While the miniseries Hatfields & McCoys picked up 16 Emmy nominations last week, there’s a lower profile historic rivalry of an intra-family nature making the rounds in tongue-in-cheek fashion compliments of BBDO New York. In this spot we are introduced to the brothers who invented the Twix candy bar. We are taken back in time to see their sibling rivalry take root as they brawl and in the process break an elongated Twix–originally invented as a single bar–into two parts, the “left Twix” and the “right Twix.”
Hence, the two finger Twix we see today. What wasn’t public knowledge until now, though, is that each brother went his separate way to build his own Twix factory, which wound up adjacent to one another. The Right and Left Twix factories are mirror images of each other as a narrator points out the key “differences” between the two–for instance the Left Twix factory flows caramel on cookie, while its Right counterpart cascades its caramel.
Now both separate factories and candy bar share only a wrapper and an ill-devised driveway–not big enough for trucks from Left and Right Twix to pull into simultaneously. Viewers are invited to try Right and Left Twix bars and “pick a side.”
Craig Gillespie of MJZ directed, with visual effects by Eight VFX.
Review: Director Tyler Spindel’s “Kinda Pregnant”
We have by now become accustomed to the lengths some movie characters will go to keep a good comedy lie going. But it's still a special kind of feat when Amy Schumer, playing a baby-mad single woman who fakes a baby bump in "Kinda Pregnant," is so desperate to maintain the fiction that she shoves a roast turkey up her dress.
You might be thinking: This is too ridiculous. The stuffing, alone. But if we bought "Some Like it Hot" and "Mrs. Doubtfire," I see no reason to quibble with the set-up of "Kinda Pregnant," a funny and often perceptive satire on motherhood, both real and pretend.
"Kinda Pregnant," which debuted Wednesday on Netflix, is a kinda throwback comedy. Like "40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Wedding Crashers," you can basically get the movie just from its title.
But like any good high-concept comedy, "Kinda Pregnant" is predominantly a far-fetched way for its star and co-writer, Schumer, to riff frankly on her chosen topic. Here, that's the wide gamut of pregnancy experience — the body changes, the gender reveal parties, the personal jealousies — all while mixing in a healthy amount of pseudo-pregnant pratfalls.
It's been a decade since Schumer was essentially launched as a movie star in the 2015 Judd Apatow-directed "Trainwreck." But "Kinda Pregnant," which Schumer wrote with Julie Paiva, almost as adeptly channels Schumer's comic voice — the one that made the sketch series "Inside Amy Schumer" so great.
The movie's opening flashes back to Lainey (Schumer) as a child playing with dolls and imagining herself a mother-to-be. So committed is she to the role that Lainey, in mock-labor, screams at her friend and then politely apologies: "Sorry, but the expectant mother often lashes out at her support system."
But as... Read More