The Goodgerman wasn't really that scary

After years of anticipation, I finally saw The Goodgerman today.

What? That's not the correct title? It's actually called The Good German?

Ah, that explains why it was about Allied-occupied Germany in the summer of 1945, not about a horrifying creature who goes bump in the night.

What the hell are you talking about, Vance?

When Steven Soderbergh's The Good German came out in 2006, the ads included the film's website. The website was (and still is) http://thegoodgerman.warnerbros.com/. However, it was easy to just omit the space between "good" and "german," and think of it as The Goodgerman. Which is how I've referred to it ever since.

Can't you just hear the announcer?

"Close your doors. Shut your windows. And most of all ... don't go to sleep. Because if you do, you'll be visited by ... The Goodgerman."

Who knows what the Goodgerman does. I don't think we want to know. It's that bad. He's like the Boogeyman, but much, much worse. What does it mean to "goodger" someone? You don't want to know.

Okay, so I actually saw The Good German. And it was only alright. At the end, I couldn't decide whether it was a marginal thumbs up or a marginal thumbs down, though I certainly appreciate the effort that went into making it look like an actual black & white film from the 1940s.

One major complaint that has little to do with the movie -- this was the second video I've gotten from the library in the last two weeks (the first being The Terminal) that contained only the standard viewing format, no widescreen. Each time I get stuck with a DVD like this, I always wonder why it's even worth it for them to press a version of the DVD that has only the standard option available. Haven't we, as a film-watching society, graduated to the point yet where we no longer think "the DVD is broken" if there's a black bar at the top and bottom of the screen?

No, the breakfast cereal

This past weekend, I saw the trailer for Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus for the second or third time. It looks exquisitely colorful and genuinely inventive. Looks like the good Gilliam rather than the bad Gilliam, who shows up much more often these days. Still not sure exactly how they will integrate Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell with the character Heath Ledger was playing when he died, but then again, even if they can't, that will make it only the fourth most confusing film Gilliam has directed.

For the first time I noticed the website listed at the end:

www.theimaginariumofdoctorparnassusmovie.com

Yeah, that's one heckuva URL.

What I immediately thought was: "The title is already an unwieldy 31 letters long" -- I didn't count at that exact moment -- "and they already spell out the word 'doctor' instead of abbreviating it.

"Why also add the word 'movie' at the end??"

I mean, it's not like you're going to confuse it for some other Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus that's not a movie. They really needed to clarify, because otherwise you might end up at

www.theimaginariumofdoctorparnassusrestaurant.com

or

www.theimaginariumofdoctorparnassusthemepark.com

or maybe

www.theuniversityoftheimaginariumofdoctorparnassusatmrmagoriumswonderemporium.com

or even

(wait for it)

www.theimaginariumofdoctorparnassusbreakfastcereal.com

I understand if it's a movie like Push, or Cars, or the Eddie Murphy-Martin Lawrence classic Life. You can't just tell people to go to www.life.com, because that takes them to Life magazine's website. But throw in the word "movie," and presto -- you're at a website that's kind of hard to believe still exists, or ever existed, for that ten-year-old movie directed by the late Ted Demme.

But The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus? There's nothing that can be confused with.

What strikes me as especially funny is that Sony Pictures does not actually own the URL without the word "movie" in it. That's what's so stupid about including the word "movie" in the first place -- you are going to buy up all the related website names anyway, and have them redirect to your main site, so you can capture the crowd that's just guessing at what the main URL might be.

But when you go to www.theimaginariumofdoctorparnassus.com, a cheery message greets you with

http://www.theimaginariumofdoctorparnassus.com is for sale!

If you are interested in buying please contact William [at] dawgcms [dot] com

Which means that either Sony wanted to buy the URL but had it held for ransom by this William character, or they never cared anyway and he took it to make mischief. Nothing (except Sony's lawyers) to stop William from turning it into a page of dominatrixes defecating on monkeys.

