Posts by Damian Christie
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And how old were you when you figured out that George Lucas was trying to make a statement about Vietnam?
@philipmatthews - phew I'm glad you say you don't buy it either... I was worried that the colour of this particular crayon was getting duller by the second...
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Sure I watched District 9 and thought "That was one seriously fucked-up system"
See - even you're over-analysing. Are you suggesting District 9 wasn't just about aliens? :)
While I'm not the brightest crayon in the box, I think I have a few brain cells to rub together, but I am spectacularly bad at picking up on themes, hidden or otherwise in books/movies. I read Animal Farm and thought it was a sad story about some animals...
On the other hand, I think you can draw lines that aren't necessarily there. When I came out of Hurt Locker the other night, my mate said to me "so the main guy represented America right, and how it's addicted to conflict?" I looked at him strangely... or is this me being dense again?
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@recordari - having just stepped back into this conversation after a late night OUT DRINKING WITH THE PIXIES </wank> I apologise for inadvertently crediting @philipmatthews with your broken link pickup...
@Islander - All due respect, but without the 3D... I dunno... hard to say whether I would've said anything positive about the film... it was only the totally immersive IMAX 3D that got to me - the ash falling in the entire cinema when the forest was on fire, those floaty pixie things right in your face... even the subtitles were cool in that they hung in mid air... without that... hmmm....
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I cannot believe nobody has noticed how angry Hitler is about this Wellywood thing
@RB - well, apart from me, in the original post (or at least an edit made to it shortly after posting), and Hugh, who pointed it out to me, and @philipmatthews who noted earlier that the link was buggered and relinked to it... ;)
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Diese Verbindung ist gebrochen.
Yeah woops sorry, fixed now, but thanks for posting one that wasnt gebrochen
Have you seen the Hurt Locker? Cos there's a distinct lack of three dimensional characters there as well. I watched it to the end, but it was an effort.
Yeah at the time I made the joke about Avatar spending all that money to make everything 3D apart from the characters, but I agree about Hurt Locker. Straight up war porn, without a message, and not especially accurate (from my first hand experience disarming IEDs in Iraq, natch). Generation Kill the TV series was a lot better I thought.
Avatar was flawed, yes, but it was soooo much better than any of the Star Wars prequels for instance, and involved an unprecedented massive leap of technology. In the end it's a big blockbuster Hollywood film, it's never going to be "Being John Malkovich" or whatever quirky indie film you love so very very much. Suspend disbelief and expectation, sit back and enjoy the ride.
And yes, James Cameron is, by all accounts, a dick.
Just fyi, Miramar...
Thanks, I always get that wrong, and paused over it, but was writing on the plane without the Interweb. Will fix now.
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Thanks Rik :) I've been a Ticketek member for ages.
I logged in at 12pm the day of the presales and they were gone in seconds too - there can't have been many presales. So then two days later I jumped on with the general public and bang, 15 seconds...
I think so many people are Ticketek members now that the benefit is quickly diminishing. It was even tricky to get the Vector ones through the presale apparently - I went one step further and got an even more advanced sale available only to Pixies fan club members (I'm not one, but used the link anyway).
I know a few people who got Powerstation tickets - all people who already had Vector tickets, which is fair enough, but what it suggests is that the appetite for Powerstation tickets wasn't diminished by the 10,000 Vector tickets, just that a lot of people are going to end up seeing them twice.
Danielle - I'm sure you already have offers, but if you end up not being able to make the Powerstation show, I'll happily buy it off you at the last moment. More than happily in fact. So on the one hand, I genuinely hope you can make the show... but on the other.... :)
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Eleven out of twenty two is not a majority of the members of the NZOM, let alone "of New Zealand's most eminent citizens".
Is it "a" majority though, if, out of 22, 11 say yes and 5 say no. As opposed to "the" majority, which would require at least 12 of them?
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Craig Parker isn't the only high-rotate voiceover artist around, there's a couple of others I know who are on at least half a dozen ads at any time, but because they're not famous actors with distinctive voices, you wouldn't know. I know quite a few of the voiceover artists personally, which can make listening to the ads quite interesting. Oh hey Bill, hey Steve, Gidday Ian... still not interesting enough not to fastforward at every opportunity.
And yes Spartacus has been a very popular topic with my industry mates recently - I think the best analogy would be Sopranos: The Prequel... ?
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So is this ad industry rational or not?
Oh, so you're looking for consistency in my argument. I'll go and make my second coffee of the morning and get back to you ;)
I don't think just because you're irrational in one regard you can't be rational in others. Otherwise they'd be trying to drive giant donuts to work and sticking chopsticks in their ears while talking in Klingon. And to advertising people, where cool is king, it could seem perfectly rational to ignore a demographic that's not.
And as I say, I think for what advertisers use it for, it works. It's the other (mis)uses I have issues with, the minute-by-minutes and so forth.
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I have worked in audience research in both the UK and NZ and became an early dis-believer, largely because of the inherent flaws in the processes
@Geoff - yes, everything you say, and more. But like I said, like God, we believe when we want to. And whatever the degree of accuracy per programme per day, on a long enough timeline it equates into something reasonably meaningful - otherwise l'm sure the billion dollar (or whatever it is) ad industry would have come up with something better - installing spycams in unsuspecting people's lounges.
And if you think TV is bad, don't get me started on the method used in radio surveys, which is right up there with a Close Up poll in terms of its scientific value. And yes, that's a line I love to hear politicians/spokespeople/Garth McVicar trotting out in interviews "Well, as your own poll just showed Mark..."
@James W - I have MySky, which as long as I'm on the channel I intend to watch, automatically records the last hour. So likewise, I sit down 15 minutes after a show has started. My DVD recorder, which I don't use much, has a button that automatically skips 1 minute at a time, so there's definitely no branding whizzing past my eyes there.
I reckon I end up watching more ads when I view stuff on-line. TVNZ could really do with increasing their on-line ad stock though, because it gets really annoying having to watch the exact same ad every time I watch a news story or piece of a programme.
And yes, I'm definitely up for watching TV on DVD/download, in big commercial free four hour blocks. Get through 5 seasons of the Wire in 2 months rather than 5 years... I remember when I first saw the Office, it was so good I ended up watching both seasons in one day!