Blogbook
Is everyone watching the Avengers: Endgame film this week? We think so. We also have a few problems with the trailer. What -is- that new uniform? Also, people are already hoping that everyone will die. Via the Guardian:
I love the Avengers. I collected the comics during university; I full-on snot-bubble cried at the cinema during Infinity War when – SPOILERS – Loki and Spiderman copped it. That film grossed over a billion at the box office, with its sequel – the culmination of over a decade of interconnected superhero cinema – on track to do even better. So you think I’d be hoping that those left standing would survive for another decade of adventures. But, actually, not so much. It’s going to hurt, but it’s time for them all to cop it. Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow and Hawkeye. Especially Hawkeye.
The debate about who’s going to make it isn’t the loudest one the Marvel films have inspired among fans – it’s the diversity debate that’s steadily been getting louder. Or, “the diversity debate – ALL STRENGTH TO IT” as Tilda Swinton earnestly put it in her email to Margaret Cho on Marvel casting her in 2016. You know, when she played the Ancient One? A Tibetan man. That guy; remember? That’s who Swinton – the white Scottish woman of 55 who lives in the Highlands – played.
A commercial for legal weed, for MedMen, directed by Spike Jonze (Her) and voiced by Jesse Williams, looking at the long history of weed. Via Esquire:
If the legalization of weed keeps chugging along, commercials for cannabis might one day be as commonplace as the ads we get served for lite beer: a little bit silly, a little bit informational, and ultimately forgettable. Right now, the United States doesn’t have full legalization. We haven’t yet been treated to cannabis marketing on a grand scale. But we have our first taste of it.
On Sunday, MedMen, the largest cannabis company started in the U.S., premiered what it says is the first-ever TV commercial for a marijuana dispensary on its YouTube channel. It is far from silly. Directed by Oscar-winner Spike Jonze and narrated by actor and activist Jesse Williams, it briefly traces the history of cannabis in America, starting with George Washington’s hemp farm. It portrays all the weed stereotypes you can imagine—like blissed out hippies and tight-laced parents frothing about Reefer Madness—as essential stops on the road to cannabis normalization. But more importantly, it examines the racial injustices wrought by the drug war, with police officers enforcing stop and frisk, and the justice system then enforcing years-long incarceration, as issues that plague cannabis culture to this day.
That’s what the infant cannabis industry can change. Investors will look to cash in on a booming market. Wellness experts and doctors will advocate for therapeutic and medicinal use. And along the way, marijuana will be decriminalized, because no one is going to be eager to lock up those investors and wellness experts and doctors. Cannabis will be the “new normal,” the commercial argues.
Welcome back from Easter! Here’s some Star Wars to kickstart the post-holiday workday: the trailer from the Rise of Skywalker. Yeah, Star Wars 9. Via CNET:
The circle is complete. Lucasfilm revealed Star Wars Episode 9’s title, The Rise of Skywalker, on Friday to kick off Star Wars Celebration Chicago.
The Rise of Skywalker trailer opens with Rey standing in the desert. “Every generation has a legend,” it reads, echoing the 1998 trailer for The Phantom Menace.
Then, a hint Rey may be in communication with Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill).
“We have passed on all we know, a thousand generations live in you now,” Luke says in a voiceover. “But this is your fight.”
Rey is then seen speed-wielding her blue lightsaber (seemingly repaired after The Last Jedi) and backflipping onto a ship that looks a lot like Kylo Ren’s TIE Silencer. We don’t see his face in the cockpit though.
Further shots show Kylo repairing his helmet; a quick look at a laughing older Lando Calrissian on the Millennium Falcon with Chewbacca; Finn and Poe in the desert; BB-8 with cute new droid Dio; Rey embracing Leia; and what look to be remnants of a destroyed Death Star battle station.
“No one’s ever really gone,” Skywalker says, just before we learn that might apply to the light and dark sides of the Force.
