Whoever designed the Sundance Film Festival website should be fired. Now.

The festival website has always been abysmal, with irritating floating elements that block the text, bug-ridden javascript, frames, annoying videos, excessive and pointless imagery, and pathetic server performance. Every sin of bad web design has been violated in a most heinous and unforgivable way.

This year, the design gurus of the Sundance site (actually, I suspect they are aspiring gaffers or key grips) show that they are completely unrepentant. The 2008 film fest website is as unuseable as any in recent years. Bravo.

Today I was trying to look up what films had been announced. You would think information like this would be front and center at a website for a FILM FESTIVAL.

I waited and waited for a javascript to load from their webstats server (http://webstat.sundance.org/ntpagetag.js), which rendered all other interactive elements on the page inoperative. This include things like all links and navigation.
Stoopid.

Aside: Yes, for all you B-listers hoping for a glance of Paris Hilton, films are actually shown during Sundance. Peel your face off the windows of the swag houses, take some super-B vitamins for your ailing liver and go see some. I promise you they will be at least as interesting as whatever ridiculous outfit fashion misfit Bai Ling throws together to walk through the snow.*

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* On a related note: a few years ago, I was up on Woodside chopping ice and trying to find a place for my friend to park her truck. She’s pretty tough and doesn’t take much shit from people. My friend had pulled over into a snow drift to let another car pass (Woodside Ave is a nightmare in mid-winter).

Paris Hilton and her boytoy of the moment walked up the 2nd street stairs onto Woodside towards their Land Rover. To his credit, BoyToy asked my friend if she was stuck, not that he’d be of much help in his $12,000 virgin rhino loafers. Not knowing the royalty to which she was speaking, my friend asked incredulously, “Am I stuck”?

You could hear the follow up hanging in the air even if it wasn’t spoken: “What, are you stupid? Does it look like I’m stuck”? Too funny.

Another Oscar movie I saw after the fact.

Hilarious mockudrama about the movie industry. It’s got to be doubly hilarious for those that actually work in the ‘biz. But if they take themselves as seriously as they’re portrayed in this movie, they might not even get it.

Wow! Had I seen this movie before the Oscars, there is NO WAY I would have lost so badly in our private balloting. It would have been “Pan’s Labyrinth” all the way down the line except for those categories with Little Miss Sunshine.

Toddopsis: The line between reality and fantasy is blurred by a little girl trying to cope with the horrors of war.

Tagline: Sometimes the greatest journey is the distance between two people

A sad story of a dedicated scientist (Ed Norton) working to cure the world’s ills. Boo hoo. Noami Watts plays the un-dedicated wife Kitty Fane, the destination of the journey.

Sometimes I confuse John Travolta with Tom Cruise, usually at upscale cocktail parties when the conversation turns to disecting the pop-culture relevance of Pulp Fiction vs. Top Gun. This is indeed “Risky Business” and not a mistake easily reconciled when wooing the model-types with my discussion of science (believe it or not, invoking the good name of scientific enterprise rarely carries much weight).

It’s a particularly bizarre conundrum nowadays, what with the Tom-Cruise-off-the-deep-end / Travolta-post-”Phenomenon” era that we now live in.

…until nerd persecution ends.

– Revenge Of The Nerds

Good god. I can’t believe how terrible this movie really is. Time isn’t kind, even to movies about nerds.