Hasta La Gadget!

“Swiss Army Man” begins with a suicide attempt that’s salvaged by a dead body. Paul Dano plays Hank, a sullen loner marooned on an island where a corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) washes ashore. Said corpse, Hank learns, talks and carries a supernatural ability to guide him home, specifically through the use of his erect penis and decomposing (read: farting) remains. Alongside his new pal, whom he names Manny, Hank rediscovers the will to live, and “Swiss Amy Man” becomes the most philosophical movie ever made about flatulence. 

Following a lucrative limited release in New York and Los Angeles last weekend, “Swiss Army Man” expands to almost 700 screens nationwide on Friday. Inspired by a fart joke and peppered with homages to things like “Jurassic Park” and “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” the movie has the potential to be one of the year’s most notable — or at least strangest — independent projects. Here’s what went into making it. 

Maybe you’ve heard it referred to as the “farting corpse movie.”

When “Swiss Army Man” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the press in attendance made note of two things: Paul Dano was propelled across the ocean on the back of Daniel Radcliffe’s farting corpse, and a slew of people walked out of the movie. Already one of Sundance’s most-anticipated titles, the divided responses only bolstered its momentum. I was at the premiere screening, which started half an hour late because officials had to control the crowd of hundreds that were turned away after the festival’s largest theater filled to capacity. No one knew exactly what to expect from the movie, assuming it would be a “Cast Away”-style survival tale, or at least something … normal. To be part of that naïve audience was exhilarating. By the time its bizarre 95 minutes came to an end, the room was stunned. Throughout the rest of the fest, chatter spanned an effusive “What was that?” to a bitter “Fuck that.” A24 snatched up distribution rights in what was reportedly a heated bidding contest. 

You’ve probably seen at least one thing the directors have done.

Before writing and directing “Swiss Army Man,” frequent collaborators Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, collectively known as The Daniels, made the trippy video for DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s 2013 hit “Turn Down for What.” Watch it and “Swiss Army Man” back to back and you’ll see The Daniels have an affinity for boner humor. In “Turn Down for What,” they treat testosterone as a laughable force that leads to uncontrollable destruction (and/or massive parties). In “Swiss Army Man,” Manny’s pecker is the compass that guides Hank home. 

The Daniels have directed videos for Passion Pit, The Shins, Foster the People and Manchester Orchestra, whose Andy Hull and Robert McDowell composed the galvanizing score for “Swiss Army Man.” The Daniels have also helmed several short films that you can watch on Vimeo. They made off with one of Sundance’s directing prizes this year. 

So what’s it take to get Harry Potter and the silent kid from “Little Miss Sunshine” to do a movie about boners, farts and suicide?

All it takes is a logline, apparently. When I asked Radcliffe and Dano this week about how the movie was pitched to them, they said it was that simple. Radcliffe recalled the hook as something to the effect of “a lonely, suicidal man is saved by his discovery of a dead body” — which is, sure, a pretty apt description of the movie. “It definitely pitched that it was a two-hander and one of the hands was dead,” he said. (Watching Radcliffe act lifeless is a croaky, glassy-eyed, limber marvel.)

But Dano liked the angle he received better, and I’m inclined to agree. “They wanted to make a film where the first fart makes you laugh and the last fart makes you cry,” he said. “With that, I was in. That’s ambition.”

They shot exclusively outdoors in California last summer. Dano had to lug Radcliffe around on his back, hoist him up hills and ride him across the ocean like a jet ski. I asked whether it was an arduous shoot, and the actors gave an emphatic, simultaneous affirmative. 

“I mainly got carried, so it was pretty good,” Radcliffe joked, to which Dano replied, “You got dragged and thrown! Your guy goes through a lot. And also the amount we were doing every day, and the speed at which we worked, and the energy at which we worked, not only us in the scenes, but the whole crew.”

After this, it’s time for the “what will Harry Potter do next?” narrative to dwindle.

Radcliffe has been exceptionally generous about the understandable flood of “Harry Potter” questions he has received since the film franchise ended in 2011. (With the play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and the movie “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” on the horizon, there’s a whole new layer of wizarding things to ask about.) And Radcliffe has done a remarkable job of diversifying his post-Hogwarts résumé, even if he’ll always be known as The Boy Who Lived. But if playing Allen Ginsberg in “Kill Your Darlings,” a supernaturally horned widower in “Horns,” a dog walker in “Trainwreck” and a magic-aspiring villain in “Now You See Me 2” aren’t enough to separate him from his wand-carrying days, the eccentric nature of “Swiss Army Man” should. 

