A small study in promotion

As I mentioned earlier, this week I posted an feature-length entry to Slackerwood: Kevin Smith broke my (red carpet) cherry. I was very proud of this entry, and I wanted to promote it as much as I could. Slackerwood doesn’t have a lot of traffic yet, so it would be easy to promote the Kevin Smith entry in several different ways, then use the stats to see which ways were most effective.
Here’s how I promoted the entry:

  • Posted to local portals Austin Bloggers and Austin Stories.
  • Posted a link in an online forum I read and post to regularly.
  • Posted a link to the ThreeWay Action portal.
  • Posted entries at Digg and Netscape, two sites where readers can vote on the entries they like.
  • Posted a link to a John Scalzi thread dedicated to people “pimping their links”
  • Posted a link here on Celluloid Eyes.
  • Sent a notify list email message with the link.

I checked my stats on Saturday morning to see the results. Here are the hit counts from the referrer logs:

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RSS feed changed and other site news

If you subscribe to my RSS feed with Bloglines or another reader, this is important news. I changed my RSS feed. Here’s the new feed:
http://celluloideyes.com/atom.xml
If you’re using Bloglines, you should resubscribe and select the above feed. The old feed is still around but it’s going away soon. (And if you’re not using Bloglines or an RSS reader, let me just say that I can’t recommend it enough — it’s much better than using the notify list.)
The new feed will give you the entire entry, not just an excerpt. I like reading entries directly from Bloglines, so I figure I should offer the kind of RSS feed that I myself prefer. Also, the Beau was helping me with some other site changes and asked if I wanted it changed.
You might notice some other improvements to the site. You can now view archives by category, using the pull-down menu in the left sidebar. I linked to the Theatrical Reviews category in the right sidebar, so you (and I) can find those easily. And if you want to read the movie reviews I’ve posted to Cinematical, I’ve added a page where I’m tracking those, which is also linked in the right sidebar. I hope these changes help … let me know if you encounter any problems.
And many, many thanks to the Beau, who spent a lot of time this morning cleaning up messes on this site and improving things.

Welcome to Slackerwood

I’d like to introduce my latest Web site: Slackerwood, which is focused on Austin film news and features. The site has been up and running for a month or so, but I wanted to wait to hype it until I had a nice juicy feature story to promote. And I do:
Kevin Smith broke my (red carpet) cherry
I hope to post regular features like the above to Slackerwood, as well as information on upcoming Austin screenings and interesting local movie news. At some point, I hope the site will have additional writers, because I can’t catch every single special screening in town. Ideally, I’d like to post news items to Slackerwood daily, but I haven’t quite reached that point yet.
Celluloid Eyes isn’t going away. The Austin-related film entries will be posted to Slackerwood, but I’ll still post general film reviews and features here.
I came up with the idea for Slackerwood earlier this year when I realized that it was difficult to find information about Austin film events and screenings in a single place. Since then, the Statesman has started their Austin Movie Blog, which includes a lot of useful information, especially Austin release dates for independent films. I also decided that I didn’t have time to track and post a database of every single local film event and screening … yes, Austin really does have that many. I think that selecting a few to highlight, and posting features about the Austin film scene, will work well for Slackerwood.
Anyway, go visit Slackerwood if you haven’t already. Feel free to post comments, link to the site anywhere and everywhere, and spread the word. I’m excited about the future of Slackerwood.

Clerks II (2006)

Clerks II: 2006, dir. Kevin Smith. Seen at Galaxy Highland (press screening).
I’ve been waiting for years to see someone rework a Thirties screwball comedy film in contemporary terms. Friends and I have argued about whether it is even possible: whether the old-fashioned screwball comedy is dead and buried, a product of its time. So it was a complete surprise to encounter a movie with a plot lifted straight from His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby in the most unlikely place … Clerks II, Kevin Smith’s sequel to his 1994 first feature.
I never in my life thought I would be referring to one of Kevin Smith’s as reminiscent of Howard Hawks … although Hawks never included expressions like “cock-stain”. But then I never imagined myself sitting in a theater at the end of Clerks II thinking, “Oh, my God. He just remade The Front Page, but with fast food instead of journalism,” and subsequently picking up my jaw from the floor at the very idea.
I heard Smith speak about this film earlier in the year. He claimed that he wanted to make a movie that Clerks fans would enjoy, and to hell with everyone else. (I am sure Smith said something cruder than “to hell” but you get the idea. If my mom ever met him she would stuff three bars of soap in his mouth within five minutes.) I have no strong feelings about Clerks — I didn’t understand all the hype, and found some of it annoying (the film’s attitude towards females), although there were parts that I liked very much (the hockey game). I liked Chasing Amy and Dogma much better. Clerks II seems to be much closer in spirit and tone to Chasing Amy.

