2wenty minutes of goo
<p>Went to see the latest Harry Potter flick last night and got &mdash;<br />
no, I won&#8217;t say &#8220;assaulted&#8221;, I&#8217;ll say &#8220;oozed on&#8221; by the infomercials<br />
Regal Cinemas started running earlier this year, some sludge called<br />
&#8220;The 2wenty&#8221; that tries to be trendy and hip and cool and attractive<br />
and fails miserably on all four counts.</p>
<p>I deduce from the existence of this thing that either (a) ad<br />
executives have the brains of planaria, or (b) they&#8217;re engaged in a<br />
conspiracy to waste their clients&#8217; money.  The 2wenty isn&#8217;t even the<br />
kind of in-your-face bad that leaves an impression &mdash; it&#8217;s just<br />
unbelievably lame-ass bland, a kind of elevator music dressed up<br />
in video effects.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s all the more unbelievable that this thing got produced<br />
because, presumably, it was done by people who get paid to be current<br />
with popular culture.  I&#8217;m just a 47-year-old white computer geek but<br />
it is dead clear that even <em>I</em> have way more street cool than<br />
whatever &#8220;creatives&#8221; they found to put the 2wenty<br />
together, fo&#8217;shizzle.  How did that <em>happen</em>?  On the<br />
production values alone they have to be sinking at least $300K a pop<br />
into these, and they can&#8217;t out-hip one single aging baby-boomer?<br />
Geez&#8230;I think I&#8217;m offended as much by their incompetence as by<br />
its results.</p>
<p>Neil Postman and Naomi Klein and their ilk have made a growth<br />
industry out of running around whining about consumer culture, how<br />
it&#8217;s all a spectacle designed to distract people from what&#8217;s really<br />
important.  Never mind that their definition of &#8220;what&#8217;s really<br />
important&#8221; is tired Marxist bullshit&#8230;if <em>this</em> is<br />
representative of what the merchants of spectacle are pumping out,<br />
they have no worries.  The 2wenty couldn&#8217;t do an effective job of<br />
distracting a hyperactive three-year-old.  It&#8217;d be more likely<br />
to put the tyke to sleep.</p>
<p>Ah well.  I look on the bright side.  When Big Media wastes money<br />
and putative talent on this scale, it&#8217;s good news for the rest of us.<br />
It&#8217;s resources they&#8217;re not spending on screwing up our culture or our<br />
legal/political system in more effective ways.</p>
<p>UPDATE: After some discussion, my wife and I think we may have identified the 2wenty&#8217;s target demographic &mdash; early-teenage girls of the mall-rat persuasion.</p>
