Bloggasm

There’s an Ann Coulter line known by most people who never bothered to read her books. It’s not a coincidence that it’s on the first page of How to Talk to a Liberal, because it’s the first line that we read when we’re standing in a bookstore and decide we want to remind ourselves of how crazy she is, read the first page, and promptly put the book back on the shelf where we found it. It goes something like this: ““Traditionally, the way to change a liberal is to make him move out of his parents’ basement and start paying taxes.”

I roll my eyes every time I hear that line, but it was something that popped into my head as I watched The Science of Sleep. The main character, Stéphane (Gael García Bernal), suffers from such blind artistic idealism and has such a child-like demeanor that one has a hard time building empathy for his sorry situation as he seems unwilling to help himself. He digresses into such childish behavior that we have to actually struggle to root for him to get the girl, and instead we can’t help from thinking, “Grow up already,” in a way that would make Ann Coulter (may she rot in hell) proud.

The Science of Sleep is what Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would have been if Michel Gondry hadn’t been hindered by Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay. And I use the word “hinder,” in a positive way, because Kaufman gave the story just enough structure so that Gondry’s directing style worked to enhance the surreal effects while at the same time create a realistic relationship between the two protagonists. But in this movie, Gondry is both screenwriter and director, and from the very beginning the cohesiveness of the story is fickle at best.

Stéphane is an artistic individual who is conned into moving back home by his mother, who has tricked him into taking a job with a calender publisher, because for some reason he thinks the company will allow him to publish his economically infeasible art called Disasterology (art work that pictures disastrous things happening). We learn that his father has just died, but Gondry decided that this was not an important theme to exploit and bring to the forefront of the plot, rather it comes up a few times in the movie but never enough so we can see how it resonates within Stephane’s life. One day when he’s on his way out the door to go to work, he’s crushed by a piano falling down the stairs and then whisked into the apartment of a woman named Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who comes to his medical aid along with her friend Zoé (Emma de Caunes).

Romantic interest blossoms within Stéphane, but not for the obvious girl. Rather than choosing Stéphanie, who is artistic and sometimes eccentric like Stephane, he first turns to her friend Zoe, despite the fact that she openly mocks him and has nothing in common with him. In fact, the only thing that could be said for her is that she’s the more conventionally attractive of the two, which simply highlights Stephane’s own hypocrisy: He pretends to have too much artistic integrity to lower himself into doing grunt work for his calendar company, but at the same time is wholly superficial in his romantic interests.

Anyone who has watched the trailer knows that Stephane often retreats into his own dreamworld, and though we’re first led to believe that this only happens when he’s asleep, as the movie progresses we find out that he can fall in and out of his dream state while being wide awake. As can be ascertained with a little bit of logic, the movie quickly becomes confusing as we are unable to separate dreams from reality. And perhaps this is quite fitting, because Stephane suffers from the same predicament.

His dream world is aesthetically pleasing, reminiscent to claymation models used in old SciFi movies. The television studio from which his dreams are broadcasted comes with video cameras made from cardboard and uses empty egg cartons for walls. The doorway that acts as a portal into the dreams is a clear plastic shower curtain, and everything has a 70s Austin Powers feel to it with Gondry’s choice of strong color. The whole setting feels like a mixture of an Erector Set and the Mouse Trap board game, in that it’s transparently mechanical.

The main problem with the movie is that rather than building the imagery around the plot, the entire movie seems built around the imagery. There’s no doubt that Gondry is artistically brilliant with the props and setting he uses, but he often sacrifices characterization by sending Stephane into his surreal dreams, and without the characterization we’re unable to feel the connection between him and Stephanie.

There are times when the movie is genuinely funny, with real laugh out loud moments. Stephane eventually comes around and pursues Stephanie, but every time he comes even close to getting her, he acts immaturely or does something to creep her out and then he’s back at square one again. Eventually, we stop caring whether or not she’ll ever be with him, and after he blows his last chance with her by not bothering to show up on a date, we actually hope that she doesn’t accept the torture of bringing him into her life.

