Shane Life

Like I said before, Alli and I went to see Away We Go at the 9:50 a.m. showing at the Fork & Screen on Saturday.

Even though our food was seriously lacking, we absolutely adored the movie.

The screenplay was written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, a real-life couple who also have a child together. The story is about Burt (John Krasinski, aka Big Tuna/Jim from The Office) and Verona (Maya Rudolph from SNL), who are expecting a child together and are trying to find a home where they can settle down.

They begin traveling across the country to different places (Phoenix, Madison, Montreal, Miami) where they have friends and family to try out each place to see if it feels right. The very concept of the movie is indie in nature and will gain Away We Go comparisons to movies like Juno and Little Miss Sunshine. The comparisons are valid — Away We Go contains the same quirky characters and sharp dialogue and disfunction that has become commonplace in indie films.

The thing that I loved about this movie was how real the characters seemed. Krasinski and Rudolph are so natural and their chemistry is terrific throughout — you can tell that they are really enjoying each other’s company. The supporting characters — and they are many: Catherine O’Hara, Jeff Daniels, Alison Janney, Jim Gaffigan, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Chris Messina, Melanie Lynskey and Paul Schneider — are all wonderfully cast and provide just the right amount of silliness to make you smile and push the movie forward. Maggie Gyllenhaal particularly shines as a hippie mother who doesn’t believe in strollers (among other things I won’t mention).

But the real stars are Krasinski and Rudolph, who bring such wonderful life to Burt and Verona and deliver Eggers and Vida’s lines with such earnestness that it will be difficult to ignore them when Oscar time rolls around.

All these terrific actors are directed by Sam Mendes, whose take on family up to this point in films has been…a little, um…jaded is perhaps the word I’m looking for. For the guy who directed both American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, Away We Go is a serious departure and could be considered flat-out uplifting. He gets fantastic performances out of all of his actors and the movie is accompanied by an absolutely perfect soundtrack by Alexi Murdoch. (For those who go to the movie and are looking to buy the soundtrack, just buy Murdoch’s Time Without Consequence…it’s the same thing.)

My favorite thing about this movie was that it shows that one person’s version of happy can be completely different than another’s. As Burt and Verona travel around the country looking for “their place”, they begin to realize that it can’t be defined by the lives of others. “Their place” is wherever they make their home as long as they are together. I am not ashamed to admit that I teared up during the scene on the trampoline. But they were tears of joy accompanied by a smile and squeeze on my arm from my wife and best friend who I’ve found “my place” with.

Away We Go may not be for everyone, but it was wonderful for me.

Alli and I went to see Away We Go at the 9:50 a.m. showing at the Fork & Screen on Saturday.

We’ve been trying to find a time to hit the breakfast option at the Fork & Screen since it opened and with the release of Away We Go (FINALLY), we were excited to give it a shot.

I’m going to cover the movie review separately.

The Fork & Screen needs to stick what it does pretty well, which is bar food. Their breakfast was pretty bad. The portion sizes were decent and the potatoes were OK (fries and homemade chips are what the Fork & Screen does best at lunch and dinner), but my biscuits and gravy were average at best.

While the biscuits were pretty good, the “sausage” gravy was flavorless and seriously lacking sausage. I got it with a side of scrambled eggs with cheese that was just a really bland, boring, dry version of truck stop eggs, except not as good as I’ve described. No amount of salt or pepper could salvage this plate of MEH.

Alli didn’t have any better things to say about the French toast, saying:

The French toast was almost certainly frozen at sometime. I couldn’t even cut it with my fork.

I don’t think we’ll head back to the Fork & Screen for breakfast anytime soon. While I love that the movies cost only $10 that early in the morning on Saturday (with $5 towards your food), the food just wasn’t very good.

I will make no bones about the fact that I absolutely adored Michael Bay’s homage to the Hasbro toys of my youth. The original Transformers was everything that you could want in a popcorn flick:

• explosions
• tons of action
• and giant freaking robots that transform into cars.

So. Awesome.

Look, if you pay to go see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and expect anything else than 2 ½ fun-filled hours of some combination of those three things, you will be seriously disappointed. Don’t expect a rock-solid plot. Don’t expect great acting. Don’t expect perfect logic. You won’t get any of those in this movie.

