There’s always something to howl about.
“Closing Escrow, The Movie”, a mockumentary mocking Realtors, opens tomorrow, apparently in a very limited distribution. Presumably this won’t stop your most pomo clients from asking you if you’ve seen it.
The trailer:
As a rule, the funniest 90 seconds of a comedy will be in the trailer. If the trailer isn’t hysterical, enduring the movie will be agony. Press play to judge for yourself. Much more at YouTube.com.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Thirty years of Elvis Lives. There will probably be more at Marlow’s place. This is John Hiatt and The Goners, with Sonny Landreth finger-picking slide on that pretty black Stratocaster.
Technorati Tags: real estate marketing, real estate photography
I wrote about The Fabulous Baker Boys at New Years. This is another film where the conflicts are painfully real and where everyone is a better person at the end.
In the clip linked below, Michelle Pfeiffer sings More Than You Know as a way of summarizing the argument of the film. As with Pleasantville, this is a film I can watch over and over again.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Here’s what I like in movies: I want an accurate portrayal of normal human life in which basically decent people are confronted with a challenge, and, in wrestling with it, emerge as even better people.
I despise the idea of villainy — not because there are no villains in the world, but because they are almost never the problem in a normal human life. Film villains are stupid, insanely over the top. If you want to deal with villains in real life, take on angry drunks or passive-aggressive wraiths or the kind of everyday trolls who try to bring out the worst in otherwise good-hearted people.
Even then I’m not interested. In real life, most people are trying to do their best from the best of intentions, and the conflicts that arise between them are interesting because we each see the world from our own unique vantage point. We are beset, mostly, by errors of knowledge, not by malice. The true story of humanity is learning to do better, and from this idea comes the best art. Those kind of stories fascinate me.
Grand Canyon is a good example. The High Concept behind the film — people are becoming more divided by their chasm-like differences, and yet the real Grand Canyon is bigger and more significant than tiny human lives — is lame, symptomatic of the pontificating Sunday editorial page Deep Think piece. But co-writer/director Lawrence Kasden manages to overcome the banality of his theme with a series of overlapping, converging story arcs. Each character is motivated like a real person, which means that none of their motivations are evil or wrong, but they are sometimes in conflict and have to be worked out.
In the clip linked here, Mary McDonnell’s Claire endures an agonizing dream exploring the changes, welcome and unwelcome, she is going through in her marriage and family.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
I don’t quite hate American Beauty. Cathy thinks that Lester Burnham is redeemed in the end, first by correcting the defects in his life and second by not succumbing to the crime of ephebophila. My take is that he’s a snarky pomo asshole from start to finish. I think the philosophical argument of the film is made by the clip of the plastic bag being buffeted at random by the winds: Nothing is everything. Ick.
But: Even ickier: American Beauty brings us the all-time most hideous portrayal of the real estate business. A piece of that is shown in the clip linked below, Carolyn Burnham defiling herself at open house. It were well to be free from pestilential, confiscatory government, which is what we celebrate today with beer and fireworks. But there is something to be said for breaking free from phony, prostrate selling stunts, too.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
Continuing with the idea of weblogging as talk radio, linked below are clips from my two favorite talk radio movies. I wrote about Talk Radio in a post at Thanksgiving. I featured Pump Up The volume in a post about long-tail television. Both films, incidentally, illustrate the idea of infotainment necessary for a successful weblog.
In the Pump Up The volume clip, I’m showing a scene that I thought was particularly well done. The film itself wavers between anarchic wannabe-profundity and formula teen-angst melodrama. But the pomo-meets-goth love interest is fun. In this scene Mark Hunter and Laura De Niro shyly explore the undiscovered country of intimacy. Samantha Mathis, as Laura, is delightfully ingenuous I think.
The clip from Talk Radio is much, much darker. It’s the agonizing climax of the third act, and it’s just enough to make you shriek for relief. Everything is perfect, script, acting, direction, staging, music. Eric Bogosian is off-the-charts excellent, and Oliver Stone, despite his ever-lengthening list of shortcomings, shows himself here to be the complete auteur.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
We have a vast collection of Vegas movies. Vegas Vacation is painful in only the way that a Chevy Chase movie can be painful, but the agony is worth enduring for the sustained farce Nick Papagiorgio story arc. The clip linked below is a nice illustration of the high art of low comedy, a masterfully funny take on degenerate gamblers.
I can’t even begin to tell you how much I get out of Pleasantville. Everything about the film — theme, plot, character development, graphic style — is stunningly original, truly a triumph in a film that draws on so many different cultural, historical and filmic archetypes. The face acting is phenomenal, and film is all about face acting. Randy Newman’s score is a let-down, if only because he brought absolutely nothing original to the task. But the pre-recorded pieces used in the soundtrack are beyond excellent, as we’ll see.
Writer/producer/director Gary Ross takes on an absolutely immense theme, essentially writing a foundational myth for modernity, just outrageously ambitious for typically-cowardly Hollywood. I’m amazed that anyone was willing to fund and release this film. It’s that good.
Linked below is a clip to show what I’m talking about. Ross uses the original Dave Brubeck recording of Take Five to bookend the scene, and the script and acting are built to respond to and complete the music. The tension at the drum solo is just perfect…
I have SO many posts I need to write and have not taken the time. But I just HAD to get THIS one out. 🙂
It’s been a wonderfully grumpy week. Please indulge me:
When the NY Times came out with its piece on the Madison, WI FSBO market, the NAR typically over-reacted and sent out another set of talking points. Last time they did that — Sixty Minutes — they received some well deserved ridicule; I’m apparently not alone in finding talking points condescending and wholly counter productive. So this time they added: Please do NOT circulate this document.
