Let’s play that game where we compare quotes from two seemingly unrelated stories that happened to come out on the same day and thus seem to say something about the zeitgeist.
I was on vacation/self-imposed internet exile when David Hudson’s IFC blog, The Daily, ceased publishing at the end of last month, so I didn’t realise it had happened until nearly two weeks later. By that point, indieWIRE had stepped in to fill the void with cinemadaily, a five-day-a-week column that usually focuses on one blogospheric meme per day. It was something, but it wasn’t enough: I missed the quick-glance view of the entire day’s worth of news and chatter that Hudson used to offer, and I especially missed his summaries of the Arts sections of international weekend papers.
Today, Hudson is back with a new vehicle for his mad collation/curation skills. The Auteurs Daily will live on the cineaste site’s blog, the Notebook, with a twist: items that would have gone in the section that Hudson used to call Shorts will now be broadcast directly to Twitter. “I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been a dedicated Twitter disparager in the past,” Hudson writes, but he now belives the microblogging platform will be the perfect way to streamline his service whilst broadcasting it in a hyper-timely fashion. You can follow those tweets here. Welcome back, David!
According to Sasha Grey’s Twitter feed, the porn actress/star of Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (of which I am a big fan) returned from Australia yesterday, where she was promoting the movie at the Sydney Film Festival, to learn that a Los Angeles-based porn actress has tested positive for HIV. The actress, who is being identified as Patient Zero, had two male partners in the industry who are in the process of being tested, and in the meantime, the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation is advising performers who have worked with the infected actress or people she has worked with “not to work.” Sasha Grey is apparently taking the same precaution; last night, she twittered: “I have my partners tested two days before I do a scene with them, but I’m abstaining until our industry hears more about this.” Follow her Twitter feed for further updates.
Today in The Assault On Film Criticism: two salvos from journalists who just don’t seem to get the online tools and communities that they’ve credited with having ar too much power. Since neither argument is new I would have ignored these stories individually, but together…
Let’s start with The Wrap, and the kind of story they seem to publish a lot of: 300 words, no news, hyperbolic conclusions. This one’s about FlickTweets, a new site that compiles Twitter updates from about movies — gasp! — normal people. The Wrap’s Maria Russo says the site “could be what helps studios and film critics, not usually the best of friends, find common cause. Both are under siege by the armies of critics at the movies these days packing iPhones and Blackberries.” Theorizing that FlickTweets “could be disastrous for the movie business,” Russo concludes by insulting the intelligence of just about everyone in The Wrap’s target audience: “it’s not clear that the studios — or film critics — could even come up with a defensive strategy.”
In today’s New York Times, Brian Stelter talks to muckraking filmmaker Robert Greenwald about his latest project, Rethink Afghanistan, which Greenwald calls “a real-time documentary.” Greenwald has posted the first two of five parts of the documentary on the Rethink website and is currently in Afghanistan shooting more; eventually, the video blogs will be “stitched together” into a full-length film for potential festival play, DVD release, and even theatrical distribution.
Greenwald says speed is his primary motivator for releasing his works in progress to the web in this way; with President Obama somewhat quietly escalating the war in Afghanistan, Greenwald (who titled the first chapter of Rethink “More Troops + Afghanistan = Catastrophe”) is hoping his film will impact policy. On the Rethink website, he’s already obtained over 36,000 signatures to a petition demanding congressional oversight hearings on Afghanistan spending, in the name of creating “a national conversation to address the many questions surrounding this war.” The YouTube comments on the first chapter would suggest that the film is already making it possible for that conversation to take place amongst the rabble, and at a surprisingly high level of discourse for the video sharing site.
One issue that Stelter and Greenwald don’t address is the fact that Greenwald is at liberty to work this way only because he has a massive grassroots base already built, and its members are already online, and he doesn’t need film festival accolades to raise his profile, and theatrical release for his films is an afterthought. Does the collapsing of distinction between online video and feature filmmaking become less significant when it’s simply a question of finding your audience where they live? Is this a model that any other name brand documentarian would be willing to play with at this point?
