Month: August 2009

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Lost in the Supermarket: El Jibarito is el Jefe edition

Is it cheating to run a Lost in the Supermarket from the “ethnic foods” aisle? Not when it features the smiley Puerto Rican Walt Whitman-homage guy! According to Wikipedia, El Jibarito is a sandwich that was invented in Puerto Rico in 1991, so I like to think of this can’s mascot as Puerto Rico’s foremost practitioner of the menage a, um, tres:

I was hoping that “Pois Congo” meant something more exciting than “Congo peas,” but life is filled with disappointment.

See the whole Lost in the Supermarket series!

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Inglourious ROI

With their “media empire” on the verge of collapse, the Weinstein brothers were pulling out all the stops to promote the opening of Inglourious Basterds last week. They’ve even played the contrition card in explaining to the NYTimes that they lost their focus after leaving Disney and starting their own company, using investor money to buy a fashion line, invest in a TV channel and a social networking site, and other activities that don’t qualify as making movies people would pay to see. (Here’s a fun takedown of that article, at the AV Club.)

So it must be gratifying to them that the new Tarantino movie was #1 at the box office this weekend, with nearly $38 million in tickets sold. The marketing is a bit misleading, since the Basterds — a squad of Jewish-American soldiers who ambush and scalp Nazis in occupied France — don’t actually get much screen time. But that’s a minor quibble. I still enjoyed the heck out of the film; it just wasn’t the movie it was marketed as. (I’m assuming the 4-hour DVD version will have plenty more carnage.)

Which leads me to this WSJ article about the movie’s performance and its marketing. It highlights the problems the Weinstein Co. still faces, but the article also seems to have buried the lede:

Part of the success of “Inglourious Basterds,” which was directed by Quentin Tarantino, comes from its $35 million marketing campaign, which Weinstein Co. executives say Harvey Weinstein approached with a renewed focus after missing the mark of previous campaigns. Last year for example, the company used stick figure drawings to sell Kevin Smith’s “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” which underperformed at the box office.

Let me see if I have this correct: the film grossed $38 million domestically and the marketing cost $35 million? With another $27 million in overseas sales, the movie made $65 million last weekend.

If that $35 mil. covers worldwide marketing, then they spent 54 cents for every dollar in ticket sales. If it was only for the domestic campaign, then it was almost 1 dollar spent for 1 dollar in sales (which are shared with the movie theaters).

Between this marketing campaign and the movie’s production cost of $65-70 million, that means this big success is still $35-40 million behind the 8-ball. Sure, there a lot of other revenue streams to help them close the gap, but this is probably not a good model for running a business.

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What It Is: 8/24/09

What I’m reading: Moby Dick and The Jew of New York.

What I’m listening to: The Lexicon of Love, by ABC, and Give Up, by The Postal Service.

What I’m watching: Inglourious Basterds at a 1:30 p.m. matinee on opening day. I enjoyed the heck out of it, but it really wasn’t about the Basterds and the baseball-bat-to-the-head marketing of it. I don’t really get the spelling thing, but “Variations on Interrogations” probably wasn’t commercial enough. And, yeah, Christoph Waltz’s performance is fantastic.

What I’m drinking: Cascade Mountain Gin & Q Tonic.

What Rufus is up to: Meeting his cousins in New England! (pictures to come)

Where I’m going: Up to Wappingers Falls next weekend for my friends’ 10th anniversary bash. Rufus will have to deal with another longish car ride (as in, over an hour).

What I’m happy about: Having dinner with an old pal from grad school, getting to see my cousins in CT, and seeing an old college friend, all in the span of 65 (or so) hours.

What I’m sad about: That the position at which I lie on my loveseat in order to rub Rufus’ belly and still read from my laptop is wreaking havoc on my neck/shoulders.

What I’m worried about: That realism isn’t realism.

What I’m pondering: What it means that the only book I’m interested in from either of these previews (1, 2) of next season’s releases is R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis.

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Classic Comics Criticism: Black Hole Son-In-Law

My in-laws’ tradition (on my wife’s dad’s side) for the big family gathering on Christmas eve is that everyone draws the name of another family-member and buys a present for that person. This is probably totally normal to the rest of you, but it’s an alien concept to me because

a) I’m Jewish, and

b) I don’t have much extended family on this continent, so there was never any mass gift-giving event.

Two years ago, my father-in-law drew my name and smartly went to my Amazon wish list to find something for me. So, surrounded by my new in-laws, most of whose names I can’t keep straight, I opened my gift and discovered . . . the hardcover collection of Charles Burns’ amazing serial, Black Hole!

What a great gift! I immediately thanked my father-in-law, started flipping through the book, and then asked, “You, uh, you didn’t read this, didja?”

Here’s a review I wrote of the fifth issue in that serial:

From TCJ #203, April, 1998:

Black Hole #5 • Charles Burns • Fantagraphics, $3.95

burnstailI’m sure glad I didn’t go to high school with Charles Burns. Black Hole harkens back to Burns’ “teen plague” strips, but this time Burns has dropped most of the sci-fi elements that filled his earlier work, keeping only the sexually-transmitted plague that causes strange and awful physical mutations to teens. The comic is a compelling, creepy look at the social interactions and sexual longings of the painful period of American life. The latest installment revolves around a conversation between a girl who’s got the plague and the guy who infected her. The episode narrated by the infected girl, delves into a flashback of her experience with the plague, developing into a rumination on her status as sexual pariah. Taken as a metaphor for teenage pregnancy, HIV, STDs and every other sexual secret we keep, the concept of teen plague has grown increasingly effective as the series has gone on. Through the awkwardness of their dialogue, Burns conveys the fragility of these kids’ lives, illustrating the mixture of sexual longing and confusion that characterizes our high school years. Visually, the book is a treat, albeit a dark one. While burns has refined his art style, it’s not overly different from his past work. His page layouts are more imaginative, and that’s probably a function of drawing for the comic book page and not for the dimensions of a syndicated strip.

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Outsourcing is a Hit!

Three weeks ago, I wrote about CIA Director Leon Panetta’s “I’m not here to talk about the past” op-ed piece, in which the agency was just following orders for the previous 8 years. Mr. Panetta was writing because of an uproar over a secret “jihadist” assassination program that had been devised during a previous regime. He canceled the program the day after he found out about it, and reported it to Congress, noting that it had never been put into operation and had not been used to assassinate members of Al Qaeda.

It always felt like a piece of the story was missing, and now we might have that missing piece. According to the NYTimes, the program also employed an outside contractor, Blackwater USA, for “planning, training and surveillance.” And, well . . .

It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.

Now, the main point of my day job is that organizations should stick to their core competencies. You know: “If there’s a function that you can’t do well in-house, then you should look to outsource it.” Still, I can see where a privatized hit team getting captured on foreign soil might create some problems. Fortunately,

Blackwater’s work on the program actually ended years before Mr. Panetta took over the agency, after senior C.I.A. officials themselves questioned the wisdom of using outsiders in a targeted killing program.

So, good for Mr. Panetta for ending the program the day he found out about it, but I’m afraid this (or programs like it) is going to be like Pete Rose’s slow-motion confession about gambling on baseball: the admissions will keep getting a little worse and a little worse.

Read all about it.

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Shred It Up

Rufus having fun with the packaging from Amy’s Crate & Barrel order:

Right at the end, I say his safe word.

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0-fer Africa

In honor of Sec. Clinton’s recent trip to the dark continent, this week’s literary 0-fer is . . . Isak Dinesen!

If she wrote under “Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke,” I probably would’ve gotten around to reading her by now.