Category Archives: Brier Archive

Kickstarter FTW!

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Have you been to this site:

http://www.kickstarter.com/

It is the perhaps the greatest site for good ever made, well except for nra.org of course. For a while there it was looking like some type of typical hippie clap trap being used to make bad indie movies about cowboys eating yogurt but then the site started to support video games.

That is when all hell broke loose and people realized they could actually influence what games got made. Games that they would actually want to play. Suddenly rainbows and unicorns starting busting loose as people dreamt of the remakes they would want, the sequels to long forgotten classics would come to fruition. The only real question about kickstarter is: why did this take so long to happen?

Might and Magic 12?

Wizardry 9?

And gulp… Star Control 4?

These dreams now live. Of course no one is funding them now. But for the first time in a very long time there is hope. Unlike the generic FPS clone crap we get subjected to each fall we now can help build the games we really want to play. This is what the internet was designed for, not flash mobs doing the Carlton, although I do admit that is pretty awesome. Ok, maybe the internet was designed for two things: kickstarting video games and Carlton dancing. And Porn. Ok the internet was designed for 3 things, but that is it.

There is one super awesome blast from the past that has been funded that is making the game sites go all aflutter and that is Wasteland 2. Wasteland was a good Fallout. With humor (thus making it good.) I loved that buggy incomplete game so much. It is on my top 10 of all time games and to think that it might get a sequel made by people with talent who care about the original and not repacking it into a cheesy rip-off of the past – I am looking at you Bard’s Tale remake, just causes a hope gusher. It’s enough to make you want the world to survive past 12/21/2012 just to play it.

How do they make you go to that movie again?

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Today we are going to delve deep into one of my favorite topics: Movie Marketing!

I DVR/TiVo everything but sometimes a commercial will slip through the cracks. This seems to be especially true for movies. Bad movies. I still debate whether I just notice the bad movie commercials more because they are so bad, but that is a different deep dive. For instance, I am so happy that John Carter came out in theaters so I won’t have to watch those horrible commercials anymore.

It seems there are always horrible movie commercials coming out though – Source Code, Immortals, Repo Men, and Red Tails to name just a few semi-recent ones. I was so happy on 11/12/11 because no longer would have to see Immortals ads. Then the Blu-Ray / DVD came out and I was subjected to more terribleness. Finally that dropped on 3/6 and I felt safe. Until the terrible Wrath of the Titans commercials started. It is like bad movie whack-a-mole.

In the pre and early internet days studios could drop 10-30 million on marketing and guarantee a good opening weekend for a bad movie. Now they can at best secure a mediocre weekend or slightly better if the film is in certain genres. Two things are at the top of killing the studio’s ability to trick people into watching bad movies. The first is Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. You don’t need to read reviews to see if a movie is bad or not, you just need to see the score. Studio’s also can’t buy reviews anymore to hide the truth. A lot critics were / are for sale. Some critics were even made up. Studio’s loved this as they could buy enough to fake people into thinking bad was good, or good enough. Then the sample space grew so large because so many reviews were pulled in from so many sources that it because impossible to hide the truth. Web 2.0 FTW!

The second thing that happened is texting / internet enabled phones / twitter. Within minutes of a movie starting to play the tweets fly out. People text their friends to never see a movie. This social power of the people kills all the carefully crafted marketing messages. It must be so frustrating to work in these marketing departments trying to trick people into seeing all this drivel.

I think a part of this is they market to lowest common denominator. They just assume everyone is stupid and will fall for the wiz bang effects or star. They don’t think ordinary people care / want to see good movies. Either that or studios / marketers are stupid and can’t tell what a good movie consists of. I am not talking The Artist “good movies” here, I am talking Forest Gump, LOTR, Captain America, Saving Private Ryan, Top Gun,  The Social Network and last year’s Moneyball, good movies. These are well crafted stories with good effects, good characters, quality acting and they are well paced. Unlike some POS art artist crap. (The idiocy of the Academy is a whole other topic.)

