What’s a humid Sunday after a night of fitful sleep good for? Movies! We watched two yesterday:

The Squid And The Whale (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was good, but I don’t know if it was 94%-on-Rotten-Tomatoes good. It was actually one of those rare movies that I wish was longer; they could’ve spent another 15-20 minutes pushing through those stories and I wouldn’t have minded. There’s no doubt about it: those parents screwed those kids up in ways that only two highly-educated neurotic egotists could.

Lord Of War (imdb | rotten tomatoes) seemed to have a weird theatrical release; it got almost no advance marketing but still did $24 million on what seemed to me like just a few screens, but that still seemed odd given the presence of Nicholas Cage in the lead role. I liked the movie, but it never quite seemed to make me feel quite as bad as I think Andrew Niccol wanted me to. He hit the macro discomfort level (pointing out that most arms dealing is done by the five permanent members of the UN security council), but didn’t effectively hit the micro level: no one I cared about really seemed to experience any personal loss because of their actions. Still, it’s worth watching.

.:.

More and more at work I’ve become interested in marketing…of sorts. I still view traditional marketing as this morbid evil, but my job has become less about using technology to deliver our company’s services and more about reinterpreting what those services should be; technology is simply becoming the standard method of delivery. Attending the mesh conference, reading Cluetrain, taking that recent marketing course (and shaking my head with disgust through nearly the whole thing), regular conversations with my boss (who also gets it), daily articles showing up in my feed reader about social marketing, blogs, wikis, podcasts, pinko marketing…and on and on. I feel like there’s real change to be had here, but I never fancied myself a marketing kind of guy. I was a guy who could straddle the line between technology and business — having decent background in both — but marketing never seemed to be a real (or honorable) aspect of business.

But is marketing changing? Or is the change that’s coming something bigger than marketing, something big enough to fundamentally change the way companies operate? Well…probably not, but things could get more interesting as they get more transparent, but I sometimes find myself wanting to lead that change.

I just don’t know if I could stand the hypocrisy. God…next I could be saying that I want to go into sales…

[tags]squid and the whale, lord of war, social marketing, cluetrain, pinko marketing[/tags]