Movie Marketing Madness: Tideland

There was a point, I think just in the last year or so, where my attitude toward Terry Gilliam changed. Not my opinion of his owrk, mind you, but of the artist himself. I used to buy completely into the “no studio gets my sensibilities which is why i work outside the system” line advanced by Gilliam himself but now think the reality is closer to “I’m an eccentric wacko who makes it up as he goes along and no studio is crazy enough to finance that.” That doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s not a great director and a true visionary – he’s definitely both. It just means that I think he gets himself into the trouble he’s always complaining about.

His latest film, which looks like a return to form, is Tideland. Jeff Bridges plays a father who takes his young daughter on a “vacation” which consists of him taking her to a house out in the middle of nowhere and then shooting up drugs. That means she needs to find her own forms of entertainment. This being a Gilliam film that involves fairies, talking doll heads and other trips into the little girl’s imagination. It’s basically an excuse for Gilliam to create the odd characters and unique environments he’s so well known for.

The Poster

I like how the visual on this poster makes the intentions of the movie very clear. The girl’s world has, quite literally, been turned upside down. It’s quite unique, it seems to me, how much real estate has been given over to the darker colors on the poster, specifically the underground dirt at the top of the poster. It takes up more than half of the available space. Even if it didn’t have Gilliam’s name on it, you’d probably be able to tell it’s his work. By the way, the tagline is awesome. You have to see it to believe it.

The Trailer

Again, this is obviously a Gilliam flick. It’s very clear that this is a movie about the heights and depths of a young girl’s imagination. Jeff Bridges is only seen briefly, most notably bringing his disappointed daughter to their new home and then shooting up heroin as he announces it’s time for his vacation. Aside from that the main focus is on the characters that inhabite Jeliza-Rose’s mind, keep her company and take her on a series of adventures. I love the rich visual look that the film has that is able to turn the real world into something wonderfully surreal.

Online

That line about the squirrels resurfaces as soon as you open up the site, which is once again fantastic. Once you enter the site proper you see that it’s laid out like a map of the home Jeliza-Rose and her father come to inhabit. There are no clear labels on anything so you kind of have to just click and explore. It’s worth it, though. There’s really no way to categorize or organize the site’s contents. Scattered and hidden behind maps and radios and staircases you’ll find a Synopsis, Cast and Crew bios, Screensavers, Wallpaper, Production Notes in PDF form, a Photo Gallery and more. There’s honestly not that much that’s unique or original about the content but when it’s packaged in such an innovative and interesting way it almost doesn’t matter. It does a very good job of pulling you into the experience and encouraging you to go back to a previous screen to see what else you might click to find something new. A great, fun departure from most standard websites of late.

Overall

Well, it’s certainly a Gilliam film, and the campaign sells it to the Gilliam faithful. Everything about the campaign is designed to bear the director’s signature, even if his name isn’t on it. The poster and trailer are wonderful and loopy but the website is really a piece of work. It actually makes the craziness of the rest of the campaign – and the movie in general – seem more grounded by giving you something you can dig into.

Movie Marketing Madness: Infamous

Here’s a tricky situation: How do you market a movie that is almost guaranteed to provoke people to ask themselves, “Didn’t this come out last year?” That’s the position Warner Independent Pictures finds itself in with the release of Infamous. The movie chronicles author Truman Capote’s research into and writing of his book “In Cold Blood” and examines the New York celebrity world he lived in. Sound familiar? It should since this is the same territory covered by Sony Classics last Fall in their movie Capote, which starred Philip Seymour Hoffman and which won him an Academy Award. Infamous was actually originally intended for release around the same time as Capote but ultimately was pulled. Better to cause some deja vu as opposed to confusion, I suppose.

Infamous stars Toby Jones as Capote and Sandra Bulluck as fellow writer Harper Lee. Once again we track Capote as he investigates the murder of a rural Kansas family by two escaped criminals. The story intrigues him and pulls him away from the high-society life he lives to find out what brought to commit such crimes. Of course, Capote, a short, effeminate homosexual from New York, does not exactly blend into the Heartland, a fact that hampers his research to some extent.

