Nikki Finke has a very surprising write-up about how the movie Bandslam (starring Vanessa Hudgens, Aly Michalka, and Gaelan Connell) is an excellent example of how a great movie can suffer from poor marketing.
I thought Bandslam was simply another movie similar to High School Musical because of the way the trailers showed Vanessa Hudgens up front and center. But it turns out that Bandslam is much more than just a typical teen feel-good flick. It’s an indie movie with an incredible soundtrack that has been buried by critics and potential viewers because many are turned off by the fact that it looks like another Disney film when it is far from it. I mean, just look at how the marketing folks behind this film put Vanessa up front and center on the movie poster above! Even I dismissed the film for being another Disney dud after seeing the poster.
Folks close to the film are now saying that Summit Entertainment has failed incredibly at making this movie appeal to a wider audience and that there’s no way of going back at this point. So sad. Maybe I’ll go and watch this now though now that I know this.
New York Magazine has a pretty in-depth article about the financial rise and fall of celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. I just finished reading the whole thing (8 paginated pages…) and learned a lot about the photographer that simply was never taught in school. I’ve always thought of Leibovitz as the kind of photographer few people ever become — ultra-rich and ultra-glamorous, meeting celebrities left and right. And it’s a bit humbling to know that she suffers the same faults as the rest of us (if not more actually, given her financial debt).
Well, it seems like there’s a small piece of Detroit within New York City limits.
Photographer Lynn Guarino has photographed the remaining bungalows in Far Rockaway which have been left abandoned and in a state of decay because of changing demographics in the area. The bungalows were reportedly built in the 1940’s to be the vacation houses of upper-class families, but when New York City started building low-income housing in the area, people split and never looked back. Now, many of these houses are left to rot with no prospective buyers lined up.
The photos are shown in an animated GIF (yeah, WTF seriously…), but you get a sense of what’s going on after several loops or so.
