The latest spot in a campaign promoting the 2010 MTV Movie Awards on June 6 broke today (May 27), deploying star power with actor/comedian Aziz Ansari (Parks and Recreation, Funny People) who is awards show emcee, Jeremy Renner who offers a tongue-in-cheek reprise of his Oscar-nominated role as a maverick demolition expert in The Hurt Locker, and pop music star/teenage hearthrob Justin Bieber.
Directed by Evan Silver and produced by Kris Walter of MTV on-air promos, all five spots in the comedy campaign are running globally on TV, in movie theaters and online.
In The Hurt Locker/Bieber spot, we see Ansari in his living room watching the Best Picture Academy Award winner on TV, with Bieber behind him in the kitchen munching on potato chips. Ansari explains that MTV hooked him up with the newest movie watching technology–“4D,” which is indeed leaps and bounds beyond 3D as we see Renner in Ansari’s cramped living room, performing a famous scene from The Hurt Locker. Renner tries to disarm a bomb only to be disturbed by Bieber’s chomping on potato chips. Renner has no idea who Bieber is–at least that’s the actor’s claim which turns out to be defused by an ill-timed cell phone call.
Other spots in the campaign include another “4D” screening of The Hurt Locker in Ansari’s home, this time with guest Kristen Bell (Forgetting Sara Marshall), as well as promos in which celebs all help to answer the query, Who is Aziz Ansari?
In yet another promo, “Let’s Go To The Movies, which is running on TV and in movie theaters, Ansari encourages the audience to come to the movies with him while the classic “Let’s Go To The Lobby” song starts up. Ansari walks right past a movie theater and into his apartment where he proceeds to illegally download a movie. A few moments later he gets a surprise visit from a very anxious gun toting SWAT Team.
In addition to directing the spots, Silver served as art director for MTV on-air promos, part of a creative team which also included producer Kris Walter, executive creative directors Kevin Mackall and Amy Campbell, writer Aziz Ansari, editor Tiffany Burchard at Edit No 6 with VFX by Mark Szumski at Click 3X.
Martin Scorsese On “The Saints,” Faith In Filmmaking and His Next Movie
When Martin Scorsese was a child growing up in New York's Little Italy, he would gaze up at the figures he saw around St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. "Who are these people? What is a saint?" Scorsese recalls. "The minute I walk out the door of the cathedral and I don't see any saints. I saw people trying to behave well within a world that was very primal and oppressed by organized crime. As a child, you wonder about the saints: Are they human?" For decades, Scorsese has pondered a project dedicated to the saints. Now, he's finally realized it in "Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints," an eight-part docudrama series debuting Sunday on Fox Nation, the streaming service from Fox News Media. The one-hour episodes, written by Kent Jones and directed by Elizabeth Chomko, each chronicle a saint: Joan of Arc, Francis of Assisi, John the Baptist, Thomas Becket, Mary Magdalene, Moses the Black, Sebastian and Maximillian Kolbe. Joan of Arc kicks off the series on Sunday, with three weekly installments to follow; the last four will stream closer to Easter next year. In naturalistic reenactments followed by brief Scorsese-led discussions with experts, "The Saints" emphasizes that, yes, the saints were very human. They were flawed, imperfect people, which, to Scorsese, only heightens their great sacrifices and gestures of compassion. The Polish priest Kolbe, for example, helped spread antisemitism before, during WWII, sheltering Jews and, ultimately, volunteering to die in the place of a man who had been condemned at Auschwitz. Scorsese, who turns 82 on Sunday, recently met for an interview not long after returning from a trip to his grandfather's hometown in Sicily. He was made an honorary citizen and the experience was still lingering in his mind. Remarks have... Read More