Archives for 2010
Spoof: Real Vampires Don’t Sparkle
Review: Welcome To The Rileys, and What’s In It For Twilight Fans
I think every Twilight fan in the world is pretty sick and tired of the assumptions people make about the Twilight Saga: it’s just for teens, it’s for brainless housewives, it’s an abstinence, LDS conversion text, …the list goes on. Those of us who have read the books know it isn’t any of those things, and the prejudgement by people who haven’t actually read the books makes us nuts. To quote one of my friends who is a recent Twilight reader, “I can’t believe I resisted it for so long. What’s on the Internet is really exaggerated.”
In the same way, the early pre-press on Welcome to the Rileys classifying it as “a stripper movie” does the same disservice. It’s no more “just a stripper movie” any more than Pretty Woman was “just a hooker movie” almost two decades ago. It has a lot of the same themes as Pretty Woman: redemption, wounded people finding and healing each other, rebirth into who you want to be. Unlike Pretty Woman, the life of a runaway, teen stripper in New Orleans isn’t sanitized, but at the same token it isn’t gratuitously revealing.
Kristen Stewart plays Mallory, the little girl lost in the seamier side of New Orleans. You see the traces of what life on the streets has done to Mallory: cuts, bad skin, circles under her eyes, vocabulary that would make a truck driver do a spit-take, never mind blush. When Mallory is not in the clothing her job requires, she is in overly baggy jeans and over-sized tees that look like Salvation Army specials. In a sense, it’s her armor against the life and neighborhood that she has found herself stuck in. It’s a way of separating, albeit subconsciously, Mallory the stripper from Mallory the person, and hanging onto a vestige of self-respect. The biggest thing you understand is that Mallory is a fighter. She’s a survivor to keep going, but until she meets Doug, played by James Gandofini, a long-term future, or a goal past waking up the next day wasn’t that clear.
James Gandofini and Melissa Leo play a married couple who are just going through the motions of life after the tragic death of their teenage daughter. They are stuck in much the same rut as Mallory in that they are just surviving day-by-day and not really living. They have lost the two things that Mallory clearly has: the fight to keep going and the ability to feel emotionally what happens to them. On the other hand, their innate need to take care of a child hasn’t died, they know what a life ended too soon is, and each struggles to “fix” Mallory.
The movie itself has good, solid storytelling. Just as I thought, “oh I know what’s going to happen” the stereotypical didn’t happen. I soon found myself asking scene after scene, “Where is all this going? What is going to be the resolution?” Thankfully, the story wasn’t lending itself to a happily ever after where prince charming saves the princess and brings her to the castle. On the other hand, it didn’t seem like the equally overdone “bonding over a climatic tragedy” was going to be the route either. When the resolution came around, I found myself smiling. It wasn’t perfect. I was so happy not to have been given a cliche. In real-life not everything gets settled with all loose ends nicely tied up. Mallory and the Rileys give each other the ability to keep going, their self respect, and the desire to want to take control of their destinies rather than to just react to what happens around them.
For Twilight fans you have the story that makes you really want to know what happens. It’s a solid story that grips you emotionally. You also see the Kristen Stewart level of talent that was evidenced in Panic Room and Speak that made Catherine Hardwicke want to cast her in Twilight in the first place. It’s definitely rated R, but nothing is cheap or gratuitous.
Some, like HitFix are talking a possible Academy Award supporting actress nomination for Kristen. It’s possible. The more likely that I see is a BAFTA, because director Jake Scott is British; therefore, making the movie eligible in a number of categories. On the heels of Kristen winning last year’s BAFTA Rising Star Award this might be where this is going, especially since the Brits have more of a love for indie film than Hollywood.
100 Monkeys Do The Monster Mash
Heidi, one of the admins on the official Twilight Facebook page, put this together had this on her facebook, and it is hilarious. It was created by Hell Yeah 100 Monkeys
Kaleb Nation AKA The Twilight Guy Needs Your Help
We’ve made no secret that we have loved Kaleb Nation ever since we first spotted his site Twilight Guy back in 2008. Pretty much the term Twi-Guy was coined because of Kaleb. We loved Kaleb’s guy centric, goofy commentary as he read his way chapter-by-chapter through all the Twilight books. We even turned the Lexicon into a Kaleb worship site as our 2009 April Fools joke(see our video from that day).