This “stupid” factor, whatever side it lies on, is a key component into why studios only make sequels now or copies of other movies. They have exhausted their ability to market crap as people figure out it is crap way to quickly now. We did it to ourselves! Of course the solution to the problem is to figure out how to make better movies so they don’t have to attempt to sell crap to people, but I guess that idea hasn’t occurred to anyone, if it did, it fell on deaf ears. Either they can hire some smarter writers / producers or stop lying in their marketing, or keep kicking the can of crap down the road. (Guess which option they appear to be making.)

But let’s say you have a stinker on your hands, what do you do? Consider the case of the Three Musketeers. You remade a classic, so you had a known brand, threw in all the modern PC stuff so you hit all your demographics, made it take place in France / Europe so you would get your foreign markets to see it. You had your star power and you marketed her as the reason to see the movie. You showed ridiculous special effects that would get the “stupid” kids to come and watch. Then for some unknown reason no one watched! Your opening weekend earned $8M on 3000+ screens, coming in at 4th place. Yikes! Luckily you only spent $75 million to make this turd puppy. Overseas would allow you to recoup your loses but a picture like this will have a DVD / Blu Ray release. Obviously your original marketing plan failed. How can you re-sell this?

Consider the original commercial:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkspbi_the-three-musketeers-new-tv-commercial-launched_shortfilms

Now take a look at the new DVD commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD5P9bFfnvk

Or how about the Movie poster versus the new DVD cover –

Theater:

DVD:

Notice something is missing? I guess Mila didn’t sample so well. Sacré bleu! Joan of Arc shunned? Say it isn’t so, but she is gone. So are the over the top moments in the commercial. It’s like they are trying say the movie isn’t about giant airships shooting fire. Of course that makes the rebranding commercial very short because the movie really is about fireball shooting giant airships. But at least they are trying to trick people picking this up, like it is a whole different movie. Marketing: If the truth doesn’t work for a movie, make sure to lie better next time.

Some of us don’t forget though. We remember the failure, and more importantly the 26% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes.

 

Supermodel? A blast from the past

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Has Kate Upton revived something long thought dead? In this age of Internet instant gratification and youXXX is the Supermodel back? This is a revival on a Jurassic Park scale. No one would have thought this possible but just like when Bieber used the Internets to recreate the male teenage singer, also thought dead after Michael Jackson grew up, so Kate has rebirthed the Supermodel.

A lot of people have been pretending to be Supermodels, like Tom Brady’s Yoko wife, Gisele Bundchen and the other stars of Victoria Secret lingerie parade. Most ended up as fodder tossed out of Leonardo Dicaprio’s or George Clooney’s bedroom. Heidi Klum tried to rise to the top with her Halloween shenanigans and strange marriage to Seal (now divorced.) But they never had “it”. Either too skinny, too foreign, or too lacking in synapse firing skills none of these models rose to the top. They never broke out of their Vogue monologue and hit the mainstream.

Without Supermodels we have been filling in with reality stars – Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton; actresses – Scarlett Johansson or Megan Fox and failed actresses – Lindsay Lohan. We have also absorbed the strange hybrids full of the crazy – Tila Tequila I am looking at you here. But models? No.

Even Upton’s rise to fame was all rated PG. Paris and Kim had to resort to underground sex tapes. Kate? She made a tape all right. A tape of her doing the dougie at a clippers game. This endearing 5 minutes was not the reason in and of itself of her rise, as I doubt you or me doing the same thing would result in a modeling contract, but it was a huge catalyst in an oversaturated media driven world that allowed her cream to rise.

It was assumed porn stars had destroyed the youthful almost innocence associated with Super Models. Sport Illustrated? Really? Is Maxim magazine still even published? The days of a Kristy Brinkley poster hanging in some young male’s room of yesteryear were assumed to be supplanted by a flush of porn sites running the gamut of every possible taste imaginable.

Perhaps it was this overabundance of pornography (and the freeness of it that is destroying the porn industry) that left the door open for a fresh face from Michigan via Melborne to save the popular modeling industry. Since cash left the porn industry are there even real porn stars anymore? Who is left to spend $25 dollars on one DVD? And it is not like you want Blu Ray porn.

