This Week in Movies

One of the first huge differences I noticed between LA and OK is the amount of movie advertisements. Of course, advertising in general is much bigger in LA than cities like OKC, Dallas, or New Orleans, but the percentage of advertisements used to promote movies is incredible. I'm going to go ahead and make up some figures here. I'd say that in any of those cities, the amount of all advertising alloted for movies is between 7-20%. In LA, I'd say it's closer to 60-80%.

"So what?" you might ask. Well, considering that I drive from Westwood to Hollywood and back six times a week, plus 1-3 runs a day within Hollywood and West Hollywood, I'd say I see this poster at least 15 times every day.

And that's not okay with me. You can get sick of some good posters (Gran Torino), and some you don't mind seeing over and over (The Dark Knight), but a poster like this, or 17 Again, or You Don't Mess with the Zohan (featuring Adam Sandler's photoshop-enhanced bulge) can be sickening.

This poster's design isn't completely bad. It's simplistic, and I find the blue background to be quite soothing. But it does have its problems. 

First of all, Matthew McConaughey is on it. Secondly, this particular shot of the prince of Austin makes him look like a demon. One point for honest portrayal, negative one point for scaring me. I don't know whose decision it was to go with the head-on angle, but it's quite terrifying, if not Jokeresque. Third, what at first seems to be a necktie is actually a giant red scarf. Why? I would bet it has something to do with the length of a necktie and that the poster is likely a photoshop of each star's individual shot, with the scarf inserted digitally. Anyway, it pisses me off. (If you're skeptical, take a look at the many versions of the Get Smart poster or the obvious Four Christmases. If they can do it with hair, a tie, hair the other way, or a ribbon, they can do it with a scarf.) 

The last thing I hate about this poster is that it's for a movie that is probably a huge piece of garbage. Can we be done with the ghost genre already? You would have thought it died with Ghost Dad, but not that long ago we had Ghost Town, with some respectable and semirespectable actors. And now this. While we're at it, let's toss out the body-switching genre. But of course, it won't happen. (17 Again at #1? I know there's not much on right now, but wouldn't you rather just not see a movie?)

If you don't believe me about the demon thing, here's a close-up. It also appears that they've used a different poster for the LA area, which apparently happens a lot. In this case, I actually like the LA version better. The "past girlfriends coming out of oddly posed photos" version is distracts from the focal point (the demon). 

I would also like to suggest changing the tagline,  "You can't always run from your past," to the more accurate, "Does it really matter?"

All Kids Out of the Pool: A Short Retrospective on Adult Swim in its Golden Years, Pt. 1

I know this is going to be hard to believe, but Adult Swim was actually showing quality programming before Family Guy went into syndication. I know, crazy, huh?

It started out (for me anyway) with Space Ghost Coast to Coast. I caught this weird show one late night in middle school and, though I had no idea what I was watching, could not turn away. Confusion led hilarity, and I was hooked. Check out my favorite episode, featuring Bjork, Thom Yorke, and this great exchange between Space Ghost and his new wife:

"You know what? It doesn't matter, because I love you so much...that, it's time for you to go to sleep."

I remember as a freshman in high school trying to convince my older sister that Space Ghost's song in this episode, "Knifin' Around," was hilarious, but to no avail.

It wasn't long until a primitive Adult Swim premiered. One night a week, 13-minute episodes. Space Ghost was joined by a bevy of great new shows: Sealab 2021, Harvey Birdman Attorney at Law (with a character voiced by Stephen Colbert), The Brak Show, and the less funny but immensely more popular Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

Sealab was particularly amazing. The first video I ever downloaded (when YouTube didn't exist and Napster was still king), was an episode of Sealab where a French diver helps the crew find Captain Murphy's Happy Cake Oven: "It's not a toy. It makes real cupcakes, with a 40 watt bulb, and there's icing packets....but the secret ingredient, is love....damn it."

Check out this amazing clip.

The Three Worst Words in the English Language:

"Mr. Pibb okay?"

This Week In Movies

I saw Adventureland last weekend at an early screening. It didn't thrill me. The trailer was fantastic, and the movie failed to live up to it, probably because they squeezed into it every scene with Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig there was. It also set the story up to be something that it wasn't. "It was the worst job they ever imagined... and the best time of their lives," goes the tagline. Actually, their summer was quite depressing.

In the movie, there's a character named Frigo who punches people in the nuts. I spent the whole movie and the subsequent days trying to figure out where I had seen him. I'll go ahead and solve the mystery for you. It's the kid from the AT&T rollover commercials.

Westwood Medical - A Year in Posters

The Westwood Medical building sits on the corner of Wilshire and Gayley at the end or the beginning of a long stretch of high-rise office and apartment buildings that run along Wilshire until they give way to the two-storey hedges that guard the Los Angeles Country Club. The face of this building is prime real estate and apparently owned by Disney.

When I first came to L.A. 10 months ago I found on its façade a giant poster for the movie Underdog. Underdog was released on August 3, 2007. For that caliber of movie, I’d say the advertisement was posted between four and six weeks before it was released, meaning that the poster hung on the side of Westwood Medical for nearly a year (circa mid-June until the end of May).

As if to quell my indignation at such a waste of good space, a Wall-E poster swooped in to replace Underdog before my first weekend here had passed. They couldn’t have done better. Wall-E is not even my favorite Pixar movie, but it’s up there, and it had been a great source of motivation and cure for writer’s block throughout my last semester at Oklahoma. Though the dream has faded and transformed over the last year, a large block of my life was spent dreaming of one day working for Pixar. That first Wall-E trailer began with Andrew Stanton narrating the events of a meeting between founding fathers, wherein they discussed the future of the studio and brainstormed the ideas that would become a string of the best movies of the last decade and a half. This, as much as the beautiful and intriguing Wall-E footage itself, inspired me again and again and again to beat my head against the wall when it felt completely devoid of any good idea.

That screenplay (conceived for animation) was 75-pages long when I moved to L.A. The plan was to work on it everyday, have it done in three months, and turned in to my producer with a month left on my internship. (This producer, incidentally, happens to be very well connected at Disney. A framed memo from Jeffrey Katzenberg, written as a fond farewell, hangs in his bathroom. In it, Katzenberg jokes about the monumental failure Newsies, advises him to seek out George Lucas and ILM for help with “being in two places at once,” and ends by telling him to “always keep [his] pager on.”) Those early months were hard fought, and each page I wrote seemed to push completion further away.

Having exhausted the Wall-E trailer, I turned to that giant poster for inspiration. I thought to myself that one day it would be my film’s poster on the side of that building. The internship was in Malibu, and it was a long drive home, but there is a hill on Wilshire Blvd. between San Vicente and the 405. It was at the crest of that hill that I was first able to catch a glimpse of the poster, and each night I felt that it was calling me home, the gate to Westwood village and the inspiration for that night’s writing.

I hoped that Wall-E would enjoy as long a berth as Underdog, but weeks after the release of the movie, it was replace by Swing Vote. As seen here from the Getty.

After that, it became High School Musical 3, then Bedtime Stories, Confessions of a Shopaholic, and Race to Witch Mountain. Basically, turd after turd after turd. Then, a great thing happened this weekend:

I’m not half as excited for Up as I was for Wall-E, but I’m definitely glad to see it up there. I will have officially been out here a year and six days by the time Up releases. Way to be on the cyclical structure, life.

This Week in Movies

A little trivia for you. Which recently Oscar-nominated director was responsible for this gem?

On a side note, anyone who thinks fedoras are cool should pay close attention to Isaac and Zac.