Random House Canada underwrote a series of short videos riffing on Douglas Coupland’s new novel The Gum Thief produced by the slick Toronto studio Crush Inc. These were forwarded to me by Alex Itin, who described watching them as a kind of “cinematic reading.” Watch, you’ll see what he means. There are three basic storylines, each consisting of three clips. This one, from the “Glove Pond” sequence, is particularly clever in its use of old magazines:
All the videos are available here at Crush Inc. Or on Coupland’s YouTube page.
Category Archives: booktrailers
shock treatment
I’ve never been a fan of book trailers, but this disturbing six-minute agitprop piece promoting Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is genre-transcending. It doesn’t hurt that Klein teamed up with Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, who made what was for my money the best major release picture of last year, “Children of Men.” Here, Klein and Cuarón are co-writers, Cuarón’s son Jonás directs and edits, and Klein provides narration over a melange of chilling footage and animation that sets up her central thesis and metaphor: that free market capitalist reforms are generally advanced, undemocratically, through breaches in the social psyche created by political, economic, environmental or military shocks. It’s a shocking little video. Make you wanna read the book?