{"id":227,"date":"2005-11-27T04:19:00","date_gmt":"2005-11-27T09:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=227"},"modified":"2005-11-28T00:21:13","modified_gmt":"2005-11-28T05:21:13","slug":"2wenty-minutes-of-goo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=227","title":{"rendered":"2wenty minutes of goo"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Went to see the latest Harry Potter flick last night and got &mdash;<br \/>\nno, I won&#8217;t say &#8220;assaulted&#8221;, I&#8217;ll say &#8220;oozed on&#8221; by the infomercials<br \/>\nRegal Cinemas started running earlier this year, some sludge called<br \/>\n&#8220;The 2wenty&#8221; that tries to be trendy and hip and cool and attractive<br \/>\nand fails miserably on all four counts.<\/p>\n<p>I deduce from the existence of this thing that either (a) ad<br \/>\nexecutives have the brains of planaria, or (b) they&#8217;re engaged in a<br \/>\nconspiracy to waste their clients&#8217; money.  The 2wenty isn&#8217;t even the<br \/>\nkind of in-your-face bad that leaves an impression &mdash; it&#8217;s just<br \/>\nunbelievably lame-ass bland, a kind of elevator music dressed up<br \/>\nin video effects.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s all the more unbelievable that this thing got produced<br \/>\nbecause, presumably, it was done by people who get paid to be current<br \/>\nwith popular culture.  I&#8217;m just a 47-year-old white computer geek but<br \/>\nit is dead clear that even <em>I<\/em> have way more street cool than<br \/>\nwhatever &#8220;creatives&#8221; they found to put the 2wenty<br \/>\ntogether, fo&#8217;shizzle.  How did that <em>happen<\/em>?  On the<br \/>\nproduction values alone they have to be sinking at least $300K a pop<br \/>\ninto these, and they can&#8217;t out-hip one single aging baby-boomer?<br \/>\nGeez&#8230;I think I&#8217;m offended as much by their incompetence as by<br \/>\nits results.<\/p>\n<p>Neil Postman and Naomi Klein and their ilk have made a growth<br \/>\nindustry out of running around whining about consumer culture, how<br \/>\nit&#8217;s all a spectacle designed to distract people from what&#8217;s really<br \/>\nimportant.  Never mind that their definition of &#8220;what&#8217;s really<br \/>\nimportant&#8221; is tired Marxist bullshit&#8230;if <em>this<\/em> is<br \/>\nrepresentative of what the merchants of spectacle are pumping out,<br \/>\nthey have no worries.  The 2wenty couldn&#8217;t do an effective job of<br \/>\ndistracting a hyperactive three-year-old.  It&#8217;d be more likely<br \/>\nto put the tyke to sleep.<\/p>\n<p>Ah well.  I look on the bright side.  When Big Media wastes money<br \/>\nand putative talent on this scale, it&#8217;s good news for the rest of us.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s resources they&#8217;re not spending on screwing up our culture or our<br \/>\nlegal\/political system in more effective ways.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: After some discussion, my wife and I think we may have identified the 2wenty&#8217;s target demographic &mdash; early-teenage girls of the mall-rat persuasion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Went to see the latest Harry Potter flick last night and got &mdash; no, I won&#8217;t say &#8220;assaulted&#8221;, I&#8217;ll say &#8220;oozed on&#8221; by the infomercials Regal Cinemas started running earlier this year, some sludge called &#8220;The 2wenty&#8221; that tries to be trendy and hip and cool and attractive and fails miserably on all four counts.&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=227\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">2wenty minutes of goo<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}