now FeBruary
continued from page 24
action figure is for 18- to 35-year-
olds,” Bossard explains. The trend
is also part of a back-to-basics
movement in toys that pushes kids
to use their imaginations. “Simpler
toys are in,” says Justin Discoe,
cofounder of Sprig Toys, which
debuted its kinetic energy-powered
toys at last year’s fair. “Let kids fill
in the gaps.” —daVid LidsKy
baseball in popularity among U.S.
viewers, it’s second only to soccer
worldwide, due largely to the NBA’s
aggressive promotion and digital
outreach. Take its boosterism of
this year’s All-Star game: The NBA,
which now has 75 international
players from 32 nations, encour-
aged fans to vote online, with
ballots offered in 20 languages. For
those keeping score, that’s a global
branding triple-double. —Cd
us into a string of cocktail-party
nuggets about dum-dums. Make no
mistake, this is breezy stuff: You’ll
learn why French music in a wine
store drives us to buy more French
wine; how ovulating strippers
wring more money out of you
during lap dances; and how, if you
aren’t careful, you could punch a
paraplegic in a bar as Burt Reynolds
once did. Unfortunately, Hallinan
waits until the very end to provide a
dollop of insight about prevention,
and it boils down to “be happy” and
“sweat the small stuff.” Mistake. —dL
Watch
nBa all-Star 2009
Phoenix
Pro basketball’s 2008 All- 15 Star game was the most- watched ever, drawing 5. 2 million viewers. While
Sun
hoops still lags football and
Read
why we Make MIStakeS
By Joseph T. hallinan
Why We Make Mistakes 17 turns a ton of academic research about how our brains can work against
tue
Switch
tranSItIon FroM analog
to dIgItal tv
Cable and broadcast 17 companies pledged in 2007 to donate $1.2 billion of advertising airtime to
tue
spread the word on the analog-
to-digital transition. If you have
no idea what we’re talking about,
well, that was wasted money, then,
wasn’t it? By last August, cable
companies had already spent more
than their promised $200 million
share on telling customers that
they don’t have to do anything.
Meanwhile, the 16% of U.S. TV
households who have held out
against cable and satellite have
gotten bombarded with ads
explaining how they’ll need
$40-and-up digital converters,
available at a retailer near you.
Rob Stoddard of the National
Cable & Telecommunications
Association calls the effort
“probably the biggest public-service
campaign in this decade.” Yes, he
really did say public service. —aCL
See: He’s Just Not That Into You
How do you turn a best-selling self-help book for women into a movie?
Focus on feelings! “The film lives or dies on my ability to make that
emotional content come to the surface,” says (male) director Ken
Kwapis. The movie, starring Jennifer Aniston and Drew Barrymore,
is out February 6. Other difficult books-turned-films haven’t done so
well at the box office—or the Oscars (February 25). —sara D. anderson
1759
laurence Sterne
TrisTram
shandy
1969
John Fowles
The french
lieu Tenan T’s woman
1998
Michael cunningham
The
hours
2001
eric Schlosser
fas T food
naTion
Create
the SIMS 3
If you’re more into creating 20 your own characters than watching someone else’s, then you’re likely familiar
FrI
with the landmark PC game The
Sims, which launched nine years
ago to critical acclaim. Within two
years, it became the best-selling
PC title in history, which it has
remained ever since. The latest
sequel boasts an entire neighbor-
hood full of diverse characters as
well as a slew of new customiza-
tion options. Our favorite: Create
a Sim mode, which lets players
make likenesses of themselves or
their enemies. We, for instance, are
thinking of making a Sim whose
profession is stock speculation.
Then we would delete the door
on his home, so he will starve
and never hurt us again. —sL
MOVIE STARRING
Steve Coogan,
Rob Brydon
MOVIE STARRING
Meryl Streep,
Jeremy Irons
MOVIE STARRING
Nicole Kidman, Meryl
Streep, Julianne Moore
MOVIE STARRING
Greg Kinnear,
Wilmer Valderrama
BOx OFFICE
$1.3 million
BOx OFFICE
$67.7 million
BOx OFFICE
$48.8 million
BOx OFFICE
$1.1 million
OSCAR NODS/WINS
Hahahaha!
OSCAR NODS/WINS
5/0
OSCAR NODS/WINS
9/1 (for Kidman)
OSCAR NODS/WINS
0/0
Animate
anIMa 2009
Brussels, Belgium
The three highest- 20 grossing animated movies of 2007—Shrek the Third, Ratatouille, and The Simpsons
FrI
Movie—tallied up nearly $2 billion
in ticket sales worldwide. Anima,
the annual international anima-
tion festival, is not for those kinds
of movies. Instead, it will focus
on more obscure productions from
studios in Asia and Europe, which
rarely make it to U.S. big screens.
The academic part of this
conference—you didn’t think these
guys just sat around watching
cartoons, did you?—will focus on
animation’s heritage in the
2005
1981
2002
2006
photographs: Courtesy of Warner brothers (He’s Just Not That Into You), Viking ( The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy book), back bay books ( The French Lieutenant's
united artists/photofest ( The French Lieutenant’s Woman movie); paramount/photofest ( The Hours movie); Fox searchlight/everett Collection (Fast Food Nation movie)
Woman book); picador ( The Hours book), Harper perennial (Fast Food Nation book); picturehouse/everett Collection ( The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy movie);
