Archive for June 25th, 2008

Hollywood Talent Agencies Moving Away from Ownership Model: video

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

from Vator.tv, a tech company social network

  • ‘The agencies, such as United Talent Agency and William Morris, are becoming more like venture capitalists as they move toward an ownership model and further away from the representation model, said Chris Pappas, head of digital media practice for United Talent Agency. “We find the right artist (and) we create a company around his/her intellectual property,” he said. As for the artist, “they’ll have a substantial ownership position,” he added. “The idea is that they’ll be the owner of that content and not just workers for hire.”‘

video here
 

Nuke the Fridge or Swinging with Monkeys?

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

I don’t go to the movies a lot, although I do watch a lot of movies.  When I heard somebody else say that they walked out of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull , and then proceeded to dump on the quality of the products coming out of Hollywood, the first thing that I thought was ‘snob.’  

This was the only review I had heard for the movie.  I decided I would check it out for myself and boy was I sorry.  I would have walked out too, if it wasn’t for the hope that it was going to get better and less implausible (after all I was raised on Indiana Jones and Steven Spielberg movies– Does Steven Spielberg even make bad movies?). 

So what’s the verdict?  Buzzwatch’s Jargon Tracker tracks the popularity of phrases on the interweb.  One of the more popular phrases this week was “Nuke the Fridge.” 

“Nuke the Fridge” references  the implausible scene from the movie, where to survive a nuclear bomb test, Indy hunkers up in an old refrigerator (and is thrown along with the fridge miles through the air– and survives of course!).  Nuke the Fridge is meant to signify anything that has left the realm of reality (sort of like “Jump the Shark”).

I’m sure there are a number of scenes that are equally as out there as the Nuke the Fridge scene, but the one that comes to mind is a CGI heavy scene where the dude from Transformers (his name escapes me) gets caught up in some vines during a high speed chase.  Transformer dude gets lifted out of the jeep, and as the jeeps speed off, he proceeds to swing through the jungle with a bunch of monkeys and somehow cuts off the racing jeeps at a pass. 

 I try to learn something from every movie I watch, and from Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I learned, just because you can do something with CGI doesn’t mean that you should.   

One of My Favorite Title Sequences

Wednesday, June 25th, 2008

is from Napoleon Dynamite because it made me realize the importance of a good title sequence.  The art of the title takes a look at, well, the art of the title.