The evidence is piling up of her Super Modelness. Consider this ad. Is it something only a Supermodel could make? (Or a reality star in her prime which we used to replaced Supermodels. Nitpicker.)

http://www.longislandpress.com/2012/02/28/kate-upton-carls-jr-commercial-video/  (SNSFW) This is quite reminiscent of Cindy Crawford hocking Pepsi products back in the 90’s, a true demonstration of her SuperModel power. We haven’t seen the like since, at least not by anyone calling themselves models.

 

Is this a flash in the pan, a Jump Jive An’ Wail, moment or do we have a real rebirth? Has she made case that she made the leap and that she is a Supermodel? The upcoming days will tell. No matter what though, it is exciting to see something so old being something so new.

 

Matthew Broderick

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With his recent Super Bowl victory Matthew has broken back into the public consciousness. Or at least mine which is just as good. He inspired flashbacks to his glory years before the incident and the sellout. The incident has left a sour taste in my mouth for the last 15 years. It was just such an unthinkable act. Something so tragic that it was nearly impossible to maintain respect for him.

I speak of course of his marriage to the creature Sarah Jessica Parker. This was quickly followed up by the inspector Gadget sellout debacle. I have had my back turned to him ever since. However Honda reached out and made me look back and remember the man he was, not the man he became. And for that I have to thank them.

His early years were beyond impressive. We are talking off the charts life changing events. For a young white kid growing up in the suburbs Broderick’s work here inspired a lifetime cynicism, sarcasm, games, fantasy, and slacker excellence. War Games and Ferris may not have directly inspired me to want to head into Computer Science but they did do several things for sure:

  1. Make me want start a Global Thermonuclear War and eat at Burger King.
  2. Assume no one in charge has any idea what they are really doing.
  3. Use my talents for mischief and otherwise slacker behavior knowing it could all be fixed in the end. I mean, look at me now!
  4. You can always win Tic Tac Toe. You just have to keep trying.

Besides the above two megahits Broderick also brought us Ladyhawke during this period. It was of course a dangerous fantasy movie that for some reason was always on HBO or Cinemax and therefore I watched it all the time as well. This plus LOTR and RPGs helped hinder my development for years. Thank God for football and sports. Many others were laid low by these traps but this was all part of the Broderick charm.

Broderick also produced the best Civil War movie ever – Glory. Name one better. Gettysburg? Ha. Keep trying. You have to have characters and character growth to tell a real story. Name one in Gettysburg. That Glory was not even nominated for Best Picture is still a travesty to this day. My Left Foot? Come on Son!

The Lion King is still the best Disney movie. Not Aladdin or Ferngully or Avatar or any of their other hippie crap. This movie is the only saving grace for that institution. It was an amazing tale and Broderick did an excellent job of voice acting even though his career was on a downward spiral at this point.

After that Broderick’s career is a series of landmines except for the excellent Election with America’s blonde sweetheart Reese Witherspoon.

Will one commercial make up for over a decade of failure and mediocrity? No. It cannot. What it can do is form a bridge over the failure back to the past so we can remember him in better times before the incident, before the ineptitude. When he was a shining beacon of the power of the 80’s and their glory. When America was great and the future was so bright we had to wear shades.

Thank you Matthew for all the memories and terrible life choices you inspired in me.

We so Hungry

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I am hungry. Starved even. It has been almost a year since the last great pop sensation broke. In between we have been delighted by Katy Perry and of course LMFAO but it was of course Rebecca Black that produced the music of substance and sustenance of last year.

Gaga was excellent but it has been what, a couple months since she last gave a us a new song? She used to come out with a song a month. Plus she is getting played. Don’t get me wrong, she is still good, but there is no mystery there. She is like chicken parm. That is one of my favorites foods but I know what I am getting. Rihanna falls into the same camp.

We need something new to gnaw on.  A perusable of the Billboard top 100 offers no comfort. Adele? Kelly Clarkson. Even a song called “Good Feeling” is depressing. The Adele plus NickiM combo is better than Mike Tyson’s one two punch. It just floors quality music and the world is worse for it.

