A very cool video about the importance of social media in our world. Presenting facts that seem astoundingly huge, the video does a good job of explaining how important social media has become in such a short amount of time. So short in fact, it hasn’t given us as a society time to fully understand it’s importance and how we could best use it.

While I’m not totally convinced of the facts and statistics, it is interesting to think about.

A trailer review? Really, you don’t have anything else to write about? Well… nothing that interests me! I haven’t seen District 9 yet, I know, I know. But… this is Avatar! Jim Cameron’s first feature film since Titanic. I like Titanic very much. Go ahead, say I am girl, that I like cheese, but anyone who has the gumption to criticize the movie Titanic has never worked in the film industry or made a movie. And if you have, then you have every right to criticize it because you know how hard it is to make a good movie.

Now, with that… Avatar looks like the movie that will once again make use think about movie making in a new way. What Jim Cameron has continued to do over his career is push the technology and medium of filmmaking. The average movie watcher see’s a Terminator 2 or The Abyss, or even Titanic and goes: “Wow, that was neat!”

I anticiapte that same reaction to Avatar. But film geeks and future Speilbergs and Camerons will walk out of a theatre going: “Holy S%$t! I can’t wait to make a movie that way!” So now, to the sad part of my review. This trailer does not give anyone any hope of this movie being good. This isn’t so much a trailer as it is a demo reel of images to let you know, “Hey! Stick with us on this; it’s going to look cool.” Well Jim, I saw Final Fantasy, and it looked cool! Please tell me you will have a better trailer in the coming months, something that gives me a sense of dialogue, a hint of how scenes are paced and characters are richly developed. Because I saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and if you do better than that POS, then we’re cool. But don’t do to me what George Lucas did! If you still have it; rich characters, a great story, and the extra Ompf! a movie needs to be good, then I am all for it. But this trailer did not show it to me.

It doesn’t even seem to know wether it’s going for that fake CG look or realistic fillm look. It’s like a blend of Star Wars III and Solaris. What I always loved about Cameron’s movies was the grit; this trailer looks too glossy and clean. I hope this is not a sign of things to come. But then again, the movies with amazing trailers usually end up being horrible. So maybe Avatar will rock my socks! I hope so.

3 out of 5 (swigs of beer)

It’s hard to define the kind of movie “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard” wants to be. A crass, crude comedy might be the closest thing I can label the film. But while sexual innuendo’s come fast and furious, the movie unapologetically jumps between a Top Gun for car salesman, and a movie directed by Jerry Zucker or Mel Brooks.

Jeremy Piven plays Don Ready, a Mercenary car salesman constantly on the road who lives to sell. His team includes a cast of characters as crude, foul mouthed, and hypersexual as Reading, played by Ving Rhames, Kathryn Hahn, and David Koechner. They sweep into a small California town to help a local car dealer, played by James Brolin, save his business.

While I was prepared for outlandish, over the top scenarios of salesman pulling every trick in the book to sell a car, I was not prepared for this movie to leave the reality of Earth and shove me onto the surface of Saturn. Every cliche of a movie is in this, from Don Ready winning over his love interest in less than 3 days, to the death of a best friend who still haunts Ready, to his team of low life, immoral scammers who have little regard for the law, woman, men, family, and religion.

It seemed like this film was originally a much more clean, but probably stale story of a car dealer needing to hire someone to help save the business. But in the hands of Piven and Will Farrell, who plays the cliched dead best friend, the filmmakers took the easy way out of making a script that didn’t have laughs funny. Crude sexual humor and gratuitous, foul mouth language in awkward situations. Like Ready asking loudly the car dealers daughter over a family dinner if she was talking about (insert crass word for female genitals.) Wow, that was so funny!

The problem with the film was that the scenario seemed so outlandish to begin with that we needed something to ground it in reality, and that never came. No one can sell 211 cars in 3 days. At least, not to 211 individuals. So if you are going to tell me a story about how someone does it, it needs to have something, anything, that gives me a shred of hope that this will make sense. Sadly, that never happens.

Instead, we get some ridiculous montage of Ready roaming through the desert after a one night stand has left him heartbroken only for him to find a junk yard full of rusted cars and his big wheel that he talked about and showed in a flashback, turned upside; a hollow remembrance of his past.

As for the parody reference I made earlier (Jerry Zucker directed movies such as Airplane and Scary Movie 3), from alligators being let loose in a California town to chain saws appearing out of no where for rioting customers to use on scared salesman, the filmmakers made it clear they were going to show you whatever they had to make this movie funny. A parody movie relies on cliches to wink at the audience about how every movie has this. But in “The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard”, the filmmakers aren’t winking; they’re furiously doing whatever they can to keep you laughing so you won’t notice that nothing in this movie makes any sense.

A for effort, D for execution. Take out all the awkward scenes full of inappropriate language, sexual references, and jokes about strippers either being single moms, poor college students, or coke heads, and you are left with a bland story that really had nothing to say.

7 out  of 10 (shots of vodka)

*My rating scale is based on the amount of liquor you would need in order to make the movie enjoyable. In this case, if you had a total of 10 shots to take, 7 would be enough to make you enjoy the movie. Which means, wether you drink 7 shots or not, this movie will leave you hungover.

Regardless of your political affiliations, beliefs, or opinions… this is  a pretty cool video with some great illustrations. Bravo to the graphic designer who made this. To learn more, go here

We just finished this :30 commercial for Remington College to help introduce the Medical Health courses to 14 markets. The spot was designed and animated by Shawn Romano from driftminer.com.

He has consistently done excellent work and created a fantastic looking spot that Remington College loved. Once Shawn passed us the animated files, we added the music, versioned the spots out for the 14 different markets it would play in (from Baton Rouge all the way to Hawaii).

This trailer is amazing! I have not seen the movie yet, but if the rules of trailers apply, then great trailers usually mean bad movies. Now, I do enjoy some Michael Bay every once and a while… The Rock, The Island, and even the first Transformers movie was good. However, I think the mistake Bay always makes is going epic. In the first movie, what really captured me was the story of a boy who finds out his car is really a robot. The first 45 minutes was awesome, enthralling, and I was sucked in. Then… other transformers started showing up… and for some reason, the epic story got boring to me.

Now, I’ve heard Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is even more epic, with battles on the Pyramids, and aircraft carriers being destroyed! But I ask… where is the story about a boy and his car who is really a robot? Because to me, that is the heart of the story… and I think Bay missed that again. I’ll find out this weekend!

The initial edit for this project was a 30 minute documentary about an elementary school in Orlando, Florida. Fern Creek Elementary was an F rated school in a low income neighborhood, and the documentary highlights the changes the school went through and how it became an A rated school.

This 8 minute edit was done after the 30 minute version was completed. This is a very condensed telling of the story, using the general arc of the story and soundbites that speak to the overall picture. The 30 minute version is, of course, much more in depth.