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I am empowering Burger King’s pernicious viral marketing campaign, which I linked to below, even further by quoting this blog from Kottke.org, in which Jason Kottke uses the mathematics behind the campaign to come up with a valuation for Facebook that is lower than the valuation Microsoft used when they invested in the company. (Getting people like me to blog about a fast food product seems to have been the whole point of the campaign.) You see, if each Whopper costs $2.40, and there are 150 million users on Facebook, but some of them live overseas and are ineligible… well, […]
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I’ve blogged before about the legal saga surrounding The Watchmen, which is the film news world equivalent of a slow-motion car crash. If you’re a producer, the idea that your film could be held hostage after its completion due to legal issues is the ultimate nightmare. One of the film’s producers, Lloyd Levin, has written an open letter that is posted over at Drew McWeeny’s new blog, Hitfix. An excerpt: One reason the movie was made was because Warner Brothers spent the time, effort and money to engage with and develop the project. If Watchmen was at Fox the decision […]
From his eclectic resumé, it’s clear that Ole Bornedal likes to challenge himself so (almost always) refuses to return to familiar territory. The Danish writer-director was born in the small town of Nørresundby in 1959, and became a director of Danish radio plays in the 1980s after failing to get into film school. In the early 90s, he moved into television, where he wrote and directed sketch comedy and political satire as well as the colorfully titled TV movie Masturbator (1993). Bornedal made his feature film debut in 1994 with Nightwatch, a thriller about a law student who moonlights as […]
Now here is outside-the-box, appealingly anti-social advertising. From Burger King comes the Whopper Sacrifice campaign, described here in Ad Week: It’s a common problem for anyone who joined Facebook some time ago. You look at your friend list and wonder who these people are. Burger King wants to help consumers do something about it. The fast-food chain has released the Whopper Sacrifice application on Facebook. The app rewards people with a coupon for BK’s signature burger when they cull 10 friends. Each time a friend is excommunicated, the application sends a notification to the banished party via Facebook’s news feed […]
“What if Sundance isn’t about the sales anymore?” asks Stephen Zeitchik in a Hollywood Reporter piece that’s worth reading for its take on the festival and the current acquisitions market. In it he mentions several films that are screening directly for executives instead of heading towards Park City, and he summons up the following vision of the festival (which is a lot like how it used to be a long time ago): But what these breakouts show is that the fest’s main value might now lie in the classic indie model, in which little money is spent and little is […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:15 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] Afghan Star is a documentary about a TV show of the same name. It’s a powerful TV format we all know — a version of Pop Idol — but in a country that most of us don’t: Afghanistan. With the backdrop of warfare and Taliban repression (they banned music and used to impale TVs on spikes) you certainly wouldn’t expect to find a TV music talent contest. But Afghan Star: The Series is now one of the most potent forces of change the country has. You […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 3:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] The story of my film, Boy Interrupted, was not affected much by recently changing digital technology. If anything, the film is a throwback to conventional documentary filmmaking; straightforward chronological storytelling – no tricks. Authenticity was our guide. The goal was to tell the story of my son Evan’s bipolar illness and suicide in as factual a manner as possible, with home movies and first-hand interviews bearing witness to our experience as a family. I love the self-contained and mostly humorous videos I see on YouTube and Facebook and […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:00 am — Temple Theatre, Park City] The hardest thing about making documentaries is finding a story inside your material — it’s just so much harder than scripted material. And so what you find are a lot of documentaries that are written in advance; that is to say that the filmmaker knew what he or she wanted to say before beginning shooting. So you feel a kind of steering going on, and therefore a falseness. The other extreme is that you see documentaries that have no story at all. The filmmaker saw something interesting, they […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 8:30 am — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Johnny Mad Dog is based on a novel by Emmanuel Dongala. At first, I wrote a faithful adaptation of the book following the same narrative construction, which was centered on two main characters: Johnny, a 15-year-old child soldier, and Laokolé, a 13-year-old girl who runs away with her family. They are in the same situation in the last days of a civil war in Africa. The same unit of time, place and space. Two roads which cross paths, two different points of view, two destinies. Once this […]