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October 28, 2005
THE WEEK IN BAD IDEAS
It's been a week of Bad Ideas, and they just seem to keep getting worse.
The lingerie company suit and counter-suit shenanigans with Maggie Cheung and Wong Kar-wai's company, Jet Tone, is slowly revealing its layers and it looks like the center of this multi-leveled litigation onion was a Bad Idea. Shanghai Bosideng Enterprise Development Co Ltd hired Maggie to appear in a lingerie ad, to be shot by Jet Tone (Bad Idea #1). Jet Tone, of course, didn't turn in the ad on time (duh) and so SBEDCL got a local company to stick Maggie's head on a model's body and aired that on CCTV instead (Bad Idea #2). Now SBEDCL is suing Jet Tone and Maggie for breach of contract, and they're suing SBEDCL for breach of contract and image infringement. And everybody's right.
Over in India, the India Times has posted a gallery of Bollywood's worst hairstyles. It loads like it's got arthritis, and some of the images are broken, but what remains is a line-up of some of the biggest Bad Ideas in hair to come along in a long time.
Also, apparently, animation is a Bad Idea in India. September saw the release of the 2 1/2 hour BHAGGMATI - THE QUEEN OF FORTUNES which features an hour of animation, starring Tabu and Hema Malini. The result: bad reviews and a box office flop. THE INCREDIBLES featured megastar Shah Rukh Khan as the voice of Mr. Incredible and his son, Dash. The result: flop. Now, HANUMAN has been released. An animated, 100 minute feature about the legendary Monkey King's misadventures, the flick opened last week against zero competition and it earned little money, bad word of mouth and poor reviews.
But the biggest Bad Idea this week came from Hong Kong lawmaker, Tommy Cheung, who had a really Bad Idea for how to stop the avian flu. Let Tommy tell it: "In other countries where you see avian flu outbreaks, most are not caused by chickens, they're caused by migrating birds. Perhaps what we should do is give each person a gun and when we see a migrating bird, we can just shoot it down, so Hong Kong would be a much safer place."
(Thanks to Jennifer Young for some of these)
October 28, 2005 at 10:06 AM in News | Permalink
Comments
you got your info wrong about hanuman dude !
Posted by: dingdong | Nov 25, 2005 11:01:17 AM
No, I didn't. But thanks for thinking about me.
I have been meaning to do a follow-up about HANUMAN, however. This animated Indian film opened and immediately dropped at the box office like a bomb. And I don't mean like "da bomb" (good) but like the CINDERELLA MAN kind of bomb (bad).
However, the distributors kept it in theaters through Diwali and the animated movie started picking up the pace. Its fourth week saw its fortunes take a 40% uptick (this in a day when most movies drop off by that much in their second week), and it recently marched past 7 crores at the box office which is quite a bit of money.
All the way over here on the East Coast I could hear the movie's investors in India breathing a sigh of relief and ordering a round of Johnnie Walker Black.
Posted by: Grady Hendrix | Nov 28, 2005 12:03:53 PM
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