45365, Bill and Turner Ross‘ SXSW-winning nonfiction film about their hometown of Sydney, Ohio, debuts today on SnagFilms, where it will be streaming for free for one week as part of Snag’s Summerfest, which brings festival films online for a limited time before their theatrical/TV/DVD runs.
As a big fan of this film’s dedicated formalism, I concur with AJ Schnack who, in an interview the Ross brothers, recalls his experience watching the film at SXSW “where the total immersion forced me to adapt to the film’s rhythms and language” and thus concludes that 45365 is the kind of film best “seen in theaters or at festivals.” Knowing this before attempting to watch the movie on my computer, I decided to try to approximate a bigger screen experience at home with the Snag stream by connecting my computer to my TV, but unfortunately Snag’s full screen option shuts down for every ad break. So it’s not the right format for “total immersion,” but hopefully it will expose the film to a wider audience, who might be moved to catch up with 45365 when Seventh Art releases it theatrically further down the line.
Also, 45365 on Snag would make for an interesting double online VOD bill with another film enjoying a similarly non-traditional release pattern, Loren Cass. …Read more
There are two interesting stories today related to the new Disney movie Earth, and since I’ve seen the little kid-friendly doc and disagree with both sides of the backlash, I’m going to address the stories in today’s bloggery despite the fact that only a few film blogs have commented on this topic. First off, there’s the complaint from Newsweek’s Jesse Ellison who thinks the film is too violent to be rated G, to which I call b.s. If anything, the movie cops out too much when it comes to the food-chain kills that every kid is aware of. Bambiis more violent than Earth, and I do honestly believe Ellison made up, or at least exaggerated, his observation of a little girl jumping into her father’s lap. There were kids at the press screening I attended too, but they were so visibly bored with the tameness of the movie that they were literally running up and down the aisle of the Disney screening room.
As for the other story, apparently all of the footage in Earth is recycled from BBC’s Planet Earthseries and basically only the James Earl Jones narration is fresh. Well, sure, maybe this is true, and maybe it’s a bit of a scam, but if so it’s at least a decent abridged and censored version with which to introduce kids to that series (since I’ve only seen bits of the series, I guess it was an introduction for me, as well).
So, I guess your decision to see the movie now rests on three things: you’re okay with a little implicit nature violence, you’re okay with an excellent nature series being retooled for your kids and shown on the big screen (where Planet Earth was not made available), and you want Disneynature to plant a tree in your honor, as promised by the studio’s genius promotion.
After the jump, some responses from the blogs, plus some bonus bloggery related to Earth Day:
Trying to make an independent film about a gay man and a terrorist bonding in a Brazilian prison cell was not an easy thing to do in the early 1980’s. Nevertheless, producer David Weisman did exactly that, making Kiss of the Spider Woman not only a reality, but an Oscar-winning hit. We talk with Weisman about his beginnings, and the struggle of making an independent film without a road map.
While independent filmmakers certainly have more options in 2008, one hurdle that remains is distribution. We talk to documentarian Anne Sundberg about her latest film, The End of America. Five months ago it was an idea, today it can be viewed for free online at SnagFilms.com.
If you opened up a movie trade publication or read a movie-focused blog between October 2007 and February 2008 the odds are good you saw at least one story about how the massive influx of Iraq War-themed films that were being released (The Kingdom, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, etc) were not only all failing but were causing havoc in the independent film world.
Their less than fantastic box-office success was not always attributable to the quality of the movie. Nor was it always to do the audience’s perceived lack of interest in movies about our current military situation. But these were easy journalistic hooks on which to hang a story and so became part of our entrenched conventional wisdom.
Indeed there were some high-quality films released about this subject matter in the last year or so that are deserving of a broader audience. But release patterns don’t always line up with audiences. That’s why the appearance of films such as Heavy Metal in Baghdad on distribution sites like SnagFilms (a Spout partner) is so important: by flattening the distribution field to allow for anywhere, anytime viewing, the audience (at least that portion of it that’s tuned into online viewing, a percentage that’s growing steadily) can find movies that will interest them regardless of whether or not it’s playing at their local multiplex.
