Popular Media

« Older Entries | Newer Entries »

The Bad News Is That Good News Isn’t Free

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on August 7, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Friday, August 7th, 2009

Rupert Murdoch wants his two dollars, and my hometown newspaper is better off dead.

Rupert Murdoch’s plan to start charging for online news is an interesting test of the theories laid out in the recent bestseller Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I think most consumers feel that given the quality of journalism over the past decade, the price of free news is just about right. It’s interesting to me that Murdoch would choose to monetize online news at a time when real-world papers are failing at an epidemic rate; I’m of the opinion that his massive media empire is simply unable – much like the music industry – to adapt to the evolving market. And apparently Gartner Research agrees. Unfortunately, with the current trend of blogs-as-news and Twitter-driven media, the problems created by completely profit-driven journalism (outlined nicely in the book The Elements of Journalism) are replaced with new ones, primarily a total lack of professionalism and ethical guidelines. I’m sorry to say that in the supposedly media-hip town that I live in, I did little grieving over its recently failed newspaper. It was an awful publication. And while I had some hopes for its online/hybrid replacement, they’ve created what many already feel is a failure of epic proportions. It’s hard to tell how bad the content is; the interface is so awful you’ll never find it! Likewise, even savvier attempts to infuse online news with a degree of journalistic professionalism and integrity – like The Faster Times – end up falling short in a number of ways. Maybe if the government somehow supported and regulated the news we could find a balance. That always turns out well. See you in the funny papers!

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re All So Meta

[ 4 Comments ]Posted on July 31, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Friday, July 31st, 2009

I want my Verfremdungseffekt back. Our collective tech and media savvy makes me feel like I’m living a fictionalized version of my own life.


William Shatner Gets Meta

Sometimes I feel like my friends and I are living a fictionalized version of our lives as products. How many times a day do you hear someone reference what they said or heard on Facebook or Twitter that day, rather than talking about something that occurred in reality? How many times a day do you hear someone who doesn’t even have a job in advertising or marketing talk about branding, or someone who does have a marketing job talk about utilizing social media as if they have the secret that makes it work? We live in a culture that thinks itself so media-savvy that the best source of news is a comedy show , the most revered art form is reality shows, and the hippest people totally aren’t. I mean, once you move to Williamsburg to be hip, how hip are you? I love metafiction, in fact, I have a half-written novel (Don’t we all? Here’s an excerpt of mine, 116KB PDF) which uses the narrator’s time-traveling and alcohol abuse as the device to explain the writer’s block that prevents him from resolving the story for you. To add an extra layer of “meta” to the whole thing, I plan on not finishing the novel. This kind of hip media self-awareness was cool back when AdBusters was new, or when William Shatner acknowledged his own absurdity in things like this parody trailer for the movie Seven, but now it’s so pervasive that it’s actually cannibalized back into advertising. It’s gotten to the point that I honestly can’t suspend my disbelief about my own life any more, let alone a movie or a product. My fourth wall is gone. I want my Verfremdungseffekt back.

Read the rest of this entry »

Green Hornet Generates More Buzz

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on July 25, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

Unfortunately not much of it is positive. Will they really be recasting Kato as a non-Asian?

I’ve never been a big fan of comic books or the films based on them, but I’ll be really disappointed if they mishandle the film version of The Green Hornet. As a kid in the sixties, I of course watched shows like Batman, but was much more drawn to things like The Avengers, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and especially the short-lived Green Hornet. I was in fact convinced that I had some mysterious connection with the show, a belief that was probably fueled by a few things: the fact that my dad drove a 1966 Imperial (the car the show’s Black Beauty was based on), that we had a mysterious Asian student boarding with us (unusual in the sixties) and that I’ve always had a strange connection with the idea that good things come from darkness. Although the show had some of the camp that many other 60′s spy or superhero shows had, it also had a little dark edginess that set it apart. And maybe doomed it to its one-season run. It also had some kick-ass music (yeah, Rimsky-Korsakov can be kick-ass) and was – as you may know – a huge break for Asian talent in the states. Although the central character of the show was supposedly the Britt Reid/Green Hornet figure, we all know the real star was his sidekick Kato, played by martial arts legend Bruce Lee. This is a story element which sadly may be changed in the film. Although the film version is slated for release on July 9, 2010 (my birthday, by the way), the production has had a bumpy ride. Originally Stephen Chow was directing and starring as Kato, now he’s doing neither. It also appears they’re broadening the type as they cast the new Kato. I’m hoping for the best; I really don’t get the casting of Seth Rogen as the Green Hornet, but Michael Gondry is directing, and so far the car looks pretty cool.

