I was not a fan of Cars. I saw it once on DVD and just was bored silly. Come to think of it, I’ve never been fascinated by cars, lowercase, wheeled. Sure, I had some Hot Wheels when I was a kid, but I was never slavishly devoted to them (or dinosaurs for that matter). I mean who wants to roll a vehicle around the carpet when there are Transformers fighting for Cybertron and G.I. Joe trying to defend the country against insane terrorists? I mean, jeez. Do you really think this is the time for a joyride?
Pablo indulges me in the Trailers Without Pity video for Cars 2 in which I rant against the only Pixar movie I really don’t like and which I’ll probably do a 180 on when I see the sequel. (Yes, I’ll probably see it. I’m not completely made of stone when it comes to Pixar.)
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).
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.
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.
