Back when Billy the Kid hit theaters last December, I wrote an essay calling Jennifer Venditti’s non-fiction feature  “The Anti-Juno.” The films begged to be compared at the time, not just because they were both, as I wrote, “films about the inner lives and social stumbling blocks of precocious, ‘outsider’ teenagers,” but because they were actually opening in New York on the same day. Juno came riding in with the best indie cred that Fox Searchlight could buy, so it’s a no-brainer that the eventual Oscar winner would outshine the truly indie Billy on a short timeline. But on a long tail, Billy has a huge advantage, if only because, as Cullen Gallagher put it today at /Hammer to Nail, “Jennifer Venditti has managed the incredible feat of both finding and conveying cinematically a character who is absolutely singular and unique, and at the same time exists as an “everyman” who sums up our collective adolescence.” Honest to blog.

Billy, which I named as one of my favorite films of 2007, comes out on DVD today, in a special package including a commentary track by director Venditti with Ryan Gosling, and a liner notes essay by Miranda July. If you go to the film’s official website and click on the DVD flag on the bottom right, you can actually get 25 percent off your purchase.

Longtime YouTube hater Mark Cuban, writing two days before the video site’s new Screening Room launch was announced, predicted that fast-growing Hulu will eventually put YouTube out of business. “The Youtube business model is broken and there is no light at the end of the tunnel as they are currently constructed,” he blogged. Because Hulu has the right to put ads on every clip and not, like YouTube, not just those produced by “partners”, “the more traffic Hulu generates, the more money it makes. The more traffic Youtube generates, the more money it loses.” I’ll be interested to see how he responds to Screening Room; if skeptical, he’d hardly be alone. Some links:

• “In all the coverage in the blogosphere, no one has mentioned that this is the exact same thing AtomFilms did for 10 years, and it didn’t work for them,” writes Chris Albrecht, a former Atom employee, at NewTeeVee. And why didn’t it work? “YouTube has a much more massive scale than Atom could have ever dreamed of, but that doesn’t change the fundamental situation. People prefer farts being lit on fire to artsy short films.”
• Another potential issue: much of the content that will be screening in the Room has been seen elsewhere. Two of the four films available at launch were pulled from the first issue of Wholphin, and according to the Wholphin blog, “Another dozen Wholphin films have been selected to appear in the Screening Room throughout the year.” Also of note: the Miguel Arteta/Miranda July short Are You The Favorite Person of Anybody?, a Wholphin title which was pitched in YouTube’s press release about the Room, has been on YouTube for almost two years.
• Scott Kirsner has some suggestions for how filmmakers can make the most out of their Screening Room deals, recommending that they “post in the YouTube comments area, so YouTube users feel you are a real, accessible human being — not some remote big-shot director!”
• Maybe Cuban can’t see the light at the end of YouTube’s tunnel, but Silicon Alley Insider can. “Google famously hasn’t figured out how to sell ads in the video stream itself, though it keeps promising that it will. Doesn’t matter…their most lucrative opportunities, so far, haven’t been in the videos themselves but on the real estate surrounding it.”

Do you remember 2005, when Miranda July was blogging and making those bittersweet video diaries from the road whilst promoting Me and You and Everyone We Know? Remember how she filmed her walk up the red carpet at the Cannes, and it seemed so quirky and novel and maybe even a teeny tiny bit punk rock for a Portland-based video artist to be taking home movies from the Croisette whilst wearing borrowed Dior? Do you remember that things like that used to be special, because YouTube didn’t used to exist?

It looks like she’s back at it. A YouTube account was created 17 hours ago (as of this writing) under the name mjsecretary. The first video, embedded above, shows July in what I assume is her own kitchen, putting together a cardboard display stand for her book, No One Belongs Here More Than You. She has a conversation with the woman holding the camera about trading t-shirts. Then July pretends the cardboard stand, which is almost as big as her, is a purse.

You know… it’s cute. But three years on the internet is at least a decade in real time (this is why I feel like I’m actually 50 years old, even though my birth certificate says otherwise), and since July last dabbled in this field, the bar has been raised. I loved her Me and You festival videos, even though I wasn’t totally in the tank for the movie itself. More like that, please.

Via tigerbeat.

• Blogs are buzzing, but the fact that Michael Moore is making a sequel to Fahrenheit 9/11 is old news –– the film is referenced in this NY Times story from April of last year. The new news in this story from Variety’s Cannes section is that the film will be distributed internationally by Overture and Paramount Vantage––NOT The Weinstein Company, which handled the relatively disappointing release of Sicko. The same companies will rep the doc for international sale at Cannes.
• The Playlist has details on Miranda July’s in-the-works second feature, Things We Don’t Understand and Definitely Are Not Going To Talk About.
• The title of this post at Tisch Film Review is worded a bit confusingly, but it’s basically a list of ten great films that are not available on DVD. The Last Movie, The Mother and the Whore, etc.

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.

The Thing is a new project out of the Bay Area, through which four filmmakers, artists and musicians a year will create art works, which will then distributed to subscribers on a quarterly basis. The artists are held to two rules: each piece must be based on an “every day object”, and each art work must incorporate text. Each project is reproduced by hand, and then mailed to subscribers, who pay $160/year for all four works, including shipping.

The first Thing, a set of window shades emblazoned with hand-painted disclaimers and pleas, comes from the mind of filmmaker/performance artist . There’s photo documentation of the Thing crew painting and preparing the shades for shipping here, and for more information on subscriptions, go here.

[Via The Underwire]