Read the rest of this entry »

Can Movies Be Made Without Corporate Capitalist Greed?

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on July 17, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Friday, July 17th, 2009

Crowdsourcing is one of many popular new buzzwords gaining traction, but will it work for movies?

A few years ago, my friend Terry Osterhout had a great idea: a zombie movie called “Hybrid”, completely produced with user-submitted material. Although a lot of buzz was generated, the submissions never really poured in. I think he was a little ahead of his time; crowdsourcing seems to be the hot new thing now, thanks to the rise of social networking, especially Facebook and Twitter. We recently wrote about the crowdsourced video for the the Japanese pop band Sour’s song “Hibi no Neiro”, but there’s much more afoot: after considerable success launching the project “Live Music” (see the clip at left) via Facebook, the project is being backed by Sony and Intel for release this fall. There’s also This Movie is Broken, a movie about the Canadian band Broken Social Scene and (this will turn out well) Star Wars Uncut which slices “Star Wars: A New Hope” into 472 separate 15 second clips, to be filmed by 472 different users. This kind of “socialist filmmaking” can have beautiful results, as when Israeli artist Kutiman Remixed YouTube or when a non-profit assembles a project like Playing for Change. But can this kind of project really shape up without a healthy injection of capitalist greed? The most successful project like this so far has been Live Music, and as this CartoonBrew article points out, it’s heavily funded by corporate sponsorship. I guess there’s always crowdfunding as an alternative. This Mashable article asks if it is in fact the future of journalism. There’s been a lot of talk about Free Stuff lately, and I have to say: few know better than I how little people who like your work will pay you when you don’t directly charge for it.

Read the rest of this entry »

How To Sell Your Soul (Or Put It In Cold Storage Until You’re Ready)

[ Comments Off ]Posted on July 12, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

A funny thing happened on the way to selling my soul. I found a trailer for the movie Cold Souls.


Be careful in your dealings with Satan.
He can be a real Dick sometimes.

With the state of the economy recently, it may have occurred to you to sell your soul to put an end to your financial woes. We were doing a little research along these lines to help you out when we ran across an interesting company that made us ask ourselves the question: why not just put it in cold storage until you decide? Unfortunately, it turned out upon further perusal that in spite of the fact that the company even has a Facebook page – which of course always lends a great deal of credibility to an organization’s brand – it is in fact itself the worst form of selling your soul (at least if you’re on a team assigned to marketing a product), a slightly botched viral marketing campaign for the movie Cold Souls, due for release in August. Actually the film looks promising, see a trailer here. But if you came here more interested in selling your soul than storing it, here are some quick guides to help you get on that road to hell. This page looks credible; it gets right to the point with red text on a black background, a “666″ in the URL, and a form you can fill out right away. This rambling guide, presented by the a member of the British Church of Satan , also looks promising. After rambling on for awhile about how to do it, it then suggests Satan doesn’t exist. Which, as we all know, is exactly how Satan works. They also provide a handy Amazon link to the Satanic Bible, like we just did. But oddly enough, the Weekly World News page on the topic had the most practical and to-the-point information, with reminders like “Remember to demand the life-extension clause“. And lastly, in the interest of maintaining the high journalistic standards of fair and balanced reporting established by organizations like Fox News, get a Christian point of view before signing anything. Happy selling! Read the rest of this entry »

« Older Entries | Newer Entries »