East Asian Invasion!

Loving there's a new East Asian comedian/actor on the scene, there needs to be more!

Kumail Nanjiani (also the annoying cell phone sales guy on Portlandia):

Awesome Apps: The Cinemagram Effect

The occasional banner ad has been popping up in cyberspace with what I'd like to refer to as a "Cinemagram effect". Although, word on the street there is another app out now, Flixel, which does the same thing as Cinemagram, only more efficiently. If you have never tried Cinemagram or Flixel, please proceed to do so now.

What I find really cool is the intersection between print and video that can happen to create an interactive experience for the user.

A great example of this is  by Bon Magazine online for a fashion editorial layout on Yohji Yamamoto, to an illuminating effect.

Outdoor Advertising: The Right Font is Worth a Lot More Than a Grand

What is with the font on this billboard, for the Eddie Murphy film, A Thousand Words? When I glanced at it, while driving in L.A., at first I thought it was for somewhere you get salads or healthy groceries.

Although, the title for this film is not much to speak of, either. Is it possible its short for the ol' saying A picture is worth a thousand words? Resort to cliches, Hollywood, rings a bell in the social consciousness every time.

Theodolite: Then and Now

1984?

I find this photo of a factory in China that produces Apple products weirdly 1984, although not in the way Steve Jobs intended.

As mentioned Sunday on This American Life, (Note:  Disclaimer on the truth of that story) Apple does make available on its website a report that includes a section referred to as "Supplier Responsibility", yet failing to mention which suppliers Apple utilizes in the making of its products. Without transparency in allowing for a 3rd-party independent investigation into their suppliers, what is the authenticity of this document?

Excerpt from report:

Apple’s procurement decisions take into account a facility’s social responsibility performance, along with factors such as quality, cost, and timely delivery. When social responsibility performance consistently fails to meet Apple expectations, we terminate business. 


So is this true? 


Maybe Orwell was referring to the increasing necessity for corporate responsibility in 1984, rather than banality of design. Good design also means ethical business practices. Unethical manufacturing practices abroad overrides American innovation, pure and simple. With a recent fire at one of Apple's plants in China, it's disappointing this invention in particular is deservant of better public scrutiny.

Proper Attitude

I am planning on checking out Downtown Abbey, at some point, but Damian Lewis and Gina McKee are fantastic in The Forsyte Saga. The series is a soap opera (remember those?), way better than anything involving the Kardashians. Lewis is especially diabolical as the character of Soames, a despicable husband to McKee's Irene Heron. Sigh, the days when books, the theater, opera, and dancing superseded all forms of entertainment, and it took at least a few days for news to get anywhere. Whereas now, we have knowledge of what international policymakers had for lunch in mere hours. Or if not, someone knows somewhere and will post as such in the very near future. The allure of incessant voyeurism should wear off at some point, at least. Here's hoping.

"My Week with Michelle", Disappointing Casting

I haven't seen the Golden Globe-nominated film "My Week with Marilyn" yet, but I don't really have any interest to, either. For basically one reason in particular:  I hate the movie poster, just despise it.

Michelle Williams was amazing in "Blue Valentine", as was Ryan Gosling. She has a knack for conveying a raw vulnerability, the kind I would liken to a doe walking in the woods while a hunter is watching, sniper window at the ready. She is a master at this vulnerability, and it is authentic. But man, those posters. They just are blatantly Michelle Williams Acting as Marilyn Monroe, that finger in the mouth. Ick, so contrived. I don't have to watch the film to know she didn't inhabit the character at all, because she was miscast.  

Marilyn was a sex icon, and always will be in a different way than Sophia Loren, Liz Taylor, or Jane Fonda, as she was immortalized before her time. But you don't become a sex icon on vulnerability alone. My impression is the former small-town girl Norma Jean was tough, brassy, saucy, lethal, and intelligent, all rolled into one at her core. Vulnerable and unbalanced are really just surface adjectives for her appearance to the world around her and at-large. Williams does more justice to Monroe's surface view, rather than the troubled actress's inner life, especially on this freaking poster.  

Christina Hendricks would have gone gangbusters on the role of Marilyn. Not only does she better fit the physicality of Marilyn, but it would have been a perfect stepping-stone for her from the character of Joan on "Mad Men". Right now (in rapt anticipation of the next season), Hendrick's character trajectory on the show has been Joan does not always win in love, but she refuses to let it keep her down. She remains a harbinger of hope for shrinking violets. Joan breaks down walls set up in place for woman during that time period of the '60s, balancing her sexuality with authority in the workplace, a rare feat. Even in current times, sad to say, her presence would probably raise some eyebrows, as her feminine curves would be construed as "wiles". But instead of using her sexuality to "win a man" so she can marry and have children, as was apropos among secretaries at the time (at least on "Mad Men"), she wields it to her advantage. Not to mention, does so with dignity, savvy, humor, and sophistication.

The resemblance is uncanny, is it not?

Sounds pretty similar to Marilyn, in a sense. Marilyn exposed herself for all of the world to see, comment on, and judge her identity, which I daresay is brave, if nothing else. She could not preserve her self-identity in it all, but who's to say she didn't try? Rendering her as unbalanced and needy, with self-descrutive vices, is both simplistic and disappointing. It's a cheap way to expose her vulnerability within the character of a film. Award-winning film, apparently, nevertheless. Marilyn was once a real person, not just an idea simmering in the cultural lexicon, of which there are plentiful derivatives, one in particular Lindsay Lohan. Lohan more and more seems as if trying to emulate Marilyn in her downward spiral, eyeing the cameras on court dates, while burying her inner life deeper and deeper past day-to-day reality.

And why in the world was this film nominated for a comedy on the Golden Globes? Just goes to show, if anything, The Weinstein Company is an ace at making pretty good films and doing some pretty damn good business. And at entertaining Hollywood-borne archaic notions of women as talent in the meanwhile.