However, if you enjoyed the first movie for those three things, you  will be entertained. I was on the edge of my seat for most of the flick. It’s a ten tons of explosive, effects-laden fun. There’s a typical Armageddon/Pearl Harbor love-story-buried-in-an-action-movie (Bay can’t seem to help himself). There’s an opening action/effects sequence in “Shanghai” that gets you ready for the rest of the movie. And there’s a lot of Shia Lebeouf and Megan Fox running. Running from robots. Running from explosions. Running from exploding robots.

Look, Transformers: ROTF won’t win any Oscars (maybe one nomination for effects, which are terrific), but it’s going to make Spielberg and Dreamworks a crap-ton of money.

This is the type of movie that is made for summer. And if you don’t enjoy movies like this, there’s just no talking to you.

(Author’s note: I realize that this “Every Day in May” post is a bit late, but you will have to forgive me, especially since the only person who really cares about the every day part is me.)

On Saturday, we headed out to see Angels & Demons with Alli’s folks. Even though I wasn’t a huge fan of The DaVinci Code, I’ve really liked Dan Brown’s books and I was hoping that they would make a better movie out of A&D since the actual source material is better than DaVinci Code. (It’s not that DaVinci Code is a bad book, it’s just that Angels & Demons is better.)

My issue with the movie adaptations had first and foremost to do with Tom Hanks. I never really bought him as symbologist Robert Langdon, so that was an issue that I had to come to terms with. Honestly, I still think that another actor would have done a better job with the role, but at least they cut his hair in A&D so that he didn’t look so ridiculous.

The plot of Angels & Demons centers around an age-old conflict between religion and science as played out by the Catholic Church vs. The Illuminati, a secret society of scientists led by Galileo that opposed the way the church was teaching the Earth as the center of the universe.

The movie runs two and a half hours long, but I could find very little stuff that I would have taken out of the movie. It’s intense and suspenseful and Ron Howard does a good job (although not as good as Dan Brown) of keeping secret the identity of the main villain behind it all.

I really thought that they did a great job of portraying Rome, considering there were only certain elements that they were able to shoot on location.

And as far as book adaptations go, I’m always hesitant to go see books that I like, but I really enjoyed this one. It’s enjoyable and it doesn’t taint the original source material too much. Also, the movie leaves out the absolutely ridiculous ending to the book (those who have read the book will know what I’m talking about) and I’m beginning to get on board with Hanks as Langdon.

I say go see it, even if you haven’t read the book. It’s a good, suspenseful action movie and the scenery is great.

I won tickets to see a preview of The Hangover at the AMC Mainstreet theater tonight.

I laughed a lot.

Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms were their predictable awesome selves. The real surprise was Zach Galifianakis, who is absolutely hilarious. And a cameo by Mike Tyson’s tiger.

Quick thoughts before I go to bed:

• AMC Mainstreet is much smaller than I envisioned it, but very nice. The theater we saw the movie in was huge.
• Bummed there were no trailers.
• Kris Allen FTW.
• This post was published 6 minutes before my self-imposed midnight Every Day in May deadline.

I cannot even begin to explain how excited I am about this movie. Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes with Jude Law as Watson and Rachel McAdams as support. All directed by Guy Ritchie.

As horrible as Ritchie’s recent movies have been, I really cannot wait for this one. The trailer looks incredible.

Love you, Alli. So glad you ignored the movie and said yes anyway.

Kansas City with the Russian Accent’s Meesha V. caused quite an uproar in the social media community with his post this week that lambasted the case study that Kansas City social media tracking company Spiral 16 did regarding the blogger preview of AMC’s Fork & Screen.

I’ve got a lot invested in this one. Not only did I attend the blogger preview (and blogged about it here), but I have made friends with AMC’s Justin Gardner, Spiral 16’s Whitney Mathews (who wrote the original and completely unattributed case study that Meesha liberally lifted from in his post) and other bloggers who attended the event.

