Three videos of note on the Facebook page (you may have to sign in and become a fan to see it) for Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax: two intros for Bujalski’s work made for Canadian TV, one starring Shawn Sides as Elvira and the other featuring Alex Karpovsky as Dracula. In both, bats flutter by on strings, as Bujalski himself looks on, silent but bemused. “Tonight I have a thirst,” Elvira drawls. “A thirst for a spine-tinglingly cold taste of American independent cinema!”
This is doing it right.
And then there’s this, also embedded above. I saw this on YouTube and thought it was a joke, like that thing with Kent Osborne in the garage, but apparently it’s an actual ad for a film series on Channel 4 in the UK. The ad features young attractive people standing in front of graffitied walls (very first season Real World), earnestly informing us that there’s a type of movie in which “there are no buldings blown to hell in slow motion, and you know what? That’s okay, because these films are about people!” The kicker: “There’s something going on here.” Cut to slow-talking redhead girl: “And that something, is a little something called mumblecore.” She then looks at the camera with one of those “this is just between you and me” smiles that are most often seen on television in the promotion of feminine hygeine products.
This is doing it wrong.
Beeswax opens at Film Forum on August 7 and expands to several other cities shortly after that. I like it.
indieWIRE reports that Cinema Guild will distribute Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax. The film, which I reviewed at SXSW, is Bulajski’s third feature; its predecesors, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation, were self-released after the former won an Independent Spirit Award and the later completed a successful festival run. Word on the street is that the new film will open in New York later this summer, after its run at BAMcinemaFEST.
Cinema Guild has been quite busy of late, actvely acquiring old fashioned art films in danger of falling through the ever-widening gap between festival acclaim and traditional theatrical release. A couple of weeks ago, they announced a deal on Clair Denis‘ 35 Shots of Rhum; a few weeks before that, they launched a home video label through which they plan to release a number of titles formerly owned by the shuttered New Yorker Films.
Video game blogs have a way of reminding me that I’m a big girl. The boys at Joystiq (some of whom are former colleagues and friendly acquaintances of mine) drop terms like “microtransactions” and “exergaming” and suddenly my brain turns off and I have an overwhelming urge to watch Tyra. Funnily enough, I picked up the former term (which still means nothing to me) from reading this story about a perspective game that would ostensibly be tailored to the girly market. Yes, apparently Juno, the little indie choo-choo train that could, the crossover underdog that scraped up $100 million thanks to a cleverly oppressive marketing campaign on pure pluck alone, is in the process of being turned into a video game.
We could speculate for hours as to what this game might actually look like (you get a jug of Sunny Delight every time you get Michael Cera to wear a blueberry condom!), but I thought it would be more fun to think about what it would be like if actual indie films were to have their brands extended into the gamer realm. Bearing in mind that my knowledge of video games pretty much begins and ends with Mario Kart, check out five ideas, for films including Gummo and Mutual Appreciation, after the jump.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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indieWIRE reports that Cinema Guild will distribute Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax. The film, which I reviewed at SXSW, is Bulajski’s third feature; its predecesors, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation, were self-released after the former won an Independent Spirit Award and the later completed a successful festival run. Word on the street is that the new film will open in New York later this summer, after its run at BAMcinemaFEST.
Video game blogs have a way of reminding me that I’m a big girl. The boys at 
