Newsflash: a major metropolitan newspaper known to be struggling to stay afloat has allocated resources to something not totally shameless! The Los Angeles Times has launched a weekly column on independent film, called Indie Focus, to be written by freelancer Mark Olsen. Olsen’s first Indie Focus story, on the perhaps unlikely double feature of Frownland and The Pleasure of Being Robbed beginning on Thursday at the Silent Movie theater, is online now; it’ll appear in the print edition of Sunday’s Calendar section, which is kind of a big deal. A newspaper attempting to combat their industry’s total desperation with a gesture that says indie film reporting (or really, any kind of arts coverage that demands an audience beyond 12 year old boys) is not only important, but worthy of the highest-profile platform that they have to offer? More like this, please.

Only a handful of people were in attendance for last night’s world premiere of blogger/filmmaker Sujewa Ekanayake’s new documentary Indie Film Blogger Road Trip at NYC’s Anthology Film Archives. Apparently most fans and writers of blogs had better things to do, such as read and write posts on the internet. Because really, what is the point of watching a film about writers about films? The only thing more unnecessary and inwardly spiraling — obviously I’m guilty of it here — is blogging about a film about bloggers about film.

Even with the film blogosphere’s reputation for insularity Ekanayake’s doc has no purpose, because its subject matter and content are already well documented on blogs. And anything new that might be discussed, any new questions that might be raised would also be more appropriately written about on the web. The film’s largest offense, though, is that it doesn’t even seem to have an intended purpose. It does not actually attempt to offer anything new to the discourse on film blogging. Nor does it have any sort of cohesive thesis regarding any preexisting discourse. The doc is simply a series of long, mostly uncut interviews with film bloggers. It’s not even necessarily a sufficient profile of the film blog community, in a “Meet the Bloggers” kind of way.

…Read more

The hottest topic of conversation leading up to this year’s Sundance Film Festival? That virtually no one is actually going to this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Over the past couple of weeks, what started as a whisper has steadily grown into a ear-splitting groan, and with the Festival beginning tomorrow, it’s become a meme that’s too pervasive to ignore.  I had heard either directly or via reliable second-hand testimony that a number of familiar faces (including a celebrity photographer, the film critic for a very high-profile weekly magazine, and a publicist representing a major distributor) were all skipping the festival this year; on the indie/freelance journalist end, reporter Anthony Kaufman took to his blog to detail the five reasons he’s decided not to head out to Utah.

Once the “Sundance: it’s gonna be a ghost town!” chatter had certifiably reached fever pitch, I went looking for Sundance regulars who would go on the record about why they’re skipping the festival this year, and what they plan to do instead. Always the skeptic, I had initially wondered if the Sundance Ghost Town Meme was a fiction invented by publicists and sold to the media in order to cover for what many expect to be a down year for sales. But when it came down to it, 5 out 6 of the people who were willing to talk to me at length and on the record about their planned Sundance absence were at least part-time journalists. Now, I wonder: is there even going to be any media left for publicists to sell fictions to?

In my conversations with five journalists about their Sundance dealbreakers, a number of common threads emerged. I break them down after the jump. If you’ve got your own not going to Sundance story, do let us know in the comments.

…Read more