Quips notes 26.10.04

In putting together the reviews for the movies that I'd checked out recently - namely, 'Surviving Christmas', 'I Heart Huckabees', 'The Grudge', and 'Luther' - I was reminded of why it's sometimes fun to take that experience of paying the price of admission and facing the consequences of that decision beyond simply going to the movie theatre. After seeing a flick, it's fun to discover the story behind that big screen story, and how it's been elaborated upon on the web by those involved.

That's definitely true with 'I Heart Huckabees'. Four websites have been created for it, outside of the usual one that studios will normally cobble together to promote their latest releases. In this case, each separate site represents and reflects the over-all personality of the three main organizations and one of the supporting characters featured in that picture. The results are mixed, but enjoyable. Here are the links:

http://www.huckabees.com
http://www.jaffeandjaffe.com
http://www.open-spaces.org
http://tommycorn.blogspot.com

Usually, the sites that are put together by the studios are so heavily bloated with Flash animation that I can't really be bothered to invest time trying to find out what's there, let alone look for useful info that might work in the movie review I plan to write. That's pretty well what ended up happening with 'Luther'. I gave up waiting for useful things to transpire shortly after it started loading a blank page with a lot more blankness and nothing else. Sending me back to checking around through a couple of my favourite reference websites for info. Here are the links, including one found through Wikipedia that's relevent and was very useful:

http://www.google.ca/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/web/ninetyfive.html

Of course, the website I usually rely on the most for general info is still The Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com/). It's heavily commercialized, but it's a great source for finding most character names, the production crew names and bios, and info about the actors and related movies that I may decide to cite while writing each review. Nothing completely replaces taking notes during the screening itself, but this site is a close second to that for my purposes.

Thanks for checking in.