Veteran creatives Arthur Bijur and Pat Stern have teamed with director David McNamara to launch Workshop, a N.Y.-based full service ad agency with production capabilities across all media. The new venture offers strategy, creative, digital marketing and branding solutions, as well as editing and post services. Bijur is best known as creative co-founder of Cliff Freeman and Partners. Stern served as a creative director at R/GA. And McNamara was a creative at DDB and currently continues as partner/director at his own production house, Collective….Director Dean Karr and studio Wild Media have signed with Burbank-based Lemonaide Media for commercial production. Karr will be repped by Lemonaide, headed by exec producer Jeanne Mattiussi, for North American broadcast spots and web media….Editorial house Beast has hired Elizabeth Krajewski as executive producer at its New York facility. She formerly worked at jUMP where she started as a senior producer in 2005 before being promoted to exec producer in ’07. Beast maintains facilities in N.Y., Santa Monica, Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco and Austin….Editor Jeremy Baumann has joined creative digital shop Click 3X in N.Y….Bang Music has hired Anne Kaehny to serve in the newly created position of head of strategy & development. She will spearhead the company’s new media and social networking strategies, manage its online portfolio and credentials messaging, and be project coordinator between Bang’s office/studios in N.Y.’s Flatiron District and its new audio post services for film and TV in SoHo. She will work directly with Bang’s exec producer Brad Stratton and sr. producer Sara Iversen in developing client interaction online and face-to face….
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