Some Thoughts On Advertising

Posted on March 4, 2013 by | Leave a comment

There are certain things in life that can be avoided.

For all our howling about vapid, synthetic pop-songs we do, at the end of the day, have the ability to simply turn the radio off. For all our wailing about trashy, stupid television, we have the ability to just point our remote and switch off the TV. Even people who annoy us we can at least avoid.

But that’s not so much true when it comes to advertising. Unless you’re living in an underground bunker somewhere in Colorado, it’s not something you can get away from.

Why you’d even be reading this blog, I don’t know.

Between telemarketers, logos, TV and radio, billboards (including mobile ones, which we have in Vegas), and the internet, there’s really no escaping. Even if you’re sitting alone in your house, it’s all around you. You’ve got company emblems stitched onto your shirts. Manufacturer’s names written on your underwear. Go to your kitchen, and you’ll find advertisements on the back of pasta and cereal boxes.

I’m only here to offer some food for thought; I won’t be taking up myself the war cry that advertisements and commercials always play to the lowest common denominator. Sexuality in the crassest, most objectified form, greed, gluttony, envy, passivity, sloth (not the kind shown above)- it’s all there, and thrown at us every waking minute of every day of our lives. What does that do to us?

Most people who work with this line of thought point to the movie Idiocracy as a dark prophecy of the world to come.

In this movie, a man is (accidentally) cryogenically frozen and awakens in a dystopian future where advertising and trashy TV has resulted in the average human IQ dropping well into the double digits. While it’s not a masterpiece in and of itself, and it’s suggestion that dumb people have inherently dumb kids is just plain wrong, the fact that more and more our society seems to be moving towards Idiocracy is downright eerie.

I will, nonetheless, offer an alternative for you to ponder.

What if advertising is actually raising our BS awareness? Information on the internet is usually either (at best) misrepresented or (at worst) outright falsehood. We don’t seem dumber as a species for it- on the contrary, we seem more skeptical and discerning. Perhaps we are, in fact, becoming tougher to fool. Naturally I can’t point to any cause-and-effect relationship, but it’s certainly something to think about.

Of course, there’s the dark alternative to that as well.

What happens to our psyches and society when we’re constantly on-guard against everything? Is that paranoid cynicism really healthy for us? What does it do to us to hold everything in contempt as just another scheme to take away your money? Even if we tone that down a bit, what does it do to us to walk through life constantly being sold things? Cradle to grave, confronted by sales pitch after sales pitch- how can that be anything but damaging?

Again, this isn’t to simply rail against advertising. There’s plenty that advertising, well, I don’t want to say “does right,” but certainly does “well.” Managing to communicate messages or ideas in the shortest amount of time using the smallest amount of words and images is, well, impressive. The ability to remotely encode associations, emotions, and reactions in the human mind through slogans, catch phrases, campaigns and the like is undeniably clever, even if more than a little Orwellian.

Imagine if all that money, research, and manpower was put towards something actually constructive. Imagine even just a quarter of all advertising dedicated to communicating positive messages. How much more of an intelligent, healthy, compassionate society would we be? If nothing else, it would mean some telemarketers could do something more fulfilling with their lives than shilling out cruises in the Caribbean.

It’s just something to think about.

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Stay Classy, Comic Book Fans

Posted on March 1, 2013 by | 2 comments

I don’t necessarily identify as a “nerd” or a “geek,” but I definitely identify as a comic book fan. As such, it hasn’t been hard to notice how I and others like me are stereotyped by popular culture, whether it be Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, Kevin Smith and his pals talking about which superheroine they’d most like to bang on AMC’s Comic Book Men, or the gawking crowd of guys in a particular episode of The Big Bang Theory. These stereotypes, like most, are not as true as people think, but every now and then they ring true, much to the shame of those who share in that group.

ComicBookMovie.com is one of my favourite comic news sites, and one that I check on an almost hourly basis. It’s great because it gives a lot of news about upcoming comic book movies, as well as previews of upcoming comic books. One issue the site has, however, is that all of the content is completely user-generated, meaning that certain things may get to the front page that aren’t exactly high quality stuff.

Take, for example, an article in response to actress Shailene Woodley being cast as Mary Jane Watson in the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man 2, titled “EDITORIAL: Making Shailene Woodley Hot Enough To Play MJ In TASM 2.”

