Swag the blog

Some posts lifted from Outside the Box on Variety.com:

Little Ditty About Jack & Diane, ...

... Two American kids, playing in the Hamptons. Entitled "Something's Gotta Give" (in which there is an unseemly allusion to a collision of seams and middle-age spread), we think we're entitled to note the irony in this swag from a movie about AARP-aged movie stars Nicholson and Keaton falling in love. The studio learns movie-goers are happy to see all women naked -- so, logically -- Sony swags clothing.

No school marmy rap across the knuckles from us for "gotta," because bad grammar do marketing good since Winston's less than Churchillian ad campaign.

Is this another movie (alluded to here) with a title taken from a song that doesn't appear in the film?

Uniqueableness: C+; A baseball T-shirt is a pleasant, if slight, verge from the norm.

Qualitativity: B+; Yeah, they're above average.

Communitably-minded: A+; We can put a robot on Mars, but technology does not yet provide the means to have a "no sweat shop" label mean you won't sweat while shopping. It does show that while studios have huge piles of cash to make movies, someone working there knows folks who make their swag will need a small pile of cash of their own to go out to see the movie. Win-Win. About some other brands? Just ask this guy (surprisingly NSFW); no smarmy rap for him either.

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Eat Me

When Alice descended down the rabbit hole and into the looking glass of Wonderland, it came after undergoing a transforming experience of perception and reality brought about by drinking and eating things that said "Drink me" and "Eat me," consumed with a quality of faith generally unknown in real life until the cultural phenomenon of Deadheads. But now, no doubt as the result of molecular bio-chemistry, crop hybridization, micro-mechanical superchip engineering and even truth-in-packaging laws, consumers are pre-informed of the visual excursions to come. Truly, it's a leap forward in the technology of recreational hallucinogenics ... a wonderland, indeed.

This advance comes on the occasion of the DVD release of Disney's "Alice in Wonderland" and the connection between eating swagged cookies and seeing the animated classic, although probably not causal, is clearly inevitable. It's a Mrs. Beasley's Iced Scanned Cookie that conveys the data in a low-res manner, seen better here.

Story author Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) was a photography pioneer, making portraits including Alice Liddel, a relationship referenced in song. Evidence suggests though, older sister Ina may have instead had his eye.

"Alice" caught the eye of every era's top illustrators, from Sir John Tenniel in 1856, to 1904, to 1, 2, 3 in 1907 (when British copyright expired), to 1914, to Disney's in 1951, to 1966, Salvador Dali in 1969, to 1982 (by Barry Moser, about whom there's a docu), and someday (who knows what will pop-up?), plus in 3-D CG.

Book was born of its time and this pulls the story into the 21st Century and this looks at Disneyland in the mid-20th. There's deep cultural impact from Dodgson's tome obviously; eventhough "Wonderland" is named after a street's murder scene, and "Next Stop ..." named after a dog track/train station and used as a metaphor here: 1, 2, 3, 4 (docu with Zippy creator), yet the term "wonderland" predates Carroll's use by at least 66 years.

So far, we referenced sex and drugs and for the whole Ian Drury triumvirate (not Triumvirat) -- we find rock'n'roll collides with "Alice" repeatedly. Of course this classic, but remember the hoopla about Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" synching up with "The Wizard of Oz," as if in a hand-cued LP & pre-VHS era any rock band would ... let alone could ... key an album's worth of songs' music and lyrics -- sprocket by sprocket, groove by groove -- to a film. Yet some hunt for synchronizations again and again. "Alice" is #14.

Likewise some search Disney films to see if animators have slipped a Mickey in (how?), specifically into "Alice in Wonderland."

Function fulfilling focus: B-; Even before visual-inducing swag, people viewing film have been seeing things and hearing things of dubious reality for quite some time.