Venables Bell & Partners (VB&P) has hired associate creative directors Paul Foulkes and Tyler Hampton, the latest additions in what amounts to a 15 percent increase in staff for the San Francisco-based indie ad agency. Foulkes and Hampton will manage and lead Intel’s global account and report directly to VB&P’s founder/creative director Paul Venables. The creative duo brings to VB&P 12 years of working together on award-winning campaigns for Electronic Arts, ESPN, Comcast, adidas, Levi’s, Comcast and HP. They first started their partnership at creative shops Odiorne Wilde Narraway & Partners, San Francisco, and Ground Zero, Los Angeles, on brands like Electronic Arts, ESPN and California’s Anti-Smoking campaign. From there, Foulkes and Hampton landed at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, where they worked on HP’s “+ HP” and Comcast’s “Comcastic” campaigns, as well as the California Coastal Commission. After branching out on their own for a year, with Foulkes becoming a creative director on Levi’s at BBH/NY and Hampton working at 180LA to run Sony, they decided to unite at VB&P….GSD&M Idea City in Austin, Tex., has made three key promotions, upping creatives Luke Sullivan and David Crawford to managing group creative directors, and Karen Jacobs to VP/director of broadcast production….DJ Hauck has returned to Los Angeles motion capture studio Vicon House of Moves as technical supervisor. Hauck has had a long career in motion capture that includes pipeline development solutions for such features as Beowulf, Monster House and The Polar Express. Hauck re-joins Vicon House of Moves from Digital Concepts Group, where as co-founder he developed DCG Face, a toolset for cleaning and re-targeting facial motion capture. Prior to co-founding DCG, Hauck worked at Sony Pictures Imageworks, where he served as senior technical animator and motion capture technology lead. Hauck began his career in motion capture in 1999, starting out as a motion editor at House of Moves in the years before the facility was purchased by Vicon. He was promoted to technical supervisor in 2000 with oversight of delivery of all motion capture files, a position he returns to today in its much expanded capacity….
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