Terry Teachout also praised Me and You and Everyone We Know at his blog. He's traditional media as well as a blogger (though interested in making the latter increasingly central), and a critic to boot, but I gather there's a national audience he reaches at ALN that isn't necessarily reading his reviews in the Wall Street Journal. Plus the film is off his usual beats, so he might not have written about it for the paper or a magazine otherwise, not to mention that his audience (and I'm just guessing here), while interested in the arts, might not have had this one on their radar screen.

On the other hand, free movie tickets would be utterly wasted on me - I still probably wouldn't go or say anything good about it if I did. Other members of the household aren't so happy about this fact.

Seeing Serenity pushed on Talking Points and Political Animal was different - I don't remember seeing Sin City on either of those blogs. I thought it was weird for them to hype a mainstream movie on such partisan lefty political blogs (though I think they hit the wingnuts too).

I didn't even think to ask—did Serenity make a splash on the right? Or was there a left/right divide in the way that bloggers responded to the film? I'm assuming the producers of Serenity wouldn't do something so stupid as as only give tickets to liberal bloggers.

As for TPM and Drum: I guess that blogger triumphalism at least partially explains their enthusiasm. It's Hollywood, of all institutions, confirming the power of teh bloggers. (TPM received a few hundred tickets to give away.) But, yeah, you'd think that the big guys would simply note it and pass it along.

If I'm not mistaken, Powerline got the same deal as TPM, a private screening for them and x number of readers. Which is a much bigger deal than kicking a few comp tickets around, though as you say, not something that costs all that much. At that level, it's more like the sort of publicity deals that the movies have sometimes made with popular djs or radio stations, just transferred to a new medium. I would love to see a comparative assessment done of the different crowds at the TMP and Powerline events, though.

Since it happens to me with the paltry readership I have, I assume you've occasionally been sent offers of free stuff by people hoping that you'll write about it. It's sort of flattering, though I generally don't respond. Also interesting, if of dubious value, are the press releases and invitations to press events in cities hundreds if not thousands of miles away from where I am. A couple of these I'd actually would have liked to attend, but mostly I just wonder what the person sending it is thinking (answer: they are not.)

That's true. I occassionally get passes sent to me for music events—just few enough and at sufficiently small venues to make me feel guilty for not going.

As for the art stuff, yeah, I get all sorts of weird stuff in my inbox. Most of it is pretty useful, though you probably see a lot of the same manifesto-type material that I do.

did anyone see miranda july's compelling performance in DC about 5 years ago? it was a wpa/c sponsored event that marta kuzma brought to town.

seeds of the film