January 31, 2004
Watching it For The Commercials
I did my month end run to the bank yesterday and the teller asked me if I was going to be watching the superbowl. Honestly it's not on the top of my list, but like millions of American's I'll probably find my way to the TV and catch at least some of it.
She remarked that she wasn't as interested in the game as the commercials. Yeah I know a lot of people watch the game for the commercials, but isn't that slightly insane. I mean for most of the year we make every effort possiable to skip ads. We buy Tivo's, fast forward through shows, but TV on DVD, and all the while bitch and moan about how pervasive advertising is.
But for some reason, this one day still has an exemption. My thought is that what people really want are cute, fun, short films and right now the only real maintream way of getting them are via the all too notable superbowl commercials. But it's still wacked that people are so duped to be looking forward to companies pitching everything from viagra to pepsi.
Posted by gkleinman at 1:13 PM
January 30, 2004
The Goat or Why The Hell Did I See This Play
Went out last night to see the Edward Albee play The Goat or Who is Sylvia?, with a local Portland cast and local Portland direction, and despite the fact that the Willamette Week thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, I thought it was one of the poorest directed plays I've seen in a while. Sure the subject matter is kind of strange, but the director has all his actors play everything way too big for a small black box theater. At least going to dinner South Park and then having tea at The Tao of Tea made up for the less than amazing play.
Posted by gkleinman at 4:24 PM
January 29, 2004
Disney is Screwed
I was pretty shocked to read that Pixar is going to be ending thier deal with Disney Yahoo Story. The current deal carries the 2 through 2005, so Disney effectively had 2 years to figure out what their business is going to look like sans Pixar. There's no way they'll be able to sustain with films like Brother Bear, which are fine films but never the huge mega-blockbusters that the Pixar releases are like finding Nemo. A lot of this probably will fall on Michael Eisner's shoulders, who is already not many people's favorite person.
The big concern is that Disney who owns the franchise rights to Toy Story and Monsters Inc will churn out low budget direct to video sequals. So who will be the one that Pixar ultimately weds? Universal is tied up with Dreamworks who is a competitor, Sony has had a lot of false starts in the animation space and with Final Fantasy they've shown that they might not be in a rush to get back into that space. So my money is either on Warner Bros (who has animation in it's blood) or Fox who has always wanted a sucessful animation arm.
It's going to be interesting one way or another.
Posted by gkleinman at 4:43 PM
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Posted by gkleinman at 2:05 PM
OK Here We Go
I've resisted doing the personal blog thing for a while now, as I'm afriad that I won't have all that much of an opportunity to make sure it's all up to date. But today I decided to throw caution to the wind and at least give it a go. At the very min I can post some general nuggets of info here that may be useful.
In many ways I was inspired by A Post in the DVD Talk Forum which asked me what A Day in The Life Of Geoffrey Kleinman was like.
Posted by gkleinman at 11:41 AM
January 28, 2004
Who Says Disneyland isn't Fun
Posted by gkleinman at 1:44 PM