their store’s rental library after they accidentally erase all the originals. OK, that was a long sentence, and is probably confusing if you’re not at all familiar with this movie. So, check out the real trailer here, and acquaint yourself. (Then check out Karina’s November clip-of-the-day post about “sweded” trailers and posters and her early January BlogNosh post about fan-made “sweded” trailers.)
Let’s face it, fellow film bloggers, we don’t have many readers who don’t have film blogs of their own. The world of cinephilia is quite cannibalistic, and we need each other to survive. However, we don’t just feed on ourselves. We also are part of an extended food chain that includes filmmakers, many of whom nowadays are also or were once cinephiles themselves. These filmmakers like to borrow, pay homage and reference movies of the past more than they like to advance the craft forward with distinct and/or innovative style. But admit it, you sometimes like the movie references, at least if you like the movie being referenced. And maybe sometimes your judgment is a little clouded by all those obscure bits that you feel cool for having gotten.
Paul Soter’s Watching the Detectiveslooks like yet another movie that only us cinephiles are made to enjoy, which is unfortunate since many of us are too pretentious to admit that we’d enjoy just any movie about a fellow movie geek working at a video store and commenting on the merits of City of Lost Childrenand the faults of Casino (see Clip 1) to our customers — aren’t most of us just like video store employees who own computers and can (sometimes) write well? Watching the Detectives could be something of a light companion piece to Michel Gondry’s upcoming Be Kind Rewind; both films should in theory have little relevance to people unfamiliar with their references to movie-geek favorites. But are there enough of us movie geeks out there to make these films worth their effort?
New Line has sent Michel Gondry on a tour of indieWIRE events at Apple Stores to promote Be Kind Rewind. But is actual, physical globetrotting even necessary in today’s wired world? I thought it was kind of ironic that on the first stop of the tour, which took place last night in San Francisco, several of my Bay Area-based Twitterfriends were essentially live micro-blogging the event––no doubt in some, if not all cases, using Apple devices.
So several days before Gondry’s tour is scheduled to come to my city, I was eating dinner in New York, and effectively getting a play-by-play of the San Francisco version of the event via Twitter updates on my cellphone. This morning, I woke up to find that Jackson West (who, in addition to being a Twitter followee, is a colleague at a site that I freelance for, NewTeeVee) had uploaded audio of the event and was making it available for download by anyone who reads his Twitter stream.
All of this says something about our new global-cultural-techno-econo-sphere, I’m sure of it; I’m just not sure what it is.
“As a student and fan of special effects and new media,” writes Bob Rehak at Graphic Engine, “I’m struck by the completeness with which the top 10 [grossing films of 2007] encapsulate an evolving mode of high-tech production in serial media.” Those films, of course, include titles like 300, Ratatouille and the latest Harry Potter flick, all of which enjoyed “enormous profitability … in striking contrast to their devalued cultural status.”
Earlier this morning, I came up with a few reasons why New Line might have bumped Be Kind Rewind by a month. Chris Thilk offers another: it could be because Cloverfield is expected to “march through the box-office like a monster rising from the depths of the sea.”
At LIBERTAS, Dirty Harry predicts that in calling Knocked Up sexist, Katherine Heigl has irreparably damaged her appeal. “Heigl might’ve thought the quote would help her with the feminist crowd which obviously means so much to her, but the American male who made her a star will only see arrogance, and that’s a turn-off.”
“Dear Studios,” writes Hacking Netflix. “Stop treating your paying customers like thieves.”
According to The Playlist (and, for what it’s worth, Box Office Mojo is backing this up), New Line has pushed the release date of Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind back a month, from January 25 to February 22. It would be impossible not to question What It All Means. After all, this is not the first time this film has been shuttled down the calendar, but the January date sure looked sticky for awhile. The studio had planned a compressed indie film media blitz to unfold over the next three weeks, to include sending Gondry on a multi-city Apple Store tour in advance of Rewind’s Sundance premiere. New Line probably just feel like they need an extra four weeks after all that to run TV ads, and that’s fair. But let’s wildly speculate as to what else could be going on, after the jump.
Vulture sends word that Deitch Projects will host an exhibition later this month built around Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. The installation will allow visitors to make and watch their own “sweded” films. This will be the gallery’s second feat of Gondry art synergy; in 2006, they hosted art by Gondry related to The Science of Sleep.
