When I was a kid, there was this place called Be a Star. Be a Star ironed your hair, gave you fingerless gloves, and propped you up in front of a camera to sulk or dance or whatever while some random '80s hit played overhead.
It would then create a music video, complete with body duplication effects, time freezes, superimposed lettering, and random pools of colour eating away at each other around your inert fishlike body.
That's what REM's video for Hollow Man reminds me of. Produced by Crush, Toronto, it also includes a digital avatar inspired by user input from its performance at SXSW. The band calls it the "symbolic heart" of the video.
Life can be cruel. Here's a simple salve for that one time you:
o Were trapped in an elevator with diarrhea
o Discovered your adult illegitimate child
o Failed to pass for yourself in a lookalike contest (featuring Erik Estrada!)
Shop Bloom! It's the only grocery store I know of that's located in a cartoon meadow.
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- Big spenders who can't be bothered to attend a fashion show: Prada wants your business. Click on "Prototypes Auction" at Prada.com to see what's bid-worthy.
- Product packaging can be vastly improved with the addition of Braille.
- Twitter, allegedly the 439th largest social networking site, is deemed niche but influential. (The niche aspect is part of what makes something influential in the first place ... right?)
- Yelp.com released a self-serving documentary to showcase its whole anti-Zagat, down-with-the-homies feel. The mini-doc was fast made mockumentary fodder by the anti-Yelp Elite, which seem to think Yelp's all about hair. No arguments here. And apparently Yelpers find the mock more amusing.
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OK, this is definitely NSFW but it's really, really funny -- if you're into watching a playful, lingerie-clad hottie have sex with a puppet, filmed in Paris Hilton Sex Tape lighting. There's moaning. There's groaning. There's writhing. There's slapping. There's penetration. And, of course, there's "completion."
All for UK MTV One's Fur TV.
Here's a series of videos from Planned Parenthood that advocate the need to "take care down there." With comical videos that debate the whether or not one must spew in order to pass on a STD, the benefits of masturbation, the importance of communication or how to apply a squirt skirt, Planned Parenthood gets its message across without seeming too heavy handed or overly creepy. OK, well the teacher dude is pretty creepy but he seems to have all the answers.
The Akron Children's Hospital , with help from Cleveland's Marcus Thomas, is running a new campaign made up of video portraits highlighting the lives of two patients staying in the hospital. Nick and Roxanne, both 15, are seen in two commercials (1, 2) as well as several other videos hosted on the hospital's site. Along with videos from many other patients, the dour aspects childhood cancer are left behind in favor of the upside: the fact life goes on, one can live with cancer and one cab even beat cancer.
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We've seen weird shit sell razors before, but we've never seen an angle like this one.
For its Satinelle ice epilator, Philips explores the life of a transvestite. The premise is simple: he has feminine hair removal concerns AND a man's intolerance for pain.
I loved the spot's "tender journey" narrative. But that "Like all men he's not great with pain" jab? It's so wink-wink-nudge-nudge.
Jesus, Philips. You did a cool thing crossing the gender divide, but you screwed it all up with that last ra-ra for the Girls Team. We don't need to be coddled.
UPDATE, 5/19/08: Boinkology scored an interview with Karis, the dancer in the ad. The boobs were fake, and he thinks of himself as less of a "tranny" than a sexually evolved person. Neato.
AdFreak's David Griner twisted my arm on Twitter and made me write about this. He taunted, "Don't get it. Wrote about a gorgeous woman disrobing and showering, and no follow-up yet from @stevehall." OK, David, here you go. Naked Vietnamese Hottie Showers. Loses Hotness. 'Nuff said.
When a screen shot and a video of a waitress with huge boobs bulging out of her top (yea, yea, yea...you're sick of boobs but as we've always said...we don't make this stuff, we just write about it) arrives in the inbox along with some cryptically teasing copy, interest peaks (not that kind of peak, sicko). So here's what was sent:
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Jun Group is disseminating this video where Steve Nash falls down on the court and gets all kinds of broken. Then he's put back together, bionic-like, by a black Dr. Strangelove with ostentatious taste in shoes.
The moral of the story is, BUY NIKE. Or recycle. Or something.
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