In this interview, Justin Long tells us about what it was like to work with Sam Raimi (Evil Dead!) in Drag Me to Hell. One could conjecture from all the “return to horror” hoopla that Sami Raimi is apologizing for Spider-Man. I can’t decide whether Justin Long, in real life, comes across more like he did in the Accepted movie or more like he does in those Apple commercials where John Hodgeman, who I love, plays a PC. What do you think?
Back when I worked in other people’s offices, I used to refer to myself as technologically bisexual. I was equally comfortable on a MAC or a PC. I mean, most of my work was in Photoshop, PowerPoint, and PageMaker, with the occasional call for MicroSoft Word, Quark, or Illustrator. Once in the blue moon, I’d need to use some more esoteric software, but it was generally something available on both MAC and PC. And once I was inside the software, it was fundamentally the same thing on either platform. I could handle the amazingly wrenching switch from dealing with a doohickey key to a control key.
When I bought my own machinery, over the years, Blue Blood has been almost entirely PC. There has been the occasional person who already had a MAC that I bought MAC stuff for, such as a MAC cam or something like that, but, for the most part, Blue Blood has been entirely a PC-based company. I was not prejudiced against MACs. Certainly not at the beginning. I thought the machines were fundamentally the same, except a MAC had a nicer case, and a PC was more bang for the buck. This is not to say that a PC was in any way a technologically better machine. It wasn’t. It just cost a little more money to get the same thing in MAC format. Plus I could buy PC parts and really save by building my own power workstations.
But then Apple came out with their series of Think Different advertisements which made my teeth itch. First they bought all that footage of really cool dead people, like Apple had a fucking endorsement from Einstein or something. Then Apple pitched a fit when The Church of Satan web site, made by actual living person Peter Gilmore, put an Apple logo and a Made with Macintosh web badge on their page. He also made a Think Different tribute featuring a photograph of Anton LaVey with the Apple slogan in the format of the Think Different Apple campaign. Now Anton LaVey actually did own and use Apple computers. Unlike say Einstein who was probably spinning in his grave as Apple utilized his image. Jessica M. Brody of the powerhouse law firm Arent, Fox, Kintner, Plotkin & Kahn went after The Church of Satan for trademark dilution, despite the fact that there were numerous places on the web which encouraged Apple users to fly their lame substitute for a freak flag high.
I remember from my other people’s offices days that some designers were afraid to work on a PC, simply because they never had. They would try to claim that really the MAC was better for design, for reasons they could never explain. This was awesome because I would get their jobs.
The only reason designers liked MACs better were that the MAC platform tended to be marketed more towards creative professionals. And people who are not tech savvy are often afraid to try varied technology. Musicians sometimes liked MACs better because new software iterations for certain music software packages tend to be released for MAC first. Slacker losers tend to like MACs better because the Apple marketing lets them feel extra creative without them actually having to do any, ya know, creative work. That and Apple did a series of crazy successful ads featuring John Hodgeman from The Daily Show claiming to be a PC and the dude from Accepted claiming to be a MAC and like so much cooler than John Hodgeman. I know I could go to IMDB or even probably just search for the article on BlueBlood.net I wrote about the Accepted party at Comic Con to find the name of the dude from Accepted. But my point is that, even in the Apple adverts, the MAC guy is actually less accomplished than the PC guy. But you can’t have turned on a television or watched video online for very long without seeing the I’m a MAC and I’m a PC advertisements, so I won’t bother to describe them, other than to say they irritated the fuck out of me. And their impact on slacker losers who started talking about the MAC tech superiority because of those adverts just drove me nuts.
And, of course, Apple astroturfed the heck out of forums on the internet where they would have their ridiculous and illogical bullet points posted. And of course the meme-susceptible and the emotionally-needy would pick up those laughable talking points and run with them, causing a viral-born illness of technically inaccurate information all over the web. To anyone who finds mentions of viral marketing makes them think of the claim that a MAC is safer than a PC, because its secure operating system makes it less likely to get a virus, (a) a MAC can get malware, but (b) it does make more sense to program anything first for the operating system with a ninety something percent market share, so I guess that goes for viruses and adware too.
