Word: metallization
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...star of five new films by five major directors, all coming soon to a desktop near you. From BMW, the German luxury-car manufacturer, the ultimate in new-media, high-end branding has arrived: six-minute melodramas, featuring some cinematic swank and a lot of expensive heavy metal, that are available only on the bmwfilms.com website. With a budget in the low seven figures and only a few company rules--the recurring character of the Hire (played with rugged poignancy by British actor Clive Owen of Croupier) and, well, a BMW here and there--each auteur can put his stamp...
There are, in this world, some rather loopy people. Not dangerously loopy. Just pleasantly idiosyncratic folks, whose enthusiasm for something high-tech occupies a little more brain space than the normal person would dedicate to, say, a metal-plated canine robot. Because Japan is the source for so much of this addictive technology, it's not surprising that these fetishists view the country as the mecca of techno-cool. Fittingly, Japan is also the birthplace of the word otaku, an almost untranslatable phrase that describes a person whose fascination with something has reached, well, loopy proportions. Below, meet five American...
There's the doctor from the East Coast and the businessman from Fresno. But no one is more of a die-hard fan of die-cast robots than Eric Nakamura, the Los Angeles publisher of Giant Robot magazine. Since he started collecting the solid-metal toys when he was a child back in the 1970s, Nakamura has been hooked by the Japanese gadgets that inspired such latter-day playthings as the Transformers and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. "They are more than just toys, you know," says the 31-year-old, a tad defensively. "They are little pieces...
Nakamura is so enamored of the colorful chunks of metal that in 1994 he named his magazine after the mightiest of them all, Giant Robot. The hip 'zine delves into Asian-American culture and spots the latest trends from across the Pacific - from wasabi-flavored potato chips to schoolgirl porn. Today's toy robots, says Nakamura dismissively, tend to be cobbled together with cheap plastic. Die-cast robots, on the other hand, are emblematic of the kind of Japanese craftsmanship that transformed the nation's image from shoddy imitator in the 1960s to technological leader just a decade later...
...present. Striving to keep demand strong and inventories down, car manufacturers are offering low-rate financing and some sweet rebates. According to CNW Marketing Research, the average car rebate in March was $2,503, up 42% from last year. But before cruising out of the lot with that new metal, be on the lookout for sneaky dealers who jack up the sticker price, thus eating away at your rebate...