Stardate 20020331.1335

(Captain's Log): I was out for my morning coffee. I go to a mall near me; there are several places which sell decent pastries and there's a Starbucks for the drugs. I get my food and sit in a concrete amphitheater in the center of the mall; sometimes they have outdoor concerts there, and there's one of those computerized fountains that the kids love so much; I sit and eat and stock up on drugs and watch the people and feed my leftovers to the birds.

There's a movie theater there, one of the now-standard mall 8-screen jobbies. I didn't see anything playing I had any interest in watching, but then I haven't gone to a movie in a theater since "The Matrix". I confess that I seriously considered going to see "Spy Kids", and I did buy it later on DVD. It's very good; the script is more intelligent than I thought it would be; the kids are not sappy and saccharine, and Danny Elfman's music is just as hauntingly beautiful as always. The special effects are everything you could hope for, and the movie has an energy and charm that's difficult to resist. And if I was gay or female, I'd be stalking Antonio Banderas. (How can any man pack so much sex appeal into one body? Gad, to be that charismatic.)

It's fun to look at the posters advertising upcoming movies; it's interesting to see just how they try to make me want to see movies which are actually going to be total trash. And some things there are revelations.

Apparently the slasher genre hasn't run out of steam yet. There is yet another Halloween movie coming, and they're bringing out another "Friday the Thirteenth" flick called "JasonX". This one is post-holocaust; he's in the 24th century.

I looked at the credits for that one on its movie poster, and they didn't list any actors. You saw all the production staff; even the name of the casting director, but no actors. None. Obviously this film will not be character-driven.

I noticed something else: every single one of the movie posters had a URL for a co-marketing web site. It has evidently become the norm now for every movie to get its own web page. (Even JasonX.) I suppose that after a few high-profile cases where the web was able to really help market a film it was inevitable that this should happen.

In fact, you see that for a heck of a lot else. It seems like hardly a TV advertisement goes buy these days without a URL flashed on the bottom of the screen, and you see them in magazine ads, too, for nearly everything. It has also become a normal part of politics; nearly every candidate or advocacy group for any ballot measure will now have a web site, and the voter's pamphlet is always full of URLs.

Ten years ago there was no web. Five years ago only technogeeks used it. Now it's omnipresent. It is astounding how rapidly it became mainstream.