Ad agency BEING, a unit of TBWA, has given voice to the up until now silent Mr. Peanut character, with help from director Ringan Ledwidge of Smuggler and stop motion animation out of LAIKA/house with Mark Gustafson serving as supervising animation director and Kirk Kelley as creative director/animation director.
The voice happens to be that of actor Robert Downey Jr, as we see Mr. Peanut hosting a holiday party replete with some characters just as, if not more, offbeat than a talking, monocled peanut, including a root beer drinking cricket a mouse-y waiter and a bird who’s trying to serve nuts to a taxidermied creature.
The BEING creative team included creative directors Kris Wixom and Alisa Sengel Wixom, copywriters Jonathan Marshall and Josh DiMarcantonio, and art director Eric Stevens. David Fisher was sr. producer for TBWA’s Media Arts.
Review: Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II”
Rome teeters on the brink in Ridley Scott's "Gladiator II." Its fall is said to be imminent. The dream it once symbolized is dead. The once high-minded ideals of the Roman Empire have deteriorated across a venal land now ruled by a pale-faced emperor.
On the throne is Geta (Joseph Quinn), who sits alongside his sniveling brother, Caracalla (Fred Hechinger). The heart of this Rome, of course, is the Coliseum, where throngs cheer for the gladiators who fight and die. There, the ageless Scott remains remarkably at home. The arena, with its eruptions of spectacle and violence, is a stand in for the director's own vision of the big screen: Go big or go home.
This dichotomy — a fallen society and its insatiable need for entertainment — is the clever and not altogether flattering backdrop of the "Gladiator" films. Part two, set 20 years after the events of the first movie, brings a new combatant to the Coliseum — a mysterious outsider named Lucius Verus, played by Paul Mescal. And to answer the inevitable question, yes. Yes, I was quite entertained.
"Gladiator II" isn't quite the prestige film the first one, a best-picture winner, was in 2001. It's more a swaggering, sword-and-sandal epic that prizes the need to entertain above all else. No one in "Gladiator II" understands that more than Denzel Washington. His performance as the Machiavellian power broker Macrinus is a delicious blur of robes and grins – so compellingly over-the-top that he nearly reaches 1990s Al Pacino standards.
Inside this Rome are scattered interests in toppling it, including Marcus Acacius, a decorated general who has just returned from a successful campaign taking Numidia in northwest Africa. (That siege makes the movie's blistering opening, with an armada... Read More