I dunno, I guess this is GQ, but it’s about a TV show, so here goes:
On the most recent episode of Entourage, “Bottoms Up,” when Sasha Gray is making everybody pancakes, she makes Vince a **Mickey Mouse **shaped pancake. It’s visible to the camera and it’s referenced in the script, so there’s no ambiguity.
In talking about the show with The Other Shoe, the subject of Disney’s litigiousness came up. Does anyone know if Disney could potentially sue HBO for using their character’s name and likeness? Assuming, of course, that their lawyers didn’t sit down together ahead of time and hash this out - but that seems like a helluva hassle when the pancake could very well have been shaped like anything else.
I haven’t seen the episode of Entourage in question, but she wasn’t half-bad as the lead in Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience”. Not great by any stretch, but certainly not distractingly bad, either.
Who decided that doing porn automatically makes one a bad actor? Sibel Kikelli won the Golden Bear for her work in Head On before her porn past was uncovered.
I think the bad acting in porn has more to do with bad directors and limited budgets (i.e. no money for second takes).
No, there is no case here. A mere silhouette of mouse ears is not a taking of the Mickey Mouse character. (Were the mouse ears at the correct angle? The correct proportion to the head?) Real life can be referenced in fiction. You can refer to trademarked characters. They could have hung a Mickey Mouse picture on the wall or done a b-roll insert of them driving past a Disney store. Entourage, when I watched it, has them move around real Hollywood all the time. Likewise, no reasonable viewer would believe that a smooshed pancake is an attempt to sell a product that would be confused with a real Disney-licensed item.
There is no bright line test on this, so I can’t tell exactly what they can’t do. But three pancakes that run together in a frying pan or griddle or whatever (I didn’t see it) are not a trademark violation.
Welllll … now that you bring it up, the pancakes had more than just the silhouette. I can’t YouTube it at work right now or anything, but IIRC she had decorated it (choc. chips? whipped cream? something like that) to make a face as well.
The question came up not because Sasha (err … I supposed … the food stylist for the show) made such a photorealistic representation of the Mouse, so much as because of talk I’ve heard that Disney is particularly litigious, and notorious for protecting its brands and image with rabidly aggressive and well-paid attorneys.
I doubt it was actually photorealistic. Just the opposite. I’m sure it merely suggested the classic Mouse. You can’t do photorealism with whipped cream and chocolate chips.
She wasn’t bad in that because she just sort of blended into the stark, listless emotionless background that was the entire film.
Soderbergh’s directoral style of steadycaming cool people having glib conversations in cool places works in films like Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven when the people in question are charmingly funny or the subject matter is powerful. When it’s just some hooker having relationship talks with her dumbass boyfriend or her johns, it’s like eating diner in that quiet little Soho restaurant next to that annoyingly pretentious couple with no personality who wont shut up.
In that episode of Entourage, she convincingly played a porn star with no personality who got picked up by Vince.
It’s not that she is bad per se; it’s just that every time I see her in something that isn’t focused on her vulva, the vibe I get is her screaming at the top of her lungs, “C’mon guys, I REALLY am SMART! I AM! No really, I am! I’m smart guys, really!”