As a little bit of context, the first shots of Woodley as MJ were not met with a great deal of enthusiasm. They depicted what appeared to be a very plain-looking redheaded girl, and not one who was anything like the “super-hot, incredibly bone-able character from the comics,” to quote the CBM contributor Mark “RorMachine” Cassidy. Below is an image I took from the article which shows Woodley side by side with a very popular image of the comic book character.

Upon skimming this article I was disgusted. The four areas that Woodley could work on in her portrayal were listed as “TITS,” “FACE,” “HAIR,” “ASS,” and “ACTING ABILITY,” in that order. I’m going to pull the first, and most offensive, of the paragraphs out to explain exactly why I was so repulsed:

TITS:

Look at the pic – comic MJ has lovely big disproportionate ones, Woodley doesn’t. Now obviously surgery would be the best route, but that’s highly unlikely so I recommend padding. It’s very simple, just stick a stuffed Wonderbra on the chick, and any scenes requiring actual semi or full (hey, we can hope!) nudity can utilize CGI! It’s a magical age for cinema folks.

To help restore your faith in humanity the article was met by others who were just as offended as I was:

I’m not sure if it was present the first time I skimmed it, but posted at the very bottom was the following note by Cassidy:

NOTE: This article is meant as satire. It’s a response to the – genuine – backlash Miss Woodley received when she was cast in the movie, and then again when set images of her were posted online. No offence to Miss Woodley or anyone else is meant, and I (meaning me, and not the absurd persona I wrote the article as!) genuinely think she is a beautiful, talented actress who will do a great job as MJ 

As is the case with the internet, users popped up to comment and agree that clearly this was satirical, and began waging war with those who were “making too big a deal out of it.” Then, over on CinemaBlend, Katey Rich wrote an article in response titled “If You Think Shailene Woodley Isn’t Pretty Enough For The Amazing Spider-Man 2, You Don’t Deserve The Movie.”

In it she decries the shallowness of complaining an actress isn’t “hot enough,” using some very choice words to address realistic beauty. Rich exhibits just as much, if not more, disgust at the article, but more importantly addresses the topic of Cassidy’s article being a satire. She claims, and rightly so, that:

The “satire” was so close to the real thing that most of [CBM’s] commenters didn’t get the difference, and reading it makes your skin crawl because you just know that’s exactly how a strong handful of fanboys feel, no irony intended.

Thankfully, and again, people restoring your faith in humanity, another contributor named “Jack Sparrow” [in quotes because I’m fairly sure that’s not his real name] posted on the site featuring Rich’s rebuttal to the offensive editorial. He essentially agrees with her, summing up why it can’t truly be seen as satire, but more important he apologizes:

We are sorry, Shailene Woodley. We are sorry, comic book fangirls. We are sorry, women that came across Mark “RorMachine” Cassidy’s “satire”. He doesn’t speak for all of us.

We are not all mysoginistic pigs. And in the light of the recent The Amazing Spider-Man 2 announcements, I couldn’t be more excited to watch Shailene Woodley start her journey to bring Mary Jane Watson to life.

I’m mildly excited about TASM2 [I’m way more pumped for this May’s Iron Man 3], and at this point I don’t have any solid opinions on Shailene Woodsley being the girl to deliver the classic line “Face it, Tiger, you just hit the jackpot!” [or some variation thereof]. What’s more important to me is that, as the title of this post suggests, comic book fans stay classy. That the people who love this medium as much as I do conduct themselves in a manner that’s, at best, not reprehensible. The public has a general view of what comic book fans are supposed to be like, and it doesn’t benefit anyone to play to that stereotype even in jest.

Stay classy, comic book fans. I mean it.

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Shame Day II: ISPs and the Six Strike System

Posted on February 28, 2013 by | 2 comments

Normally, Thursdays here at Culture War Reporters is dedicated to “Fame Day,” in which Evan and I call attention to people, events, or trends we think aren’t getting the attention they deserve.

But not today.

Partly due to my illness, partly due to some unforeseen time constraints, and mostly because of the severity of the issue in question, today there will be no Fame Day.

Instead, we’ll be performing an emergency Shame Day on the subject of yesterday’s terrible news that five major internet service providers (ISPs) will be implementing a “six-strike” system on people suspected of copyright infringement.

