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.

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Way back in May, I discovered (long after the rest of the world, I thought) that the 2005 German film Downfall had become unlikely fodder for a huge number of YouTube spoofs. This weekend, Virginia Heffernan looked into the meme for the New York Times. In my post, I commented on the irony that although millions of people have now been exposed to Downfall via the various YouTube spoofs, the videos don’t work as compelling advertisements for the movie itself. Now Heffernan notes that the ubiquity of Downfall as seen out of context not only fails to promote the film, but actually damages the experience of watching it:

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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.

• Who was the “major U.S. critic” who allegedly “stormed away from a mobbed, delayed 10:30 p.m. Cannes press screening of Two Lovers declaring she’s ‘not going to wait an hour for f—–g [director] James Gray’”? After allowing the blogosphere to stew on it for a week and a half, EW’s Lisa Schwarzbaum uses the Pop Watch blog to come clean. “Dear reader, the storming, cursing critic in this international incident was me.”
• Girls in terrible earrings! Boyfriends looking for an out plan! Radar has a photo gallery from a first New York public screening of Sex and the City.
• Burbanked salutes the late Harvey Korman with a clip from High Anxiety.
• Remember ROFLcon? It’s going on tour, with stops in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Seattle through the summer. More info here.

Yesterday, I dropped the name of Deborah Scranton’s The War Tapes, a documentary shot by the soldiers on the ground in Iraq, within this story about the ultra-indie “pro-troops” doc challenging Redacted’s sales. It had slipped my mind that Scranton has a new documentary, also shot by soldiers, called Bad Voodoo’s War. Chuck Tryon describes Scranton’s “virtual embed” technique in his review:

Bad Voodoo’s War focuses on the experiences of a California National Guard platoon, showing us, as the website claims, “the war through [the soldiers’] eyes, filmed with their own video cameras.” In order to make the film, Scranton equipped the soldiers with cameras and then kept in close correspondence with the soldiers via IM and email as they continued to send her tapes of their experiences.

Because the film is part of PBS’ FRONTLINE series, you can watch it in its entirety on PBS.com. There’s also an associated website, where the soldiers in the film are blogging and posting video extras. I found out about this today via a Facebook message from Scranton; she pointed specifically to this clip, called “It’s Not A Matter of If, It’s A Matter Of When”––referring to a change in attitude about the chances of an attack at any time. There are also many video extras on YouTube, including the preview embedded above.

Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind may have failed to make much of an impact at the box office, but as Liz Shannon Miller reports at NewTeeVee, it did touch off a serious wave of low-budget remake making on the web. Of the three “Sweded” mini-masterpieces she considers, by favorite is the above take on An Inconvenient Truth. Watch it, and join the fight to keep polar bears from taking our jobs. Related: this plus The Pleasure of Being Robbed makes two recent works to employ use of a fake polar bear. I just have to find one more fake polar bear in popular culture, and I can pitch a trend piece to the New York Times!

YouTube handed out awards this week, voted on by users of the site, to the best videos of the past year in twelve categories. I watched the short film winner, My Name is Lisa, when it was a finalist in that Juno promotional contest a couple of months back, where it took third place. I thought it was pretty terrible––unbearably mawkish, in fact. But what do I know? It apparently managed to draw tears from at least one person who makes a living telling us why culture is stupid, and that’s no small feat. Watch it for yourself above, and see the rest of the winners here.

Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s 2000 fashion world spoof, has been doing consistently well on iTunes’ movie download-to-own chart. NewTeeVee’s Chris Albrecht wonders why. “Wait, what? An eight-year-old comedy is more popular than Ratatouille, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, and High School Musical (parts 1 and 2)?”

Apple hasn’t released demographic information, but let’s try to imagine, for a second, who might be willing to spend $10 on a legal––but DRM-heavy––movie download at this stage of the game. First of all, it’s gotta be someone who uses Mac products exclusively: students, artists, upper-middle-class nerds, aging hipsters, style-conscious parents, the curious rich, celebrities. Albrecht has screen caps of several recent iTunes top sales charts, and it’s clear from a glance that adventurous cinephilies don’t seem to be yet represented––but then, with the exception of a handful of classic titles, iTunes’ movie catalog doesn’t seem to be going for adventure. So let’s assume that the cool hunter Apple user is getting their movies elsewhere, and concentrate on the more middle-of-the-road aspects of the Apple demographic.

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Annie Waldman has posted her elegant and affecting short doc, So The Wind Won’t Blow Us Away, at the Huffington Post, along with an artist statement/essay. The ten minute film, a glimpse at the lives of three teenagers living without parents in FEMA trailers and ravaged houses post-Hurricane Katrina, was funded by Cinereach’s Reach Film Fellowship, “a contest designed to encourage young, emerging talent to produce socially aware media” through which the selected filmmakers were given grants of $5,000 and are teamed up with established mentors in the documentary field.

