Category: culture

kristen hall sues sugarland

~ jamie ~ 5 Comments

from an associated press article a few days ago:

A founder of the country band Sugarland is suing the two current members of the popular group for $1.5 million.

According to a lawsuit filed late last month in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, Kristen Hall was to get a cut of the group’s profits even after she left in 2005 for a solo career. The lawsuit says Hall, who founded the band in 2002, has an agreement with Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush to equally share profits and losses.

Hall says in the lawsuit that she has been excluded from the group’s profits since she left.

this somehow seems un-kristen-like to me, but i suppose she’s entitled to the money if they promised it to her. does this mean that she should continue to share in profits only from work when she was with the band, or that she should get a share of the profit for work that sugarland did after she left? i can’t say that it makes sense to get money for work you haven’t performed, so to speak, but if that’s what they agreed on then give her the money.

i hope she has that in writing.

wall-e

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

more often than not (especially as i get older) my criteria for going to an actual movie theater to see a movie is: “is it something i must see on the big screen?”

“trumbo” the movie opened this past weekend. i saw the play several times, starting from workshop performances. kirk’s former boss at the westside is the director. and yet we’ve debated whether to go see it in a theater or wait for it to come out on dvd, because it’s a “netflix” movie.

on the other hand, i went to see “speed racer” in the theater. even paid extra to see it in imax. why? it’s something that you want to see writ large, on an enormous screen. the visuals are an attraction to me, and are often the defining factor.

the problem with that, as i forget each time i see a movie on that basis, is that the buzz only lasts so long; with some the buzz lasts longer than with others, but it always wanes. speed racer was stunning for the first fifteen minutes or so, and then i was completely inured to its visual charms. even the monkey couldn’t save the movie for me.

and i love monkeys. oh do i love monkeys.

which brings me to wall-e, which i saw last night. definitely a movie to see on a big screen.

but, for probably the first time ever, the buzz lasted for the whole movie. wall-e is an all-time classic movie if there ever was one. in retrospect, i think i now know what people felt at the turn of the last century, when they saw their first movie. it’s that arresting, that engaging, that challenging, and that different.

because there’s no dialogue for the first 1/3 of the movie or so, and large stretches of movie after that without dialogue as well, the filmmakers had to rely on the visuals to propel the story forward. wall-e the robot is buster keaton, directed by preston sturges. wall-e is gene kelly, directed by vincente minnelli. wall-e is marlon brando, directed by orson welles.

it’s easily in the top ten of movies i have seen thus far in my life. it’s that good. little did i know when i linked to the movie’s viral website months ago that i’d like it so much.

etcetera

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

» versions of “gypsy” i have seen/heard prior to last night:

— the rosalind russell movie version
— the bette midler tv version
— the bernadette peters broadway version
— the ethel merman broadway cast recording
— the genesius theatre version in kirk’s boyhood home of reading, pa

kirk could add:

— the tyne daly broadway version
— the betty buckley and debbie gibson version at paper mill playhouse

i don’t think he saw angela lansbury as mama rose, but he can correct me if i’m wrong.

at any rate, to say we had “gypsy” burnout would be an understatement. we really didn’t want to see it this past spring at genesius, but kirk knew people in the cast and we had season tickets, so we went and it was good. even though patti lupone was getting raves in the latest broadway incarnation, we just decided to take a pass.

we were sung out, louise.

but then we saw the tonys, and she performed, and she won a tony, and boyd gaines won the tony as herbie, and laura benanti won the tony as louise, and they were all wonderful and we got chills and so forth, so we looked at each other and said “ok, get the tickets”. so we did, and got a decent deal, and went last night. house was packed — a good audience that we didn’t have to shush. amazingly, i think some of them were unfamiliar with the musical; there were lots of audible gasps when baby june took off at the end of act one.

we really enjoyed ourselves. the staging was good — there was a tattered proscenium onstage which symbolically lifted at the end, making it a “play within a play”. i especially loved the interplay between herbie and louise. the actors gave that relationship an added depth i’d never seen. june was alternately manically perky when “onstage” and bitterly cynical when “offstage” — great job. the most world-weary and ancient electra i’ve ever seen — hysterically funny.

and patti lupone was indeed a marvel. force of nature. complete presence. all the adjectives. two standing ovations — at the end of “rose’s turn” and at the end of the play.

even if you think you never want to see this warhorse (“gypsy”, not patti lupone!) on stage again, it’s worth the money.

