October 18, 2002

Standing in the Shadows of Motown

/ movies

Gwen and I saw Standing in the Shadows of Motown last night, a documentary about 14 session musicians in Detroit known as the Funk Brothers. The story goes that these 14 guys, in some combination or another, were the sound behind every hit vocalist that came out of Motown for about 12 years.

The movie was interesting if for no other reason than that it exposed me to that fact. It had a lot of good music (seemingly shot at concerts staged for the movie), and a lot of bullshitting and storytelling by the men in question. Although it keeps things in a rough chronological order, there’s not much organization to it. That’s OK up to a point, but running about two hours long, it starts getting a little old–it could either use tighter editing or more structure.

Switch

/ technology

In the beginning were the Switch ads from Apple. Quirky music in the background and a regular person just describing why they switched from Windows to Macs, with a lot of jump cuts to stress certain points.

Then came the parodies. Will Farrell made an especially funny one that was played at a Macworld conference.

Then came the ripoff. Microsoft concocted an obviously faked Mac-to-Windows switch story (nobody talks like a marketing weasel except a marketing weasel). When they were called on it, they took the page down. It lived on for a while in Google’s cache, but seems to have been lost to the shifting sands of time.

Anyhow, one of the original ads in particular, featuring a teenage girl, Ellen Feiss, seemed to capture the imagination of a lot of people. So now there’s a fan site for her. And a tribute song.

And now, Apple has brought the switch ad concept to Japan. Momoko Kikuchi seems to be the one most like Ellen (her story is kind of like Ellen’s, too…). I wonder how long it takes before she gets her own fan base.

In a related story, that annoying “Dude, your gettin’ a Dell” guy is out of work. Maybe he’ll be able to get a part in Dude, Where’s My Car, Part II.