Yep. That should help.
On a related note, today’s REALTOR&174; Mag email link gives a wonderful illustration on how spin backfires:
Poll: Few Consumers Know What You Do
A new survey by the Washington, D.C.-based Consumer Federation of America reveals that while 84 percent of consumers have a favorable opinion of real estate agents and brokers, many of them lack an understanding of the services that real estate professionals provide.
From which it’s easy to infer that people love us, even though they aren’t aware of all we do in a given day.
But. Here’s the actual survey. [Note I’m not defending the survey itself since it’s so badly conceived it exists primarily to establish its own conclusion.] The takeaway from the press release:
“Taken as a whole, these survey data suggest that consumers value the services provided by agents and brokers, and have usually had good experiences with these agents and brokers, but that their views are positive in part because of their lack of awareness of specific industry practices that could harm their interests,” said Brobeck.
Juuuuuuust a bit outside.
And the 84%? That’s the percentage of A) The 29% in the survey who’d bought or sold within the last five years; and B) who were rating their own agent. The generic number for all surveyed is 68% favorability, which means a third need a little extra convincing, more than would be required, say, by a set of talking points. One third is a serious number for a profession that begins its appellative with a capital and ends it with a circle R.
Speaking of which: You know the guy you meet at the cocktail party, the one who Read more
This is fun, but it’s not too far from wrong. Pete Townshend is 62. Roger Daltrey is 63. There are some hand-lettered signs (harkening to a Bob Dylan (age 66) video) that make Jeff Brown’s arguments all too well.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
You feel that delicious thrill coursing through your every nerve and vein and you know, subtly, without quite knowing why, that something has changed. The air is still and the birds are strangely silent. The sun beats down with a relentless intensity from a crystalline, cloudless sky and you feel as if you could see for thousands of miles in every direction. Strangers make eye contact, and by their quiet, knowing smiles they communicate with an unshakeable certainty that all men truly are brothers — united in a quest for truth, serenity, rectitude, beauty, wisdom, perfect justice and an exalted, almost unendurable vision of unblemished excellence.
What is it? You guessed it. The Main Event is still a month off, but The World Series of Poker starts today.
We’re about half-way through the RE.net waist-loss challenge, so it seems like a good time to pull out the scales and the tape measures. This was the plan I laid out for myself in March:
My goal: A 34-inch waist by August 1st.
My plan: A half-hour a day on the stationary bike, while reading nothing work-related. Eat half as much, twice as often — or less. Add real bicycling as the weather warms up. Add free-weights and crunches as appropriate.
No crunches at all yet (O, the pain!), but everything else proceeds apace. I got sick a little while ago, and I haven’t yet reintegrated the weights before bedtime. I finally got onto my mountain bike a couple of weeks ago. I hate anything like cold weather, so I won’t ride if the outside temperature isn’t what most people would think of as blistering. Anyway, I found out right away that the recumbent bike is a vigorous way of sitting down. By now I can do 45 very hard minutes on the bike, but I haven’t yet found myself tempted by any of the nearby mountains. Eating less and better has been no problem at all. Food has always bored me, but the weights and the bike lead me to a certain fascination with protein.
Consequences? I’m down 30 pounds from the start of the year, but that doesn’t really matter. I care a lot less about weight than about converting fat to muscle. That much seems to be working well. I’ve burned two inches off my belt, but that vast beach ball above my belt is much deflated. Riding a mountain bike is an excellent workout for every muscle from toes to glutes (plus some upper body stuff), so the biggest muscle groups in my body are getting substantially stronger. Plus which, while free weights are beyond excellent for building fat-burning muscle, working out with weights is blindingly boring, where riding the bike is always interesting.
Even so, there is a degree to which all exercise sucks. There is nothing quite as pleasant as laying down on the sofa and sinking into another fascinating Read more
An email I received today:
no hassle listing was not my experience. Your representative sent to install my sign refused to put the sign where the realtor and I agreed to. He was too busy talking on the phone to listen to
How long is The Long Tail? Long enough, even, for Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, ten long years after its theatrical release. I despair for the state of staged drama, and not just in the chip-on-its-shoulder burgs, but this, in Horace’s phrasing, is “a monument more lasting than bronze.”
The news: Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is to be released on DVD, at last.
We’ve been on the waiting list at Amazon.com for years, and I’d like to hope that this is a vindication of the waiting list idea, a social tug-of-war to stretch The Long Tail.
I’ve written a lot about this film, huge surprise. The introduction below was written in November of 1997. The Cameron you meet there would have just turned six years old. The review comes from February of 1997, at the time of Hamlet‘s theatrical release.
Hamlet past his bedtime
I rented Branagh’s Hamlet last night. I had seen it this spring at a big-screen theater in Phoenix, an unforgettable experience. Sadly, the videotape is not letterboxed, so much of the wide screen impact is lost. Nevertheless it is quite fine and very worth renting — or buying.
My six-year-old son Cameron came out of his bedroom and tried to pretend that he just had to see the film, a staying-up-late ploy that never works and that he never stops trying. Surprise of all surprises, last night I let him stay up, and he surprised me by becoming engrossed. I had to synopsize for him now and then (though Hamlet in synopsis is very brief), but he figured out from the synopsis that Hamlet and The Lion King are the same story. Not even Cameron can stay up as late as Kenneth Branagh, but he made it to the slaying of Polonius, nearly two hours.
Branagh’s Shakespeare is vigorous, to say the absolute least, but this can’t be a vice when we are so used to thinking of these plays as dry and dull, the fitting penance of a schoolhardy youth. In the theater I thought the ghost was too much, but it was just enough on the television screen, and it was the ghost who hooked Read more