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An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

An Inconvenient Truth: 2006, dir. Davis Guggenheim. Seen on June 30 (Alamo South Lamar).
An Inconvenient Truth reminded me in many ways of Spalding Gray’s one-man film Swimming to Cambodia. The premise sounds totally non-cinematic, but that somehow works: a guy talks to us for nearly two hours. Gray told us entertaining stories, while Al Gore shows us statistics and gives us scientific proof about the effects of global warming.
I read Susie Bright’s review of An Inconvenient Truth, which dismissed the global-warming information in the film as being too obvious — that everyone knows this stuff. She felt the film was meant as Presidential propaganda for Gore. I’ve heard a couple of other people with similar opinions about Gore and the film.
I would disagree on this point. Of course many of us already know that global warming is a problem that we need to solve, that we need to stop ignoring in the hopes that it will go away. But for me, seeing the statistics, the photos of diminishing ice caps, the dire forecasts, right there on a nice big screen did make a difference.

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A Prairie Home Companion (2006)

A Prairie Home Companion: 2006, dir. Robert Altman. Seen on June 24, 2006 (Dobie Egyptian Room).
Neither the Beau nor I were eager to see A Prairie Home Companion, but it was our only choice for a non-stupid comedy over the weekend. We aren’t huge Altman devotees (although I’m quite fond of MASH), and we’ve never been fans of the radio show, but wanted a light, smart movie to watch in a theater. A Prairie Home Companion was just right for meeting those expectations.
A Prairie Home Companion is an offshoot of Garrison Keillor’s radio show. In the movie, Keillor plays himself, G.K., the host of a live radio show that is giving what may be its last performance before new owners of the venerable old theater knock it down for a parking lot. Some of the musical acts on the show include Lefty and Dusty (John C. Reilly and Woody Harrelson), the Johnson Sisters (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin), and Chuck Akers (L.Q. Jones). Meanwhile, detective wanna-be Guy Noir (Kevin Kline) has spotted an unusual backstage guest … the mysterious Dangerous Woman (Virginia Madsen). Can she somehow help save the theater and the radio show? Will the heartless new owner (Tommy Lee Jones) really go through with it? And what’s been going on between G.K. and Streep’s character, anyway?

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a genuine movie-critic moment

My boyfriend and I were talking about my reading tomorrow night at BookWoman and where it was being advertised and how and he asked me, “Have you Googled yourself lately?” He told me that when he Googled me as “Jette Kernion” he found all sorts of interesting links. He was impressed that sites promoting movies had excerpted my reviews and/or linked to the reviews, even if they weren’t positive. That’s been happening to me for awhile, since SXSW 2005. But The Beau’s comments intrigued me, and I decided to do my own Google search under “Jette Kernion,” since usually I do vanity searches only under my last name, or with some other combination of search terms.
The Beau was right — there were more links to my reviews than I remembered from sites for specific movies. This seems to happen most with SXSW films that don’t yet have distribution and that are eager to highlight any kind of recognition or publicity from critics. I was pleased, but not particularly surprised.
Then I found this page. Scroll down a bit and you’ll find a quote lifted from my review. Read the quote carefully.
Now go read my actual review of that film. (It’s a short one, trust me.)
To quote myself (accurately this time), I couldn’t stop laughing. This is the first time someone has ever truncated a fairly negative review of mine to make it sound positive. I may not be at Cannes right now, but I feel more like an influential film critic than ever before. What’s next, will local theater owners start throwing pies at me?

a very Weird Wednesday indeed

I have been saying for years that I need to see a Weird Wednesday movie at Alamo Drafthouse Downtown. How can I resist a free movie, even at midnight? I used to have the excuse of a day job with regular hours, which made midnight movies impractical. However, since I’m freelancing right now, that excuse won’t work. I’ve had to resort to the excuse that I am not as young as I was and it’s hard to stay up that late and enjoy a movie. Yeah, that’s pretty lame too.
Last week I was unable to refuse. First of all, I may be returning to work full-time in an office, so I may have only a limited time left to see midnight movies during the week. I don’t want to look back and realize how dumb I was to miss such a good opportunity. Second of all, the movie was one I wanted to see at any time of day: Hells Angels on Wheels, the 1967 biker film directed by Richard Rush, starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Roarke. I am a big fan of Rush’s dark comedy The Stunt Man, and I’d just seen another Rush film starring Roarke at QT Fest, The Savage Seven. Then I heard that the film’s stunt coordinator, Gary Kent, would be at the midnight screening. I had nothing scheduled for Thursday morning, and I took a little nap on Wednesday afternoon to prepare. I was ready for Weird Wednesday.

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Art School Confidential (2006)

Art School Confidential: 2006, dir. Terry Zwigoff. Seen May 14 (Alamo South Lamar).
I wanted to see Art School Confidential with The Beau, and he checked Rotten Tomatoes beforehand, as he hadn’t heard much about the film. The rating was low (in the low 30s) and he looked pretty skeptical. But I had read a positive review that caught my interest, and anyway it was the only movie playing at the time that looked at all funny. Wary but hopeful, we decided to give it a shot.
I can see that if you’d been expecting something along the lines of Ghost World, Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes’s earlier film, you might find Art School Confidential disappointing. Some reviewers assumed the movie would be a scathing, insightful, in-depth critique of the art world, and then were upset when they found out that it’s not. It is a smart person’s dumb comedy, and if you watch the movie with those expectations, it can be quite enjoyable. The movie more closely resembles The Freshman, the 1990 Matthew Broderick/Marlon Brando comedy about an NYU film student who becomes entangled in organized crime, than it does Ghost World.

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