How to Be Alone is the first film from writer/director Kate Trefry, who worked on Stranger Things. It’s a horror/psych thriller short. Via Short of the Week:
How to be Alone, the directorial debut from Stranger Things staff writer and Blacklist-honored scribe Kate Trefry, is one of those kinds of film—horror in form, but psychological thriller in theme. It’s a very personal kind of horror, one that turns the neat trick of transplanting a woman’s interior anxieties into the real world—mental demons brought to life. It isn’t particularly scary per se, though it is a gorgeous film filled with incredibly creepy imagery, but instead it shines as a thoughtful character examination of a young woman in a crisis of identity. Artfully borrowing from touchstone classics, the short bridges the classic horror archetypes of the “final girl” and the “dysfunctional mother” as these warring identities collide on the battlefield of her own neuroses, allowing for a fascinating interplay between victim and badass warrior—a rich characterization that does not have to submit wholly to either.
The Dead Don’t Die is a promising-looking zombie survival apocalypse film with a lot of deadpan humour, starring Adam Driver and Bill Murray. Via Ars Technica:
The peaceful town of Centerville finds itself battling a zombie horde as the dead start rising from their graves in the first trailer for The Dead Don’t Die, director Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan foray into the zombie-comedy genre.
It’s an interesting new direction for Jarmusch, but based on the trailer, the genre is tailor-made for his idiosyncratic style and deadpan wit. His career took off in 1984 with his first major film, Stranger Than Paradise. Shot entirely in black-and-white (a signature of the director’s early work), the film won the Caméra D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year and established the director as a darling of arthouse cinema.
Movies like Dead Man, Mystery Train, Down by Law, Night on Earth, and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai further cemented his auteur status. In 2005, Jarmusch won the Grand Prix at Cannes for Broken Flowers, which starred Bill Murray as middle-aged man searching for the mother of the son he never met. And Jarmusch is no stranger to unusual takes on traditional horror stories, as evidenced by his 2013 “crypto-vampire love story,” Only Lovers Left Alive.
Game of Thrones has been upping its publicity ante, this time with a huge water display in Las Vegas, at the Bellagio casino-resort. Via SFGate:
Fire-breathing dragons held court over the world-famous fountains at the Bellagio casino-resort Sunday, as familiar elements from the TV phenomenon “Game of Thrones” were projected on the rising water. The jets danced to a score incorporating the recognizable theme song before one of the colossal beasts lit up the lake along the Las Vegas Strip in a blaze of pyrotechnics.
The 3½-minute spectacle that left a crowd of onlookers cheering debuted two weeks ahead of the scheduled premiere of the HBO fantasy series’ final season.
The streaming water formed the show’s iconic throne and crown. A towering 800-foot-long (244-meter) wall of water emerged from the lake.
The display, however, intentionally did not reveal any elements of the new season.
“We didn’t just want to portray literally scenes from ‘Game of Thrones’ here, not like a teaser or a preview of season eight,” said Mark Fuller, CEO of WET Design, the company that created the fountains and show. “We want to bring you the emotion.” At the heart of the fountain show is the giant wall of water. It represents the ice wall that defines the TV show, but also serves as a surface onto which the creators project falling snow, the series’ logo and the silhouettes of the dragons breathing orange and blue flames.
The company worked with the series’ composer Ramin Djawadi to create a special score that along with the dancing water aimed to capture the excitement of the TV hit.
The fountain show begins by dropping musical hints of the TV series, using Djawadi’s “Winter is Here” from the seventh season. It comes to full force as the show’s recognizable “Main Titles” theme song comes on.
Starting April 1st (No, it’s not an April Fool’s joke), Burger King will be selling the Impossible Whopper, which is plant-based. Via Vox:
Plant-based meat just went mainstream.
Starting April 1, Burger King is selling a new kind of Whopper that it claims is identical in taste to its traditional beef patty, with just one difference: It contains zero beef.
No, that’s not an April Fools’ joke (though some people, including in the Vox newsroom, wondered if it might be).
The new beefless burger is a partnership with the startup company Impossible Foods, which will supply patties made with heme, a protein cultivated from soybean roots that mimics the texture of meat — convincingly, by the sounds of it.