Aside from having a Twilight website, Kaleb is also an incredibly talented, web designer, children’s author, photographer, and YouTube vlogger. We partnered with Kaleb on the red carpet for the Twilight premiere. Without Kaleb, we wouldn’t have had footage from that event.
Right now Kaleb needs your help. His YouTube channel is one of four YouTube channels that is up for a fantastic prize and he needs your vote. See the explanation below from YouTube.
“More and more of our YouTube partners are hitting subscriber numbers in the 100,000s and even in the 1,000,000s. We want to help more of you to get to those kind of subscriber numbers, which is why we’re starting a new monthly feature called “On the Rise.”
Here’s how it works: every month, we’ll pull together a list of partner channels whose subscriber rate has quickly accelerated in the last 30 days but who still have less than 100,000 subscribers. We’ll winnow that list down to a handful of channels, and then we’ll ask the community to vote on one channel to be featured on the YouTube homepage and get promoted through our social media channels on Twitter and Facebook.”
So if you’ve enjoyed our Twilight movie red carpet footage, seen Kaleb’s actor photos, enjoyed Kaleb’s blog, liked the Bran Hambric series, and loved his videos GO VOTE FOR KALEB!
Robert Pattinson Closing The Taft School?
There’s a long standing tradition at The Taft School in Baton Rogue Connecticut (but the video was filmed outside Baton Rogue) of having a headmaster holiday. It dates back to when President William Howard Taft was being sworn in and his son wanted to be there. You can read about it on their website.
Anyway, each year the headmaster tries to find a creative way of letting the kids know that they are having this holiday which amounts to a day off. Call it a mental health break.
Well actor/director/producer Peter Berg who is a grad of the school got Robert Pattinson involved in this year’s headmaster holiday announcement. No clue what the headmaster is ever going to do to top this one.
Via RPatttzNews
Etsy: The Fuzzy Line of Creativity and Trademark/Copyright Infringement
Two of the biggest online entities for fan creativity are CafePress and Etsy. Often for fan artists there is a tricky balance between creating an item that is inspired by a book or the movie vs. something that takes the rights of others. It gets even trickier when you have a book in the mix because now you have a publishing company’s rights to deal with as well.
CafePress entered into an agreement with Summit to allow fans to produce fan items from the Twilight Saga. There are tens of thousands of items from water bottles to tee shirts. There are some limits, like no images from the movie, and no fangs, but you can quote the movie, and use character names.
On the other hand, Etsy has no such agreement, and this leads to confusion over what is allowable. CNET covers some of the controversy:
One of the biggest entertainment franchises in the world, for example, is almost completely absent from Etsy: the Twilight teen-vampire book and movie series. There are items that describe themselves as “Twilight inspired,” but posts in Web forums by Etsy sellers who have had Twilight-related items removed from the e-commerce site indicate that Summit Entertainment, the movie studio that owns the trademark to the Twilight franchise, has been policing Etsy for more obvious infringements.
For legal reasons, Etsy’s Feingold declined to comment on these reports or on which specific brands’ trademark holders have called up the company with takedown notices, and Summit representatives did not respond to a request for comment. But considering Summit’s history of filing suit against unofficial Twilight media, it’s not surprising.
One of the reasons why this is so complicated is because trademark holders are required to enforce their property or risk losing the trademark altogether.
“They are required to protect their trademarks, if they are to continue to have them, so that it doesn’t fall into the public domain,” explained David Foox, a onetime patent litigator who is now an artist. Foox said he’s experienced these complications from both sides. “If you have a trademark, and you registered it, it means you have carved out a part of this idea that has been developed into a brand.”
Foox said that as an artist, he sees fan creations, including those where the fans aim to profit, as a measure of success, but that as an attorney, he recognizes the legal requirement to protect trademarks.”
So what exactly can you or can’t you do? Some things are obvious. You can’t take things like the Little Brown cover art, the movie stylized writing, movie stills, photos taken by professional photographers and use them without previous permission and in all likelihood payment for using them. Those are all unquestionably trademarked items. They are infact a violation of the Etsy Terms of Service. You just can’t take those and not expect to be slapped with a takedown when the intellectual property owner finds out.