» dinner before the show at bocca:

no silly, not the sandwich shop. the italian restaurant in gramercy. very nice experience. we had the prix fixe: for me, pomodori (fresh tomatoes, sliced onions, avocados, olive oil), trota (trout with roasted bell pepper salad and grilled potatoes), and frutta e zabaione (strawberries and bananas served with sabayon); for kirk, polpettine (veal meatballs served with melted truffle, pecorino cheese and veal jus), straccetti (pan seared oregano flavored shredded filet mignon served with roasted cherry tomatoes and wild rocket pesto), and the aforementioned frutta e zabaione. i had a glass of white, he had a glass of red. espresso after dessert (please don’t have your coffee with your dessert, says the food snob. so tacky!) we skipped the bread in deference to kirk, but it looked great from across the room.

everything was incredibly delicious because they did a great job of the one thing i love to see in restaurant food — each dish was just a few extremely high quality ingredients chosen and combined simply and well. not fussy, not cluttered, very clean yet surprisingly complex. good job.

they have a nice drinks menu as well and seem to get an after-work one-drink crowd; kirk started with a really yummy basil-infused gimlet.

total bill with tax and tip was $145 — a splurge for us but worth it.

» weekend update:

we’re going to reading for the second weekend in a row.

last weekend we went, borrowed kirk’s father’s truck and went camping at hickory run state park. we’d planned to hike a lot and be all active, but we lucked into choosing one of only eight campsites that were on the park’s babbling brook (out of 300+ campsites; what were the odds?). so we sat by said babbling brook and read, thursday through saturday. left early saturday afternoon due to impending thunderstorms and saw a production of “the women” in ephrata, pennsylvania. very fun.

this weekend, we’re taking an old steam train with kirk’s parents. it runs from somewhere to jim thorpe, pennsylvania and basically takes the whole day doing it. sounds like a relaxing time — looking forward to it.

next weekend, kirk makes the third consecutive trip to reading for sweeney todd auditions. i think my reading visit streak will end at two.

ellen and senator john mccain debate gay marriage

~ jamie ~ 4 Comments

this is a must-watch video clip — ellen hands john mccain his head on a plate, logic-wise.

here’s my favorite part:

“Blacks and women did not have the right to vote. I mean, women just got the right to vote in 1920. Blacks didn’t have the right to vote until 1870. And it just feels like there is this old way of thinking that we are not all the same. We are all the same people, all of us. You’re no different than I am. Our love is the same. To me — to me, what it feels like — just, you know, I will speak for myself — it feels — when someone says, ‘You can have a contract, and you’ll still have insurance, and you’ll get all that,’ it sounds to me like saying, ‘Well, you can sit there; you just can’t sit there.’ That’s what it sounds like to me. It feels like — it doesn’t feel inclusive…It feels — it feels isolated. It feels like we are not — you know, we aren’t owed the same things and the same wording.”

and the end of the clip is wonderful as well. go ellen…you rock. i don’t want a frigging contract either.

i used my $40 dtv converter box coupon

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

kirk and i have an hdtv, but it’s an older model and doesn’t have a built-in tuner. it’s just a monitor. so without paying for cable, we’ve never been able to get a television signal. no cable, no signal, no tv. and since we dropped cable about a year ago, the only things we’ve used the tv for was netflix rentals and playing with the wii.

with the upcoming broadcast conversion from analog to digital, the government is providing $40 coupons to buy a converter box. my tv doesn’t have a tuner, so i wasn’t sure if it would work or not. what the hell, right? so i sent off for my $40 coupon, and used it to buy the converter box. total price was $60, so my net cost was $20. i bought an indoor amplified antenna as well, for $40, so total out of pocket expense was about $60, or half the price of one month of cable.

hooked it all up last night. i figured if it didn’t work, i’d take it all back. no harm, no foul.

wow.

