one time there were two magician movies

Girls5eva and Queens: TV shows about fictional 90s Girl Groups getting back together.

in the span of 18 months the man was in two entirely different movies about the zodiac killer, one a masterpiece and the other a piece of junk, because that's just what our great character actors did goddamn it https://t.co/CThWB4CSI6

— Jess Harvell (@cheaptrickrules) June 13, 2022

Vietnam-era movies about stateside Navy lifers dealing with the vagaries and unfairness of "The System": Cinderella Liberty and The Last Detail (1973):

There was a wave (get it?) of penguin movies in the mid 00s

March of the Penguins - 2005
Madagascar - 2005
Happy Feet - 2006
Surf's Up - 2007

Do songs count?

Space feat. Cerys Matthews - The Ballad of Tom Jones (1998)

Fun Lovin' Criminals - Love Unlimited (1998)

Ode to the life-and-marriage-saving properties of a disco era crooner in novelty single form

Also, The Munsters and The Addams Family to thread.

(both 1964)

Two movies about the Bling Ring thieves: a Lifetime TV movie (2011), and a theatrical film directed by Sophia Coppola (2013), both entitled The Bling Ring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_films

Producer Bingham Ray recalls a conversation where the screenwriter of the 2006 Truman Capote biopic Infamous phoned to announce that his script had been finished. Ray said "I know, I've got it on my desk!" before realizing that he actually had the screenplay to Capote, a biopic by a different writer.[5]

forgot abt this one

Christine 2016 Kate Plays Christine

Kerouac adaptations: On The Road (2012) and Big Sur (2013)

...and then there was also Howl (2010), which is part adaptation of the Ginsberg work and part dramatization of the obscenity trial, with all the Beat legends present and accounted for.

Justin Bieber: Never Say Never (2011)
The Thing (2011)

To Sir with Love (released June 14, 1967)
Up the Down Staircase (released June 28, 1967)

Citizens Band (1977)
Convoy (1978)

Empress Elisabeth of Austria:

The Empress (TV series) (2022)
Corsage (Film) (2022)

This was one of two films about Wilde released in 1960, the other being The Trials of Oscar Wilde. They were both released in the last week of May 1960.

possibly connected to this among other things

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenden_report

This is a little less concrete, but A Face in the Crowd came out May 28, 1957, followed by Sweet Smell of Success on June 27, 1957: both meditations on celebrity, phony patriotism, and Joe McCarthy.

there’s a third current Empress Elisabeth of Austria thing going on too - a tv series called Sisi.

Loose adaptations of the Russian novel The Twelve Chairs: 12+1, 1969 (Sharon Tate's last film), and The Twelve Chairs, 1970 (the second film by Mel Brooks).

candy (2022) hulu
love & death (2023) hbo

both about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy_Montgomery

I think this basically fits: Air and BlackBerry (Canadian) both opening right now. They're separated by 15-20 years on a timeline, but, based on seeing the trailers and what I already know about the products, there would seem to be a lot of overlap.

There's also the Taron Egerton movie Tetris on Apple plus.

The new inspirational movies are about how moguls starting making bank. Assume the bezos one is coming soon. Maybe an "irreverent" one about musk in a decade or so.

Just back from BlackBerry--definitely lots of overlap with Air, starting with a note to myself to take a break from films where people shout at each other for two hours (BlackBerry the much more egregious offender on that count).

Also that there's a Mario movie, a Tetris movie, a DnD movie and a Barbie movie all out at the same time. Not exactly the same, but seeing them all up there on the cinema board was like a list of "Christmas most wanted list 1988"

I have no idea what this Blackberry movie is going to entail, but I'm just imagining someone looking up with a mad look in their eyes during a boardroom brainstorming session saying: "Wait a minute, I've got it. Let's include ALL the letters"

I'll have to figure out a thread for posting about it, but it really wore me down before long.

Lol dog Latin

After the great cultural achievement that is Minecraft: The Movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHY8NKj3RKs

I am just gonna hold out for Candy Crush III: the Crushening

Minecraft, Minesweeper, whatever

Frogger 2: The Froggening was pretty good tho

That Minesweeper thing is great

Remember: Mine is money.

