The 3-D animated story of a struggling “super villain” who is eventually softened by the three little orphans whom he rescues is fun and kid-friendly.
Debuting at the Nokia Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, the audience included most of the cast: Steve Carell as Gru, Jason Segel as Vector, Russell Brand as Dr. Nefario, Julie Andrews as Gru’s mother, Will Arnett as Mr. Perkins.
The audience was lively, not not near as responsive as the electrified Eclipse audience. The after-party was held in the same tent on the event deck as Eclipse. They even used the same giant moon balloon at the Despicable Me premiere.
By the way, what’s up with the moon theme? And they both premiered around the same full moon (yesterday). And there was even a minor lunar eclipse yesterday (a brilliant marketing flourish). And this month’s moon is no ordinary moon – it’s known as the Mead Moon, according to Garrison Keilor’s Writer’s Almanac. Coincidentally my brother and I harvested honey yesterday at his house in Santa Monica. Seriously! Photographic proof:
And is it a mere coincidence that DESPICABLE contains the letters for the word ECLIPSE? Okay…
That one was a stretch. The Despicable Me after-party was mostly a family affair with IHOP sponsored beverages and little dancing “Minions.” Rainn Wilson was there with his wife and child – as was most of the cast of “The Office.” Steve Carell was the man of the hour, surrounded by kids and parents and a couple watchful security guards.
The musical score was perhaps the most striking thing about the film. Pharrell Williams and the talented Heitor Pereira did a remarkable job with the music. The theme song is especially catchy:
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How can some number-crunching grad students really think this is possible? Analyzing the potential success of a screenplay with a computer? Measuring brain reaction to find a winning story formula?
Some professors at Wharton have even proposed a metric for analyzing screenplays to predict the Return on Investment of a film(pdf here). The method uses such criteria as vocabulary, genre, number of characters and sentence length.
“We compare the performance of our portfolio against two benchmarks. In the first benchmark, 30 movies are randomly chosen to form a portfolio. Each of the 81 movies in the holdout sample has equal probability of being selected in the portfolio. The ROI of this portfolio is recorded, and this procedure is repeated 1000 times. Then, the mean ROI based on random selection is calculated by averaging the ROI that results in 1000 portfolios. We find that the mean ROI in this case is -18.6%. In the second benchmark, we try to replicate more closely the way studios select movies by MPAA ratings. Studios in general make roughly 60% R-rated movies and 40% non-R (G / PG / PG-13) rated movies
(MPAA 2004). Thus, we replicate this rule of thumb by fixing the number of R-rated movies to be made in the 30-movie portfolio case to be 18 and the number of non-R rated movies to be 12. Then we select 18 R-rated movies randomly from the pool of R-rated movies in the 81 holdout movies, and likewise for non-R rated movies. The mean ROI of a portfolio selected using this “MPAA-based” selection method is -24.4%. Our method outperforms both benchmarks by a significant margin. Indeed, as shown in Figure 6, our approach always produces a significant economic gain no matter how many movies are selected for the portfolio, suggesting that our model is able to capture determinants from the textual information in movie scripts and hence significantly improve the studio’s profitability.”
Their results are surprising, however I would guess that a thoughtful, experienced person could pick the most profitable scripts with more accuracy than this formula.
Analyzing the profitability of scripts based on comparable precedents is one thing – but trying to increase a movie’s impact by scanning the brain’s reaction to scenes is another. Some well-intentioned brain specialists at MindSign have coined the term neurocinema. My first reaction was that the whole concept is idiotic and deeply misunderstands the purpose and nature of Story. In an NPR interview, Philip Carlsen of MindSign said:
Ideally, a director could send dailies out to us and we can scan the dailies. For those of you who don’t know, dailies are all the shots at the end of the day. They’ve got seven shots that look exactly the same, but we can give you the most activating shot of these seven, and you can use those. You can actually make your movie more activating based on subjects’ brains.
First of all, a story contains much, much more than a collection of images and scenarios. Anyone who presumes to measure the impact of a story by measuring the impact of individual scenes is not a story-teller. A story digs deep into universal human principles; it opens up the world of things unsaid and unseen – of intimation and connotation – and it affects us on different levels. I don’t think this technique could even work on a popcorn flick, because the arc of a story is so much more than the sum of its parts.
Because this FMRI reveals individual brain responses to film clips, its most valuable purpose appears to be in determining what kinds of images excite the individual’s brain most. I still have a problem with this, because an image or scenario is profoundly affected by what precedes it. For example, the image of a man running through a tunnel affects us differently if we sympathize with him or fear him. Is he chasing something or being chased? So this goes back to my previous point; a movie is more than a collection of moving images – it’s a story that is experienced as a whole.
I really hope that Dr. David Hubbard is related to L. Ron.
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The most successful filmmaker of our time started somewhere: XENOGENESIS.
As a guest at a recent taping of The Jay Leno Show, I heard James Cameron talk about his earliest experience in the world of film. The episode aired last night at 10.
After years as a machinist and truck driver, he claims to have maxed out his wife’s credit card to make a short film in his living room. The film was inspired by the recent release of Star Wars, in which Cameron recognized a world that reflected many of his own ideas. The short is both amateur and inspired, a machinist’s take on the sci-fi genre. Even though the human element is underdeveloped, the old-school robot fight is almost exciting, and foreshadows Cameron’s creation of THE TERMINATOR.
Xenogenesis got him “a gig” working for Roger Corman, the most prolific B-movie producer of all time. His first feature directing gig was a gem: 1989′s PIRANHA PART II: THE SPAWNING. The film was basically a JAWS ripoff involving a mutant strain of killer fish that originate from a sunken fighter ship. I recommend the article Bad Acting, Boobies and Blood… James Cameron’s First Film. Then his first script, THE TERMINATOR, was produced. And the rest is history: ALIENS, T2, TRUE LIES, TITANIC and AVATAR. Those are just the highlights.
To learn that he was at one time a very normal person encourages those of us who have big dreams and humble realities. But wouldn’t machining be fun too?
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