it all works brilliantly. not only do i have television, but the converter box has widescreen capability, so the digital picture fills in the entire widescreen. it’s not true hd, but the resolution is just fine — comparable to watching a dvd, probably. and the indoor amplified antenna pulls in 21 stations. some you’ll never watch — there’s one channel that’s just a cam set up in times square, some spanish-language stuff, and what-not, but for a one-time $60 payment i can now watch the networks and other local stations. and there’s great sound coming from my stereo and a great digital picture on my hdtv.

i’m still not going to watch that much tv — i like not knowing who flunked the lie detector when asked questions about their wife, or if i’m smarter than a fifth grader, or whatever. but i can watch the news, and keep up with the election, and whatnot, and that’s a good thing.

thanks, government. you got it right this time.

and the oscar for best score goes to…

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

jonny greenwood for “there will be blood”?

um, no.

i know. let’s give the oscar to the most cloying and obvious score in recent memory.

honestly. i didn’t think much of atonement. the young girl (saorise ronan) was phenomenal, but the movie itself was badly in need of some editing. i nearly fell asleep while they wandered endlessly around france during world war ii.

but the thing that kept me awake was the score, because every time i started to nod off, there would be that goddamn tap tap tap on the typewriter sprinkled throughout the score, supposedly strategically. this to me is an idea that sounds like it arose in a committee, and should have been rejected. “hey, she’s a writer. what sound can we use symbolically in the score to show she’s a writer?”

can we get more obvious? this is oscar-worthy brilliantly divergent and original thinking?

it’s as if voters purposely picked the worst score, in protest. maybe they did.

all i know is that someday, jonny greenwood is going to be a even more critically acclaimed composer in musical genres other than rock. perhaps he’ll win that oscar someday, for another film.

my advice to him?

don’t waste your time scoring any more hollywood films. they don’t deserve you.

loving me some twin peaks

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

no not women’s breasts, you boob. i mean twin peaks, the tv show.

kirk is a huge fan of the series, which i missed the first time around. but we’re both big david lynch fans, so i got him the dvd box set at amazon.com. the first season has been available in the u.s. for quite a while, but the second season just came out via this “definitive gold box set”. he had vhs tapes of some of the episodes, but it’s nice to have a complete set all in one place, with everything remastered and modernized and such.

i think i may have watched an episode or two when it was first on, but i think i missed a show or two and then got lost and lost interest. but it’s ideal to have this box set. we’ve been watching a couple of episodes a night, and have gotten through the first [short] season.

i love the pace. it’s so slow and drawn out, which adds to the overall spooky effect. when i was younger and less patient, i probably would have merely thought that this pace was boring — but it’s anything but. and the characters are so interesting. my favorite is audrey, played by sherilynn fenn. what a terrific actress she is.

i never thought i’d care who killed laura palmer, but now i can’t wait to get home each evening to watch the show. if you’ve never seen it, put it in your netflix queue. if you have, time to rediscover it with the benefits of age and experience.

of course, maybe you shouldn’t listen to me. i loved inland empire too, and it made perfect sense to me.

jonny greenwood and “popcorn superhet receiver”: no oscar for you

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

jonny greenwood’s score for “there will be blood”, which i discussed in my previous post, has been disqualified from consideration for an oscar this year.

when the nominations came out this morning and he wasn’t on the list, i assumed that he had just been overlooked for his amazing work, which was in my estimation not just the best score of the year, but one of the most effective film scores in my memory.

turns out that apparently people voted for him, as he was included on the academy’s reminder sheets that were mailed to voters over the past few weeks. but because his score included previously used music — some in the public domain, some from his own “popcorn superhet receiver” — the score was declared ineligible just a few days ago, and all the votes for the score were ignored. too late, of course, for any appeal.

boy is this crap. i’d be hopping mad if my vote was wasted because the academy couldn’t get their act together to make a timely ruling.

and i’m furious for jonny greenwood, whose amazing work deserved better treatment.

as did he.

popcorn superhet receiver

~ jamie ~ 3 Comments

kirk and i saw “there will be blood” recently and came out raving about the score, which was by jonny greenwood of radiohead. i thought it was the best thing about the movie, daniel day-lewis included. kirk didn’t go that far, but that’s what makes the phone book.

so when i got a ny times email about the wordless music concert featuring jonny greenwood’s composition “popcorn superhet receiver”, i immediately got tickets.

and the associated article discussed his love of messiaen, a composer that kirk and i love.

sometimes, serendipitously, all signs point to yes.

