After a few months of wild speculation in Hollywood, the announcement yesterday that JJ Abrams would be directing the new Disney STAR WARS movie was a bit of a surprise (and blew up the Twitterverse). He'd publicly taken himself out of the running last fall, saying he had a number of his own projects to work on after the new STAR TREK movie was done. But either this was a PR fakeout or something convinced him otherwise as now he will be reviving the STAR WARS franchise with the new film, currently being scripted by Michael Arndt.
Given the way Abrams revived the defunct STAR TREK franchise a few years ago, this news bodes extremely well for STAR WARS fans. It will be exciting to have him bring the franchise back from the dead after Lucas's 1,2,3 prequels which may have looked cool but were dramatic duds. Abrams has been a vocal and rabid fan of that galaxy far far away so he will certainly bring to it his passion and his talents for making entertaining blockbusters that are not stupid. The new movie is due summer 2015.
If you happened to watch any of ABC's election night coverage, you got to see the odd sight of Diane Sawyer seeming a bit drunk as she slurred her words, made weird hand gestures, and said very odd things for a network news anchor co-hosting live coverage of a Presidential election. Things like "OK--I wanna--can we have our music because this is another big one here? Minnesota. We're ready to project Minnestoa rrrright now. Well, tonight we know that President Barack has won Minnesota." Party on Diane!
With behavior like this, she quickly became a trending topic on Twitter and even inspired a couple insta-feeds too. Oddly, ABC's election studio lost power for about 20 minutes, at which point they went to crowds in Time Square. After that, apparently Sawyer's performance seemed a little less embarrassing and more sober. But it turns out that this is not the first time she's had incident like this. During Obama's inauguration she was also seemed a bit tipsy as seen above (maybe she just loves celebrating the Obama's victories?). And, in another crazy YouTube video below from the 1990's, she is seen drinking wine and popping pills on the set of her old show Prime Time Live.
ABC said she was exhausted and Sawyer, on her Twitter feed, seemed to have a sense of humor about the whole thing. She was back on the air, as normal, on World News last night sounding more like a network anchor.
Within minutes after Mitt Romney said it during last night's debae, Twitter and Facebook lit up with the phrase "Binder Full of Women". He was referring to an initiative he claims to have started in Massachusetts to hire women but his unfortunate phrasing turned it into an instant meme and, essentially, the "Big Bird" moment of this debate as far as the Internet was concerned. By midnight, less than two hours after the debate ended, there was an active Tumblr dedicated to the meme which is where I found the above photo (which made me chuckle).
All joking aside though, the claim Romney made during the debate last night is not exactly true. The now infamous binder was part of a larger initiative to get women more involved in government and it was prepared in 2002, before anyone knew who the incoming governor would be. Romney was essentially handed the binder when he took office. What is it about this candidate and his propensity for half-truths designed to make him look better? In the end, and after some simple Internet fact-checking, they really end up just make him look desperate to win....at any cost.
So we've got 12 days left on our Kickstarter to raise money for BEST SUMMER EVER, my new feature film. The bad news is we've got a long way to go to make our goal. On Kickstarter, it's all or nothing and so far we have only raised about 10% of the 25k needed to start production on the film. But fear not...we can still reach our goal. That is, if you help us out.
The beauty of crowd-funding is that all it takes is a lot of people giving a little bit to help make it happen. For instance if everyone I know on Facebook donates just $20 then our campaign is over TODAY. Done. That's it. And we can start making this movie a reality. So if you haven't helped us out, here are all the pertinent links below.
Please give what you can and support us online by tweeting or posting about our Kickstarter w/our bitly link below. Or you can copy and share our image above too...it's prettier that way! Everything little thing you to support this little film counts...so don't underestimate the power of you. :) Thanks so much and I hope you are having the BEST SUMMER EVER! #BSE
It's been almost 10 days since we started our Kickstarter campaign for my new feature film BEST SUMMER EVER. Much thanks to all our early supporters who have given so generously since--we've had more than a few major donors at the $100 level and above which has been amazing! But now we need hundreds of donors below that level for this whole thing to work. So I'm asking those who have supported BSE to help us get the word out on social media...where we now have a great presence: we are live on TWITTER, FACEBOOK and even TUMBLR.
So you can join in all the Internet fun AND really help us out by following and "Liking" us too. But even more helpful than that is making your friends/followers aware of our fundraising here on Kickstarter by tweeting or posting kickstarter URL to your twitter or FB status update:
The key to crowd sourcing is growing our crowd...ie; you tell two friends and they tell two friends and so on and so on. So if you can do this sometime in the next day or two, that would be major! So please alert your peeps about this fun movie....it won't get made unless we get it out to more people who can donate, especially at the lower levels. 100 folks donating 10 bucks = a cool 1K! So please help us out as we spread the word about BSE... and I hope you have the Best Summer Ever! :)
Over at The New Yorker's website, they threw a Twitter contest to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the release of STAR WARS. Yes, it was Memorial Day weekend 1977 when George Lucas' blockbuster sci-fi epic hit screens across the country and spawned lines around the block. So to commemorate the occassion, the magazine asked readers to sum up the movie's plot in a Tweet. That's right--140 characters to summarize a cultural touchstone and a legendary film. Easy right? :)
I'm actually not that crazy about the two winners, which you can read about in full here, but there were a few runners up that caught my attention.
@fabiorojas: “Whiny, but gifted, teenager trashes spiffy new military base” LOL!
@samanthaglavin: “In a galaxy far far away, witty robots save stupid humans from trouble over and over again, set to a dramatic musical score” ROTFL! And then my favorite for it's simplicity and honesty. How would you sum it all up? Put your tweet in the comment below....or just tweet it!