David Lynch used yesterday’s edition of his daily video weather report to acknowledge the authenticity of his Twitter account. Compare his slumping resignation in the above clip to today’s report, during which he speaks brightly and smokes happily. I am deeply moved by the apparent trepidation with which he makes this admission, and hope in the future, all celebrities and filmmakers are forced to make similar taped confessions regarding their use of the technological tools of their audience.
For our pre-Oscar show, we wanted to give our predictions of who will take home the little naked men, but we also wanted to give a running commentary on the awards as they happen. We reached a compromise. We’ve decided to put on our own Oscar ceremony, so we can react to our own predictions, all while providing witty and humorous insights. Watch out for a few upsets! Even we were surprised! (We’ll also be providing commentary on the actual show, via twitter, which you can follow right on SpoutBlog).
Karina joins us to talk about live-twittering the Oscars and the Independent Spirit Awards. She also talks about a compelling new documentary called Moving Midway.
Contests: Tell us which movie you think should be turned into a graphic novel, for a chance to win the graphic novel version of Waltz With Bashir. Tell us which film has the best production design of all time, and you could win a companion tome to the forthcoming film, Watchmen. E-mail both to filmcouch (at) spout (dot) com.
My favorite memory of the Oscars last year was Karina Longworth’s Twitters hitting my iPhone every few minutes. The way she can describe Diablo Cody’s dress in one sentence had me turning to my wife saying, “You’ve got to hear this…” By the end of the night we had the iPhone sitting between us, propped on a pillow where we could both see each twitter as it popped up.
Sunday, February 22nd, Karina and a gaggle of other SpoutBlog writers will live-twitter the Oscars again. Check back here at 8:00 EST. If you won’t have a laptop with you to see all the action, you can at least follow Karina on Twitter.
Saturday, February 21st, Karina will also be at The Spirit Awards, twittering from the scene. IFC’s televised coverage begins at 5:00 EST, hosted by Steve Coogan.
Want to see Karina’s Twitter stream? It’s embedded after the jump.
Thinking about the art and process of documentary filmmaking, and then thinking about how people “document” their lives via Twitter — can you envision ways you might use Twitter as part of your work or storytelling?
Since the only kind of documentary work I’ve been involved in has been vérité style, in which the camera must stay with the subject for a long time, potentially years, in slow and deliberate accumulation of material that will be distilled down, I can see similarities between that process and Twitter. Certainly you can observe a lot about someone by reading the accumulation of in-the-moment information they have left behind in tweets. In that sense, it is similar to vérité. It is, at least to those who use it un-self-consciously, a window into personality. If a documentary subject were a Twitter user, you would definitely want to follow their feed — it would be a gold mine of inside information that could lead to new ideas and possibilities in your film.
Amanda Hirsch talks to documentary filmmaker Louis Abelman about Twitter on the P.O.V. Blog. You can follow Hirsch and Abelman on Twitter. Hell, you can follow me and Spout, too.
Twitter, the popular micro-blogging service, has turned into a powerful tool in the hands of not only consumers but marketers of all stripes as well. Comcast, Paramount Pictures and a handful of others have all latched on to it as a way to communicate with customers, acting not only as a distribution platform but a conversation hub and customer service hub as well. Some of the biggest names in the social media marketing world are spending serious time brainstorming how to use Twitter for marketing, debating its usefulness and otherwise hashing out a series of best practices for utilizing the service.
Media outlets have also turned to Twitter for many of the same reasons. TV Guide, Fox News and even Spout have a presence there to, again, promote their content and, in some cases, even engage in a back-and-forth with readers.