last night’s concert was a marvel. the venue, an acoustically outstanding church, was filled to overflow capacity with an atypical crowd for orchestral music — lots of groovy williamsburg types who looked to be fleeing for the “l” train afterwards. what an attentive audience, though — much more attentive than the old folks normally attending these things. absolutely rapt, and appropriately so given the well-planned program. each of the three pieces built internally to different climaxes, as did the three pieces taken as a whole.

the first was “sinking of the titanic” by gavin bryars — based on the music that the band played as the boat sank, and interspersed with tape of survivors’ interviews and ambient noise. a bit somnambulant, but relaxing and engaging.

the second was “christian zeal and activity” by john adams. a bit more active musically, and this time the interspersed tape was jimmy swaggart preaching the story of the healing of the man with the withered hand. loved this, because it took me back to that great jimmy swaggart sample in “welcome to paradise” by front 242 (hey poor! you don’t have to be poor anymore! jesus is here!) this piece was shorter quiet sections that built to quick crescendos and repeated the theme.

the last piece was “popcorn superhet receiver”. i’ll excerpt the ny times review to explain:

Mr. Greenwood has described “Popcorn Superhet Receiver,” named for a shortwave radio, as a study in white noise, the electronic whoosh you hear between radio stations. But it also contrasts old and new technologies: white noise is approximated by antique instruments made of wood, horsehair and catgut.

And where pure white noise is an undifferentiated hiss, Mr. Greenwood’s score, even at its most densely atonal, has a consistently alluring shimmer and embraces everything from lush vibrato, glissandos and sudden dynamic shifts to slowly rising chromatic themes. Toward the end his clusters give way to a prismatic full-orchestra pizzicato section: imagine the scherzo of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony on steroids, or acid, or both.

what he said.

all i know is that it was, for me, far and away the most engaging and exciting piece of the evening, mr. greenwood’s celebrity-ness notwithstanding. it had the feel of someone with unlimited talent being finally let loose to express himself in a new medium, to startlingly good effect. the whole evening had a “moment in history” feel, as if you had been in the audience for steve reich’s first performance or something.

i think this greenwood kid may have a future.

update: jonny greenwood is in the scott walker documentary. another artist we’ve discovered and love. this keeps getting weirder and more coincidental.

cherry blossoms

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

via kottke, a story about an artist whose project illustrates our disconnect with the terrorism that so many other countries live with every day.

from alyssa wright’s site:

The project starts in a backpack outfitted with a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative location, to the center of the city, are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates and releases a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking like a mixture between smoke and shrapnel and the white blossoms of a cherry tree, completely engulfing the wearer. Each piece of confetti is inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war, and the circumstances of their death.

genius.

and everything art should be.

smell yo dick

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

reading the sunday new york times (which is huge and very sensibly comes on saturday to give you additional time to read it) i ran across a blurb about riskay, a rapper from bartow, florida.

my dad lived in bartow, so it caught my eye. also, riskay looks like a drag queen, so that caught my eye too.

anyway, of all places to learn about a new rapper, you’d think the new york times would come in last. but they were dead on target this time. she’s brilliant, and her big myspace-popular song is called “smell yo dick”. head over and listen…it’s fantastic on many levels. catchy tune, risque subject matter, slightly satirical, and boldly feminist in a reclamatory kind of way.

the times thinks she should clean up her act and try for mass radio play.

i think she’s fine the way she is.

getting caught up

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

with the holidays upon us, it’s been a while since i posted. here’s what’s been going on:

» we had a holiday/housewarming party. tremendous fun, attended by ~30 of our friends at one point or another. we had it on saturday 12/1 from 5pm until ???. the ??? turned out to be about 1:30am. old friends actually schlepped to riverdale, and given the number of manhattan-centric friends we have this was no small feat and a testament to the strength of our friendships. we also had quite a few new friends from the building. food cooked by us, some catering from the garden gourmet and mike’s deli at arthur avenue, lots of wine and spirits, duck fart shots (jack daniels, bailey’s, kahlua) courtesy of our friend suzanne, great conversation, good music, and some spirited wii competition.