Other than Betty Draper's "big" return to the show last night, the other notable event on MAD MEN last night was a tossed away line that her husband said while talking on the phone. It was a reference to George Romney, the then governor of Michigan, who Henry called "a clown".
Though it was a throwaway line and not part of any of the show's real storylines, the mention caused a political tempest today, with Tagg Romney going on Twitter to defend his dead grandfather. Slate has the full coverage of the Tweeting that ensued. All in all, I thought it was a fun reference to something modern in the shows' 60s context. And clearly a fun political tweak by the show's liberal creators as well.
I've posted a few times before about the increasing intelligence of computers and whether or not they are approaching the sinister capabilities of SkyNet, the fictional computer that became self-aware in the TERMINATOR movies and turned on its makers. Yesterday, Apple was supposed to announce the iPhone 5 but the real big announcement was of a new app called Siri, which is a digital personal assistant. It makes appointments on your calendar, it tells you where to find local Starbucks, it will even remind you gently to call your wife.
Of course, it does all of this after you tell it to. But no matter....the Internets were abuzz with SkyNet freak outs yesterday. CNN reported on this in a story which mentioned old SkyNet precursor Hal9000 from the 2001 movies. I didn't even know that Hal has his own Twitter feed but he certainly had some snarky things to say on it about his new rival. No word from Watson, IBM's supercomputer that beat a human on Jeopardy recently. But maybe if someone set up Siri (who sounds like a woman, though Apple creepily calls her "it") and Watson and they had a baby it would grow up to rule the world! [Insert sinister laugh here.] Computer conception, though, seems a little ways off....
OK--so I'm "borrowing" this headline today from CNN.com where it caught my eye this AM. Of course, in true CNN style the hype doesn't quit match the actual story. But the story is pretty interesting anyway. It's about a new unmanned hypersonic vehicle that the Department of Defense is testing today. It's a triangular "plane" that flys at more than 21 times the speed of sound. In military terms, that means it could ostensibly reach anyplace on the planet in less than an hour.
Though hardly meant for bi-coastal commuters, it's still fascinating in a science-sense. What I also found intriguing is that the plane is developed by DARPA, the military's advance research lab. And though you could not watch the top secret launch, you could follow it on Twitter. Yes, top secret, highly classified DARPA has it's own Twitter feed! The launch was live-Tweeted today but they seemed to have lost contact with the vehicle and it's status is currently unknown. I will be following to find out more....
There's a new bird in town. Just a few blocks from my apartment, two red tail hawks have taken up residence on the 12th floor ledge of Bobst Library, just outside the offices of NYU President John Sexon. Bobby (l) and Violet are pictured here (with Washington Square behind them) and there are more red tails to come with three eggs soon to hatch. NYU has even set up a Hawk Cam so you watch all hot nesting action in real-time.
Christopher James, the PR rep for the school was even savvy enough to create a Twitter feed for the birds, which he has been semi-secretly writing. Granted the nesting routine of the domestic red hawks is not nearly as dramatic as another recent celebrity animal feed, that sassy Bronx Zoo snake who took to Twitter and racked up nearly 30,000 followers in his week on the lam. But it's still fun to check out as we wait patiently for those eggs to hatch....a lovely sign of spring in the heart of Greenwich Village.
This weekend, a Twitter-fight blew up after Southwest Airlines asked filmmaker Kevin Smith to get off a flight because he was too big. The plus-sized Smith had bought two seats but then got switched to a SW flight with only one seat. Since then, he's been bitch-slapping the airline on his Twitter feed and they've been trying to make nice on theirs.
ABC's World News Sunday's did a story about the incident, quoting a spokesperson from the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance who said this was a case of fat discrimination. When I heard the name of this organization, I was like....come again? Is that for real? After Googling it, I found that NAAFA is actually a legit and serious group that's been around for more than 40 years, trying to "build a society in which people of every size are accepted with dignity and equality".
I'm not sure if Kevin Smith is a member but I'm sure they can count on a hefty (ha) donation from him now that he's felt the sting of anti-Fat Acceptance. Anyway, in a time of skyrocketing national obesity rates and a Presidential initiative to reduce the country's waistline, NAAFA may want to reconsider their mission. Or at least their name....just a suggestion.
Roger Avary, the Oscar winning screenwriter of PULP FICTION, was sentenced to a year in jail back in September for a vehicular manslaughter charge stemming from a January 2008 accident which left a young woman dead. Not exactly the most remorseful inmate, Avary had been making use of his time with some very writerly "tweets" about life in the big house that read like a screenplay-in-proress. From November 20th: "Nightly, every few hours like clockwork, a guard's flashlight beam strikes #34's face, perhaps to ensure lack of proper rest and exhaustion".
However, prisoners in California do not have internet access. Apparently, Avary was on a work release program where he had to report to jail every night and on weekends. Well, that all came to an end over Thanksgiving weekend when a judge ordered him into a higher security, more traditional prison stay. And that ended his Tweeting too.
This is a bit from the Tonight Show which I found pretty amusing; William Shatner reading Levi Johnson's tweets, with appropriate bongo/bass accompainament. Apparently, Shatner had some success earlier this year doing the same schitck with Sara Palin's tweets. Warning--this clip has been known to induce pop culture whiplash. Watch only while seated. Thank you and enjoy the weird.
As you may have heard, Sarah Palin's "tweets" became big news after she hastily resigned her governorship, giving her only public statements since her rambling resignation on Twitter. So in case you're curious about what she's been up to this week or just looking for a giggle, here's Sarah Palin's Twitter Page. However, I think she'll have to change that "AKGov" handle soon. Any suggestions?