The Poster

You can tell from the poster that, despite the identical subject matter, the tone of the movie is going to be a bit different. Where the Capote poster was monochromatic, austere and featured Hoffman standing in a farm field, this one is a bit more flashy. It shows Jones’ face with a world of beautiful, infamous (sorry) and interesting people circling around him. It shows how this movie will focus more on that New York lifestyle he lives as opposed to being solely about his travels and research. It’s also a better mechanism for spotlighting the all star cast that appears in the movie. Jones also looks much more flamboyant and less dour than Hoffman did. Overall it does a very good job of differentiating this movie from the previous Capote flick.

The Trailer

The trailer is pretty much just what you’d expect from the poster and and once again clearly positions Infamous as being a different movie from Capote. Jones cuts a much more mannered portrait of Capote as opposed to Hoffman’s mostly internalized performance. I really don’t have much to add since the trailer does the same things as the poster does and in the same manner. Good stuff.

Online

The best parts of the official website are definitely the Production Notes and the Gallery.  The Prod Notes are lengthy, detailed and really enhance the reader’s understanding of the world of the movie quite a bit. The rest of the website is pretty standard, if dressed up a bit nicer than usual, but the Production Notes are fantastic and I love the design of the Gallery and how it starts off as a wall of portraits. Very nice design.

The rest of the site is fairly standard in content though very well laid out. You get the usual Cast & Crew bios and backgrounders and Downloads. Multimedia is a tad redundant since all that’s in there is the trailer and right next to it on the menu is the Trailer. The only difference is that when you click the Trailer link you get a pop-up stand-alone player.

Overall

As I said, the movie had one major factor going for it as a differentiator between it and Capote: It’s focus on the New York life lead by the characters. Fortunately it plays that up to tremendous effect. Everything about the campaign brings you into the world of nightclubs, starlets, unfulfilled society women and the other aspects of Capote’s life. It works very well at being different enough from its predecessor to generate interest among fans of the first movie.

LOTD: October 11 – Picking on stuff edition

You’ll figure out the theme pretty quickly, trust me.

• Fast Company’s blog picks up on how Universal Music’s eLabs EVP Amanda Marks iwas talking about how P2P was “irrelevant.” Umm, yeah. Apparently, she doesn’t spend much time on the torrent servers. Sorry, no soup for you.
• Good job, Google. You’ve just picked up YouTube. Are you going to Disneyworld? Nah, says Paul La Monica at CNNMoney, because the next bubble is in online video, of course. Oh, okay. Maybe Google will make it to Disneyworld, but no one else will be there.
• So, Yahoo!, now that Google’s gone and done something big, what are you gonna do? Man, let’s not forget they picked up broadcast.com WAY before any of this stuff was hot, okay.
• Sorry, Microsoft. You’re trying really, really hard to make things work, especially with regard to RSS and such. But it’s not cutting it, at least in the eyes of Andy Lark, who sees some issues with how various tools are integrating with Outlook, IE7, etc.

So much for Writely – but yay for Google

I’ve been using Writely, the online word processing program, for a while now. I love having all – or at least most of the functionality of a word processing program online. Earlier this year Writely was bought by Google and then a couple weeks ago they finally integrated with the Google accounts of its users. But that didn’t change much about the look and feel of the system.

Until today. This morning when I went to writely.com it redirected to docs.google.com. All my documents were there, just as they had been, along with the Google Spreadsheets I had in my account. This is just the sort of integrated functionality I’ve been looking for from Google since I can now access my Calendar, Docs and Picasa photos all from the Gmail page I open as soon as I sit down at the computer.

Great move by Google to make sure their features are as easy to use as possible. As more of us spend out entire days online using Web 2.0-ish apps this a handy way to put everything Google offers in one convenient place.