Movie site Mubi makes the argument that there is a surprising uniformity to the poster designs for many recent high school comedies and quirky indie films, one that might be traced back to the 2004 quirky indie high school comedy “Napoleon Dynamite”:

“[A] cut-and-paste combination of photographs of actors surrounded by absent-minded doodles (and preferably on a backing of lined or graph paper) has become de rigeur for advertising high school comedies. It’s also become a staple of the quirky urban indie (and occasional doc) where the protagonists are set against whimsically sketched city skylines. And of course hand lettered title treatments are also mandatory…”

I think I was somewhat aware this was the case but seeing all of these collected together brings the trend into sharp relief.

Of course, that’s not to say that this trend is bad. This hand-drawn quality is certainly a step up in imagination from the otherwise dominant trend of floating heads in movie posters.

See more examples and read Mubi’s full write-up at their blog.

Jump to this link

A catalog of all of the cars that cartoonist Hergé drew in his immortal (if flawed) Tintin comics series — matched up with photographs of their real world equivalents. See the obsessiveness in full here. (Via Swiss Cheese and Bullets.)

Jump to this link

At first glance, what interests me the most about Apple’s just-announced iPad 2 is its innovative new “Smart Cover,” which fastens to magnets built into the frame of the new tablet, allowing easy removal. When closed, the cover puts the device to sleep, and when opened and folded back, it forms a triangular base upon which the device can rest. Through and through, this strikes me as a truly clever design, the kind of protective layer that only Apple — and none of the third party case manufacturers vying for this market — can come up with, because they can make all the pieces fit together. It also strikes me as the kind of intelligent engineering that Apple should be coming up with, meaning it corrects the blight on industrial design that was Apple’s old iPad cover, a chintzy, polyurethane rain slicker of a cover; I found it ill-fitting, remarkably un-Apple like in nearly every way. It always seemed to me more like something you’d find sold under a generic or unfamiliar brand name at Staples than something designed in Cupertino. Good riddance.

The new Smart Cover has its own marketing page here, where a video shows it in action.

Jump to this link

Magazine designer and enthusiast Jeremy Leslie is pessimistic about the iPad’s prospects for reviving the magazine form:

“The main issue is that readers — paying or not — aren’t engaging with overtly magazine-like apps. There’s a simple reason for this: printed magazines work better in every way. They are a simple one-off purchase that can be used (both in a navigating and reading sense) anywhere. They are lightweight, easily shared and disposable. You’ve heard the arguments plenty of times but this first year of apps have done nothing to weaken them. Why would you buy an app when it only repeats the printed magazine?”

Obviously, I agree.

Jump to this link

Music writer Steven Hyden muses on his experience reviewing Radiohead’s latest album, especially with regard to how long and how often a reviewer should spend with each record. It’s a really thoughtful rumination on how we experience music and how that can make writing about it difficult:

“But the tricky thing about music writing — and part of what makes it the trickiest form of arts writing, in my opinion — is that a good piece of music should elicit varying responses over spans of time and in all sorts of environments. Unlike books, movies, or TV shows, songs are supposed to be experienced many, many times… Music by nature is a slow burn, parsing out its charms in small increments over the course of weeks, years, even decades. Music can be the focus of your attention, but it often fades into the background, only to re-emerge when you least expect it and reveal a whole other dimension. No other art form weaves its way into the fabric of your life like music, and this inevitably shapes our feelings about it.”

Hyden’s point, in part, is that “The King of Limbs” demands at least several listens, but that imperative of sustained experience makes it so subjective to write about — the opinions he formed just before writing his review may not be accurate based on another week or two of listening. And besides, who has the room in their life to spend so much time with an album, anyway? Read his complete, very thoughtful essay here.

For my part I’ve been listening to “The King of Limbs” regularly since its release and have come to the conclusion that it’s not their best work by a long shot. It’s a bit disjointed: the most interesting parts aren’t as good as the best Radiohead, and the most typically Radiohead parts aren’t very interesting.

Jump to this link