Eve Of The War

FROM : <a href='http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/05/nyregion/05ads.html' target='_blank'>http://www.nytimes.com/</a><br /><br />Having spent nearly half his life as a transit worker, Ray Volsario is used to his subway cars looking a certain way.<br /><br />But on Monday, Mr. Volsario, 50, entered the 42nd Street shuttle, the line where he works as a motorman, and noticed that none of the yellow and orange seats seemed normal. He assumed the seats were dirty. <br /><br />Mr. Volsario was "all set to call a car cleaner to clean the seats off," he recalled, when he looked closer and realized that the seats were part of an elaborate advertisement for "Deadwood," a television series.<br /><br />HBO, the cable network, paid about $100,000 to cover the interiors of three subway cars - including the walls, seats, ceilings and doors - with plastic wrap promoting the show, which begins its second season on Sunday.<br /><br />Riders who board the shuttle at Grand Central Terminal and take the 90-second trip to Times Square were confronted this week with another series of advertisements - these applied directly to the white tiled walls, and wrapped around the stanchions, near the shuttle platforms.<br /><br />The advertisements portray a flock of birds against an angry red sky, with a single phrase: Omnium Finis Imminet, Latin for The End of All Things Is Near. The advertisements, for Steven Spielberg's movie version of H. G. Wells's "War of the Worlds," cost about $50,000. The film is to open in July. The two sets of advertisements are likely to reopen the debate over the degree to which public space should be protected from commercialization. Most shuttle riders seemed to react to the "Deadwood" advertisements with surprise or amusement, but others viewed the advertisements as an intrusion.<br /><br />"I think it's creative, but it really imposes on our privacy," said Andrea Sage, 42, a real estate lawyer who lives in Chelsea and rides the shuttle every day. "It's disorienting. It's really going to wear thin after a while."<br /><br />Kent L. Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society of New York, an organization devoted to urban design and planning, also criticized the advertisements as excessive.<br /><br />"It was one thing when they decided to sell all the advertising in a car to a single advertiser," Mr. Barwick said, "but it's a quantum leap to actually convert a public conveyance into a stage set in which I am now totally captive." <br /><br />A spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Tom Kelly, defended the advertisements but acknowledged that money is a driving factor. "This is our attempt to experiment, to find different ways to seek advertising revenue to go back into the system," Mr. Kelly said. "Remember, this is one campaign." <br /><br />He added: "Should someone else come along with another campaign, obviously, considering the financial condition that we're in, we'd give it serious thought. But it would have to be something that is tastefully done."<br /><br />The "Deadwood" advertisements produced strong but divergent reactions from riders.<br /><br />Andy Elbery, 31, an architect from Jersey City, gazed admiringly at the plastic-covered seats, which resembled cushions. "It's beautiful," Mr. Elbery said. "I love the textural feeling, with no material."<br /><br />Annie Kirby, 25, a graduate student from Park Slope, Brooklyn, said there are few spaces where New Yorkers can be free from commercial messages. "That's one of the difficult things about living here," she said, adding that the movie advertisements try to "direct our fears away from real problems."<br /><br />The Spielberg advertisements seemed to attract less notice. When James A. Venable, 52, a subway conductor guiding shuttle passengers to the correct platform, was told that the end is near (at least in Mr. Spielberg's film), he replied: "Yes, it is near, but we don't know how near."<br /><br />

talk about forcing it down peoples throats...

<br /><br />Birds? Hey, maybe that's how the film's going to end - it's not bacteria that kills the non-Martian aliens, it's birds! Huge flocks of them, descending on the invaders and pecking them to death as a metaphor for Nature rising up against both their presence and the Red Weed. Plus it'll allow Spielberg to pay homage to Hitchcock and Stephen King at the same time.<br /><br />You think I'm joking, but do you really want to lay odds on me being wrong?<br /><br />As for the latin... pretentious, moi? Who's in charge of the marketing for this film, Chris Carter?<br /><br />

Maybe the Birds SH*T on the Martains from overhead and they get Pigeon Flu!<br />Or Maybe birdsong drives them insane after a few days of it and their heads blow up. This would be a new idea, Martians have never had their heads blow up on film because they heard music before, did they?

I don't know, Ask my friend Mr Tim Burton

Consensus on some other blogs is that the Omnium campaign is part of promo for an NBC miniseries called Revelations -- which is supposed to be set in the end times as described in the last book of the Bible, to be released in April of 05. This connection would make more sense for the Latin verbiage. Nothing especially Latin about Wells, whether Victorian or modern American.