“People on my team who know the Whopper inside and out, they try it and they struggle to differentiate which one is which,” Fernando Machado, Burger King’s chief marketing officer, told the New York Times. This is a huge deal for those who want to see meat alternatives replace actual meat because of concerns over animal cruelty or climate change. If this scales up, it could help save hundreds of thousands of animals from suffering on factory farms, and it could fight global warming by reducing the number of methane-producing cattle. It could also combat other problems like antibiotic resistance.
This Wind in the Willows trailer is actually a Wildlife Trusts environmental PSA, featuring VO work from Sir David Attenborough and Stephen Fry. Via the Drum:
Sir David Attenborough, Stephen Fry, Catherine Tate, Alison Steadman and Asim Chaudhry star in The Wildlife Trusts’ Wind in the Willows campaign that aims to stop the rapid depletion of the UK’s natural landscape.
The UK’s countryside told a far different tale when Kenneth Grahame wrote The Wind in the Willows over a100 years ago.
Since Grahame put pen to paper, a bewildering 97% of lowland meadows and the wildflowers, insects, mammals and birds they supported have completely disappeared, while 80% of purple heathlands have vanished – along with the blaeberries, sand lizards and nightjars that grew and frequented within them.
To raise awareness of the plight of the UK countryside, The Wildlife Trusts and Don’t Panic have pulled together the star-studded cast for a Wind in the Willows trailer that calls for a wilder future.
The film opens within the world of Wind in the Willows. Thick with foliage and fresh with wildflowers; a snoozing Ratty gently floats along the steam in his little wooden boat.
Produced in the manner of a movie trailer, the opening reads: “This Spring, it’s time to go back to the riverbank” and a montage of familiar earthly scenes unfold, featuring our favourite wildlife quartet: Badger, Ratty, Mole and Toad.
Intermarche’s new ad, C’est Magnifique, is a short film where an old widower poignantly remembers the dead through food — and the help of the supermarket. Via The Stable:
An ad agency called Romance should create beautiful love stories. The French ad agency called Romance has been doing so since 2017. Creating beautiful love stories, fro French supermarket chain, Intermarché.
The emotional power cells all have the same aim, to encourage people to eat better and cook healthier food. This one is the three-minute story of a widower who undergoes a quest to recreate his wife’s pasta sauce when he finds her old recipe book – replacing the processed ham and cheese sandwiches he has been eating.
Adding to the film’s magic is a cover of Cole Porter’s famous American song, C’est Magnifique, by French singer, Benjamin Biolay. The gorgeous, cinematic quality of the film, and evocative product scenes, comes from director, Katia Lewkowicz, via Grand Bazar.
What we’re watching: The rise and fall of Theranos is getting a lot of renewed interest recently, what with a HBO documentary and a podcast out. Via Vox:
Modern grifters and con artists manifest a certain vampiric quality. The hipster grifter, fraudulent socialite Anna Delvey, the fake Saudi prince, Fyre Festival (and maybe, if you squint, even college admissions fraud) — they all have one thing in common: A sexy, alluring cast to the con that makes the feeding off the (metaphorical) blood of the conned even more seductive to those of us sitting on the outside, munching popcorn as our eyes widen.
So perhaps what makes the story of Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes so compulsively interesting is that it’s the rare double grift, subtext and text: Holmes, who promised that technology her company had supposedly developed would change the world of medical testing forever, fed the con through sucking the metaphorical blood of wealthy people’s bank accounts and through, well, actual blood. Even the poster for Alex Gibney’s upcoming HBO documentary about the fallen entrepreneur, The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, boasts some ominously vampiric undertones.
Theranos turned heads with its signature invention — a blood testing machine about the size of a home breadmaker named the Edison, after Thomas and (perhaps in a stroke of dramatic irony) the many failures he endured en route to success. The Edison would have, by all accounts, radically shifted how we approached health care. The vials and vials of blood required to run medical tests would be reduced to just a “nanotainer” of blood, drawn from a prick on a fingertip. The nanotainer would be deposited into an Edison, and thorough analysis could be run inexpensively, quickly, and seamlessly. All at your local Walgreen’s.