An old and a new.

Movie review time. Today you get a twofer.
A new movie "The graduates"
and an old movie "The planet of the apes" (2001 version)

The graduates is a movie that can't decide what it wants to be. For part of the movie it is a celebration of the reckless teenage years very similar to American Pie, for the other half of the movie it turns into a needlessly preachy "You gotta focus ahead, grow up, and stop being so immature" movie. The movie follows a group of male friends, one of whom you discover is gay. Surprisingly it's not THE ONE WHO IS FREAKING OBVIOUSLY GAY! moving on, The four guys are stereotypical to the 9th degree. There is the main character Ben, who is obsessed with the slutty girl who has a boyfriend and ignores his female best friend who is in love with him. His friends are: the stereotypical mouthy italian guy, the cool quiet guy, and the socially awkward guy with a girlfriend.
You of course assume that the cool quiet guy is the gay one for obvious reasons, he defends homosexuality multiple times, dresses well, and ignores all the women in the cast.
But no, it's the awkward guy with the girlfriend. Turns out the reason he hasn't slept with her is that he's secretly gay. wooooo, what a twist. He then tries hitting on the cool quiet guy, who shuts him down and tells him to go back into the closet.

Ben, our protagonist, eventually hooks up with the slutty girl, who is by far the most irritating female character ever written. Every scene that she was in made me want to hurl bricks at the screen. Her boyfriend shows up, he's an uber douche, and we're finally rid of her. Her leaving is the greatest moment in the entire film. He then realizes that he's been treating his female best friend very poorly and spends a crazed night trying to apologize to her. He doesn't end up with her, in fact, the closing scene of the movie is them walking down the beach and discussing how good of friends they are and how they don't want to ruin their friendship by dating.

But the movie isn't even about those people, it's actually about Ben's older brother, who is a 29 year old layabout who has been attending highschool events ever since he left highschool. He runs into someone he graduated with and he decided that it's time for him to move on with his life, get a job, and settle down with a family. The friend in question of course has the opposite reaction, seeing the brother, he decides to be a douchebag, ignore his wife and kids, take up smoking, heavy drinking, and mushrooms. He then takes over the brother's post of "creepy old-guy douchebag at the highschool parties".

So yea, interesting film, would not recommend it.

Planet of the apes.
Skip it. Watch the original, it atleast makes some sort of sense.
The 2001 version features Marky mark as a near-future astronaut on a star-trek style exploration mission with a bunch of apes. They receive a distress call, so they send an Ape in a space ship. the ape disappears so mark goes to investigate, followed later by his mothership. He ends up on a world run by apes with humans as slaves. The apes have somehow developed into human-ish creatures with a number of strange quirks:
1. They have language and culture, and civilization, yet still maintain their feral mannerisms.
2. They are afraid of water, for no goddamn reason.
3. They still have opposable toes, yet they wear shoes.

It's eventually revealed that the spaceships traveled through time and arrived in reverse order. the mothership arrived first, bringing humans and apes to the world (Yet somehow apes managed to evolve drastically and humans remained exactly the same). Mark arrives a few thousand years later, after everyone he knows is dead, and the ape they sent out first arrives a week after mark.
None of this makes any sense.
Furthermore, the apes while clearly non-language based and non-cultural prior to the crash, somehow have extremely detailed records of the crash and the human population at that time. Oh, and according to the dialogue all of the humans were wiped out, yet we can clearly see them all over the goddamn place.
Then we have the time travel problems.
1. The planet is revealed to be the earth, but that would mean that all human and ape life on earth had been created in this infinite paradox, and have effectively created themselves out of thin air.
2. The dialogue however clearly disproves the paradox when it is revealed that Mark was the one who sent off the distress signal that he received earlier in the movie. This gets rid of one paradox by creating another. How could he send a message to himself that is entirely reliant on a bizarre series of improbable events that would have never happened if he had not received said message? So not only have both species created themselves out of thin air, but the entire catalyst for the events of the movie were pulled from the ether aswell.
This brings us the problem of is history solid or fluid? if it's fluid then he couldn't have possibly sent the message because he hadn't yet traveled through time to send it. in this scenario history can be changed, but cannot move ahead of itself.
If history is solid, then him sending the distress signal is a set event in time, cannot be changed. However, if that were true then the reveal at the end of the movie makes no sense, nor does the rest of the movie. If time cannot be changed than either he's always been living amongst sentient apes (in which case the end makes sense but the beginning doesn't) or they died off well before his time (in which case the beginning makes sense but the end doesn't).