After all that, I started actively avoiding use of or purchase of Apple products. Not because of their technology, which is sometimes slightly ahead, sometimes slightly behind, and generally simply in the running with other similar products. I have a Blackberry and not an iPhone. I have a Sony music player from Japan where Sony released product with higher capacity drives and not an iPod. I have never made a single purchase from monopolistic iTunes which is trying to control what music you can listen to and which musicians can make a living and which can’t. Even though I once received an iTunes gift card as a holiday gift. (Apologies to Matthew Cooke; I did still appreciate the gesture even though I didn’t use the card.)
So I’m terribly terribly pleased that MicroSoft is smacking stupid Apple back with their current Windows Not Walls ad campaign. First off they found an actual MicroSoft employee who looks so much like John Hodgeman that the viewer has to double-take. They point out Apple’s bigotry of cool. Bill Gates apologizes for wearing glasses. Basically they call Apple out for acting like anyone who used a PC must be a geek and nerd and the only worthwhile thing in life would be to be cool and hip. After succinctly demonstrating the loathsomeness of Apple’s fundamental point, the MicroSoft commercial goes on to show that most of the world runs on PCs. A string of successful people in extremely varied jobs from politico to teacher to athlete to musician to actress to guru point out that they use PCs.
I do not dislike Apple products, but their marketing makes me actively irritated. So I would like to thank MicroSoft for bitch-slapping those smug and ignorant astroturfing Apple freaks back.
Estimated opening weekend gross for Accepted is around $10 million, which is hunky-dorey for a movie with a production budget of only around $23 million. I don’t know what percentage of those movie-goers also attended Comic Con or talked to someone who did, but Accepted did the most brilliant promotion at the convention.
Comic Con is the largest convention of its type in the U.S. This year, significantly more than a hundred thousand people showed up. Which is significantly more than the forty thousand or so the city of San Diego could probably handle. It was impossible to park anywhere near the convention center and it was approximately one billion degrees and the food in the convention center concessions started tasting kinda rancid by the second day. And, even for pretty literally nauseating food, the lines were likely to take an hour or so. Which cuts down on one’s collectible-browsing time. So, by the end of the day, everyone was sort of running on empty, streaming out of the San Diego Convention Center en masse, hungry and a long way, under a hot sun, from their transportation.
So the promoters of the Accepted movie threw a collegiate-style beer blast and barbeque across the street. The basic concept of the flick is that an enterprising young man is rejected from every college he applies to, so he creates his own institution of higher learning called South Harmon Institute of Technology. Yes, that acronym is what you think it is. The star-studded event featured a skateboard ramp and a giant banner reading “Welcome SHITheads” with the San Diego Gaslamp district as a backdrop. While waiting in a refreshingly fast-moving line for food, I was standing a couple of feet from James Duvall. While I wouldn’t talk to someone at my local supermarket, I’m generally in outgoing and friendly mode at a show like that. So I’d normally have told him that I like his work, but all of a sudden I got this horrible mental flash of the appalling scene where he’s castrated in Gregg Araki’s Doom Generation and I didn’t want to encourage my brain to keep going in that direction when I was about to eat.
The burgers and hot dogs were shockingly good and generously handed out. There was water and soda, in addition to beer, despite the kegger theme, but I think vegetarians might have been stuck with cheese and toppings. There might have been veggie burgers too, as I admit I was pretty transfixed by the yumminess of my own carnivorous fare.
The party had a fun and light-hearted vibe. A nicely straight-up rock band, called The Ringers, with a pleasingly sleazy sound kept the energy level up. I got bashed in the head when some of the actors from the movie got up on the stage and started throwing free T-shirts into the crowd. The gentleman who hit my noggin gave me the T-shirt he’d just caught, though, so it was all good. It says, “Ask me about my wiener.” Because I didn’t have enough lewd shirts already.
The trailer for the movie looks humorously promising and Lewis Black who I love from Comedy Central’s Daily Show is in it. If Universal knows how to throw a fun keg party, odds are good that they know how to make a fun movie. Best theatrical release promo ever.