I was hoping something really old could bring it. Like a nice retro moment reformed. A phoenix rising from the ashes of pop culture. This was the hope and prayer for Madonna. Unfortunately the sweet melody that she started was tainted with the worst trash of the modern era: Nicki Minaj. She single handedly destroyed all hope for Give Me All Your Luvin. Her idiocy and terrible rapping ability make for beyond unlistenable songs. She is the Blake Griffin of music.

Disgusting.

Revolting.

What is wrong with everyone? It is like the country is depressed or something. Well things were really depressed in the 1970’s. And you know what that got us? Besides me? Michael FUCKING Jackson.

Where are you Mike II? We all need some help up in this place.

Radioactive Vampire Unicorn Blood

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Originally Posted January 14, 2009

 

So I finished watching True Blood Season 1. What did I learn? That everything is about blood(drugs) and sex. It’s either having sex with a vampire and them biting you or drinking vampire blood / tripping and having sex. While this can be entertaining and works just fine as the central plot to a B horror movie, can it stand up as the major plot for a whole TV series?

It sure as hell can if you keep casting women like Ana Paquin in lead roles. Anyway, this got me thinking: What other types of blood would be worth harvesting for super powers?

Zombies? No way. You’d turn into a zombie silly!

Ninja’s? No. They are just highly skilled humans.

Pirates or Robots? Maybe robot blood if it would not kill you. Like Voltron blood.

Spider Man blood? A good bet. It’s radioactive and a spider bite made Peter have super powers.

Superman? How you gonna get it? You can’t pierce his skin.

X Men types? There has to be a better way to get a mutant gene.

Alien from Alien? Possibly. It’s acid, but there might be a way to take it to give you alien powers. Wasn’t this Alien 3 or 4?

Smurf? Now that is just silly. Maybe Fraggles. No to Pound Puppies, but yes to Care Bears. The stare power is freakin awesome.

Definitely unicorn blood. That has all kinds of crazy goodness up in there. I think it lets you make rainbows and stuff.

What’s the best? Perhaps a vampire unicorn that has been bit by a radioactive spider. That’s what I am placing my bet on.

Twilight

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I suspect many of you are sick to death of Twilight. I predicted this debacle in a Brier post:

Originally Posted on November 19, 2008

 

What to say about this film? First, it is always good to see Vampires getting mainstream acceptance, except when it goes horribly, horribly wrong. For instance, the anticipation and then eventual enjoyment of Interview was great. I then started to read the books. The first made the movie even better filling in several holes. The next book, The Vampire Lestat, told the story of a depraved creature with some serious mommy issues. Another winner. Then… It got weird yo. Way weird. In ways I will not, cannot, return to. Ann Rice – You are my list. Not cool.

We now turn our attention to Twilight. This series is the next Harry Potter novels, selling something like 30 million copies worldwide. However, the fans are all girls. Is this Vampire In the City, or DeGrassi Vampire High, or even Vampire School Musical? I say it is more:

Robert Pattinson walked the red carpet last night for the world premiere of Twilight where he was reportedly deafened by 50 bajillion screaming teens who thought it’d be cool to scratch their necks all up to simulate a vampire bite. Ha ha. That’s our future, folks. I’m drowning myself in the tub. Us Magazine reports:

“They all just scream at me and now it just kind of feel like my job,” said Pattinson, who joked with MTV News that he’d gone “completely deaf” at the premiere.
Just the other day, Pattinson realized, “there were some girls who had scratched … the side of their necks so [they were] freshly bleeding when they came up to get a signature.
“They were like, ‘We did this for you.’ I didn’t know what to say. ‘Um, thanks guys?'”

http://thesuperficial.com/2008/11/robert_pattinson_attends_the_p.php

These kinds of reactions are more chilling and terrifying than anything a vampire could do. And so… I fear this movie, even being the best mainstream bet in vampire tales in the last decade, will not do justice to the genre or meet any of my many standards for attendance. Is it just Gossip Girl with teeth? Now don’t get me wrong – I love the teen fare. 90210, Mean Girls, even Smallville are all my bread and butter. CW for life, yo.