“It’s interesting, someone did say to me, ‘Did you choose this because it’s so different from Potter?'” Radcliffe said. “Yeah, but it’s also different from everything I’ve ever done. Some people want every career decision I make to be in some way a comment on my relationship to Potter, but you’re not in control of what gets sent to you, so when you read something original and you love it, that’s that. And I’m in a position that I can do things that I want to do and I don’t have to do things for other reasons, so for as long as I’m in that position, I’m going to make hay while the sun shines.”

For his latest trick, Radcliffe had to wait until seeing the finished product to learn what his fictional farts sound like. The movie’s sound guys asked members of the cast and crew to record their farts, which were then blended with artificial effects, like in elementary school when you squeezed your hands together and blew into them. You can read all about the process in this Village Voice interview. I asked if Radcliffe thought to ask for a fart-approval clause in his contract: “No, but I should have, just to say that I had that at some point. When else am I going to need it?”

It may not be the type of movie you take home to Mom, but the profundity of “Swiss Army Man” is surprising.

Radcliffe has no qualms showing the movie to his “weird” parents, literary agents who used to be actors themselves. People often ask whether he was “embarrassed” to perform the play “Equus,” a theological character study in which he appeared nude, in front of his folks, when in fact they “encouraged” him to take the role. “They’re artsy, I guess,” he said.

Dano, on the other hand, is far more cautious, calling his parents “super old-school.” Lucky for him, they’ll just be enamored because it features their son. “If we took me out of it, I obviously don’t know how it would play,” Dano said. And by now, they’re used to seeing him portray misfits struggling to find their way. Dano made a name for himself by doing just that in “L.I.E.,” “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Being Flynn,” “Ruby Sparks,” “Prisoners” and “Love & Mercy.” 

I don’t want to spoil the movie’s thematic punch, but the zany comedy of “Swiss Army Man” morphs into a poignant statement about learning to appreciate life. Hank is a suicidal recluse who has lost all hope — until Manny’s childlike questions about the world force Hank to realize how much beauty surrounds them. Some viewers may be frustrated by the magical realism, which makes the film more surreal than sensible, but look beyond the scatological bro-gags and you’ll find a missive about companionship, self-acceptance and wonderment. 

“There’s something intrinsically wonderful about the image of ‘If you just come into the world knowing nothing about it and with no emotional baggage, it’s a fascinating and wonderful place,’ which is sort of what Manny discovers,” Radcliffe said. Manny uses that discovery to teach Hank how to “live again and love again.” 

Dano agreed. “It’s largely about being yourself, in a way,” he said.

“Swiss Army Man” is now in theaters.

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Did Donald Trump violate IRS rules, by using a charity’s money to buy himself a signed football helmet?

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Despite speculation that Donald Trump’s candidacy could shake up how people vote, polls look pretty similar to 2012 voting patterns. Political polarization has reduced the number of competitive counties in the presidential race. And Donald Trump is adding three more pollsters to his team.This is HuffPollster for Friday, July 1, 2016.

HuffPollster is going on a brief hiatus July 4-8 to “recharge and refuel.” We will return on July 11th. Happy 4th of July!

TRUMP’S CANDIDACY MAY NOT CHANGE VOTING PATTERNS – Alan Abramowitz: “Overall, 40 out of 50 states voted for the same party in all four elections between 2000 and 2012. But none of these elections involved a major party nominee like Donald Trump….[T]here has been considerable speculation about whether his candidacy could result in major shifts in the voting patterns that have characterized recent elections. The ultimate answer to this question will have to await the November election….However, an examination of data from the 2016 ANES Pilot Study… show that the American electorate remains deeply divided along party lines….Based on these findings, voting patterns in the 2016 general election should closely resemble those seen in recent presidential elections…. As a preliminary test of this claim, we can examine the relationship between group voting preferences in a recent national poll with those from the 2012 national exit poll…. The data for 2016 come from a CNN/ORC national poll from June 16-19. The results displayed in Figure 2 show an extremely high degree of consistency in group voting patterns between these two elections….These findings strongly support the belief that group voting patterns in 2016 are likely to closely resemble group voting patterns in 2012.” [UVA Center for Politics]