I think it’s really amazing to see a short film (especially a fairly lyrical short doc that looks more like art than reportage) being presented on a major web portal, alongside news and editorials, with no special marking or qualification. I found Wind by clicking on a headline, assuming I was going to get a standard blog post, and I had no idea a full film would be embedded into the page. This week’s Cinema Eye Awards gave many independent non-fiction filmmakers a chance to vent about the difficulties of getting their work seen by mass audiences, but I don’t think the topic of online distribution alternatives came up once. This kind of presentation isn’t going to work for every film or every filmmaker, but for a short topical doc, integration into an online news site like Huff Post is probably going to put the work in front of more eyeballs than would see it at any festival. It’s something I’d like to see more of.

Sundance just released their short film lineup, and though I’m still going through the release, I know for a fact that there’s at least one film on there that you can watch right this second. FCU: Fact Checkers Unit stars Bill Murray, Kristen Schaal, Peter Karinen and Brian Sacca; it was written by Karinen, Sacca and director Dan Beers. I watched it a couple of months ago on YouTube. It’s good; it didn’t change my world, but it’s polished and funny. In the 3+ months since it’s been available at YouTube and FunnyOrDie, it’s already been watched about 750,000 times. At that point, is playing at Sundance even a big deal? Depending on where it plays and how often, they’ll be extremely lucky if 1,000 people see it in Park City–but I guess the hope is that it’ll be the right 1,000 people.

In any case, it’s not like this is your standard viral video–it clearly has a budget, and did I mention it stars Bill Murray?–but this is, as far as I know, the first instance of a online video hit making the jump to a festival the size Sundance. Please correct me if I’m wrong. And watch the short above–I have a feeling it won’t be on YouTube for much longer.

Martin Scorsese has never been shy about aligning himself with brands, but when the offer came in to shill Freixenet sparkling wine, he must have momentarily flashed back to Orson Welles’s Paul Mason commercials. There’s a difference between taking home a paycheck, and prostrating your legacy to a bald-faced, half-assed cash-in, remembered for all eternity via the YouTube dissemination of regrettable outtakes.
It’s no wonder, then, that this elaborate Freixenet ad directed by and starring Scorsese barely announces itself as an ad until the final minute or so.

The concept: Scorsese the tireless film preservationist finds three pages of an unproduced Alfred Hitchcock project called The Key to Reserva; Scorsese the filmmaker decides to film the pages “the way [Hitchcock] would be making it then, only making it now.” The ensuing short combines elements of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, The Birds, and probably countless other Hitchcock films; there are just two, extremely fetishistic, shots of the product. Watch it here.

[Via GreenCine Daily]

The West Side, a web series by Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Lieberman, defies online video stereotypes in virtually every meaningful way. It’s not a quick-and-shoddy, webcam-in-a-dorm-room production; there are real scripts, costumes, score and locations. It’s presented in wide screen, in crisp, meticulously lit and After Effected black-and-white. Plus, it’s a Western, a period piece, and a gangster fantasy. But it’s also a truly independent production, produced with more ingenuity than cash, taking inspiration from existing genres but twisting them to fit its own unique iconography and mythology.

This is likely one of the reasons for the four month gap between the debut of the first episode (which I wrote about here) and the posting, this week, of the second. In the interim, the filmmakers’ blog has become an essential read, not just for details on their tech struggles and triumphs, but as a source for tips and tricks for DIY filmmakers making work specifically for the web.

This is truly a serialized work, so if you haven’t seen Episode One, watch it here before moving on to Episode 2. They’re not embeddable, but that’s okay, because they look really pretty on the plain white page.

Full disclosure: Ryan and I both used to work for this company, but we’ve never met.

Brandon Harris sent me a note about his stylish short film, Happiness is No Fun, which purports to be “a short blaxploitation tinged remake of Godard’s seminal Breathless.” It’s not as jokey or spoofy as that logline might lead you to believe–which might lead to some initial disappointments. On the whole, I thought it’s refusal to go to the genre+genre=joke route was refreshing, if at times it gets a little didactic and speechy in its insertion of racial politics. Watch it above, and check out Brandon’s blog here.

Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee has crafted an open letter to George Lucas, re: eventual distribution options for his in-the-works Star Wars TV series:

Mr. Lucas, take a cue from Radiohead, and tell the networks to take a hike.

Why bother with traditional TV? You own the one of the biggest brands in the, well, universe. The shows are already being produced without a network commitment. Avoid the hassle of negotiating terms with networks around the world (and dealing with their marketing and promotions).

But most of all, it would give you what you are famous for — control.

The reference to Radiohead seems a little bit off the mark, as Albrecht doesn’t seem to be suggesting that Lucas set up his own storefront and/or allow fans to set their own price. It’s also worth noting that Radiohead’s price-it-yourself experiment has not been an unqualified success: though 1.2 million copies were legitimately purchased last week, another 500,000 were downloaded illegally. But if Georgie were to follow one of Albrecht’s suggestions and broadcast his series via an ad supported video sharing network like Brightcove, piracy wouldn’t be an issue, and he’d be able to keep all ad revenue for himself.

It would be a very, very encouraging sign if someone like Lucas were to wake up to the fact that the internet is where his fan base lives, and subsequently take the initative to come to them. But even if Albrecht is right in that an online-self release would actually give Lucas *more* control over his content, I think the perception amongst traditional media producers is still that the internet is the wild west, and that releasing content in this world is equivalent to giving up control. Isn’t that why Video ID exists?