However, I think we aren’t getting the good teen fare here. I think we are getting The Vampire Girls and until informed otherwise I will not be plopping down my cash to witness the debacle. It is a bit of a shame to waste such a great chance to mainstream a great genre. What we need instead is a new Buffy movie. It’s still the greatest TV show of all time, and does the genre credit. I would be much happier if the this new generation of girls was being raised in the Buffy model instead of this Twilight model where they all want to go crazy and turn into Goth chicks who want to get themselves bit all the time.

Congrats boys of the next generation, you can thank Stephenie Meyer for all those messed up nights you will have to endure dealing with your Girlfriend’s future Twilight fallout and impending psychosis.

Little Bit

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Originally Published 11/12/2008

Have you noticed how the phrase “Little Bit” has crept all throughout the vernacular of athletes? For instance, a team loses 36 -3, and they asked a losing player what went wrong – his answer: “Well, we just didn’t tackle very well, a little bit.” Or a pitcher gives up a grand slam: “I just missed inside a little bit. We have to get after it a little bit more. The hustle was there but we need a little bit more.”

Little bit? This phrase needs to stop being used in situations where it grossly does not apply. Little bit should be mentioned when talking about pouring sugar into coffee, not on the playing field. Consider yourself enlightened and now when you see, read, or hear an athlete abusing this term you can think of me and give a little “grr”.

Meet and Greet with Joe the Plumber

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(Originally Published on 11/5/2008)

Are we human?
Or are we dancer?
My sign is vital
My hands are cold
And I’m on my knees
Looking for the answer
Are we human?
Or are we dancer?

–  Killers Human

I have been battling with these lyrics for about a week now. Dancer? Isn’t there an ‘s’ missing? The strict grammartarian in me was cringing. What are these guys thinking? I ended up seeking out PDE advice, and what I found blew my mind. You see, we can’t think of human as a noun, but as an archetype, and so is Dancer. Are we human or are we dancer is like saying are we American or are we Russian. Do we belong to just the base human, or are we dancer, transcending to a new form. Dancer is not a subset of human, no, not at all. However, there Venn diagrams do interact and go beyond. Dancer is what we should be, not what we are. So cut cord, be Dancer.

Now, amidst the euphoria and glory of the recent Phillies championship, other great events in sports have been happening. I speak of College football, a topic long debated among members of Brier Nation. So far we have an excellent season shaping up.

Consider:

  1. GaTech beat FSU for the first time in Bowden era
  2. PSU won in OSU for the first time in 30 years
  3. Michigan lost to Toledo.
  4. Michigan blew the second longest winning season streak in history. #1 you ask? PSU of course. Better luck in 2059.
  5. PSU beat Michigan for the first is like forever.
  6. First losing season in like forever for Michigan.
  7. First none bowl appearance for Michigan is 34 years.
  8. Michigan lost to… well I think you get the picture. A good strength and conditioning coach does not make up for no talent. Who knew?

As all members can agree, these are all excellent events. I am still trepidatious about the over rated Big 12 stealing another chance for JoePa to play for a title, so I won’t linger to long there, but instead will focus the truly unexpected: Ga Tech.

How can they be winning (In first place of the Coastal division) when:

  1. They have the ugliest uniforms in football. What happened? We used to have great classy uniforms. Where have you gone Rudy? Now.. yuck.
  2. They are running the wishbone. Call it the triple whatever, I will go with BobbyB – It’s the bone.

These things make me sad for my great and mighty alma mater, and go against everything I believe about football, (yes I believe good looking uniforms are a pre req for winning and you need throw the ball.) but the wins? They somehow mask this. I guess I feel like a feminist did when Bill stained Monica’s dress.

Just win baby.

Note: Amazing how a BCS game and years of consistent winning can change your views on Paul Johnson. I am still not convinced this offense is versatile enough to win a national championship, but it fun to watch. (We also fixed the uniforms.)