The Wholphin Blog alerts us to the news that Carson Mell will be screening a program of his animated shorts and music videos a week from tomorrow in San Francisco. Mell is producing some of the most cinematic (in terms of narrative scope and point of view) indie animation around right now. His Chonto, a former Wholphin DVD pick, screened at Sundance this year. I saw it when I was on the shorts jury at CineVegas and absolutely loved it, but my fellow jury members had their own favorites and compromise was inevitable. You can watch a trailer for Chonto above. The Chonto issue of Wholphin was also a topic of an episode of FilmCouch.
If you’re visiting a theater and tired of the same old movie clichés, conventional wisdom would point you to the independent movie selection. However, a string on indiewood flicks–most recently The Visitor(opening tonight)–are caving in on their own “indie” clichés. Like rogue environmentalists tracking an invasive species in an Appalachian creek bed, we digest their ways and spew out some indiewood movie pitches of our own.
As a palette cleanser, we talk to Carson Mell. We formed a crush on him last week watching Wholphin DVD No. 5. His sharp wit and creativity are on display in his short animation, Chonto.
Iraq fatigue: the conventional wisdom settled on in the last year that nobody wants to go to a movie theater for an Iraq war movie (most recently: Stop-Loss). Is it a new phenomenon or are all movies questioning war during wartime doomed to financial failure?
The new Wholphin quarterly DVD magazine is out. It’s probably the best curated source for short films outside a major festival and we give it the attention its due on FilmCouch.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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