Let me break it down for you.

Normally, when you sign up with an internet provider, exactly what you do or don’t do with your connection is entirely and exclusively your business. Whether it’s something as impressive as you doing an electric guitar cover of the hallelujah chorus or as lousy as writing a thousand comments calling that same YouTube video gay is all up to you. What you read, what you write, what you post, what you view- the ISP is simply there (as the name states) to provide internet.

But no longer.

Yesterday, five major ISPs (Verizon, Time Warner, Cablevision, Comcast, and AT&T) announced that they would be participating in this anti-piracy initiative spearheaded by the “Center for Copyright Information” or “CCI”- a lobbyist group for a number of media groups. Quite simply, individual users suspected of “copyright infringement” will be given five warnings, the sixth “strike” resulting in their internet speed being slashed to dial-up quality for an unspecified amount of time.

Now you’re probably thinking “Hey- just don’t pirate stuff and you’ll be fine!” and you know what?

You’re right. You don’t have to pirate.

I’m taking over from this point on for a number of reasons. For the most part because although Gordon had good things to say, he didn‘t necessarily say them well, and in some cases didn’t make very much sense; we’re going to chalk that up to his recent illness. I will be relating to you what points of his that I can, while adding my own.

-Evan.

Gordon’s next point is that for the most part, many people pirate because of time and money. Focusing on time, the truth is that we can’t always guarantee that we’ll be at home on a Thursday night to catch The Office. Maybe we’re working another job [many of us need to], or maybe we just forgot. What options does this leave us?

For those of us in America, Hulu is always an option. The on-demand streaming site once provided a very broad range of TV programming, and Gordon points out that it’s a fantastic resource, or at least used to be. Nowadays, however, it’s a lot more difficult to use than it used to be. Hulu Plus, which requires a subscription, is needed to watch a lot of older shows, sometimes even episodes that aired a month ago, if New Girl is any indication. With one of the most convenient resources made less so, is it any wonder that so many people simply turn to torrents?

Gordon’s next point, and a very valid one, is this issue of the Six Strike System and how it relates to piracy. There’s an issue of what exactly is at stake here. Gordon insists that the answer to that is everything, and while I’m not fully with him on that, there’s some sense to what he’s saying.

The thing is that almost anything can be considered copyright infringement. YouTube covers, memes [which often use screenshots of shows like Futurama {see: our Shame Day image}], Gordon’s beloved gifs, even many of the pictures of this blog, in spite of being Photoshopped, don’t technically belong to us.  Would we have our internet cut because we run this blog? [Answer: I wouldn’t, because I am Canadian.]

To finish off what Gordon wrote earlier today, the issue is that the people in question aren’t being penalized by an international agency, or even the state or federal government. The fact of the matter is that these ISPs are “using their lobbies to persecute and prosecute suspected users without due process” [quoting Gordon]. What truly incensed him more than anything, though, was the way they’re going about it. That they’re holding themselves up as Knights of Good when in reality they’re just proud that they’re “selectively picking off anyone their bosses deem a threat to their unending stream of profit.”

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Piracy is not a subject I agree with Gordon on, and in fact I had a very hard time letting his last piece on the subject be put up on the blog. If people really, truly love art, whether it take the form of television or movies or video games they need to vote with their wallets and know that what they love is worth spending money on.

That being said, I do believe that what these ISPs are doing is wrong, particularly in that they have no one to be accountable but themselves. No business or corporation should have that right. Shame on these ISPs, and shame on the Center for Copyright Information.

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Posted in advertisement, advertising, America, art, business, Economy, Fame Day, film, internet, media, money, music, news, politics, Shame Day, television

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Evan and Gordon Don’t Talk This Week

Posted on February 27, 2013 by | 3 comments

Actually, we did. I mean, we’re pretty good friends; we more or less get in contact for a couple minutes every day. The strength of our friendship aside, when we did talk the following conversation arose:

This is us talking about maybe blogging last night.

The joy I feel at having people digitally spitting in Gordon’s face notwithstanding[and leaving out his next comments about said people], I too was disappointed to see that our votes for this week looked like this:

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As I said, I thought it was funny. But it is also horrible.