» kirk and i flew to tampa to visit my mother. she’s in assisted living in sun city center, and it was a quick in-and-out short weekend, so please all my florida friends, don’t get upset that i didn’t visit you! she’s doing well, and it was good to see her, my sister, and meet my nephew’s new s.o. sherry. they just bought a house together. i know how they feel!

» kirk and i saw “the belsnickel scrooge” at genesius theatre in reading we visited kirk’s parents for the holidays this past weekend. kirk has to work the day after christmas, so we’re just staying home for the holidays this year. but we did want to visit them, and we had tickets for the aforementioned show, so two birds with one stone. the show itself was marvelous — it’s a pennsylvania dutch adaptation of “a christmas carol”, complete with the belsnickel. the belsnickel only visits bad children and beats them with a stick. talk about negative reinforcement. anyway, it was lots of fun, even for a non-pennsylvania-dutch-person.

» the apartment is pretty much finished. kirk did the last bit of painting (mainly window frames, and the bathroom). someday soon we’ll have the tub refinished, and at some point we’ll just redo the whole bathroom, but the big projects are done. let the myriad small projects commence.

» we saw kiki and herb at carnegie hall. last time they were there, we had tickets and forgot to go. not this time. it was a good show, with old classics and new material. nothing’s ever going to touch small intimate joe’s pub shows with kiki climbing over the tables, but it was thrilling to see them on that stage nonetheless. saw old friends as well — our friend jared, the show’s producer; and john cameron mitchell. saw alan cumming as well — what a cutie.

» we saw the radio city christmas show. it’s the 75th anniversary, and they’ve beefed up the show considerably. it’s a rockettes-fest — they are everywhere in the show, much more than normally. lots of new numbers, all good, along with the classics you want to see. and they are selling fantastic souvenir martini glasses with rockettes’ legs instead of the stem. we see the show every year, but this year was special. if you have any inclination to go, it’s a must-see year.

» we sent out our annual holiday cards. this was my year to send them, and i wanted to ratchet down a bit due to last year’s “kirk and jamie sing holiday songs” extravaganza, which was great fun but very time-consuming. it was a simple but elegant card printed on silver paper. if you didn’t get a card for some reason, and you think i would have sent you one, let me know. and if your cd is not playing correctly, let us know. we’ve had some reports of cd-burnout (i think the ones you burn yourself don’t last as long), and we’re happy to replace your old copy.

that’s the major stuff. happy holidays, everyone.

your creation museum report

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

via daring fireball, a tour of the creation museum, from just the right perspective.

here’s a sample:

Let me say this much: I have to admit admiration for the pure balls-out, high-octane creationism that’s on offer here. Not for the Creation Museum that mamby-pamby weak sauce known as “Intelligent Design,” which tries to slip God by as some random designer, who just sort of got the ball rolling by accident. Screw that, pal: The Creation Museum’s God is hands on! He made every one of those animals from the damn mud and he did it no earlier than 4004 BC, or thereabouts. It’s all there in the book, son, all you have to do is look.

i had to stop reading, because i was at work and in danger of laughing so hard i’d disturb the nearby cubedwellers.

this one’s a classic.

entertainment on strike

~ jamie ~ 2 Comments

the world of entertainment is on strike. and how is it affecting me?

not much, i have to say. at least not directly.

first there’s the writer’s strike in hollywood. i guess that if you were a big tv watcher, you’d be upset about this. no new episodes of csi or lost or letterman or whatever, and all. but, having given up television (no cable tv, and our tv doesn’t have a tuner, so no over-the-air broadcasts either), i could care less. if the strike goes on long enough it could eventually affect the movies, and i’d care marginally more about that, but there are enough movies on netflix to last a lifetime. if they stopped making new movies tomorrow, i’d still never get to watch all the movies i’d like to see.

second strike is the stagehands on broadway. we don’t go to as many shows as we used to, so this doesn’t directly affect me in that sense. however, it definitely affects the economy of new york city, so in that sense i’m at least indirectly affected. but again, there are plenty of live entertainment options in new york — some broadway shows, off-broadway, off-off broadway, concerts, cabarets, and so on.

in general i support the concept of unions — we wouldn’t have much in the way of benefits and rights as workers if they hadn’t fought for them. and there are many jobs that i wouldn’t take unless there was a union to represent me. and when i taught school, i always belonged to the union — even though i agreed that they promoted and tolerated incompetence, i still saw the overall value in membership.

