Marketing is All That Matters

Who would have thought a low budget sci-fi alien movie taking place in South Africa would do well in the box office? It turns out that District 9 did do quite well (#1) thanks to a "viral marketing campaign featuring clever billboards and other signage." This article discusses the viral marketing campaign and its success in further detail. Is this the new best way to promote films? It seems like it was able to work well enough for Sony's Tri-Star label.

Some Pics From NYC

Here are some photos I took during the summer, and then messed around with in photoshop.

Times Square in an HDR style

Black and White Times Square

The dorm in NYC

Church in Geneva, Switz.

Sunset in Cannes, France

Internet Ads Transformed

(originally written on June 2, 2009)
This article explores the idea of a web based advertising that is more similar to TV spots than Newspaper ads. It would involve pages with video ads popping up in between the navigation of web pages forcing users to wait for the commercial ad to finish. This plan seems to be better in terms of commercial monetization, but worse for the overall user experience. As I see it, the way for this plan to actually work would be for the user to have an enjoyable video experience, by not being distracted by the ads. This may require the video commercials to be entertaining or at least of a high production quality. In such a model, I don’t think user generated content would be successful.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell - Movie

This past summer at the Cannes Film Festival, I saw the movie I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I wrote a short blog post about my experience, but I never posted the full review.
In order to publicize the film's release, the producer and author of the book that the film is based on is going on a 30-day-tour to promote the movie. One of the stops is Athens, GA. I've already bought my ticket for the premiere, and look forward to it.


Following, is my film review in it's entirety:

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell Gives You a Good Buzz

May 19, 2009

Jour 5590

“You represented a stripper midget?” Tucker asks his law teacher. “Was she hot?” The class bursts into laughter. This quote represents the film as a whole. If you think comments about stripper midgets are funny then you will like this film. I liked it.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is based on the book of the same title by Tucker Max. The book is much more graphic in its descriptions of his sexual exploits, but if the movie were to equal these descriptions visually it would have the audience throwing up in their laps.

The film begins with shots of a police car responding to a call. The police bust in through the front door of a house to discover Tucker having sex with a girl who is deaf and making unusual loud noises. When she realizes the police have entered, she gets upset and angry and tells them she was just about to come.

“Raise your hand if you’ve ever fucked a deaf girl,” Tucker obnoxiously asks his friends Dan and Drew the next day. He raises his hand. This typical interaction between Tucker Drew and Dan is what a lot of the film is based around, and the friends are portrayed well and in what seems like a truthful manner. Tucker’s friends serve as the backbone to the film, and it is their motivations that seem to move the plot.

When I first entered the theater, I expected the film to chronicle Tucker’s adventures and follow him very closely, but it often strayed as it followed tangential stories with Dan and Drew. Dan is about to get married to Kristy, and Tucker knows that he has to throw an awesome bachelor party. Drew ends up going home with a stripper, and this sparks an on going relationship for this part of the film. During these two side stories, I was thinking, “Where’s Tucker?” It seemed like he was absent from his film for almost fifteen minutes! What the hell? He is the most interesting character and I wanted more of his story.

The best part of the film is the dialogue. There are tons of one liners and insults that had the whole theater laughing. Drew, who has just broken up with his girlfriend after he caught her cheating on him with a rapper, delivers many of the sarcastic remarks and punch lines in the film. For the first half of the film, he acts like a sexist curmudgeon and scares away all of the girls that try to approach him. His sarcastic remarks are intelligent and witty, but the delivery seems a bit too rehearsed. Despite the delivery, the jokes are funny enough to make the whole audience laugh. The dialogue is also not afraid to use big words that have a more personalized impact on the humor of a joke for those that are able to understand them. The jokes make the viewer feel smart, and in return the viewer likes them more.

The most memorable scene in the film was Tucker running through the hotel lobby with diarrhea shooting out of his pants and down his legs and covering the hotel lobby. This happened because he had insulted a girl at a bar who proceeded to spike his drink with a laxative. The toilet in his hotel overflows because the woman who he has brought back to the hotel has had some of his drink too, so Tucker’s only option is to run throughout the hotel leaving a trail of brown all over the place. Again, if you like this type of humor, you will like this film.

This film is cute; or as Tucker would say, cute like full blown AIDS. The overconfident protagonist often asks his friends WWTD-What Would Tucker Do? Tucker would see this film.

The hard part about transitioning from a series of hilarious short stories and anecdotes to a feature film is that a lengthy plot needs to be developed. For this film to actually succeed there needed to be a story line, and it feels like the story was just thrown together to accommodate some of Tucker’s hilarious experiences and jokes. The story itself is not that good, but the jokes are.

This film’s story is similar to diarrhea all over the floor of a hotel lobby. It’s all over the place, disgusting, and pretty funny. The story itself makes for a clogged toilet of a film.

Despite being independent, the style of the film is very Hollywood with traditional camera angles and set ups being used. The use of quick flash backs within the story gives it an extra good punch.

The film is worth seeing for the writing alone. The story is a bit underdeveloped, but overall it is hilarious.

I HOPE THEY SERVE BEER IN HELL

Opens in 2009.

Directed by Bob Gosse; written by Tucker Max and Nils Parker; based on the book by Tucker Max, produced by by Tucker Max, Richard Kelly, Nils Parker, Sean McKittrick, Aaron Ray, Karen Firestone, and Max Wong, released by IM Global.

Running Time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

WITH: Matt Czuchry (Tucker Max), Jesse Bradford (Drew), Geoff Stults (Dan), Keri Lynn Pratt (Kristy), Marika Dominczyk (Lara).