MEDIUM FIDELITY BLOG

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Uh.  So I thought the Con-Tiki product placement with MTV was clever, but what I’m watching now, as I sit at work answering Carleton College’s telecom line (507-222-4000, in case you were wondering), is a little much.  Viacom has appropriated an episode of “My Super Sweet 16″ from one of its properties, MTV, for the purposes of promoting a new film coming out on Paramount, another subsidiary.  The result is a 30-minute advertisement for the upcoming formulaic-looking Canadian film How She Move, with a lot of tie-ins to the movie’s subject, stepping, and the young, telegenic, target-audience-worthy actors (who are strategically employed in the implementation of this birthday party cum integrated marketing conceptualization).

The whole thing is impossible to watch.  A vapid television show happens when you TOTALLY sell out your programming.  Though maybe other people don’t notice this, and appreciate the fact that the television show franchise (which has a valuable brand name, being as it is a show on the vanguard of the teen exploitation reality genre) is reaching out and showing them art, which since How She Move was at the Sundance Film Festival it must be.

As I write, Heath Ledger has JUST been found dead in New York.  Now Fox News is delivering nonstop breaking news coverage.  Yet the other channels are mentioning nothing about it?  What does this mean?  Will all the other channels soon switch over to covering Heath Ledger?

I was on vacation in Mexico recently, which was wonderful save for the aquatic devastation of Hurricane Wilma. I hope reefs regrow. Shamefully it was in this period that I caught up on my favorite television show Cops (sadly, not joking), as well as plenty of MTV, as I sat on the couch in a condo that had a smuggled Dish network receiver. I am a big fan of Court TV in general, but I don’t like it’s programming in the morning, when it attempts to be a news show, “covering” sensational trials around the country. In the afternoon and evening its programming shines, with Cops, Most Shocking, World’s Wildest Police Videos and Party Heat: Bayou Blast taking turns outdoing one another. These shows reflect the entire human tragedy at its most heartfelt - a wife and husband reduced to tears, shouting at one another shirtless, a child screaming in the background - and as such any one can them comprehend at a basic human level.

The shows also fulfill a sense of voyeurism that most people possess - it’s like rubbernecking as one does in traffic, reconceived in the privacy of one’s own home. Which brings me to the topic I had in mind originally, namely the fantastic PR work of Con-Tiki on The Real World (above is cast member Dunbar). I always watch around one episode of The Real World per season, because that’s about the frequency I tune in to MTV. But I happened to watch an episode set in the latest hotspot, Sydney, Australia, just in time to catch one of the savvier promotions in recent memory. So The Real World cast members are twentysomethings, AKA Con-Tiki Vacation Travel company’s target, and are superficial and good looking to boot. So why not have the crew from The Real World just, uhh, lead a tour of Sydney for a Con-Tiki tour group? And film it? And somehow make it into a challenge between two teams divided in such a way to incite long lasting emnity between the cast (per usual)?

It sounds so ridiculous on paper, which is why I write it out as above, but somehow everything is inserted just seamlessly in the relevant episodes (more than 1!) and the episode watches flawlessly. Con-Tiki must have paid a fortune for this much exposure. Seriously: interviews with the Con-Tiki management at Sydney where they deliver lines like “Con-Tiki isn’t your typical vacation. It’s a full-on adventure…” I mean, however much Con-Tiki paid was probably a steal, considering the comparable air time they’d need to pay for ads that wouldn’t be nearly effective as what they got from the Real World. A lot of kids are going to get fucked up in Amsterdam and then sleep through Vatican City now. (Or maybe just go to Amsterdam for Easter)?

You can check out the cast members’ not-terribly-critical interviews about their Con-Tiki experiences here.

I’m Not There is director Todd Haynes’ rich, muddled tribute to Bob Dylan, and his life from mostly the late 1950s to the late 1970s. The film uses a curious device - multiple actors playing, for lack of a better way to put it, different aspects of Dylan’s life, personality, and experience. If you need a good summary type the movie’s title into Google.

If Haynes’ multiple-actor device sounds familiar, it could be because Todd Solondz, director of better films Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, used it to mediocre effect in his latest work, Palindromes. I basically just want to declare the use of numerous actors in the same role dead at this point.  To start, it hardly adds anything to the narrative. Multidimensional characters are good, but the facile and childish use of - get this - multiple actors to represent different aspects of personality - is almost too obvious. It’s a crutch; instead of drawing noble performances from good, consistent actors, the device uses superficial differences in appearance and style to create the illusion of probing investigation. Look how multifaceted my character is, the filmmaker seems to say. Way more multifaceted than any one character could illustrate. I find the whole premise unjustified - DeNiro in Taxi Driver, Hoffman in Capote, etc., etc., serve as two of 78579340 counterexamples - and moreover I find the effect disjointed.

That being said, Cate Blanchett does a very nice job as Dylan doppelganger Jude Quinn, as does Richard Gere as an older version of Dylan. Because the film is essentially six different stories, with little to connect them besides allusions to Dylan’s songcraft and, of course, the soundtrack, each character occupies a different world. The best of these, by far, is the one Gere occupies: a strange, carnival-like town in Missouri where a Halloween shop is open all year round and the domineering landowner is trying to drive a highway through the anachronistic and somewhat creepy main street. It is the part of the movie that feels least like hagiography and most like a depth-psychological journey into Dylan’s exceptional and idiosyncratic mind.

Grade: B-

This BMW ad is now a year old, and still much better than EVERY OTHER CAR AD I’VE SEEN IN THE PAST BILLION YEARS. Although I’ve never sold cars to people, I can imagine the difficulty manufacturers face in presenting expensive, gas-guzzling vehicles as, like, diamond rings or other tokens of love and affection. Car ads are just the bottom of the barrel, in general, because there’s always the same boring cast of characters: desert plain/snowy road, nice car, deep narrator’s voice that gets really sped up when the fine print hits. When the holiday season comes, of course, there are more snow shots and less desert shots. It’s clearly time for a new paradigm.

NOTE TO ALL CAR MANUFACTURERS: no more cars with enormous bows! Make ads that are clever like this one.

My second article for Pop Matters hit the interweb on October 26, THE DAY AFTER MY BROTHER’S BIRTHDAY.  Read it here.  It’s about underage drinking, teenage parties, and the COPS!

This is, of course, the world’s premier occasional blog.  It’s been too occasional, though, so it might become less occasional now.  By which I mean more frequent.

The Cloak Room, my show on KRLX 88.1 (www.krlx.org) is airing every Thursday from 4 to 4:30 pm. Hosts, besides me, are Max Leibowitz and new Cloak Room member Terin Mayer. You may download podcasts there as well. Highly encouraged.

Here is our new promo:

BERLIN.  GO HERE: www.cityastext.de .!!!!