So let's see what happens on some similar URLs:

www.imaginariumofdoctorparnassus.com (no "the"): "This portion of the requested page has been blocked. Click here for details."

www.imaginariumofdrparnassus.com (no "the," "doctor" abbreviated): A "support site" for the movie -- in other words, a fan page.

www.theimaginariumofdrparnassus.com ("the" included, "doctor" still abbreviated): This calls itself "The official Dr. Parnassus webpage," but really all it is is a Quicktime movie of the "UK trailer," with a link to Twitter at the bottom

www.doctorparnassus.com: Same as the one immediately above, though this time the banner says that it is "Coming Soon"

www.imaginarium.com: Redirects to Toys R Us. Ha!

www.theimaginarium.com: Redirects to ZenHQ, "Film Production and Producer Services in Cape Town, South Africa"

www.theimaginariumofdoctorparnassus.org: Server not found

www.theimaginariumofdoctorparnassus.gov: Server not found

www.theimaginariumofdoctorparnassus.edu: Server not found

www.theimaginariumofdrparnassusmovie.com ("doctor" abbreviated only): Redirects to Sony's site. Whew!

I guess I shouldn't find it so strange. After all, there's precedent. Sony is only following the example set by www.theenglishmanwhowentupahillbutcamedowna mountainmovie.com and www.boratculturallearningsofamericaformakebenefitgloriousnationofkazakhstanmovie.com.

And why not?

No, I'm not

The first time I remember a movie website whose URL was something other than www.[moviename] -movie.com was The Matrix back in 1999. As you may remember, information about this ground-breaking film could be found at www.whatisthematrix.com. In fact, the site is still going strong.

And something about that website made everything a little more intriguing, didn't it? "Yeah, what the hell is the matrix?" You really wanted to know.

Countless movies have followed this trend since then, some of them bold enough to not even include the title in the address. I wish I'd kept track of them, because at this point, it's hard to recall them, and I don't know of a good way to search for them, either. I guess I don't go to movie websites all that much, even if some of them are really cool.

And so I can't discuss this trend with my usual cavalcade of evidence. But I can pick on the latest movie to follow it poorly: the recently released Obsessed.

If you want to use the worldwide interwebs to find out information about Obsessed, you go to www.areyouobsessed.com.

Blog interactivity compells me to do so, but I hate making this a link that you can click on from my post. I don't think you should go to this website. Not only is this supposed to be a really bad movie, but it's a damn stupid URL.

First off, it ascribes a certain grandiosity to what seems to be a pretty pedestrian thriller, just an interracial Fatal Attraction. With The Matrix, it made sense, as the Wachowski brothers were really introducing us to a whole new world. It's even more appropriate in retrospect, as The Matrix became easily one of the most influential films of the last ten years. (It's actually just about a month past being ten years old). Not only that, but the website itself heightened the themes of the film, gave you a sense of the big brother eeriness of a computer network that controls us all.

Obsessed? What are we supposed to learn here? It's pretty much just the story, cast and crew. And oh wait, there's a chat window that pops up from Ali Larter's character, that makes you think for a moment you might have ended up on some kind of social networking site that might be reading and stealing information from your computer.

Then there's the problem with the question itself. Do you want to be obsessed? Isn't that a bad thing? Do you really want to be psychologically aligned with a stalker who has potentially murderous intent? What's more, the website lets you figure out whether you are or not. There's a lame eight-question quiz that's supposed to help you determine your level of obsession with a person that may actually exist in your world. It's meant mostly to be whimsical -- I took the multiple-choice quiz, answering each question with the most stalkerish answer of the bunch, and at the end they told me that "Your crush might want to call the cops! You are over-the-top obsessed!" I'm fine with that being tongue-in-cheek, but doesn't it undercut the mood this film is trying to create? It's a thriller, not a comedy.

Then again, from what I've heard about it, maybe it's an unintentional comedy.