Terribly Happy

Some movies we do for Trailers Without Pity sound like a good idea at the time, but then we sit down to script and watch the preview over and over and it’s like, “Wow, this has really soured us on the whole idea of this movie.” It’s like eating little Tootsie Rolls until you suddenly realize you ate too many and you never want one again.

This was happily not the case on Thor, the superhero movie due out in May, which actually got better the more times we watched the two trailers that are out for it. It just got dumber and funnier and more absurd the more we watched it. I am hoping the movie retains some of that “So ridiculous it’s awesome” magic. (Not that I will pay to go see it. I mean, come on. It’s fucking Thor.)

So here is the video we did for it, which is one of my favorites that we’ve done. You really can’t put me and hammer jokes in the same room and not expect me to have a good time.

We’re figuring out the schedule for the next few videos but we are likely to do Cars 2 next.

In this new Trailers Without Pity video, for the upcoming period romance Water for Elephants, we take a break from aliens, superheroes and knife-wielding maniacs to tackle a Reese Witherspoon/Robert Pattinson movie. But then we found out that Christoph Waltz from Inglourious Basterds is in it and he probably wields a knife at some point. Win some, lose some.

As we say in the video, it reminds us a lot of a blockbuster movie about seemingly doomed romance and giant things you ride on. (In this case elephants, not luxury ocean liners.)

Next time, we go back to the comic-book-movie grind with Thor. Enjoy!

For about a month and a half, starting at the beginning of February and ending less than a week ago, my whole life was pretty much South by Southwest Interactive.

The festival takes place in Austin every year and for the last two has been growing at a rate of more than 35 percent, year-over-year. Like smartphones and apps, it’s become one of those things that only becomes a bigger and bigger part of my job. It’s not just a national tech story that publications like Wired, CNet, The New York Times and others pay attention to, it’s a local story for us. And as the lead reporter on it for my paper, I get really, really competitive and territorial about our coverage. It’s probably the only time of the year that this journalistic bug hits me, where I turn into one of those guys with the hat with “PRESS” on it and bark things out like, “You’re not gonna scoop me, ya out-of-towner, see?”

The “See?” is probably unnecessary.

But it really does take over my life for a good while. I turn down freelance assignments and other offers to do stuff with, “I can’t. South by Southwest.” We coordinate a schedule of babysitting help for my wife with the explainer, “South by Southwest.” When I go to get a bite to eat at a restaurant and they ask what I want, I say, “South by Southwest.” Then they bring me back a soggy sandwich and I wonder if perhaps I’ve gone too far.

What is the festival? I don’t really know anymore. It was once a funky, centralized festival for CD-ROM producers, digital artists and people dabbling in online porn (“dabbling” is a good word for that, don’t you think? It’s dirty-but-not-quite-dirty-sounding).

Today, it’s a massive social media event, a place where start-ups try to get a foothold with early adopters and a place where huge companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their brands in front of bloggers, top Twitterers and the press.

For me, personally, it’s the hardest I work all year on any one project. It’s also the only time of the year I have a free pass to stay out as late as I want for a whole week and to really throw myself into coverage.

I won’t bore you with the play-by-play because I pretty much did that with Twitter for a whole week (and then some) to the point where I wondered if one more post with the hashtag “#SXSW” was finally going to drive my friends away for good.

I took last Thursday and Friday off after the fest and am scheduling some vacation time soon.  You’ll see why below.

Here’s a lot of what I wrote in that blaze of pre-festival, mid-festival and post-festival activity.