By the last scene, he has lost all his child-like charm, and we literally watch him throw a tantrum because he doesn’t get what he wants, hiding up in Stephanie’s bed and refusing to climb down when she pleads with him to do so.

In most romantic movies of this sort, the director should have us hoping that the guy gets the girl, but in this case there is no such comradery. Though the movie is an interesting foray into the structure (or lack thereof) of dreams, there’s not enough of a tether to keep us going along while the plot derails into Stephane’s surreal world. And when the ending credits begin to roll, there’s this feeling that closure hasn’t been reached, that any semblance of denouement was skipped over because of ambiguity and Stephane’s childish resistance to change.

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Google Books, which might or might not be a sinking ship depending on outcomes with copyright lawsuits, has decided they’re pulling Yahoo and MSN down with them with subpoenas issued to both companies:

New developments in online selling and the lawPublishers and authors are taking Google to court over its programme to digitise the libraries of four US universities, Oxford university library and the New York Public Library.

Google has said that it will subpoena two of its fiercest competitors, Yahoo! and Microsoft, for information relating to their own book scanning operations as part of the case. The information being sought by Google includes project costs, lists of books, estimates of sales and details of discussions with publishers.

I’ve always been a supporter of Google Books from the very beginning, and I think they might have a good chance of working out through my limited knowledge of copyright law. If nothing else, they can scan all books in the public domain, and then have publishers submit their books to be scanned, like Amazon does.

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Fernando Meirelles, director of the Oscar-winning (best supporting actress) movie The Constant Gardner, is to launch a new series of movies out of Brazil, and Focus Features has taken the bait:

The 2005 film “The Constant Gardner” won acclaim at film festivals and an Oscar for best supporting actress Rachel Weisz. Now the film’s Brazilian director is harnessing his fame to jump-start his country’s struggling movie industry.

Fernando Meirelles has signed a three-year deal with Universal Pictures and its Focus Features unit to bring Brazilian-made films, in English as well as Portuguese, to the studio.

I never really thought The Constant Gardner deserved anything close to an Oscar. Like Crash, it was filled with self-importance and subscribed to yet another artsy cliche: Set a movie in Africa, include lots of footage of poverty along with grainy African images, and then don’t bother with a compelling plot.

What I find interesting is that having a dictatorship actually helped its movie industry, which didn’t go downhill until after the dictatorship collapsed:

Brazilian cinema got its start in 1930 and reached its apex during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, when the government created the state-run giant Embrafilme to promote Brazilian culture as part of a national development project called “Big Brazil.” After the films were produced they were turned over to the government for censorship.

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I remember a few years back, a gay blogger jumped down my throat because I noted a correlation between gays and the HIV virus, and he started quoting untrue statistics that he’d heard at some kind of AIDS awareness conference. After I linked him to sites with true stastistics that show a definite correlation, he disappeared and didn’t bother responding. At some point over the last few years, some gays have tried to distance themselves from the disease by emphasizing that straight people were able to get the disease as well. I understand why they do this in some ways, it’s a natural reaction against right-wingers who use the HIV stastistics against them as an excuse for homophobia, but at the same time they’re kicking themselves in the foot by not addressing the higher risk they face. Well, one gay rights group is addressing the issue:

One of Southern California’s most influential gay institutions has launched a controversial ad campaign
declaring HIV to be a “gay disease.”

The Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center, which has for 20 years vigorously fought the contention that HIV/AIDS is a ‘gay plague,’ says it now wants to target gay men who have become complacent about the illness.

The message “HIV is a gay disease” and the tag line “Own It. End It” is set to appear in magazines and on billboards across L.A.

Proponents of the campaign say the current AIDS awareness focus on minority women and other groups has left gay men — who still represent most of those infected in the U.S. and Western Europe — feeling a false sense of security.

