After making a big splash at Sundance several years ago with his hysterical short Windowbreaker, the incredibly prolific and versatile Tze Chun, who in the five years since graduating from Columbia’s undergrad Film Studies program in 02′ has made a whopping 12 low budget short films, will be back in Park City this year with his debut feature, Children of Invention. A feature length version of Windowbreaker, it follows two young Asian children living illegally in a model apartment who are left to fend for themselves when their hardworking mother disappears. We caught up with Tze (pronounced “Z”) to discuss his adoration for inappropriately long Charlie Kaufman interviews, his desire to adapt portions of Virginia Woolf and in what capacity Richard Kern and Britney Spear might become friends. …Read more

Black Friday is a scary time for shoppers in any given year. The crowds, the lines, the difficulty finding parking — all these and more are common annoyances on the day after Thanksgiving, as millions upon millions of Americans begin the Christmas season by making a run for the shopping malls and department stores in hopes of finding the best bargains. This year, of course, the economic downturn will make the day even worse than usual. The stores may be desperately holding the biggest sales we’ll ever witness, but lowest prices aren’t quite low enough for those who are broke or bankrupt.

So, you may stay home this Friday. Perhaps you’ll at least make some minor online purchases, because you’re a patriotic, consuming American and it’s kind of like an unofficial holiday in our capitalist democracy. But don’t not go out to the mall simply because of the craziness potentially happening on its many floors of fashion and furnishings. You mustn’t be frightened of the crowds. Just recall any or all of the following ten movie scenes and by comparison you’ll think your Black Friday errands are like a stroll in the park.

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Thursday, October 30, Grand Rapids, Michigan. A seemingly average midwestern city. Until the zombies invade. A throng of at least 3,370 zombies flowed through the downtown streets (it’s very likely it was over 4,000) to try and break the world record for the largest zombie walk. The event, organized by college sophomore Rob Bliss, shattered the previous record of 1,375, set just a few days earlier in the Pittsburgh suburb of Monroeville. If Monroeville sounds familiar to zombie fans, it should. The Monroeville Mall was the setting of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

While Grand Rapids may not have the zombie pedigree of Monroeville, it’s no less qualified for an invasion of the living dead. Annalee Newitz recently wrote a post on io9 charting the correlation between civil unrest and zombie movie production. The results are surprisingly revealing. Given the current economic downturn, it’s no surprise that struggling post-industrial areas like Pittsburgh, and the whole state of Michigan, would see an increase in zombie invasions. If Michigan’s unemployment rate cracks 10%, I predict a complete state-wide zombie apocalypse by Halloween 2009.

For more ghoulish goodness on Spout.com, check out The Zombie Group and Horror Movies 101.

Photo gallery after the jump of the Grand Rapids Zombie Walk:

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It’s been more than 100 years since the Philadelphia Quakers changed their name to the Philadelphia Philadelphians, which was thankfully shortened to “Phillies” very quickly, probably by printers who were afraid of using up all of their ‘P’s in the printing press. Since being founded in 1883, they’ve been one of the most tenacious teams in baseball, winning six pennants, and the World Series in 1980. In fact, in all of American sports (not just baseball), the Phillies are the team that’s been in one city with one name for the longest time. They’re one game away from another World Series win tonight, despite being the Major League team with the most losses in history. We celebrate their scrappiness with a list of quintessential Philadelphia movies. Check them out after the break.

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When the trailer for Watchmen hit the web a few weeks ago, I was as pumped as anyone. I’ve always been a fan of comics, but when I finished reading Alan Moore’s opus for the first time, I closed the back cover, starred into space, and solemnly said, “This changes everything.” Seriously, it’s that good. And the trailer looks good, it appears to be a faithful adaptation of the source material.

The key word here is appears. The visuals are stunning, some sites even took the time to do shot by shot comparisons with the book. But I’m not worried at all about that, I’m more concerned with how the film will be edited. Like most comics/graphic novels, Watchmen is practically a story board waiting to be transformed into a film. But what made the book so revolutionary was not the art, it was the story, and the way the story was told. Watchmen is a dense web of complicated interconnected stories. Multiple generations of characters deal with epic personal, philosophical, and political struggles, all woven into one masterwork.

Watchmen, the book, excels at the graphic novel version of cross-cutting. Several pages contain nine panels that are set up like a checkerboard, alternating between two separate stories that intimately inform one another, albeit across expanses of space and time. On the one hand, this seems like source material for a final-scene-of-The Godfather level of powerhouse editing. But on the other hand, it could just be a huge mess.

After the jump, Snyder says why he feels up to the challenge…

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