• The Monday that the festival ran, I did a piece with NPR on trends at the fest.  We recorded it via Skype from the press room of the Convention Center (which was much more convenient than going to the studio where we usually record).
• Before the fest, I did a profile of 4chan and Canvas founder Christopher Poole that ran in our Insight section and covered the actual keynote. I also profiled SCVNGR chief ninja (and founder) Seth Priebatsch, who ended up doing a great job on his keynote.
• On the Saturday of the fest, I had a story/essay run about so-called “Social Media Gurus” that featured a photo of me that all my editors found very amusing.  I just tried very hard to avoid making eye contact with the photo.  Overall, I thought it turned out really well. It’s a piece my editor and I have wanted to get into the paper for a while.
• I also wrote about the backlash against the festival in 2010 and how Interactive is dealing with growing pains and emerging as a huge social event. (2011 would eventually prove a lot of this even truer). I was surprised to see that piece pop up on Techmeme.
• A Tweet I posted about Apple’s surprise pop up store became a Twitter top Tweet, featured on the front page of Twitter.com! (It wasn’t even linking to a story I wrote. Our great real estate writer Shonda Novak covered that.)
• We covered a ton of panels, posted lots of photos and just did a lot of write-ups on the fest programming.
• Post-festival, I wrote about how it grew to more than 19k attendees and how SXSW Interactive can be fixed for 2012 (not that it’s broken).
• At the fest, I was in videos for Access PR and Gen Connect, being interviewed about SXSW Interactive.
• I created a Flickr set of some of my SXSW photos as well as the Statesman Texas Social Media Awards, where I was a judge. I’m still tweaking pics and putting more of them up.

• I shot a video of Trey Ratcliff’s amazing downtown Austin photowalk. Bonus was that I got to hang out with Jackie Danicki, a long-time Internet friend. You can also see a video I shot of an IBM Watson demo and a stand-up I did wrapping up the fest embedded below.

Shot in New Braunfels, around 9:30 p.m.

We’re not quite sure what to make of this horror sequel, this Scream 4 cinematic venture, which has a trailer that seems a little ripe and not in a good way. In fact, I daresay it might be overripe! Criminy!

I’ll tell you a short story about my bathroom.

My wife and I share a sink. There are two sinks in our bathroom but for some reason that has never been explained to my satisfaction, we only use one. The other sink is like a catch-all for clothes and junk. MOVING ON!

So this sink we share gets my shavings, my wife’s curly-hair products, both our toothpaste leavings, all manner of hair and gunk from picking up and cleaning the baby (don’t even ask) and plenty of other gross stuff that I don’t even remember well enough to recount.

Every six months or so, this sink gets clogged up and I have to go in there with a wire hanger and dig whatever’s backing things up. Invariably, I’ll pull up a giant black wad of sticky, tar-like shit with hair and a funky scent and I have to keep back my gagging as I collect it in a wad of toilet paper and throw it away, hangar included.

That’s how I felt when we tried to do a video about the Scream 4 trailer. What is this gunk we pulled up out of the sink and how did normal, human things turn into this… this… thing? Who is this for? Why does it exist?

That’s Scream 4’s trailer in a nutshell. My bathroom sink’s tar shit.

Enjoy our video about it!

There’s a segment on the Extra Hot Great podcast called “Tiny Triumphs” about little victories that we have in our lives. I was blessed to have one this week; I wrote a piece for CNN.com that was published early this morning and appears to have struck a nerve. As of this writing, it’s earned more than 700 comments and I’ve gotten lots of e-mails and Tweets from people who read the piece. That hasn’t happened before, even with the piece I did on Facebook and religion.

The editor I work with at CNN e-mailed me to tell me that at one point today it was the 3rd-most-popular piece of content on the entire site.

Last week, a trailer for the video game Dead Island was released (my brother Pablo sent me the link) and it earned near-universal praise on gaming blogs (and some mainstream ones as well). But something about it just didn’t sit well with me and the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn’t have a problem with just this trailer, but with several video games that are using the deaths and torture of children as central plot points.

I pitched the column to CNN and they were able to get it published pretty quickly. I don’t know if what I wrote is right or wrong, I just know that the best stuff I write typically comes from a strong feeling I have and the need to explore what that feeling means and where it came from. This was the rare piece where I got to do it for a very popular site and get the idea out in front of lots of people.

I’m embedding the original trailer below. Warning: it’s VERY gory and potentially disturbing. It’s also well-crafted and haunting, an amazing piece of work. And there’s part of the problem.