I remember a gay friend of mine telling me that now that there are HIV cocktails, that some gay people don’t even take the disease seriously anymore. In fact, there have been reports of some gays who actually go out of their way to get the disease, they think of it as some sort of initiation. Now that’s scary.

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R. W. Apple, Jr., one of the greatest journalists of the twentieth century, died yesterday.

Here’s a wonderful profile the New Yorker did on him a few years ago: The triumphs, travels, and movable feasts of R. W. Apple, Jr.:

There is a consensus in the trade, I am pleased to report, that Johnny Apple—R. W. Apple, Jr., of the New York Times—is a lot easier to take now than he once was. Even Apple believes that. When I asked him not long ago about the paragraph in Gay Talese’s 1969 book on the Times, “The Kingdom and the Power,” which presents him as a brash young eager beaver, he said it was, alas, “quite an accurate portrait,” although he doesn’t recall boasting in the newsroom that while covering the war in Vietnam he had personally killed a few Vietcong—the remark that, in Talese’s account, led an older reporter to say, “Women and children, I presume.”

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“The Oprahfication of America.”

Context: A journalist used this phrase to explain why celebrities check themselves into rehab after being publicly humiliated in order to try and dodge bad PR (examples: Congressman Foley, Mel Gibson, etc…)

I’m not sure whether or not Oprah should be flattered that she’s had a phrase named after her.

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Even though viral advertising–what some have labeled “guerrilla marketing”–is very effective when it actually works, at least you can say one good thing about traditional advertising: It’s honest. Since viral marketing usually works to be misleading or vague in some way in order to create word-of-mouth, it’s understandable that people get pissed off when they find out that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. And since viral marketers often target bloggers to start their campaigns, they’ll often find out that Hell hath no fury like a blogger’s scorn.

First, let’s look at cases where viral marketing worked. Before Donnie Darko came out, people involved with the film began putting up posters in crowded places. These posters were deliberately vague, saying things like “Where’s Donnie?” which then caused people to talk about them as they wondered what it was all about. This created some buzz about the movie and probably contributed to its cult success. 60 Minutes did a report some time ago about the new marketing target called the “Tween,” (girls who are almost teenagers but not quite) and how companies trying to create word-of-mouth amongst Tweens have hosted parties where the tweens would get to test out their product and then later tell their friends about it. And then there’s Snakes on the Plane, which was one of the most hyped movies of the modern internet age.

This “viral marketing” scheme is a company’s dream, because it means that it can essentially go without paying big advertising dollars and at the same time produce real results. Naturally, this has caused them to try and dupe bloggers into promoting their products, and we’re not falling for it. What’s worse, when a blogger gets wind of a foul marketing scheme, he or she often doesn’t just ignore it, but uses it against the company in what amounts to negative advertising. Below I’ll outline three recent instances where the viral marketing blew up in a company’s face.

1. Brody Ruckus: As I blogged about extensively, a person claiming to be a college student named Brody Ruckus used his facebook account to create a facebook group that said that if the group reached 100,000 members, his girlfriend would allow him to have a threesome with him. The group quickly grew viral and reached 100,000 people in a few days, which led him to change the rules: If it reached 300,000, then his girlfriend would let him take pictures of the threesome and post them online. If it became the largest group ever on Facebook, she’d let him post the video online. In the meantime, “Brody Ruckus” began posting links where you could buy T-Shirts from him and started linking to his own website and encouraging people to sign up to it.

Within mere days after the group caught on, dozens of people who went to the school Brody claimed to attend came out and said that there was no such person as “Brody Ruckus” that they knew of. Nobody had heard of the guy. Several other keen facebook users noticed that his facebook account was created right before the Brody Ruckus group was created. Something was off.

After it became apparent that this was some kind of marketing scheme to sell t-shirts and/or sex videos and/or music (a lot of people noticed that there was a music site called Ruckus Music, and the school Brody supposedly went to had several alumni who worked for Ruckus Music), I posted that Brody Ruckus was a fake on this very blog, and since a lot of people linked to my post about it, it became the #1 post on Google whenever you searched for “Brody Ruckus.”

