Movie Website Reviews for Weekend of February 15, 2008

February 16, 2008

The year has been slow for websites with some weeks having no sites at all that were worthy of awards. This makes it frustrating that week we have two sites that could have taken home the Weekly Website Award; it's either feast or famine. But there can be only one winner and this week it is The Spiderwick Chronicles - Official Site.

Definitely, Maybe - Official Site
I checked this site out in the past, and it was pretty good. It has all the usual features, a large number of video clips, an interactive quiz, and overall sold the movie well. Today when I tried to review it, it wouldn't load properly and can't get anything to work. Annoying.

Diary of the Dead - Official Site
Just a MySpace page. Not even a particularly attractive MySpace page.

Ezra - No Official Site
No site, nothing to review.

Jodhaa Akbar - Official Site
There appears to be no site, just two company links.

Jumper - Official Site
There is a lot of background information on this site with information on the characters, Jumpers in general, the Paladins, etc. There is also plenty of sound and animation while surfers can hunt through the four different locations to find all of the content, or just look in the site menu. Add in the regular features and the site as nearly everyone one could expect (perhaps a game would have been a cool addition). It's a small complaint, but in an unusually competitive week, it was enough to prevent this site from winning the award.

The Spiderwick Chronicles - Official Site
Another great site, this one has ever more interactive features, but we are getting ahead of ourselves. Things start with the usual features, synopsis, production notes, cast & crew bios, image gallery and trailers. There are also some of the more common extras, like clips, but this site excels with seven clips. There is background information in the form of the field guide, which is interactive thanks to the Seeing Stone, which allows the surfer to find hidden features like additional downloads or even more clips. If you find the three pieces of the map, you can search the three areas for bios on the 8 main characters, each of which has one of the games previously mentioned. Some of these games are simple ones like the personality quiz or the word games, but others are action games and that's a lot more rare. Overall this huge site presents all of the regular features with more than enough extras as well as style to lift it to the top and make it the winner of the unobservable Weekly Website Award.

Step Up 2 the Streets - Official Site
Just like the original, this one uses a MySpace page. Yuck.

Vexville - No Official Site
No official site, at least not one for the North American release. You can check out the original Japanese site here, and it is visual enough to at least get some hint as to what the movie will be like.

A Winter Tale - Official Site
A lot of information, but not much in the way of style or even polish.

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation - Official Site
All of the usual information is here and there is a sense of style here as well. (It is not enough to really stand out, but it doesn't seem like a boring, cookie-cutter site either.) There are a couple extras including a making of featurette and a section on the sound track; I assume there are clips, but I can't get ether of these to work. (Or the trailer, for that matter.) Sad, could have been a really good site otherwise.


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Filed under: Jumper, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Step Up 2 the Streets, Definitely, Maybe, Jodhaa Akbar, Diary of the Dead