Restless, a Santa Monica shop formed by exec producer Bryan Farhy and directors Wayne Holloway and Christophe Navarre, has added director Jake Lunt to its roster. Lunt’s viral piece for Samsung, “How We Met,” which was directed in association with The Viral Factory, recently garnered a Silver Cyber Lion and a D&AD Yellow Pencil…..Mark Fitzloff and Susan Hoffman have been appointed executive creative directors at Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore. The two W+K vets succeed Jelly Helm and Steve Luker. Helm returns to his roots as the director of the agency’s experimental advertising school W+K12, which he founded in 2004. Luker is currently exploring opportunities within the global network of W+K…..Michael L. Fink, winner of an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for his work as senior VFX supervisor on last year’s The Golden Compass, has been hired as president, visual effects worldwide, for Prime Focus Group and will be operating out of the company’s Frantic Films VFX Facility based in Hollywood, Calif. Fink will be overseeing VFX projects and integrating VFX pipelines at the various Prime Focus facilities, including Machine in London and Frantic Films locations in Winnipeg, Vancouver and Hollywood…..Editor Beth Cramer has joined Chemistry, New York. Cramer’s prior affiliations were The Well and prior to that, Red Car….Santa Monica-based Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) has upped Carol Lynn Weaver to executive producer for the overall edit house. She formerly served as exec producer exclusively on projects cut by Angus Wall. Furthermore RPS has added editor Damion Clayton, who had been with Spot Welders, and promoted assistant editors David Brodie and Terence “Biff” Butler to editors…..
Review: Director Bong Joon Ho’s “Mickey 17” Starring Robert Pattinson
So you think YOUR job is bad?
Sorry if we seem to be lacking empathy here. But however crummy you think your 9-5 routine is, it'll never be as bad as Robert Pattinson's in Bong Joon Ho's "Mickey 17" — nor will any job, on Earth or any planet, approach this level of misery.
Mickey, you see, is an "Expendable," and by this we don't mean he's a cast member in yet another sequel to Sylvester Stallone's tired band of mercenaries ("Expend17ables"?). No, even worse! He's literally expendable, in that his job description requires that he die, over and over, in the worst possible ways, only to be "reprinted" once again as the next Mickey.
And from here stems the good news, besides the excellent Pattinson, whom we hope got hazard pay, about Bong's hotly anticipated follow-up to "Parasite." There's creativity to spare, and much of it surrounds the ways he finds for his lead character to expire — again and again.
The bad news, besides, well, all the death, is that much of this film devolves into narrative chaos, bloat and excess. In so many ways, the always inventive Bong just doesn't know where to stop. It hardly seems a surprise that the sci-fi novel, by Edward Ashton, he's adapting here is called "Mickey7" — Bong decided to add 10 more Mickeys.
The first act, though, is crackling. We begin with Mickey lying alone at the bottom of a crevasse, having barely survived a fall. It is the year 2058, and he's part of a colonizing expedition from Earth to a far-off planet. He's surely about to die. In fact, the outcome is so expected that his friend Timo (Steven Yeun), staring down the crevasse, asks casually: "Haven't you died yet?"
How did Mickey get here? We flash back to Earth, where Mickey and Timo ran afoul of a villainous loan... Read More