Monday, November 09, 2009 - Posts
-
sponsorship
Could James Cameron's Avatar kill 20th Century Fox? According to today's New York Times, probably not. Michael Cieply reports that Fox has brought in outside investors to minimize the company's risk in the event that the $500 million Blue Man Group-in-outer space flick turns out to be a Heaven's Gate-style megaflop. Along with this smart financial buffering, the Times piece reveals that "Fox is backing up Mr. Cameron's movie with what an executive recently called the studio's ‘secret weapon.' " What is this secret weapon that has the power to stave off potential bankruptcy? Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel.
Fox's confidence in the Squeakquel is easy to understand: Despite rotten reviews, the company's first foray into computer-generated rodentia—2007's Jason Lee starrer Alvin and the Chipmunks—brought in $217 million. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, which opens on Christmas Day (a week after Avatar's debut), appears to follow the same high-pitched formula. Check out the trailer below—interspecies romance! the best furball football catching since Air Bud: Golden Receiver!—and judge for yourself if Fox's confidence is misplaced.
Click here to comment on this post.
-
sponsorship
Alongside images of modern cities fractured like cracked ice, or a colossal Jesus statue toppling down on helpless hordes, posters, billboards, and trailers for Roland Emmerich's upcoming action film, 2012, invite you to Google 2012 to learn more. Doing so calls up the film's official Web site, as well as its IMDB and Wikipedia entries. But since 2012 is not only the name of a movie, but also the year that—according to certain interpretations—the Mayan calendar predicts the world will end, Googling 2012 further summons a slew of amateur scholars, fearmongering opportunists, and fly-by-night profiteers, all of whom are seeing Web traffic skyrocket as the release date nears.
Sponsored Links—sites that chose 2012 as a keyword in Google's paid advertising scheme, AdSense—include a numerologist, survival kits of canned goods and bagged soup, the University of Metaphysical Sciences, a New England environmental group, and "survival land" for sale in Montana and Wyoming. The site Prophecy News Watch has used 2012 as a keyword since 2004 (in fact, most of the mentioned sites had previously employed the term), but site rep Kade Hawkins said Google impressions have increased tenfold in 2009, spiking to nearly 3 million in October alone. An estimated 1 percent of those impressions yield a click-through to the site.
Other sites are seeing increased action, no thanks to AdSense but simply because Google's matrix ranks them high for the search term 2012. John Kehne, whose Web site www.December212012.com is a cheery depot of apocalyptica that maintains a running countdown to the big date and a roster of "celebrity believers" like Lil' Wayne and Montel Williams, said he moved to a more powerful server to accommodate the new traffic. Australian Robert Bast, who since 2000 has slowly published chapters of his book, "Survive 2012," on his Web site, has seen an increase in unique visitors from 5,000 per day to 20,000, though some days it's been as high as 80,000. "The free promotion of my site via Sony was nice," he said via e-mail, referring to 2012's global distributor. "But you never know, the idea for the movie may have begun from a visit to my site." Bast was joking—but it's possible that his site and others like it inspired the marketing campaign if not the film itself.
Sony's marketers chose a deliberately diffuse method for drumming up interest in 2012. A more precise search term, like "2012 The Movie," would have better directed traffic to Emmerich-related sites. But in this case, imprecision is good currency, because by sharing attention and traffic with crackpot sites, Sony draws attention to the existing paranoid hysteria and makes the film seem like a more significant cultural event. Likewise, in addition to the alarmist-sounding official home page, www.Whowillsurvive2012.com, Sony has created a network of six satellite sites, all launched during the past year, that deftly blur the lines between the film's fictional world and actual armchair paranoia, given names like Corruptiontheory.com and Thisistheend.com (easily mistaken for the Church of God's The-end.com). One of the dummy sites, Instituteforhumancontinuity.org, mixes fictional conceits like a human lottery system and boutique personal bunkers with links to real-world organizations like the Alliance to Rescue Civilization and even a Guatemalan real estate agency. Down this rabbit hole, it can be hard to distinguish between true believers and hustlers, survivalists and Sony, but all are happy to take your money.
Click here to comment on this post.
-
sponsorship
We all know that Law & Order rips its stories from the headlines—but which headlines? Every week, Brow Beat matches L&O's plot points to the events that inspired them.
Nov. 6, 2009:
"Boy Gone Astray"
These Are Their Stories
In the first act, a female drug dealer is murdered by two 14-year-old American boys who learned how to use firearms at a training camp in Mexico.
This Is the Real Story
According to an April 2008 story in the Dallas Morning News, Mexican drug cartels operate military-style camps "to train cartel recruits—ranging from Mexican army deserters to American teenagers—who then carry out killings and other cartel assignments on both sides of the border." A June 2009 New York Times story described how Mexican cartels recruit American teens "with promises of high pay, fancy cars and sexy women."
These Are Their Stories
One of the teenage assassins seems completely unmoved by his actions; he laughs about the victim and sings a song about "la gringa brava" to his parents when they come to visit. The detectives discover that the song is a narcocorrido tribute to a Mexican gang so badass it has "hot Yankee blonds" selling its dope. On the day of the murder, a group associated with a rival cartel releases another song about la gringa brava's death, mentioning details the police had not released.
This Is the Real Story
Elijah Wald's 2002 book Narcocorrido: A Journey Into the Music of Guns, Drugs, and Guerrillas recounts the history of corridos from anti-colonial ballads to a sort of musical newspaper educating listeners about the drug world. In a 1999 New York Times story, an accused trafficker explained the purpose of the songs: "[T]hrough the corridos comes the philosophy, how the members of the cartel have to behave. They tell you what they did wrong. Why they were killed. You learn what you have to do so they won't kill you."
"Doped"
These Are Their Stories
Brenda Sawyer is driving four children—two of her own and two nieces—to a weekend getaway when she becomes disoriented. She drives erratically and enters the highway in the wrong direction, where she crashes head-on into an oncoming vehicle. Only her son survives.
This Is the Real Story
On July 26, 2009, Diane Schuler drove her minivan the wrong way onto an exit ramp and rammed into an SUV. She was killed, along with her daughter and three nieces; the three men in the other vehicle also died. Only her son survived. According to the New York Daily News, tests revealed that Schuler had smoked pot and drunk at least 10 ounces of liquor during the 90-minute drive.
These Are Their Stories
The detectives find alcohol in Brenda's system and in her car and assume she was drinking, but then they realize that her allergy medicine had been spiked with Propofol, a powerful anesthetic. They discover that Brenda and her boss, Zack Marshall (Mad Men's Harry Crane, looking just as ineffectual in a straight tie), had gathered evidence proving that a highly profitable but medically ineffective drug manufactured by the pharmaceutical company they worked for was being marketed illegally. Whistleblowers can receive a slice of settlements, and Brenda was threatening to donate their cut to charity, so Marshall poisoned her nasal spray and slipped booze into her smoothie. He had no idea there would be children in the vehicle.
This Is the Real Story
Under the False Claims Act, whistleblowers are entitled to between 15 percent and 30 percent of recovered damages, and according to a Gannett story from Nov. 4, 2009, "Of the top 20 False Claims Act cases, measured by the amount of money recovered, 12 involved judgments or settlements against pharmaceutical companies, accounting for billions of dollars in recoveries." In September, a whistleblower earned $51.5 million from Pfizer as a result of a suit alleging the company had promoted pain drug Bextra and 12 other drugs for unapproved uses and doses.
Click here to comment on this post.