Steven Sills has joined kaboom productions as head of production. He will be based in the company’s Los Angeles office and work closely with owner/exec producer Lauren Schwartz who operates out of kaboom’s San Francisco headquarters. Sills’ experience includes serving as a staff bidder for the former Bruce Dowad Associates, working on jobs for directors Dowad, Robert Logevall, Vincent Ward and Alain Gourrier. Sills then jumped into freelance production managing on commercial projects with such directors as David Cornell, Agust Baldursson, Ulf Johansson, Speck/Gordon, and music video helmer Antti J. Sills then moved to producing and worked on jobs directed by Douglas Avery and Charlie White, among others. In 2006, Sills took a hiatus from commercials to produce an independent film, Sinner, which went on to win several festival awards and will be this fall. He has worked in over 15 countries in productions for film, television and advertising. He brings 16 years of production experience to the kaboom team….Boutique U.K. animation studio Not To Scale, under the aegis of founder/executive producer Dan O’Rourke, has signed London-based directing duo Vincent (John Hill and Rheea Aranha) for worldwide commercials and music video representation. Vincent was formed last year and got off to a fast star with projects including the BBC2 “Christmas” campaign and BBC2’s iconic “Thursdays are Funny.” The directorial duo has also recently wrapped 44 animated idents for Orange’s forthcoming IPTV service through Red Bee which is due for release later in 2008, as well as its first Not To Scale production, a combo live-action/animation job for a forthcoming product launch for Canon, also due out later this year….Impactist, the directing team of Kelly Meador and Daniel Elwing, recently signed with Red Truck Films, Raleigh, N.C., for representation in the Southeast. The duo’s work is an inventive hybrid of real and synthetic elements, visual and musical, emotional and contemporary. Impactist’s credits include Nike, the Peace Corps and Westin….
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