In the 16 months or so since it first became possible to distribute full-length feature films in single viewing windows embedded in a blog post, there’s been a lot of talk as to how a film presented in this matter might function. For Four Eyed Monsters, the first feature film made available legally in a single stream on YouTube, the embed functioned as a meme spreader for the FEM brand (and the page the embed code came from served as a revenue generator for Spout.com). At Telluride last month, Annette Insdorf talked about the embed’s value as reference point within online criticism, which is something we’ve done here on SpoutBlog, most recently with Steven’s post last week on DW Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln. Also last week, Anne Thompson suggested that Wayne Wang’s Princess of Nebraska, recently made available for streaming in full on YouTube, can serve as a marketing tool for the film Wang made concurrently, A Thousand Years of Good Prayer, which is currently in theaters. In pieces in the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, John Horn and John Jurgensen both suggested that free streaming solutions for features are performing a kind of public service; Horn commended SnagFilms, the portal for ad-supported embeddable documentaries, for their ability to bring “important movies to audiences that otherwise might never have known the films existed,” while Jurgensen focused on Hulu and YouTube’s potential to help relieve the “glut of movies jockeying for theater screens.”
This is all well and good, but in most cases, up until now an argument could have be made that the “better” place to see the film in question would be on a big screen, and/or with an audience, because the assumption has been that the natural home for cinema is in a cinema, that distribution via embed is an alternative option when theatrical distribution doesn’t work out. The same can not be said for The End of America, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s non-fiction adaptation of Naomi Wolf’s book and ensuing lecture tour, which debuted on SnagFilms today. This is the first film I’ve seen that seems ideally suited to be seen as a blog embed, and not just because a good deal of the footage within was pulled from web video sources. Essentially a Top Ten list followed by a How To, it’s the first film I’ve seen that seems to have internalized the structure of the traffic-baiting blog post.
The End of America, a new documentary based on a book by Naomi Wolf and directed by Ricky Stern and Annie Sundberg (The Devil Came on Horseback), will premiere tomorrow night at the Hamptons Film Festival. And then, it’s going to be available … everywhere. It’s the first production of IndiePix Studios, and the company has developed a unique plan to get the movie out there via a ton of different means. After its festival premiere it’s going straight to streamability via Snag Films, and then, according to a press release, the doc will “flood venues around the country, from special screenings to theatrical exhibitions, from book stores and merchants that sell DVDs to internet sources for renting, streaming and downloading the film.”
As far as I know, it’s the first film to go to Snag directly from its festival premiere. Presumably, the goal is to enable the film, which “addresses issues of freedom, dictatorship, civil liberties and democracy - and warns that the United States’ claims on constitutional civil liberties are fast eroding,” to “go viral” in the days leading up to the election. It’ll be an interesting experiment; so far, most of the films on Snag have been titles that had been available in other forms for awhile, and this may be a test of whether or not, when given the oportunity to embed and discuss a brand-new political documentary, bloggers will pounce. I’m seeing the film tomorrow in the Hamptons and will have more thoughts after that.
If the titles of the three films mentioned in the title don’t evoke a sense of anxiety about the present, I’m not sure what will. At the same time, they’re all immensely different films. Fernando Meirelles’s new film, Blindness, opens tonight. Will it replace Children of Men as our favorite recent film about societal collapse?
Karina joins us to talk about one hit and one miss from the New York Film Festival thus far. While Happy-Go-Lucky inspired homicidal thoughts, I’m Gonna Explode did not disappoint.
The financial mayhem of the day made us remember a little known documentary from 2006, In Debt We Trust (which can be viewed for free on SnagFilms.com). We call director Danny Schechter to talk about what’s been going on in the two years since his nearly prophetic film was released.
