Curious Enough.

I finally went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Maybe a coincidence, that same morning I had a breakfast conversation with a friend about how it's fine for some movies to just entertain. Not all of them have to be extremely artistic and not all of them have to be groundbreaking. Some of them can just entertain. Which is the first thing any movie should do anyway.

In that spirit I went to see Benjamin Button, and I enjoyed it. There's an interesting story (about a man living life from old to young) and there's good acting. Some might say it's a bit long, I agree. But the movie keeps the viewer engaged for the most part.

SPOILER ALERT- If you have not seen the movie, stop reading.

Now there's one thing that the movie is missing. A good ending. Or a better one. It actually has that better ending embedded in the film, except that it's not the ending.
Generally a good ending is based on the fact that the pinnacle of the movie has just happened. After that all you need is a resolution, and that can be as quick as Casablanca or as long as The Return of the King.
I think the ending in this film came when the daughter is reading the postcards Benjamin sent after he left. That was the most emotional part of the film. She's reading the birthday cards and you're seeing the images of him traveling around the world. A good resolution after that could have been when he visits Daisy for the last time, narrated by Daisy herself and finally ending with the fact that they found a boys back pack with a book that had her name on it. And we never see him as a little boy. Actually, that's when the movie lost me, those last 10 minutes of seeing him go younger. We know that, we know he's going to die as a baby, we might as well not seen that and end the movie at the pinnacle. With the boy sequences the audience cools down from that emotional moment. You can even feel it inside the movie theater, the way people react by the end and the feeling in the ambient is not the same as when that emotional moment happens.
A good ending is hard to get, and most movies usually have it in there. It's all about editing or knowing when's a good time to stop.

What I learned from Super Bowl 43.

There's a funny thing about the Super Bowl, it's the moment in which everybody seems to like and care about advertising. Not only that, but it's the moment in which everyone turns into an ad critic.
I've never been a die-hard football fan, I used to follow football much more about 8 years ago, but I still watch the Super Bowl every year. The only difference now is that I actually get to see the "famous" commercials, since back in Mexico we don't get to see the same commercials.
This year I went to a Super Bowl party. But it was a non-ad people Super Bowl party, which I thought could be interesting. It was. I could see first-hand how people react to ads. Real people, real ads. No over-analyzing, no judging, no awards, just reactions that take a second, gut reactions, which I think are the ones that count the most.
This is a dangerous thing, to see what people really like, and maybe even disappointing. You realize that they don't like the same stuff ad-people like, and they like the stuff that we would right away condemn.
Last year, the Brandcenter brought the people from the USA Today Ad Meter to speak, we all realized (and they made it clear too) that comedy is mostly what works at a Super Bowl. And animals seem to work pretty good too. Maybe it's the Super Bowl's environment (friends, TV, beer, guacamole) that makes people pay more attention and hence react better to funny stuff. We would say, "it's the same kick in the groin joke", and it is, but funny enough the Ad Meter was topped by an ad featuring, yes, a groin joke, which by the way was consumer generated. Now, I don't really want to get into the whole "shit, consumer generated advertising is better than..." because it's a quick judgement and even the idea of having a contest to make consumer generated ads to go into the Super Bowl came from an agency.
It reminds me of that FedEx commercial that listed the top 10 things you need to have in a Super Bowl commercial, of course kick in the groin and animals where there (bonus points for dancing animals.)
Everyday we break our heads thinking how to make things different, and every time we see something like the stuff that people like in Super Bowl ads we say it's all been done before and that no one wants to see it again. But in the end we find out that people do want to see it again. And here lies a dilemma, and I don't think we should keep doing the same stuff over and over, but then you realize what people like and... well, are we speaking the same language?


Here's that FedEx commercial.