Stereogum has posted a music video for Austin band The Octopus Project, directed by David and Nathan Zellner. It doesn’t have a Barry Lyndon homage starring a monkey, but it does have a singing boat and psychedelic crustaceans. That is enough.

Kevin Lee’s vigorous defense of Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax — surprisingly divisive when it premiered at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival –– included a thematic interpretation of the film’s title. He wrote that Beeswax, a picture which has nothing directly to do with either bees or wax, was titled as such as “a tip to the film’s depiction of life as a hive, where people passive-aggressively fall on each other for support in the face of life’s overwhelming choices, and in doing so both limit and enable choices to be made.” It’s right to shine a light on Beeswax as a film about a community’s interconnectedness — and probable that the nuances of that specific community, Austin, might feel like flat, mundane Americana to an eye hoping for a retread of the classically cool “disaffected rocker in black and white” vibe of Mutual Appreciation. But the title also seems like something of a multi-layered reference to the film’s ambitious leap ahead of Bujalski’s previous filmography. Having built a following based on two finely calibrated odes to linguistic imprecision, Bujalski’s third film moves away from messy, non-committal “mumbling”, in order to cleverly examine the double-speak of slang, simile and idiom that flows through American conversation uninterrogated. As a moniker for this crayon-colorful (and beautifully shot) comedy steeped in colloquial American English, the title Beeswax feels less like a metaphor for anything bees do in public, than a veiled reference to private lives - as in, “mind your own beeswax.”

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If you listen to this week’s episode of FilmCouch, you’ll hear me tell a sad story about why I no longer have my most beloved cable channels like Turner Classic Movies and IFC, and what happens to a girl when she’s hungover from her birthday party and is forced to lie on the couch all day without her premium channels (hint: it involves both Michael Ian Black and Kathy Bates. Be afraid.) But thankfully, I *do* still have the ability to pay Time Warner extra money for movies, so the next time I’m curled up in a fetal position on a Saturday afternoon, I’ll be able to watch David Zellner’s Goliath, which just debuted on IFC’s VOD-only Festival Direct service. Back at Sundance, Kevin Buist interviewed David and brother Nathan, and Joe Swanberg went shopping with them.

Above: 41 seconds of psychedelic casino nightmare by the Zellner Brothers, masquerading as a promo for the CineVegas Film Festival. The Zellners’ latest feature, Goliath, will be screening at the fest in June. Several other filmmakers have made promos for the fest, including Cam Archer and Kevin Everson; see them all here.

Shopping With Filmmakers: The Zellner Bros.

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In another installment of his series of Sundance interviews, Joe Swanberg goes shopping for, um, “fine art” with David and Nathan Zellner, stars and co-directors of Goliath. The Zellners talk about working together as brothers, navigating the insanity of Sundance, and why they qualify as “total sluts.”

The festival is over, but we’ve still got a back-log of content to deliver. In this installment, I talk to Nathan and David Zellner. At last year’s festival their short about the mysteries of circumcision, Aftermath on Meadowlark Lane, got a lot of people talking. This year they return with Goliath, a feature about divorce, demotion, and a missing cat. For my money it has the best trailer of any film in the festival, check it out along with Chris’ thoughts here.

Zellner Brothers Interview

From what I hear, everyone is talking about Goliath, a film by the Zellner Brothers that premieres at Sundance this evening. But after watching the trailer, I have to wonder what has people so excited. Sure, I think it looks cheap and funny in a Me and You and Everyone We Know sort of way — which isn’t a gripe, as Miranda July’s film was my favorite at the festival back in 2005 — but it also looks like something homemade and bound for YouTube, and I’m not the only person on the internet to say so. Fortunately, the film has support from the right people. On the Goliath Facebook page, SXSW producer Matt Dentler commented that it’s “an awesome, awesome movie. Truly.”

But Sundance is very different from Austin, and just because the Zellner Brothers have a loyal following back home doesn’t mean they’ll succeed in Park City. Then again, after excitedly watching Me and You three years ago, I never thought it was going to catch on with other people at Sundance let alone be a huge hit in the real world. Of course, the Zellners have already been to Sundance — every year since 2005, in fact. It could all change this year, though, with their first feature, the simple synopsis of which is as follows: “In the wake of a divorce, a man desperately searches for the one relic of the broken marriage- his pet cat ‘Goliath’, who has gone missing.”

So, I can’t wait to hear what festivalgoers think of the film after tonight’s premiere (or even from readers who view the trailer and wish they could be there). For those of you not in Park City, you’ll have to settle for this sorta funny clip. And maybe eventually the film’s website (Goliathismissing.com) won’t be down — damn that Sundance buzz for causing the bandwith to be exceeded — and we can investigate further what is so attractive about this little movie. Is it just the association with filmmaker Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation), who appears in the film? Is it just the popularity of the Zellner’s three shorts that have shown at Sundance in the past? I guess I could just go and find those films on the interweb and see …

Goliath premieres at the Prospector Square Theater tonight at 8:30 PM. It also screens at the Library tomorrow morning and Saturday morning and then in Salt Lake City on Saturday night.