Immediately, I started getting thousands of hits a day from people google searching Brody Ruckus. People who might have been duped to going to his website and buying whatever product he was pushing, were instead coming to my post bashing him and likely weren’t going to be tricked into later buying his stuff. In fact, my post created a negative word-of-mouth campaign against Brody, and several facebook groups started linking to me to prove that he was a fake, increasing the number of people who would find out that it was a sham.

So what originally seemed like a succcessful marketing campaign ended up blowing up in their face. By now, it’s well known that Brody Ruckus isn’t the real thing, and the entire ordeal has died down to a few hot coals.

2. Napster Music: Hmm, another online music site being the victim of bad viral advertising. Notice a pattern here? Back in July, a PR firm working for Napster Music contacted blogger John Scalzi to get him to promote the Napster site. Scalzi thought that the PR firm’s email was incredibly lame and posted about it in his blog. He took the time to outline every reason why he disliked the email and juxtaposed it with a PR team working for Tower Records who he thought did an excellent job with their pitch:

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I am apparently enough of a high-profile blogger that I get people sending me stuff and wanting to do business with me in my capacity as a blogger. People sending me stuff is always fun (it’s stuff. And it’s free), and that’s why I have my publicist guidelines over there on the side bar. Wanting to do business with me is a tricker proposition. This site is (until I am hard up for money, at least) resolutely not a commercial site, and I’m not particularly inclined to ‘ho out my readership for a few shiny baubles or whatever. Also, as someone who makes at least part of his money crafting marketing messages for various clients, and has for the better part of a decade, it’s not like I don’t know how marketing works. I know the difference between a good pitch and a bad one, particularly when it’s directed toward me. I get annoyed at the bad ones.

After he posted the bad Napster email, the head of the PR company came onto his comments thread and personally apologized. Not only was he sorry, but he also admitted to terminating the employment of the person who had sent the lame email:

I am glad this was brought to my attention, as it enabled us to correct the situation. We concur with your assessment and strive to continually have our entire staff practice the recommendations you scribed. To reduce the risk of future similar incidents, this GPR rep’s employment has been terminated.

Ouch. In this case, not only did the person create bad PR, he or she also got fired in the process!

3. The Science of Sleep: Tisk tisk, we would expect something more from a movie that looked like it had so much promise.

As Making Light points out, an LJ community was created a little while ago that was supposed to hype the movie The Science of Sleep. LJ users, however, quickly noted that the entire thing seemed rather plastic and fake. There were dozens of “users” who were saying incredibly cliche positive things about the movie like

I saw it two days ago and it changed my life forever…

thank you Michael Gondrey… not only did you bring my dad and I closer, but you made me a different person

and

I am soooo looking forward to see this movie!!! I really liked the idea and I adore Gael Garcia Bernal! So it changed your attitude? made you a different person? That makes me want seeing this movie even more

Looks fake to you? It gets better. Several LJ users took the time to investigate and they noticed some odd things. For one, all the positive posters were relatively new LJ users who had only created their accounts mere days before the LJ community popped up. Secondly, every one of these Livejournals were either friendslocked or had a few fluff posts in order to make them look legit. And the kicker? The fact that all the positive posters happened to be friended mostly only to each other.

Now, LJ users not only are not fooled by this fake viral advertising, they’re claiming that it has made them decide not to see the movie:

insomnia: And just to think, I was actually curious about seeing The Science of Sleep in a movie theatre before this unwanted ad sellout in LiveJournal. Now I’m going to have to give the movie a pass, simply for ethical reasons… and I will use my journal to encourage others to do the same.

Sorry film-makers. If you want to create blogger word of mouth, talk to the Snakes on a Plane guys. Now that’s what I call viral marketing.

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