Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

My recent blog entry Wacky Holiday Fun Movies attracted a lot of eyeballs, so we return with more pop internet video craziness. Everybody loves a good joke. Add audio and video special effects, shot quick and dirty, and you’ve got a crude laugh riot.

Google recently announced at the 2006 CES show in Las Vegas their intentions to sell video produced by major content producers such as CBS. Meanwhile, a look at Google Video reveals something like America’s Funniest Home Videos on a global gross out scale. Google clearly understands how to attract eyeballs, with their clean presentation and access to thousands of dirty little homemade videos and animations uploaded by the salt of the earth.

Poop Today? Clever stop motion video of floating young men singing a gay song.
Fire Fart, a man lights a candle by lighting ass gas on fire. A human torch!
Matrix Ping Pong, Creative example of what ping pong looks like in Matrix time-space.
Hung Up Remix, Maybe not the music video Madonna had in mind. Performers from a distant era can’t keep the dancing spirits down.
Farting Preacher, Strange attention getting methods of a televangelist. Sounds fake.
Girls Judo Wrestling Match, Rachel’s first jiu-jitsu tournament.
Dumbest Dog, a dog who seems to want to bite himself with a laugh track.
Poppin’ Balloons, a peak inside of what appears to be a college dorm room balloon popping party.

Google set out to organize all the information in the world, and now we can see that there is such a thing as too much information.

Once again, congratulations to Reid on your accomplishment in getting Broken Arrows made. Cannot say enough for someone who manages to realize the long road from the idea to the screen.

Fortunately Reid is one of those people like myself who has been known to take a few risks, but they are carefully calculated risks. On the other hand, there is a man I know of who died by jumping backwards from his roof onto trampoline, only he missed. He broke his red neck; the thoughtless party stunt killed him. For him we have a Darwin Award.

The Darwin Awards:

“We salute the improvement of the human genome
by honoring those who remove themselves from it.
Of necessity, this honor is generally bestowed posthumously.”

Comical tales of the unwitting demise of fools who try to build their own rocket cars, drink from bottles found at the dump, or who drown in their kitchen sinks may have served as inspiriation for HBO’s Six Feet Under, and no doubt for their own movie, The Darwin Awards, to be screened later in January’s Sundance Film Festival. The film version written and directed by Finn Taylor, stars a quirky cast including Joseph Fiennes, Winona Ryder, David Arquette, Ty Burrell, Kevin Dunn, Nora Dunn, Judah Friedlander, Lukas Haas, Tom Hollander, Brad Hunt, Juliette Lewis, Julianna Margulies, Tim Blake Nelson, Alessandro Nivola, Chris Penn, Max Purlich, D.B. Sweeney, Robin Tunney and Wilmer Valderrama.

More details in a San Francisco Chronicle article.

I’ve been out of touch with many of the multi-talented, creative folks I met and worked with on Shrek 2 at PDI/DreamWorks. So, it was with great surprise and delight that I read a front page San Francisco Chronical news story about the friendly, energetic software engineer Reid Gershbein writing and directing an independent film Broken Arrows. The Chronicle knows that eyeballs are attracted to Google, so the headline is more about how the Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are involved in funding roughly 50% of the making of Broken Arrows. Turns out Reid knows them and successfully pitched his story.

The Broken Arrows trailer looks very promising and I’ll be looking forward to seeing Reid’s first film when it comes out later in 2006. Maybe I’ll even be fortunate to get a pre-screening…. hello, Reid?

Here is what Google’s home page artwork looks like as an animated GIF sequence.

There are few places on Earth where the stars in the sky can be seen in all their glory. In most civilized or inhabited regions, the stars’ powers are diminished by the many particles and pollutants in the air. As the population grows greater, the stars grow dimmer.

One would think that with a greater talent pool, there would be greater star actors. But alas, and alack, the stars fade to black.

What I am talking about is the Oscars ain’t what they used to be… they are headed the way of the Miss America pageant. Take a look at this Road To the Oscars list of the Top 25 Stars of 2005 at the Internet Movie Database. Paris Hilton at #5? Perhaps this explains the confusion…

rankings were not based upon critical assessments or box-office performance, but the actual search behavior of over 30 million users of IMDb.com.

Recently I’ve received requests from 2 different music CD publishers for usage of my Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band photos. Both of these requests came from Great Britain, although one is a major label’s UK office.

Beefheart apparently has a big following in Europe, as does Frank Zappa.

From the Sports section, a troubled ex-field goal kicker, Cole Ford told his psychiatrist…

while watching Siegfried & Roy he realized “what was wrong with the world was linked to the illusionists’ treatment, dominance and unhealthy intimacy” with their animals.

“He felt they threatened (the) world, and he began trying to figure out how he could stop them.”

Then in September 2004…

Ford drove past the sprawling Jungle Palace estate owned by Siegfried & Roy. Obscenities poured out of the slow-moving van, then blasts from a 12-gauge shotgun sprayed the entrance.

An obstinate Ford later appeared in a Las Vegas courtroom, demanding to plead guilty to the shooting. Instead, the judge ruled he was incompetent to stand trial and sent him to the state’s mental facility in northern Nevada.

“I’m perfectly competent,” Ford told the judge in January.

Although there is strong evidence that Siegfried and Roy’s DreamWorks 3D TV show Father of the Pride lowered the bar for 3D computer animated entertainment, that is no excuse for Cole Ford’s violent response.

The lighting and shading on the above image is unforgivable, enough to throw any respectable 3D artist into a tantrum. Most folks just changed the channel.

Cole Ford may have perceived part of the world’s problems while watching Siegfried and Roy’s live act. DreamWorks’ choice to outsource their FOTP 3D animation to China is yet another problem. So far no news of California 3D animators morphing into Yosemite Sam and going postal.

“No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” – H. L. Mencken

Stern on Yahoo! Pretty amazing media convergence!

I’ve tuned into Stern’s radio show on and off since 1986 when he was on at WNBC, and have been repulsed and fascinated from the very start.