• Why doesn’t anyone care about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening? iO9’s Graeme McMillan has a theory: “The trailer gives you absolutely no idea what the movie is about, apart from people dying and Mark Wahlberg looking confused. People probably thought that it’s some kind of big-budget sequel to A&E’s turgid Andromeda Strain remake.”
• Paul Scheer’s first paid job as an actor was in The Onion: The Movie. “I shot it about 6 years ago, I’ve never seen it, nor did I ever see a script for the entire film (just my scene) but after reading this quote from the Washington Post, I’m intrigued…” We assume he was as “intrigued” as us by the part about the film co-starring “Kevin Federline, who — oh irony of ironies! — appears as a dancer in a music video that satirizes soon-to-be-wife Spears.”
• Jeff Wells takes a look at a piece by Gregg Goldstein on Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, New York. “The title of Goldstein’s piece is ‘Synecdoche could improve with edit’; the subhead is ‘Hypnotic film may undergo further cuts.’ The Hollywood Elsewhere response: ‘No shit?’”

• Earlier this week, Jonathan Marlow published a rant on GreenCine Daily, titled They didn’t build their sales model for you. Much of the piece is given over to a description of the dire state of distribution affairs for truly independent filmmakers. Marlow, who acquires films for GreenCine’s DVD-by-mail main site, essentially argues that filmmakers should put less weight on dreams of theatrical distribution and concentrate on the many new media options. I didn’t comment on this story earlier because, well, my reaction was pretty much the same as Agnes Varnum’s: “It reads to me as a good summary of where things have been for last couple of years in film sales, so my question is what’s the news? Do people really not know this information?”
• Tom Hall also weighs in on the Marlow piece, from a festival programmer’s perspective: “Let me begin by taking exception to Marlow’s straw man, one that I have seen being built over and over again on panels and in discussions among filmmakers and programmers over the past few years; Film festivals are not, in fact, an ersatz distribution system for films.”
• If you live in New York and/or read the blogs of people who do, chances are you’re aware of The Emily Gould Fiasco. Funnily enough, Juan and Victor Piñeiro, brothers as well as director and producer of Second Skin, have bared witness to several smaller-scale Emily Gould fiascos over the past decade and a half.
• Finally, Paul Scheer explains why, although no one will admit to wanting it, Beverly Hills Cop 4 will make back twice its budget in its first weekend: “I’m like an abused sequel wife, I keep going back to theaters time and time again to get mercilessly kicked in the cinematic balls for having faith that a sequel can actually be good as it’s predecessors.”

Forget about comedians making a funny videos to plump up their IMDb profiles––the new hotness is skipping the video, and taking comedy directly to IMDb. On his Tumblr, comedian/Human Giant star Paul Scheer implores The Internet to join him, Adam McKay (writer/director of Anchorman and Talladega Nights) and several of their friends and colleagues in mobbing the message boards attached to the IMDb entry for the questionable classic, Another Stakeout. “Come join us and help us turn this movie into a giant cult hit for absolutely no good reason,” Scheer writes. “Let’s forward this e-mail and flood the site to the point where there are Another Stakeout festivals and conventions and midnight showings with people in costume saying lines along with the movie ala Rocky Horror Pic Show.” Why Another Stakeout and not just Stakeout? Scheer clarifies: “The first one was pretty good but like the Godfather 2 (or is the Godfather 2 like Another Stakeout?) director John Badham got it right the second time around.”

Threads on the Another Stakeout page which look like the handiwork of Scheer and gang include: Van Sant to helm shot-by-shot AS2 remake?!?!?, How many AS-related tattoos do you have?, and Another Stakeout suicide club!. wherein tommyxtommy bemoans that AS fans “do not have a recognized place in the world!” The solution? “Wemust killourselves!” Sic.