On the other hand creating a fingerless gloves similar to the ones Alice wore in New Moon and calling them “Twilight Inspired” (vs actually saying “these are Alice’s gloves”) is probably fine. Creating a bookmark that says, “A Perfect Rainy Day in Forks” or “Volterra, Where Tourists Come In, But They Don’t Come Out.” are both probably sufficiently vague.
So what about making a pendant that quotes the spider monkey line and has Team Edward on it. What about making locket and inscribing it with “Renesmee”? …Welcome to the gray area, and THAT’s what is causing a lot of the trouble!
What also leads to trouble is that when a complaint is lodged about one item, at times an entire shop will be suspended rather than just the one item in question which results in a loss of revenue for the shop owner until the matter is cleared up. Cafepress, for example, doesn’t remove entire shops, just the item(s) in question.
Twilight isn’t the first franchise to do this. Warner Brothers, who control the Harry Potter franchise, took down all Harry Potter CafePress shops circa 2003. They sued a women having Harry Potter dinners at her restaurant. They also vigorously enforced their copyright on fansites (Ask the guys on Mugglenet what they have gone through over the years to make various tee shirts).
Additionally, if you really want a legion of lawyers to descend try taking anything that has to do with Disney. Disney is legendary with their vigorous defense of their intellectual property. I’m sure this family business didn’t bank on the 1 million dollar lawsuit over Winnie the Pooh!
So as of now, it looks like CafePress is the safest place for Twilight fan creations. Etsy, is going to be a proverbial crapshoot.
Hollywood Crush: Supporting Breaking Dawn Actors, Their Guess
After yesterday’s announcement of supporting actors, everyone has been wondering who exactly was playing who. They could in fact be characters in the book that are smaller like Gustavo or J. Jenks. On the other hand, they could be movie creations like Cora, the waitress from Twilight, the vampire who gets his head ripped off by Felix and Demetri in New Moon, or Mr. and Mrs. Biers (Riley’s parents) in Eclipse.
We had a lot of questions yesterday on what is supporting vs. an extra. Sometimes it’s a tough distinction because a supporting players role can range from one word to a couple of small scenes. Supporting players are different than extras in that they actually have lines of dialogue that are easily identifiable as theirs alone, not just crowd noise and/or they have a featured moment that sets them out from the crowd. So, nameless people in red capes in Volterra are extras vs. kid in cape who sees Edward is supporting. Various Quileuetes running in terror at the Cold-Ones flashback are extras, vs. The Third-Wife supporting.
Hollywood Crush has their guesses. Some we like, like the one for J. Jenks others we just aren’t sure.
“Take for instance Ty Olsson (pictured). The 36-year-old actor best known for his work in “2012” and “X2” is a dead ringer for the balding, middle-aged attorney James Jenks that Bella deals with several times over the course of “Breaking Dawn.” He has a fairly important part in the story, so it makes a lot of sense that an established actor would be cast in the role instead of a newcomer, like some of the new vampires were.”
Chaske Spencer Rides Mechanical Bull at European Twilight Convention
The sound you hear is the insurance people at Summit having coronaries. You just know that a “no mechanical bulls” rider is about to be added to everyone’s contract! 🙂
Chaske is also doing a book launch on November 8 in New York City as part of his ongoing work with United Global Shift. This a also a charity event and the general public can attend. See details here.
TV Guide: Hottest Creatures of the Night Series
TV Guide Network took a look at the hottest creatures of the night and of course Twilight represents!
Via RPattzNews
New Comic: Twilight Connection or PR Ploy?
The PR team of the newest installment of the DC Comic Superman has been talking about the newest incarnation of Superman has a look closer to Edward Cullen in Twilight (as portrayed by Robert Pattinson) than Christopher Reeve in the movies of the 1980’s.
When we first saw the graphics (see graphic at left), there was definitely a Robert Pattinson semblance, but after seeing more on Moviefone, we were left wondering if it was a one graphic fluke.
Check out the full gallery on Moviefone.
What do you think? Does it look like Rob as Edward, and does it make you want to buy the product?
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