In the tradition of "Air" and "Blackberry," I just saw a trailer for "Flamin' Hot," a movie about Cheetos.

Can’t tell if serious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=it7sNRloq-A

when there's a movie about Flamin' Hot Monster Munch, I'll allow it in this thread

I completely forgot that I saw a David O. Russell movie about a mop.

can't wait for the Swiss Cheese origin story

there are two different kinds of pastry known as nun farts: pets de nonne from france, and pets de sœurs from canada

there are probably many documentary films online about nun farts but i expect they are unrelated

The great thing about the Flamin' Hot movie is that the story it's based on is, of course, wrong

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-05-16/flamin-hot-cheetos-richard-montanez

Flamin’ Hots were created by a team of hotshot snack food professionals starting in 1989

they should make a movie about this, too, and just have sooooo much cocaine in it

o snap i guess they already did:

An internal promotional video for the Cheetos brand from the first quarter of 1991 serves as further proof that Flamin’ Hots were already out in the world.

The nearly nine-minute video, which Lukaska shared with The Times, is a Day-Glo green-and-pink time capsule, with Frito-Lay execs in fashionably baggy suits touting the latest and greatest snack aimed at kids, Cheetos Paws. At one point, two DDB Needham advertising executives perform a “New Jack City”-era rap about the coolness of Chester himself. Flamin’ Hots appear in the video for less than a second, in a rapid-fire slideshow set to MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This,” alongside two other minor brands of the day, Cheetos Curls and Cheetos Light.

Every once in a while, my career puts me in touch with people who do things like that (devise and market snack foods, novelty ice cream products, energy beverages, etc.).

I do kind of wonder what their inner lives are like, and whether they laugh or cry when they reflect on the sheer silliness of it.

A few examples:

I worked for the person who came up with the slogan "soup is good food." Research indicated that mothers had underlying anxiety about feeding children meals that had not been prepared from scratch; Campbell's play was to alleviate this using the simplest, most direct possible language. The underlying lesson, I think, was that sometimes a lack of cleverness is a type of cleverness.

Much later I worked with the people who came up with the Taki's box-with-one-chip-in-it campaign. Ordinarily, companies want to communicate value, bounty, abundance. This was an instance where a manufacturer decided to go the opposite direction and sell scarcity.

There is a nice poem by Stephen Dunn with a line about how helping National Biscuit sell biscuits is wildly comic. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=36748

this all just reminds me when they made a big-budget movie based on the battleship board game and everybody was like "a movie based on a BOARD GAME god movies really have sunk to a new low", and all i could think of was how people said the same thing when the movie based on the board game clue came out in 1985. plus it had three different endings depending on which print you saw. total gimmick film.

except of course that film is fucking AMAZING.

if you make a good film on a stupid premise it will probably take longer for it to get appreciated but it will probably eventually become a cult classic. see also for instance the wachowskis making a film on the pretty bad '60s anime "speed racer" or rian johnson inexplicably deciding to make a movie in the trashy "star wars" series of films

I worked for the person who came up with the slogan "soup is good food." Research indicated that mothers had underlying anxiety about feeding children meals that had not been prepared from scratch; Campbell's play was to alleviate this using the simplest, most direct possible language. The underlying lesson, I think, was that sometimes a lack of cleverness is a type of cleverness.

― sane clown posse (Ye Mad Puffin)

a classic counterexample, someone who came up with ideas too clever for their own good, is stan freberg. he came up with this extremely elaborate busby berkeley extravaganza to promote a line of soups called the "great american soup" intended to compete with campbell's... people saw the ad and thought it was for campbell's soup. also see his ad campaign for the airline company that had just had some high-profile crashes... sophistication and irony are maybe not the best qualities for an ad campaign... it was nice to see daniel clowes getting work mind you.

Good post Kate.

Now I feel like maybe we have enough material to make a musical about canned food, which will be called...

Wait for it...

SOUP OPERA.

that made me think Ouija Boards were originally a board "game" made by Parker Brothers and imdb lists

1. Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)
2. Ouija (II) (2014)
3. Ouija House (2018)
4. Ouija Seance: The Final Game (2018 TV Movie)

so we are back on topic 8)

the second Ouija was actually really fucking good.

Elvis (2022) & Priscilla (2023)

Oh no, but he’s not a hero