The one face that has been prevalent all over Fantastic Fest for the past week, even more so than Alamo Drafthouse founder Tim League, has been Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo. His movie Timecrimes premiered to U.S. audiences here last year, and was snapped up by Magnolia; there’s now an Americanized version in the works. He’s been at pretty much every single screening, every event, and in every condition: tired, wired, drunk, sober, sleepy, awake.
He doesn’t have a feature film at the festival this year, but he did come with about 90 minutes worth of his short films, and those played as a single screening full of Nacho’s wacky blend of British and Spanish humor. Check out the full interview with him below, where you can also watch several of his shorts.
The Wholphin Blog alerts us to the news that Carson Mell will be screening a program of his animated shorts and music videos a week from tomorrow in San Francisco. Mell is producing some of the most cinematic (in terms of narrative scope and point of view) indie animation around right now. His Chonto, a former Wholphin DVD pick, screened at Sundance this year. I saw it when I was on the shorts jury at CineVegas and absolutely loved it, but my fellow jury members had their own favorites and compromise was inevitable. You can watch a trailer for Chonto above. The Chonto issue of Wholphin was also a topic of an episode of FilmCouch.
“Smart, absurd and heartwarmingly innocent, Joshua Safdie’s The Back of Her Head is a dessert short, that euphoriant treat that could in endless play still mesmerize with its sweetness and richness of story,” writes Noralil Ryan Fores at ShortEnd Magazine. The above clip “is in a way, a trailer for the film,” according to its YouTube synopsis.
This is as good an excuse as any for me to point you to redbucketfilms, the YouTube channel of Josh and Bennie Safdie and their filmmaking cohorts. There’s a bunch of stuff there: shorts, trailers, fragments, a minute of footage of Albert Maysles walking around an art gallery (and then, sitting and yawning epically) billed as “an observational documentary about a man at a party, who makes observational documentaries.” Etc.
Iraq fatigue: the conventional wisdom settled on in the last year that nobody wants to go to a movie theater for an Iraq war movie (most recently: Stop-Loss). Is it a new phenomenon or are all movies questioning war during wartime doomed to financial failure?
The new Wholphin quarterly DVD magazine is out. It’s probably the best curated source for short films outside a major festival and we give it the attention its due on FilmCouch.
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.
We’re just one week away from the official premiere of Joe Swanberg’s web series, Butterknife, and to mark that exciting occasion, here’s the last in our series of Butterknife promos, made by members of the show’s cast. This fabulous little number is the work of Mary Bronstein, who co-stars in Butterknife as the wife of the detective played by her real-life husband Ronnie. Make sure to check out our Butterknife page, where you can get more info and sign up for updates before the premiere of the series on Monday, January 28.
Add to My Profile | More VideosIt’s that time again. Above, you’ll find the second-to-last in our series of Butterknife promo shorts, made by the cast and crew of Joe Swanberg’s new web series. This installment is the work of Frank Ross, whose films Hohokam and Quietly on Byscreened as part of IFC’s New Talkies festival last summer. This clip stars Ross and fellow Butterknife co-star Tony Baker, who has also appeared in each of Ross’ films to date. Take a look, and check back next Monday for the last of our Butterknife promos, directed by none other than Mary Bronstein. Here’s a clue about that one that might entice you: it stars a puppet version of Joe Swanberg. And don’t forget: Butterknife premieres on January 28, right here.
At Slackerwood, Jette Kernion fills in the back story on this cryptic post by Matt Dentler, in which the SXSW Film Festival director teased details of “a production that will make its debut at SXSW 2008.”
If you attended SXSW Film Festival in 2002 — or if the culty word-of-mouth reached you later — you may have heard about the Burger Hut film-fest house ads that year. You know how film-fest house ads can often be incredibly lame and annoying, especially if you have to watch them before 15 or more movies in a week? Apparently that didn’t happen with the goofy Burger Hut ads. I wasn’t there in 2002 and I haven’t tried to watch the ads 15 times in a week, so I can’t vouch for this personally, but word gets around. People are very nostalgic about the Burger Hut.
The Burger Hut promos were co-written by and starred Kent Osbourne, recently of Hannah Takes the Stairs fame, and even more recently pictured in Burger Hut-character on that Dentler blog post. You can watch one of the old promos above, and the rest on YouTube; for new Burger Hut, it looks like you’ll have wait until SXSW 2008.
Agnes Varnum points to a preview clip on New York Magazine’s website, from the upcoming third season of Joe Swanberg’s Nerve.com series, Young American Bodies. In a very inside-baseball bit of humor, the clip features Swanberg himself literally in bed with film festival programmer Holly Herrick. Both appear in various states of undress, so don’t watch it at work. And if you’re a Swanberg fan, keep your eyes on SpoutBlog, as we’ll have a surprise from Joe here within the next 24 hours.
With all this Trapped in the Closethullabaloo in the air (yes, I just typed “hullabaloo”, and no, Firefox’s automatic spell checker had no problem with it), how could I resist Same Dude? Currently featured on YouTube, the hipster/nerd girl takeoff on R. Kelly and Usher’s Same Girl is the brainchild of Hannah Bos and Frances Chewning, who star in and produce the “Choose Your Own Adventure” web series The Mimi and Flo Show.
By transplanting Kelly and Usher’s blinged-out creation to Brooklyn, Bos and Chewning get away with some pretty great visual gags, such as when Mimi laments the loss of her “potential husband” on the 61 bus instead of a private plane, and when the girls drown their sorrow in chocolate and marshmallow fluff. But I have to say, I am a little disappointed that Same Dude cops Same Girls lame “whoops! They’re twins!” ending. When I saw Mimi with that frying pan, I was really hoping for some violence.
For more on Bos and Chewning’s shorts, check out MimiAndFlo.com
Blogging at BoingBoing about a recently-released 4-DVD set of 1930s Popeye cartoons, Mark Frauenfelder wrote, “Cartoons don’t get any better than this.” I thought that a little funny (well, maybe not funny ha ha, but…) because just last night, my boyfriend and I were watching TV and when a commercial came on for the same box set, Mr. Karina said, “I wonder if that set includes all the racist Popeyes.”
I had not previously been aware that there was a sub-genre of Popeye cartoons that were racist, although I admit that I probably should have been. He’s already an unpleasant enough stereotype of a sailor–why wouldn’t he also be a vehicle for of-the-era anti-other prejudices?
Of course, I went straight to Google and did some research. According to Karl F. Cohen, who wrote a book called Forbidden Animation: Censored Cartoons And Blacklisted Animators in America, while a number of Popeye shorts are generally considered to be borderline too racist for TV, there’s been no formal attempt to remove these shorts from the marketplace, and it’s up to individual TV stations to decide which episodes to air.
All of the examples he names come from the 1940s, and therefore wouldn’t be contained on this new boxset. However, one of these, a sterling bit of World War II-era propaganda called You’re a Sap, Mr. Jap (1942) is readily available on YouTube, so it must be on some disc, somewhere. Of the eight shorts named by Cohen (who is in turn citing Paul Mulan), only one is in Spout’s database: Fightin’ Pals (1940). No one’s reviewed it yet, but according to its IMDb profile, the action starts when Bluto “sails off to Darkest Africa for exploration” and doesn’t come back right away. Popeye follows, and finds the good doctor with “a bevy of native beauties attending to his every need.” On Spout, I’ve helpfully tagged it “Racist Popeye” for future reference.
Thus concludes your lesson in Reprehensible Pop Culture of the Early 20th Century for today, kids. Go out and play.