The vote for “Other” was “What the church is doing wrong/right,” and I’m glad someone decided to take the opportunity to suggest a topic to us. Our break this week is largely because of the way the votes turned out, compounded by the fact that Gordon is getting over an illness and I am not used to working a 9 to 5 [yes, I work now].

I will likely be trying to garner suggestions via Facebook in the days between now and next Wednesday, and hopefully that gives us some new material to work with and discuss. As always, feel free to leave a comment, maybe offering a topic we can talk about next week.

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2 Broke Girls, S2E18 “And Not-So-Sweet Charity”: A TV Review

Posted on February 26, 2013 by | 3 comments

This is late because I work now, so sorry about that.

I feel like I have more to write about than usual this week [unfortunate, since I’m a little late to this review due to my having a job now], so let’s get right into it. To summarize this episode in a sentence, Max and Caroline have not been paying their rent and are being forced to sell their property to a real estate corporation; not wanting to do so the two go to Caroline’s makeup mogul Aunt Charity to ask for some . . . financial help.

The first topic I wanted to delve into a little bit was the show’s humour, not in how it chooses the easy route on almost every joke but how it seeks to push the bar in its content. For example: a semen joke eight seconds into the episode. Co-creator and executive producer Michael Patrick King said that he “[considers] our jokes really classy dirty [ . . . ] they’re high lowbrow.” While the show has largely steered away from the rampant rape jokes which cropped up multiple times per episode int he first season, they certainly haven’t stopped walking, and often crossing, the line between “classy dirty” and dirty.

Take Max’s joke about how bubblegum flavoured lip gloss [which was wearing when she had her first kiss] helped to get her an A in class. It’s no secret that her character has slept around a lot, for little to no reason, but hinting at a minor [I’m sure her first kiss was before the age of 18] locking lips with a teacher is uncomfortable at best. A few minutes later she likes a tube of lipstick to a dog penis.

“How much is too much?” is a question that Gordon and I discussed once in regards to stand-up comedy, and we came to the conclusion that edgy humour is only as good as what its meant to accomplish. In the case of 2 Broke Girls that’s apparently to elicit cheap laughter. As far as I can tell, I mean. This has never been a laugh-out-loud show, but it’s Max’s snarkiness [as overbearing as it is at times] and not her disregard in screening her sexual partners that drew me to her to begin with. 2 Broke Girls may be trying to brand itself as an edgy comedy à la Family Guy, but needs to ask itself if they can continue to counterbalance that with the heartfelt moments they’ve been trying to inject into the show.

As a final note on the show’s humour, Aunt Charity had the upper two layers of her skin removed to look two years younger, which actually made me queasy just looking at her. Physical gross-out humour may be something 2 Broke Girls is thinking about adding more regularly in stretching the limits, which is a decision I’m currently unsure about. After all, one of my favourite episodes was the eighth one of this season, where Caroline yanks a needle out of her arm and proceeds to spurt blood all over the walls of an egg donation clinic.

Finally on to what was the biggest moment for me. So I’ve been writing about what the point of the  “Current Total” and it’s accompanying ka-ching at the end of each episode for a while, so imagine my surprise when I saw it change so drastically in this episode.

Caroline coerces her aunt into signing over $25,000 to cover what the real estate corporation says they’ll need to keep the property, but finds out later that the cheque doesn’t clear because taking advantage of drug-addled relatives [Charity was on morphine lollipops to dull the pain of not having a face] isn’t exactly an ethical business practice. Then her and Max sign over the store.

All of the first season was leading up to “Max’s Homemade Cupcakes,” and suddenly we realize that the girls are starting over from scratch, especially since Max declares that they have just enough money to pay back everyone they’ve borrowed from. Soon after a little bit of curious greenscreen work in the windows behind Caroline’s head is explained when a car crashes through one of their walls. It looked pretty realistic, too.

The “New Total” leaves the girls with a single dollar to their names and us as an audienec wondering what exactly is next for them. This is a hard reboot of the status quo, though there are hints by both Charity and the real estate woman [who was deaf, by the way] that maybe starting out smaller is the way to go.