21, directed by Robert Luketic and starring Kevin Spacey, will open the 2008 SXSW Film Festival. David Hudson has early details on the rest of the lineup at the link.
Mike Jones reviews a few writeups of the Baghdad International Film Festival, which was apparently THE hipster event in Iraq last week. Yes, seriously.
“Ego overmatches imagination in the work of the vast majority of critics, bloggers and editors,” sniffs The Reeler, who has once again declared war on Top Ten lists.
Speaking of lists, the Village Voice/LA Weekly Critics Poll is out. Southland Tales, which placed high on the Best Film lists of the Voice’s J. Hoberman and Nathan Lee, also tied The Bucket List as the year’s Worst Film.
Let there be a Juno backlash, and let it begin with Modern Fabulosity. And let it continue with Craig Kennedy: “Some folks are even looking at this as being an Oscar contender. I don’t think it is, but when I’m ultimately proven wrong I’ll be the first to admit it. Of course, if I’m right I’ll be shouting it from the rooftops.” Finally, at Reverse Shot, Elbert Ventura concedes that Fox Searchlight has found “this year’s Little Miss Sunshine“–which should not, under any circumstances, be considered a compliment.
The Reeler talks to Jennifer Venditti about Billy the Kid and, most interestingly, the subject’s complicity in its construction: “He met Heather, and after that he would come up to me on the way home and say, ‘I think tomorrow we should do a scene where we’re holding hands walking down the street.’ Of course we didn’t do those things, but he was going with it in his head and getting into it.”
Both Alan at Burbanked and Chris at Movie Marketing Madness have complaints about the new one sheet for Be Kind Rewind. I hate to say it, but their fears were confirmed by a friend of SpoutBlog, who called with a four word review on his way out of a Rewind press screening this afternoon: “It sucked my ass.”
There’s some cool new promo stuff up online for Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. The film is about two video clerks who accidentally demagnetize every VHS tape in their store while their boss is on vacation, and then proceed to produced no-budget camcorder “remakes” of the most rented titles. The studio is–smartly, I think–exploiting the DIY theme of the story in order to sell it to kids who live online as a user-participatory event.
First, go to the official website. Wade your way through the animation about the internet being erased, and tell it that you want to rebuld the internet. Eventually, you’ll get to a place where you can insert an image of yourself into a VHS box of a “classic” film, such as, um, Drop Dead Fred. I went with My Own Private Idaho, because I thought it would be funny. See above.
Then, there’s the obligatory “viral” video component. So far, there are three trailers on YouTube, representing three of the films remade within Be Kind Rewind. I’ve pasted my favorite, for Ghostbusters, after the jump; you’ll find the Robocop trailer here and the Rush Hour 2 trailer here. I know the guru of faux-viral movie marketing said that clips this this should be under 30 seconds, but honestly, I could have gone for a longer Ghostbusters trailer, if only to hear Jack Black and Mos Def argue over who’s going to be the Key Master and who’s going to be the Gate Keeper.
It’s probably not a great sign that the release of Michel Gondry’s upcoming Be Kind Rewind, starring Jack Black and Mos Def, has been pushed back to the icy winter wasteland of late January. With major critics too busy in the proceeding weeks to see much beyond Oscar hopefuls before heading off to Sundance, it’s traditionally the portion of calendar where movies destined to draw bad reviews go to hide. But even if that one’s a wash, Gondry’s next project sounds really, really cool. He tells MTV News:
I am working on an animated film with my son…We’re translating our relationship into a futuristic story with a dictator and a rebel. He’s the dictator in the story [and] it will be based on [his] art.
The MTV story doesn’t specify which son Gondry’s talking about–he has two–but according to Director’s File, it’s Paul Gondry, who is 16. He recently made an animated music video for The Willowz. You can watch that here; I’ve pasted a still of it above.
For a slice of the father-son relationship ostensibly inspiring this new project, check out this interview Paul conducted with his dad for INTERVIEW Magazine last year, around the time Michel’s The Science of Sleep was released in the U.S. In the interview, Gondry said he cast Gael Garcia Bernal in that film’s lead role because “he looks like [Paul] a little bit.” Paul said, “It’s hard for me to watch your movies sometimes because they’re always based on everything you went through and I was there with you in a way.” Michel responded, “Same for me.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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