It’s been almost two years since the last “official”, non-news oriented episode of the Four Eyed Monsters video podcast. Today, IFC releases a new Four Eyed Monsters DVD, which contains the film, the previous 8 video podcast episodes, and five new episodes that finally pick up the Arin & Susan saga where episode 8’s cliffhanger left off. It’s worth the wait: episode 9 gets right into the nitty gritty of What Happened After Susan Kissed That Guy in Park City. Watch it above, and keep an eye on IFC’s Four Eyed Monsters page, where they’ll be releasing the remaining new episodes online next week.
From Here to Awesome, the “discovery and distribution” online film festival initiative spearheaded by Arin Crumley, M Dot Strange and Lance Weiler, has released a video explaining their basic raison d’être. Subtitled “Festivals Don’t Work”, the video gives a brief refresher course on Crumley, Weiler and Strange’s efforts to deliver Four Eyed Monsters, Head Trauma and We Are the Strange directly to their audiences. And yes, Spout (who sponsored Four Eyed Monsters’ YouTube premiere and ended up paying the filmmakers almost $50,000) gets a little shout-out.
CinematicalIndie has a lengthy interview with Arin Crumley of Four Eyed Monsters fame, and in an unusual twist, Arin has made a video of his side of the conversation, which Cinematical’s Erik Davis has posted alongside a partial transcription.
Arin and Erik cover a lot of ground–an explanation of how Arin and Susan racked up so much debt, the pros and cons of putting your feature film up on YouTube, the dynamic between Arin and Susan’s business relationship and thier personal relationship–but I was particularly interested in this segment, where Arin talks about the potential role for social networking sites in the distribution/exhibition process. (I swear, I’m not excerpting this just because Arin has a lot of nice things to say about Spout):
If you look at Spout and the way their site works … one of the ways I use is I kind of organize the films I plan to see…Netflix is no good because that’s just if the film is available on DVD, and some are not available yet. So what I do on Spout, there’s a button next to every film, you search that film, you find it, you hit the button that says I want to see this film. So if you project ahead to either their site, or other sites, or who knows who might build this tool…but the concept of being able to store and publicly share your interest in movies–and if you can also be publicly sharing your location, which of course changes from time to time–there could be an intelligent system that knows what people want to see. And because of digital projection, you could really be showing anything on a screen, you’re not limited to what film prints were mailed to you…theoretically, you should be able to have a theatrical jukebox, where anything can be shown there. It’s just a matter of, “Well, what do people want to see?”
Transcribing from YouTube is no fun, and the whole interview is really worth ingesting, so just watch it yourself (or, as Arin suggests, listen while you work–it is, after all, about 49 minutes longer than your average YouTube clip). And if for whatever reason you still haven’t signed up for Spout, go here, start a free account, and Arin and Susan will be able to subtract one more dollar from their mountain of debt.
Some movies are violent, some are disturbing, and others are just plain wrong. Paul W. S. Anderson’s Death Race is a fun ride with some gnarly crashes, but it can’t hold a candle to its demented predecessor, Roger Corman’s Death Race 2000 (1975).
Cinema’s favorite weirdo, Cripsin Glover, is taking his film across the country, personally [...]
