Sometimes Things Just Go Wrong

I am a big fan of Seth Godin’s blogs. The man is smart and has the ability to articulate things very well in crisp, short sentences. Almost as if the guy was made for the Twitter age of 140 character messages! Some of his blogs are too marketing oriented for my liking, but mostly I like them.

In a recent blog, Godin wrote about the flop movie starring Johnny Depp, The Lone Ranger. I agree that the movie was horrible, though Johnny Depp was funny as usual. That said, Godin’s point below is only partially correct:
“thousands of people touched this project…Each of these people got handed a turkey, and some money, along with instructions on how to somehow improve it, promote it or otherwise dress it up. Alas, no one had the guts and the leverage to say, “stop.’”

I agree with Godin to the extent that none of those “thousands of people” increased Johnny Depp’s role in the movie. Then again, they were basing this on a book, so their hands were tied (beyond a point).

So why do still I feel Godin is only partially correct? Because some of those “thousands of people” did pick a guy who, as Brian Hiatt said, is paid:
“island-buying money, recording-studio-in-your-house money, your-kids-and-grandkids-never-have-to-worry money”!
To put that differently, they picked one of the most bankable actors in Hollywood. And they even tried to make his character as similar to that famous and awesome role of Captain Jack Sparrow as possible.

I think sometimes we forget that the movie business is touchy-feely and unpredictable, that it is an art, not science. And art, like beauty, lies in the eyes of the beholder!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more