The Democratic National Convention is over, and all the ecstatic party members have left Denver to go back to their zombie-esque lives (Bob Hope said it, not me). But after four days of celebrating what it means to be a Democrat, some may not wish to settle down and calmly wait out the next two months until Obama’s (possible) win, let alone the next five months waiting for the candidate to (possibly) be sworn in as President, participating in the normal non-specifically-Democratic, non-self-congratulatory activities that most of us are content with.
So, one thing excited Democrats can do is watch movies that will continue to inspire and encourage their beliefs and politics. As Karina already wrote, The American Presidentis one movie that just barely may allow Obama fans to relive his DNC speech. Also, beginning yesterday, the Oscar-nominated documentary No End in Sight will be available in full on YouTube through till Election Day. Of course, there’s always other anti-war and anti-Bush docs for free viewing online, at such sites as SnagFilms and FreeDocumentaries.org.
And since there are so many docs out there that can make a Democrat giddy with the want for change, I’ve decided to limit today’s list to fictions and dramatizations, because they are more about feelings than facts, and that’s all you really need for political inspiration these days. As usual, I’m leaving out a lot of picks, both obvious and obscure, so feel free to tell us what movie make you feel most proud to be a Democrat.
We’ve been running into a really exciting company at festivals called SnagFilms (snagfilms.com). Today, they launched their beta site with a slate of over 270 free documentaries, many of them full-length. The next few weeks the library should increase to 400. They’ve also acquired the perennial news source for independent film, indieWIRE, which will be SnagFilms editorial voice for these unsung gems that would probably otherwise languish on the festival circuit.
Many of the docs available were featured at the SXSW Film Festival, like award winning audience favorite of SXSW 2006, Darkon. Watch it. It’s free. (It feels so good to write that.)
A little film called The Dark Knightopens tomorrow tonight, and it’s so highly anticipated and it has received so much positive buzz that one expert is predicting it could gross anywhere between $100-150 million. I’m going to to do him one better and broaden that gap further to $100-900 million. Good thing this isn’t The Price is Right.
And speaking of down-on-their-luck, alcoholics, Jeff Bridges will play one — a country singer, though, not a superhero — in the T Bone Burnett-scored musical Crazy Heart, which will also star Maggie Gyllenhaal and Robert Duvall.
John Woo is known for announcing about 20 new directing gigs a year, so don’t get too upset if he doesn’t actually end up helming the comic book adaptation Caliber.
Can we expect a whole new marketing strategy for Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie? United Artists has just hired a new chief of marketing and publicity, Michael Vollman from Paramount, to replace the resigned Dennis Rice.
Documentary site SnagFilmshas acquired indieWIRE. Congrats and good luck to our SpoutBlog friends at iW, including Eugene Hernandez, who has a new position and will oversee content on both sites.
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.
filmcouch-114
There are two interesting stories today related to the new Disney movie Earth, and since I’ve seen the little kid-friendly doc and disagree with both sides of the backlash, I’m going to address the stories in today’s bloggery despite the fact that only a few film blogs have commented on this topic. First off, there’s the complaint from Newsweek’s Jesse Ellison who thinks the film is too violent to be rated G, to which I call b.s. If anything, the movie cops out too much when it comes to the food-chain kills that every kid is aware of. Bambi is more violent than Earth, and I do honestly believe Ellison made up, or at least exaggerated, his observation of a little girl jumping into her father’s lap. There were kids at the press screening I attended too, but they were so visibly bored with the tameness of the movie that they were literally running up and down the aisle of the Disney screening room.
If you opened up a movie trade publication or read a movie-focused blog between October 2007 and February 2008 the odds are good you saw at least one story about how the massive influx of Iraq War-themed films that were being released (The Kingdom, In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, etc) were not only all failing but were causing havoc in the independent film world.
A little film called 
