Sure, this movie is directed by Steven Spielberg, is being released on Christmas day and has a tie to an acclaimed Broadway production, but my number one criteria for us doing a video for War Horse was simply, “We will get to make lots and lots and lots of horse jokes.”
And so we did. At the very least, I knew there’d be an endless supply of stock photos of horses to choose from. (There were.)
As to what the movie will actually be like, I thought for sure this was going to be amazing, but the closer it gets to the release date, the move I’m convinced it’s going to be a manipulative weepie that perhaps I may not actually want to see in a theater.
The other notable thing about this video is that it contains one of maybe five of my favorite jokes of all the videos we’ve done. The visual just really cracks me up. It’s near the end of the video and involves the equine embodiment of pure evil. Nevermind that it’s a joke recycled from Twitter, I still laugh at it every time I see the photo Pablo put together.
Next up for us: the weirdly hypnotic trailer for Liam Neeson’s The Grey.
As with Valkyrie, I’m always puzzled when something so insanely dark and grim is trotted out as holiday fare, but then, as we say in the video, maybe that’s the antidote people need when their late December gets a little too sugary and sweet.
I still haven’t read the books, but I’m tempted to make a sprint through the first one before the movie comes out. Worth it? Let me know in the comments and enjoy the video.
This year the gift guides diverged a little more than usual because we decided to make the Statesman one more locally focused with products produced by Austin companies or powered by Austin technology (or, in a few cases, just stuff that would appeal to Central Texans). So the TWOP gift guide ends up being a lot more general and TV-focused while the Statesman one has a more local feel.
This is probably way more information than you care to have.
Which is all to say that while these packages often look really easy: just a bunch of product images with really short descriptions, they’re a huge challenge to put together. I save email pitches all year in a folder called “Gift Guide Tech” and I literally go through those emails one by one when it’s time to put these stories together. This year there were about 170+ emails and more kept coming in as I was working on it. Some of those emails included information for 10 to 20 products each. I used to put all my picks in one big Excel spreadsheet and work from that, but this year I ditched the spreadsheet and just made a simple list and that saved me a little bit of time.
I’ve been trying in general to save time on the things I do and not waste it, especially at work where it feels like deadlines are closing in and the year is already drawing to a close.
Like most of you, I’m just hanging on for Turkey Day, looking forward to just relaxing for a day or two and not thinking too hard about what’s left to do in 2011, which has proven to be a challenging, very weird year for me that I’m still trying to figure out.
I can only remember one such romantic comedy I’ve actually watched in the last three or four years and that was Going the Distance and it didn’t. And a movie overstuffed with characters and storylines and meet-cutes and a midnight deadline to declare your love… that just sounds exhausting. How do singletons do it? Texting? Dating via Facebook? The belly folds and dank alleyways of this culture are a mystery to me, as nebulous in my mind as a monster’s deep, foreboding pit.
Anyhoo! This is our second video of the season and things are rolling along. We should be back next time with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Speaking of dank, foreboding and mysterious.
You can check out the video below or on TWOP. Please watch the video since we dressed up in tuxedos for it.
I know there’s been a backlash against The Muppets and a backlash against The Muppets and as we were doing this video, it made me a little sad to realize that I fell right in the middle; I just don’t really have an opinion on The Muppets right now. I still find them funny when I watch them, but I don’t go out of my way to seek them out and my kids haven’t yet latched onto them. (Although Carolina’s favorite thing to say right now is, “ELMO! ELMO! ELMOOOOOO!”)
The first movie I ever remember my parents taking me to was The Muppet Movie. I don’t even remember the movie, I just remember the experience of going and hearing my dad tell people how much he liked the movie, too.
So, I really hope the movie is good and maybe we’ll end up taking the kids and they’ll remember that experience someday. Maybe Elmo will make a cameo and that will really make it memorable for Carolina.
Illustration by Don Tate II / Austin American-Statesman
Today, I’m at home on the first day of a week-long vacation. It starts with Halloween and ends with the first day of Wurstfest, which seems to me to be some kind of divine calendarification, evidence that sausage and ghosts and perhaps God are all working together in some way. Maybe two out of three of those, at least.
The work trip I wrote about last time went fine. The kids were well-behaved and went to bed on time and there was even sleep to be had. That ended a week later when the weather changed, some allergens blew in and Carolina developed a bad, phlegmy cough (which sometimes leads to middle-of-the-night vomiting) that we’re still dealing with. Still, she just gets up and starts bouncing around when she wakes up, as if the psychic and also goopy wreckage of the night before never happened. She’s going to be one of those annoying people who never gets a hangover, I can feel it.
The vacation was… very necessary. We got more bad news at work last week. This was news that was scheduled. There was a meeting and a date and time for that meeting set and months of anticipation as to the things that would be announced at that meeting. All that was left were the details.
And yet, we’re all still devastated. We’re hurt and frustrated and knowing it was coming doesn’t make it any easier to swallow. This was the day before my last day at the office (which I ended up spending working from home). The last few weeks in general were really tough at work and I just bore down and tried to knock every single thing off my to-do list so that I wouldn’t have any loose ends or things to worry about when I was gone.
So here I am, first day of vacation, writing about work.
I wrote so much the last two weeks, a lot of it stories and blog posts scheduled to run later, that it’s going to look like I’m not even gone.
Last week, I did a Tech Monday column about Siri in which I asked her a bunch of questions about Texas and the lady of the iPhone 4S proved pretty convincingly that she’s no Texas belle.
Also in today’s paper was a short story about SXSW Interactive’s ScreenBurn and I have a few more things in the pipeline for the rest of this week and next. The blog’s been busy with lots of tech reviews that’ll run as an upcoming roundup column and lots of stuff about Apple’s iOS 5.
We’re taking the kids trick-or-treating tonight. My wife and I went to our first Halloween party in probably about six or seven years and we even worse costumes. Mine was not so well-received and I blame it on the party being in San Antonio where, apparently, “Breaking Bad” is not a thing people watch at all. I went as Walter White, meth cook extraordinaire:
We haven’t taken any photos of the kids in their costumes, but Lilly did get in some carving time yesterday:
Also on tap this week: new Trailers Without Pity season starts with The Muppets! That should be up in the next day or two.
Busy vacation! Hoping to do lots of writing, TV watching, de-cluttering, gym-going and Halloween candy eating.