i think the writers have a valid point. everything’s going online, and if something they wrote is rebroadcast on the internet or sold via itunes, there should be some payment for that. of course, if the strike continues, there may not be much of an audience left for their product, given people’s limited and continually fracturing attention span. but they have a point, and they should press for a solution if they think the risk is worth it.

i don’t think it helps their image, though, to have big stars on the picket lines, and jay leno bringing them donuts, and so on. i’ll bet the vast majority of striking writers are middle class folks with middle class incomes, and all those big stars do is leave casual observers with the impression that all writers are wealthy people looking for even more wealth.

the broadway stagehands seem to me to have less of a point. i’ll be the first to admit that i’m not fully informed, but from what i can gather, one of their main demands is to retain the right to tell producers how many union members each show must hire.

i’m guessing that most people would think that an unreasonable demand. i know i do.

i’d love to have the contractual right to tell my company that they had to employ a set number of my co-workers. who wouldn’t? but that’s not reasonable. and while i’m sure greedy producers drive up the cost of broadway tickets, having to hire union employees regardless of actual need isn’t helping either.

for the sake of the economies of new york and los angeles, i hope both strikes are settled soon.

personally, though, i don’t care much either way.

update: with the broadway strike, what’s at issue is controlling how many workers are present at the load-in for the show (when all the sets, etc., are brought into the theater). i have less of a problem with that — i dont think the producers should be telling the union how many people that takes.

trendspotting: music without earphones

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

i’ve seen this enough recently that i think it’s a trend-in-waiting.

after years and years of everyone wearing headphones and listening to their own music in their own world, i’m seeing a growing number of younguns going headphoneless on the subway. not with big boom boxes, but with small devices with a small external speaker.

i kind of like it, as long as it’s occasional and not too ubiquitous. i don’t mind listening to snatches of music that i’d never hear otherwise. and i like it when people figure out slightly subversive ways to buck the current trend. my biggest objection is that the speakers are of such crappy quality that the music sounds awful — i’m guessing that the volume is maxed out so the speakers sound blown.

now, if this ranges toward half the world carrying boom boxes on the subway and turning them up loudly, then i’m going to have a problem. and i’m most definitely in the minority on this, i’m sure. but on a small scale, i’m ok with the concept.

those demonic black-clad youth

~ jamie ~ Leave a comment

from a news article about the school shootings in cleveland:

Coon, who was white, stood out in the predominantly black school for dressing in a goth style, wearing a black trench coat, black boots, a dog collar and chains, she said….Police believe Coon, wearing a Marilyn Manson shirt, black jeans and black nail polish, targeted the two teachers he shot Wednesday.

why is it that all these kids who shoot people in school are always dressed in black?

it isn’t, that’s why. it just sticks out in your mind that they are, because the press always notes the clothing and style of the kid when it doesn’t conform to their perception of societal norms.

what does dressed in black have to do with his motives for committing the crime? absolutely nothing. maybe, however, this has something to do with it:

The Department of Children and Family Services was called to Coon’s home in 2000 because he had burns on his arms and scratches on his forehead, the newspaper said.

maybe someone should have spent more time on that. but why bother, you know. the weirdo dresses in black and listens to marilyn manson. try to ignore him.

it’s easier.

SNL Digital Short – ‘I Ran’

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

another in a series of andy samberg shorts for saturday night live, in case you missed it. this one’s called “i ran”, and imagines a love story between samberg and mahmoud ahmadinejad of iran, where by ahmadinejad’s account there are no homosexuals.

hilarious stuff, and i love how samberg does this without a trace of irony and with no knowing winks, which of course makes it all the more ironic, and definitely not homophobic.

and a hell of a catchy tune as well.

unsolicited recommendation: buynlarge.com

~ jamie ~ 1 Comment

via kottke, the “secret site” for the upcoming new movie “wall-e” from pixar.

i generally hate it when companies do crap like trying to make me “discover” their site to accomplish their guerilla/word-of-mouth marketing campaign objectives, but this site is exceedingly well done and a riot to click through.

it interests me that the movie will have no dialogue. i’ll have to see how they accomplish that, but given the complexities of a worldwide movie release, it’s a strategy that’s brilliant in its simplicity.