THERE AREN’T THAT MANY COMPETITIVE COUNTIES IN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS – Drew DeSilver: “When it comes to presidential elections, there are fewer competitive counties, and more counties in which Democrats or Republicans hold overwhelming vote advantages, than at any time in the past three decades or so – on-the-ground evidence of the heightened partisan polarization that characterizes U.S. politics today….Closely contested counties aren’t, as you might expect, predominantly in the ‘swing states’ that get the lion’s share of attention from presidential campaigns and the media covering them. While there were notable concentrations in 2012 in the upper Midwest and along the Pacific coast, closely contested counties were scattered across the country….Except for a small bump up in 2008, the number of closely contested counties has been declining since 1992. At the same time, the number of counties where one party or the other holds an overwhelming partisan advantage has risen dramatically.” [Pew]

THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY MIGHT BE A FACTOR IN SOME STATES – Stan Greenberg and Nancy Zdunkewicz of Democracy Corps (D) and Page Gardner of the Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, on a survey of battleground states:  “Clinton is beating Trump by 8 points in the more demographically diverse battleground states, outperforming Obama in Florida by 10 points, North Carolina by 13 points, and Arizona by 4 points. …..The Libertarian Party will likely be a long-term factor in the race. Not surprisingly, Johnson is getting 24 percent of independents. But on the right, he is also winning 11 percent of Romney voters, 26 percent of Kasich supporters (and 21 percent of all non-Trump GOP primary supporters), and 23 percent of GOP-moderates. On the left, he is winning 17 percent of Sanders primary voters, 25 percent of white millennials, and 10 percent of unmarried women.” [Democracy Corps]

TRUMP CAMPAIGN REPORTEDLY HIRING MORE POLLSTERS – Maggie Haberman: “Donald J. Trump will expand his roster of pollsters, with plans to add three new ones as his team shifts gears toward a general election with new urgency, according to a person briefed on the matter. Mr. Trump, who once decried the use of pollsters on a campaign, will now have five polling firms working for him, according to the person briefed on the hires, who was not authorized to speak publicly. Kellyanne Conway, a veteran pollster who has had a long working relationship with Mr. Trump, is among those joining the effort….Mr. Trump’s team is also expected to bring on Adam Geller, who works with Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, and Michael Baselice, who was the pollster for former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas and for the state’s governor now, Greg Abbott. Mr. Trump already has hired Tony Fabrizio, another veteran pollster, and John McLaughlin, who was brought on specifically to help Mr. Trump in New York.” [NYT]

A MAJORITY OF AMERICANS SUPPORT ABORTION RIGHTS, AND HAVE FOR 20 YEARS – Margie Omero (D): “We may think of abortion as one of our perennial ‘controversial’ issues, but perhaps it’s not so controversial at all. This week the Supreme Court’s Texas decision showed us even a divided bench, short a person, can still reaffirm that a woman’s basic right to choose an abortion should be protected. The polling shows America has come to the same conclusion as well. Pew‘s tracking shows a majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases — a trend that’s been fairly stable over the last twenty years. (Some pollsters, along with the pro-abortion rights group NARAL, have argued that a three-point question might better capture public opinion, by giving respondents an option to say they find abortion morally unacceptable, but still think it should remain legal. In this formulation, over two-thirds say abortion should be legal. But even without this methodological shift, the results are clear and consistent.)” [HuffPost]

WE DON’T KNOW WHAT THE 2016 ELECTORATE WILL LOOK LIKE – Nate Cohn: “When people complain to me about a poll, it’s usually because they think the demographics are wrong. The pollsters polled too many white people, commenters might say, or too many old people. Or perhaps the sample of Hispanic voters doesn’t seem quite Democratic enough. Most of the time, these comments are wrong….There’s always uncertainty about the composition of the electorate in a poll, so don’t judge too harshly. And the sources we can use to compare — like the exit polls taken right after an election and the census — aren’t perfect, either. There’s genuine uncertainty about the composition of the electorate in many battleground states, and nationally. The good news is that there’s no need to sweat small differences. It just doesn’t matter as much as you might guess. A pretty significant three-percentage-point difference on the number of white people nationally, for instance, might mean only the difference between a tie and a two-point lead for Mrs. Clinton….Most of the polls done right now question registered voters, and most high-quality polls are accurately representing the demographic makeup of the electorate.” [NYT]

HUFFPOLLSTER VIA EMAIL! – You can receive this daily update every weekday morning via email! Just click here, enter your email address, and click “sign up.” That’s all there is to it (and you can unsubscribe anytime).

