Director David Gaddie and visual effects supervisor James Rogers have formed The Colony, a multidisciplinary directing collective spanning VFX, design, postproduction and live action filmmaking. Gaddie’s honors include a Gold Lion at the Cannes International Advertising Festival for an Australian PSA. Over the years, his work also garnered such kudos as silvers at the One Show and Clios. Prior to The Colony, Gaddie was repped by The Sweet Shop. Meanwhile Rogers has contributed to visual effects for the Sony PlayStation game Final Fantasy VIII, and films such as Daybreakers, and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Located in Manhattan, The Colony, repped by B Reel Films, completed its first campaign, a pair of PSAs for the Foundation for a Smoke Free America….Los Angeles-based Boxer Films has signed director Rodrigo Garcia Saiz, founder of eight-year-old Central Films in Mexico City. A visual storyteller with a comedic slant, Garcia Saiz has directed for assorted major clients in his native Mexico, including Tecate, Axe, Nike and Sony PlayStation. Garcia Saiz’s irreverent “Mariachis” piece for Skwinkles candy landed a Gold Lion at last year’s Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival….Joe Lin has joined Digitas as creative senior VP for the agency’s Stamford, CT office. He will serve as creative lead on the Delta account, among others, reporting to Lincoln Bjorkman, executive VP/exec creative director for Digitas/ N.Y. region. Lin had been exec creative director at Publicis Modem Asia. There he helped develop integrated brand and interactive strategies for clients such as Hewlett Packard, Cisco, LG Electronics, and P&G. Prior to that, Lin was creative director/VP at Publicis Dialog, San Francisco….
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