The time traveling in the original movie made far more sense. He discovers that he had traveled forward in time, not to another planet, so when he sees the statue of liberty it proves that he is still on earth, but his race has long since died off, and the apes gained sentience in the meantime.

So yea, if you know anything about temporal mechanics, the remake will make you very, very angry.

The cast (excluding mark) was actually pretty good in the film, but the concept for the film was just too awful to be salvaged.
Final thought: avoid this movie, much like "Lost in space" it's pretty and has pretty girls in it, but watching the film will make you stupider.

Geek-chic

No movie reviews this time, but expect some soon. This time a real topic. The nature of Advertising and "Cool-hunting"

For the last decade or so advertisers have been struggling to stay ahead of the trends, finding and exploiting new trends in their infancy before they have a chance to hit the mainstream on their own.

Let's be honest here, we all know the definition of "Cool". Cool is "What I have but you haven't gotten yet".

By this definition these advertisers have succeeded in keeping themselves "Cool" by all terms. There are of course the regular hit-and-miss campaigns where they get the tip that something is going to be fashionable, but ends up not being. But these can be discounted as a factor of the volume of campaigns in action at any given point.

The major problem that advertisers face is that while there is the percentage of the market that enjoys being spoon-fed new trends as they come in, that is not the entirety of the market. These days it's not even the majority of the market.
The real target audience that they need to be focusing on are the disenfrachised. Those people who have been permanently labeled as "uncool", the geeks.
These people have no interest in designer jeans or top of the line sunglasses. They have their own interests, and being "Cool" isn't one of them.

This audience is one of focused attention, they very often have a couple hobbies that they spend alot of their time on, but are otherwise your normal every-day wage-slaves. These hobbies serve as their sanctuary from the real world. Many of them get into RPG's of one kind or another, a literal escape from reality as they stop portraying themselves and portray someone else.

To get this audience the advertiser needs to accomplish two things:
1. He must become the geek. This market is very good at smelling phonies, If you've never played dungeons and dragons, you have no chance of marketing your product to them. They might buy it anyways for reasons of neccessity or convience, but they won't seek out your brand of sunglasses just because you claim to be in their hobby. You have to prove it to them.
2. He must accept the geek. This market tends to shy away from standing up for their hobby in the real world. While they don't expect to be cool, they don't want further social rejection. To gain their support, you need to support them. Be willing to alienate your "Cool-seeking" audience for the approval of the geeks. You can't expect to gain both audiences, you have to pick and choose.

This is not even really theory at this point, it's proven fact. A number of people have managed to gain quite a following through this method. Two notable examples are Felicia Day and Joss Whedon. Day has taken the MMORPG crowd and turned them into her own personal cult by casting off her standard Hollywood actor persona and accepting her videogame loving persona. It's not even clear if she is even an active videogame player, I know she plays Dungeons and Dragons once a week (Her twitter tells me so), but no hard evidence has been displayed that she is an active videogame player. Because she doesn't need to be. She's proven that she's atleast knowledgable about the subject, and has embraced it fully. And so, her fans have embraced her and anything she wants to sell us.
Joss Whedon is an amazing example. He doesn't need to divulge too much personal information about himself, his writing speaks for itself. It shows that he is into conspiracy theories, Sci-fi, westerns, vampires, werewolves, demons, etc. Even musicals are represented in his work. Whedon's shows are like a mecca for those who love that genre, so while he might not have his hands on the entirety of the audience, the audience he does have is intensely devoted.

The most amusing thing about this whole phenom is that advertisers are not sure what to do about this. For decades they have been trying to sell us an image of what they think we want to be. Now we have an audience who already knows who they want to be, they just need people to sell them things that they want to have. Some marketing for this audience would be simple to write. Want to sell more Pepsi? Show 20-something people playing whatever the latest videogame is and drinking Pepsi while they play. Others would be much more difficult. It'd be hard to convince this audience to buy a Gucci purse for a ridiculous price. However, offer them a Gucci gaming bag for a more reasonable price and they're in. You might have to compete with the $15 target bag that suits their needs just aswell. You can't sell them something that they can get just as good, for cheaper.