FRIDAY’S ‘OUTLIERS’ – Links to the best of news at the intersection of polling, politics and political data:

-Sam Wang’s 2016 forecast gives Hillary Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning in November. [Princeton]

-Nate Silver explains that his forecast isn’t predicting that Clinton will definitely win. [538]

-Most Americans know basic American history, but struggle with trickier questions. [USA Today]

-The Guardian’s Australia poll average indicates a Coalition government is the most likely outcome of Saturday’s elections. [The Guardian]

Almost 6 in 10 Brits are opposed to holding a second referendum on membership in the E.U. [YouGov]  

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Sony A6300 Review – An amazing mirrorless camera for photographers and videographers with a couple of kinks. No camera is perfect but the Sony A6300 on paper definitely comes close with a 24MP sensor, 425 AF points with great coverage, 11fps shooting, 4k video with focus peaking, slog-3, and a host of other video and photo features with tons of customization. So let’s see how this amazing camera on paper performs in the real world in this Sony A6300 Review.

Purchase the Sony A6300:
B&H Photo | Amazon

Download the RAW + JPEG files from this review and get more information on the a6300 at LearningCameras.com

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By Sultan Khan, CEO, AdMaxim

If you work in marketing, there are two words that will have become regular fixtures in your thinking and talking about advertising over the past three years; programmatic and native.

Programmatic – the automation of the buying and selling of digital ads – has cut costs and made campaigns much more effective for brands. To say it’s taking the industry by storm could even be an under-statement, given that IAB figures show that 45% of online display ads in the UK were bought this way in 2014, up from 28% the previous year. It is probable that the figure is now beyond 60%, given eMarketer’s predictions.

Programmatic is even more prevalent in mobile, with 64% of mobile ads in 2014 being bought using programmatic methods.

Where programmatic has brought benefits related to scale and the application of large volumes of increasingly intelligent user data, the phenomenon that is native advertising has so far existed in a different space. Native ads are designed to echo the look and feel of the editorial context that they appear within, in an attempt to respond to digital user’s frustrations with intrusive ad formats.

Other factors have also contributed to the huge growth in popularity of native ads (spending on the format rose 49.9% to £776m in 2015 in the UK). Our constant exposure to social media platforms has arguably kick-started the development of native, as ads appear in feeds that are highly reflective of regular posts in their design.

Publishers spotted the opportunity for revenue and have spent the past few years exploring ways of offering native ads, developing templated slots within their content management systems. The Guardian, for example, created its Guardian Labs division two years ago to develop its native advertising capabilities, building a team of 133 and developing its own proprietary analytics system.

Publishers have also been exploring partnerships with agencies in an effort to collaborate on how best to offer ad slots to marketers – our native.ly service capitalises on the time we have spent developing partnerships like these.

This is where we believe programmatic meets native. At first sight, it might appear odd to attempt to marry the benefits of automation with customisation. If native is all about blending in with the environment, isn’t this the exclusive preserve of the individually-created and placed ad? We believe it doesn’t have to be. In the past two years, as we put together our native.ly offering, we’ve seen critical mass developing in terms of ad formats across various publishers.

What has really helped more recently is the development of a real time bidding protocol including native standards. This is facilitating an automated purchase of native like never before as it enables the different parts of the advertising technology ecosystem to standardize the way they transact.

We’re also finding that mobile is proving to be a particular catalyst in the drawing together of programmatic and native. Global spending on mobile video is expected to leap by 30% to $13.3bn by 2020 (PwC). It’s easy to see that we are moving in the direction of mobile becoming the main way consumers access the digital world, and that broadcast content is an increasingly effective way of communicating with them.

In this context, the data that publishers and agencies can derive about users offers a great opportunity for planning creative, as well as media placement. We think of this as Dynamic Creative Optimisation – integrating data on, for example, users’ content consumption, audience segment, location and other contextual factors, in order to either create or update an ad in real-time.

Standardisation has helped marketers to reap the benefits of scale, while native has aided the process of improving users’ responses to ads. Put the two together and the potential is huge.

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