Each day this week, Christopher Campbell will take a look back at a “classic” film that played the Sundance Film Festival. Today’s installment: Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton’s Little Miss Sunshine (2006).

If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many big-budget films with all-star casts at Sundance in recent years, here’s why: the Little Miss Sunshine scenario. While this particular film is not the cause nor was it the first studio-like movie to arrive in Park City sans distribution, it is perhaps the most exemplary of a situation that’s currently very familiar at the festival. Sometimes a film can come out the worse for the scenario, as in the case of last year’s What Just Happened? But sometimes it can create a “Cinderella story,” as it did for Little Miss Sunshine.
…Read more

Free. Totally gratis. No pay. If you’re reluctant to contribute to The Day the Earth Stood Still’s box office gross (or if you already have, and need a cleansing), we’ve unearthed some science fiction classics that you can view online, completely free of charge.

The People That Time Forgot

Made in 1977, this movie didn’t blow cash on the special effects. It seems like they poured everything into the cavegirl’s fake boobs and her fur-bespangled outfit. But, the acting and the story in this is actually pretty darn good. If you can get past the the terrible dinosaur costumes, this is actually pretty decent, and ripe for a remake.

…Read more

As Chris briefly noted earlier this morning, MGM has confirmed last week’s CNET rumors and announced that they’re slowly rolling some of their feature film library on to YouTube. But the New York Times story about this, by Brad Stone and the always-skeptical Brooks Barnes, warns us not to get too excited — because MGM certainly isn’t.

…Read more

In a post published today on Hulu’s official blog, Kevin Smith reminisces about his 21st birthday, which he spent driving from New Jersey to New York to see Richard Linklater’s Slacker. Inspired by J. Hoberman’s Village Voice review, Smith says, “the promise of a scene centered on a Madonna pap smear of questionable authenticity was bait enough to lure us from the Jersey ‘burbs into the wilds of Manhattan-after-dark.”

17 years later, thanks to Hulu, no one will ever have to drive an hour each way for the Madonna pap smear scene again. Slacker is embedded above.

Crawford, David Modigliani’s documentary about George W. Bush’s adopted home town, becomes available today for free streaming on Hulu, with downloads to come via Amazon VOD and iTunes. Hulu is billing this as their first movie premiere, which hopefully is an indication that the site, a co-venture of super-mainstream media companies NBC and Fox, are prepared to showcase additional films straight off the festival circuit in the future.

The Texas company has become a name-brand over the past year or so for their film festival websites, which allow attendees to program their own schedules and rate the movies they’re seen, thereby allowing other attendees (and festival programmers, distributors, etc) to gauge a given film’s “buzz” in real time. B-Side has worked with festivals (Fantastic Fest, most recently) in the past to stream their films off of the festival’s own site, and has previously seen films from their Choice Indies slate premiere on IFC TV, before coming to iTunes.

But Crawford is, as far as I can tell, the first B-Side film to go directly from the festival circuit to a major onlie video portal. It looks like a smart move, not least because Crawford, unlike other Hulu features, is embeddable, and thus can easily serve as fuel for political blogs. Watch it above, or grab the code for your own blog here.

In the liner notes to the Criterion edition of writer/director Whit Stillman’s debut film, Metropolitan, cultural critic/historian Luc Sante notes that the picture, “which looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990, today seems like an artifact from an earlier century.” Sante is likely referring to the debutante culture in which the film is set, but the story of how the movie itself not only found an audience but rose to classic teen movie status among a certain class seems equally antiquated in this age of indie film Chicken Littles.

Made for a reported $250,000, starring a full cast of young unknowns, and consisting primarily of one long scene after another of rich kids sitting in a palatial Upper East Side apartment discussing Jane Austen, Charles Fourier, their mostly unfashionable morals and fears of failure, all the while dressed in evening clothes, Metropolitan played in theaters for seven months, eventually grossing $3 million and earning Stilman an Oscar nomination (he lost to the screenwriter of Ghost).

But if Metropolitan traveled a commercial road that seems nearly unnavigable today, the film itself has perhaps never been as in tune with popular culture. From Best Week Ever pundits to big-traffic bloggers, it’s become the standard mode of digesting the world around us to stand outside of it, employing caustic, self-deprecating humor as a defensive mechanism. It’s like we’re all Chris Eigeman characters from a Whit Stillman film––except, in some cases, stripped of the anxieties of old-money entitlement.

With Metropolitan premiering tonight on Hulu, I chatted with Whit about his films, the state of the indie film industry, his alleged political agenda, the state of the Last Days of Disco DVD, the project he’s getting ready to shoot, and why it’s taken ten years for him to make a fourth film.

——

Karina: I want to get the inevitable elephant out of the room, which is of course the “What have you been doing for 10 years?” question. The most recent stories that I can find about projects that you have in the works were the Jamaica project, and then Little Green Men [based on the novel by Christopher Buckley]. Are either of those still happening?

…Read more

Hmm, maybe the programming execs at FOX have souls after all: they’ve mercifully taken The Return of Jezebel James, a disastrous waste of Parker Posey masquerading as a sitcom, off their schedule after just three episodes. At BigScreenLittleScreen, Ted Zee describes how a scene from the second episode (he’s obviously more dedicated to the Save Parker cause than me, because I couldn’t get past the pilot) pretty much sums up the whole situation: “you’re relieved that it’s over, because it’s not funny, and you feel embarrassed for everyone involved.” Unfortunately, video evidence of the crime inexplicably lives on at Hulu, thus ensuring that this blight on Posey’s resume won’t fade as quickly as it should.

When we first saw clips of Parker Posey’s stab at sitcom stardom, the long-delayed FOX offering The Return of Jezebel James, we were skeptical that the sometime high school hazer and incestuous Jackie O impersonator would be able to make the transition to laugh track anchor without diluting her own charms, or worse, becoming really, really annoying. Based on the first two episodes, which are already available for watching and embedding via Hulu (see the pilot above), both of our fears were valid––Posey’s total inability to grasp sitcom comic timing is a big problem, and her flailing attempts to do so strip her of all likeability. It’s such a sad thing to see such a strong actress in a debacle like this, especially just one year after making a really good film which, in a fair and just world, would have sat at the top of her resume until she could get cast in something even better.

But there are sadder things about Jezebel James to discuss…

…Read more

There’s been some hubbub over the past couple of days on media blogs about Michael Douglas, who recently became the new announcer for NBC’s Nightly News with Brian Williams. According to TVNewser, Douglas “worked for scale, and … donated his earnings to charity.” But I have to wonder if maybe the aging actor took payment of another sort. Check out the most recent episode of NBC’s 30 Rock, embedded above. Wait (or skip) to about 8:10, and you’ll see a very clear reference to a film from Douglas’ heyday––which was recently re-released on DVD. Coincidence? Yeah, probably.

And if you’re wondering if this post is just an excuse for me to justify using work time to watch clips of 30 Rock on Hulu … well … guilty!