Whatever happens with the rest of this season, I have to give 2 Broke Girls my grudging respect for reigniting my interest and curiosity in the show.

onedolla

Stray Observations:

  • The audience was going bonkers over Sophie today, and she wasn’t even really doing anything. Maybe an exec decided to re-send the memo that she’s supposed to be this generation’s Kramer.
  • Han has been very into memes lately. “Ermahgerd!”
  • “It’s obvious! She’s obsessed with her brother and she saw your being born as his love being taken away from her.” Morphine lollipops make Max smarter. 
  • The greenscreening was particularly suspicious in that is showed an actual street outside their window, and was actually filmed against a wall I don’t think they ever showed prior to this episode. Which leads me to wonder if they’d planned a car crashing into it from the beginning, which I hesitate to believe if only because I don’t think they have that much foresight.
  • 2 Broke Girls Cheesecake Menu: I feel like CBS is forcing me to eat my words when I assumed that they were having the two girls show more skin to draw in viewers. Not much to report here, once again.

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Shame Day: Hollywood and the VFX Industry

Posted on February 26, 2013 by | 6 comments

Let me begin this by saying that I did not watch the Oscars on Sunday night. I made a little joke on Facebook about how I didn’t have to because everyone else was doing it for me, and 14 people liked it, so I’m pretty funny. Anyway, let’s move this along.

Ang Lee’s adaptation of the Yann Martel novel Life of Pi won the award for best VFX [visual effects], which I can only imagine was deserved because, well, I have not seen it. Bill Westenhofer, the VFX supervisor for Rhythm and Hues Studios, was giving his acceptance speech when he was cut off by music, as pointed out by Variety’s David S. Cohen:

Word on the street is that this is because of what he was about to talk about. See, it would be wonderful for Rhythm and Hues that they received so much promotion due to winning an Academy Award if they weren’t bankrupt. Westenhofer had planned on addressing the crisis within the industry during his speech, and was thankfully able to voice his thoughts afterwards to writer Bill Desowitz for his blog, where he said:

At a time when visual effects movies are dominating the box office, that visual effects companies are struggling.  And I wanted to point out that we aren’t technicians.  Visual effects is not just a commodity that’s being done by people pushing buttons.  We’re artists, and if we don’t find a way to fix the business model, we start to loses the artistry.  If anything, Life of Pi shows that we’re artists and not just technicians.

During his acceptance speech for best director Ang Lee forgot to thank his VFX collaborators at Rhythm and Hues, which prompted a letter from Phillip Broste, the lead compositor at Zoic Studios. It’s quite long, but I feel like quoting two of the last few paragraphs, because they really say quite a lot:

Mr. Lee, I do believe that you are a thoughtful and brilliant man. And a gifted filmmaker.  But I also believe that you and everyone in your tier of our business is fabulously ignorant to the pain and turmoil you are putting artists through.  Our employers scramble to chase illegal film subsidies across the globe at the behest of the film studios.  Those same subsidies raise overhead, distort the market, and cause wage stagnation in what are already trying economic times.  Your VFX are already cheaper than they should be.  It is disheartening to see how blissfully unaware of this fact you truly are.

By all accounts, R+H is a fantastic place to work; a truly great group of people who treat their employees with fairness and respect.  Much like Zoic Studios, the fabulous company that I am proud to work for.  But I am beginning to wonder if these examples of decency will be able to survive in such a hostile environment.  Or if the horror stories of unpaid overtime and illegal employment practices will become the norm, all because you and your fellow filmmakers “would like it to be cheaper.”

It’s no mystery that most summer blockbusters these days are built on the backs of animators, artists who spend hours upon hours trying to perfect the texture of wood grain or the way light reflects off of the ocean. Rhythm and Hues won two awards for Life of Pi, both the Academy Award and the BAFTA Award for Best Special Effects; they won both awards in 2007-2008 for The Golden Compass. This studio going bankrupt is like . . . . well . . . . an award-winning studio running out of money because they weren’t getting paid enough.

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People who work in VFX are just as much artists as painters, musicians, and photographers, and all have the right to be fairly compensated for their work. Good art takes time and effort, and if Hollywood refuses to give those in VFX the respect and money that they deserve then we need to let them know how wrong they are. Tell people about what’s happening, tweet with the hashtag #VFXprotest, check out VFX Solidarity International, and don’t be okay with Samuel L. Jackson talking over Robert Downey Jr. just because you like the guy as an actor:

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Posted in art, bizarreness, business, Economy, film, Shame Day

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