Today in various bits of internet ephemera that sort of sound like Onion headlines:
Rick Rey, producer of the popular vlog EPIC-FU, is going to watch Rambo 3and live-Twitter the experience. “This is a landmark Twitter experiment and I may lose many followers - a risk I’m willing to take,” he bravely notes at the Facebook page for the “event,” which goes down on Tuesday night. You can follow the action here, or play along aIong at home! “If following the action isn’t enough, you can simultaneously Twitter your own Rambo 3 experience at exactly 9:00PM PST. I’m pretty sure it’s in stock at every Blockbuster worldwide.”
Nikki Finke takes a look at “how the pushback of Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince to 2009 has had such a profound effect on this coming holiday’s North American release schedule.” Conclusion? “When moviegoers think Christmas, they think Nazis…”
Related (we think): Vulture’s extremely scientific research proves that 2008’s fall movie season is marginally more likelt to induce clinical depression than 2007’s.
Fantastic Fest, held at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin in September, announced a number of films and events today. As expected, the Jean-Claude Van Damme meta-biopicJCVD made the cut, as did the Leos Carax/Michel Gondry/Joon-ho Bong omnibus, Tokyo! Other highlights:
Wicked Lake, in which “four buxom ladies head out to the country for some good old-fashioned naked lesbian Wiccan frolicking.”
Fear(s) of the Dark, a collection of six animated horror shorts by acclaimed graphic novelists (see trailer above).
Santos, which has probably the most baffling film festival catalog capsule description I’ve ever seen: “A wild, sweeping tale of comic book nerds versus superheroes in a battle for the future of mankind. Think Ultraman with a Latin American brain transplant.”
Also: at 2pm EST today, if you’re on Twitter (check) and you’re planning to attend Fantastic Fest (check), you should send the following message to your followers:
I’m heading to Fantastic Fest (Sept 18-25)! Join me there and pass it on! New films and fun announced at http://www.fantasticfest.com
Those who mass tweet will be get themselves on the list for the Fantastic Fest opening night after-party.
It’s Internet Week in New York City! That means all my Twitter friends are going to three parties a night and texting from each about about how bored/drunk/drowning in nerdy masculinity they are. Because they keep going back night after night, I have to assume that either the NY tech community is full of self-destructive masochists (probable) or these events are actually kind of fun (naaaahhhh).
I’m going to see what all the fuss is about tonight, as IndieGoGo, FILMMAKER Magazine and the IFC Center co-host an Internet Week event called Where Internet and Film Collide. The evening will begin with screenings of Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno shorts; one of Jamie Stuart’s short films produced during the annual New York Film Festival press screening grind; Beyond the Rave, an online series for which Lance Weiler created an interactive game; and web neo-Western The West Side, about which we’ve gushed previously. After the screenings, Stuart, Weiler, and West Side creators Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Leiberman will join Ari Kuschnir and Scott Thrift of web video studio M ss ng P eces and Christopher Barry, a digital media exec from the Sundance Channel for a panel discussion. I’ll Twitter it, I promise!
At the Risky Biz blog, Steven Zeitchik accuses the Wachowskis of “insidious” product placement in Speed Racer, altering the design of Speed’s helmet and the Mach 5 to subliminally invoke corporate partner McDonalds. “It may not be brand placement. It’s something much newer and trickier: brand suggestion.”
FILMMAKER Magazine’s website has published the essay by David Gordon Green from the liner notes of the recently-released Benten DVD of Todd Rohal’s The Guatemalan Handshake. His first impression of that film? “I had a queer anxiety in my stomach that in fact the movie was “too good,” or should I say “special,” like a retarded kid who is enchanting and liberating in his or her world view, destined for a conflict with the traditional culture.”
Movie viral marketing or fan fic? It’s too early to tell, but twoG.I. Joecharacters have started Twittering. GeneralHawk’s latest update: “Having a late lunch at Bennigan’s with Snake-Eyes & Alpine. Alpine says The Roots newalbum is, quote, ‘Dope.’” [Tipped by Kevin]
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.
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Tell us which movie you think should be turned into a graphic novel, for a chance to win the graphic novel version of 
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Today in various bits of internet ephemera that sort of sound like Onion headlines:
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