There are always going to be people like Meesha who believe that as marketers we should just leave some things alone. That may be true. But I cannot fault Justin or AMC for trying something new when it comes to marketing to this demographic. The world that we live in has changed significantly over the last two years. Twitter (where Justin originally reached out to the KC Twitterati) has experienced 1,382% growth from February of last year to February of 2009. Facebook, which was already huge, still grew a staggering 228% during the same time period. Social media is the new word of mouth. Marketers who do not figure out how to be a part of the conversation are going to be left in the dust.

Tools like those that Spiral 16 provides are helping those of us in social media and online marketing to help measure results and show value to the people that we report to. Folks like Meesha may not like that, but it’s an important part of the process. One of the beauties of social media is that you have the ability to unsubscribe, unfollow, unfriend someone if you don’t want to hear from them. There’s also always the beautiful “Mark as Read” button. But exercises like AMC’s with bloggers and the Fork & Screen are going to continue to happen. I need only point to Universal Studios notifying seven people about the new Harry Potter Theme Park and getting it viewed by over 350 million people within 24 hours. That’s the power of social media to marketers. Traditional advertising and marketing isn’t working as effectively anymore and so we are looking to new avenues to find our customers.

For the last year or so, I’ve been a part of the Social Media Club of Kansas City, a group of bloggers, marketers, and ad folks who get together on a semi-monthly basis to talk about the challenges and pitfalls of this new online world that we’re dealing with. Speaking with some folks at Friday’s breakfast about this post and what it implicates was interesting. Accusations of “shilling” don’t sit well with me, especially since I’ve gone back to the Fork & Screen time and time again, paying full price each time because I like the experience. Others may not. That’s their opinion. But to accuse people of “shilling” just because they got a free movie…that’s attacking my credibility. I’ve always done my best to be myself on this blog and in person. Pensive Girl hit it on the head yesterday:

be yourself. be true to who you are in real life. the digital space is just an extention of you. don’t foreget this. don’t be fooled by how easy it is to just say whatever you want to say and “be” whoever you want to be. don’t use the digital space as a platform for creating the person you are not strong enough to be in the real world. be you. becuase if someone gets to know you this way. through your tweets and your blog and your thoughts. and if this person then meets you in real life, and you’re nothing like your blog or your tweets or whatnot, there is a huge disconnect between who you really are.

Now that part of my job is applying my knowledge of the web and social media to a large organization like Cerner, I only see the crossover between personal and business becoming more pronounced. This may rub some people the wrong way. But there are some of those people who use “online monikers” and “web personalities” and even their participation in social media isn’t entirely genuine.

The challenge as a marketer like myself who also uses the web as a personal outlet is to always remain authentic. Anyone who has ever met me in person knows that there’s no difference between the real-life me, @shaneomack, Shane Life blogger, and the corporate marketer I am. In fact, for anyone to suggest otherwise is insulting.

Alli and I went with her sister, fiancee and to-be nieces last weekend to see Monsters vs. Aliens, the latest offering from Dreamworks Animation Studios, the people who brought us Shrek and Kung Fu Panda.

The movie is a lot of fun. There were several moments where I laughed out loud at the antics of Bob (the blob, Seth Rogen), The Missing Link (ape-fish man, Will Arnett), and Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie). But the plot itself is a little tired. Aliens invade with the idea of colonizing Earth. SNOOZE.

But the animation and the voice acting done by the Monsters and the main alien (Rainn Wilson) is spot-on and there are plenty of great one-liners that will stick with adults who schlep their kids to this latest family offering. It’s worth the trip.

The story centers around a run-of-the-mill bride (Reese Witherspoon) who gets hit by a meteorite just before her marriage to local Modesto, California weatherman Derek (Paul Rudd). Rudd is great as the greaseball local TV guy and Witherspoon’s charm manages to make its way through to her animated countenance.

The plot is really what fails this movie more than anything. I enjoyed it, but not because of the story. This movie dies if not for the great voiceover done by comedians Rogen and Arnett. And there really couldn’t be a better casting for a mad scientist than Hugh Laurie. Top that off with Stephen Colbert as the President and Kiefer Sutherland as the rogue general who has kept his monster force a secret and you’ve got a great cast.