Stereogum has posted a music video for Austin band The Octopus Project, directed by David and Nathan Zellner. It doesn’t have a Barry Lyndon homage starring a monkey, but it does have a singing boat and psychedelic crustaceans. That is enough.

Three videos of note on the Facebook page (you may have to sign in and become a fan to see it) for Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax: two intros for Bujalski’s work made for Canadian TV, one starring Shawn Sides as Elvira and the other featuring Alex Karpovsky as Dracula. In both, bats flutter by on strings, as Bujalski himself looks on, silent but bemused. “Tonight I have a thirst,” Elvira drawls. “A thirst for a spine-tinglingly cold taste of American independent cinema!”

This is doing it right.

And then there’s this, also embedded above. I saw this on YouTube and thought it was a joke, like that thing with Kent Osborne in the garage, but apparently it’s an actual ad for a film series on Channel 4 in the UK. The ad features young attractive people standing in front of graffitied walls (very first season Real World), earnestly informing us that there’s a type of movie in which “there are no buldings blown to hell in slow motion, and you know what? That’s okay, because these films are about people!” The kicker: “There’s something going on here.” Cut to slow-talking redhead girl: “And that something, is a little something called mumblecore.” She then looks at the camera with one of those “this is just between you and me” smiles that are most often seen on television in the promotion of feminine hygeine products.

This is doing it wrong.

Beeswax opens at Film Forum on August 7 and expands to several other cities shortly after that. I like it.

While I was on vacation (did you miss me? did you even realize I was gone?) David Lowery posted an interesting pair of videos on his blog: the first nine minutes of his feature St. Nick; and a webseries episode shot in 2007 that became a kind of video sketch for the opening of that film, albeit with a much older male lead. St. Nick, which won a prize at the AFI Dallas Film Festival and which I became a big fan of at SXSW earlier this year, screens in Seattle on July 24, and will have its New York premiere on August 28 at Rooftop Films.

When one considers what’s going on technologically and commercially, he said, there’s a real question about whether festivals “are going to be obsolete in a decade, because people won’t find them valuable anymore—they won’t be the platform from which people need to operate.”

Above, from a story in the Village Voice by John Anderson pegged to tonight’s opening of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival, Geoff Gilmore sells the biggest event associated with his new employer by theorizing that it, and all festivals, may be on a long slide towards obsolescence.

Coincidentally, earlier this morning I watched the below video by JJ Lask, whose directorial debut On the Road With Judas premiered at Sundance in 2007, toured the country last year on the Range Life Roadshow, and is now available on DVD. “Don’t expect too much,” Lask says. “I’ve never had a girl come up to me after a show and say ‘I want to blow you,’ … I’ve never had a distributor come up to me and say, “Hey, I want to buy your movie … and blow you.’”  Lask goes on to suggest that the real values of the film festival experience are the free wine and the cushy hotel rooms from which to work on a follow-up screenplay in peace.

…Read more

One of Karina Longworth’s favorite undistributed films of last year is available to watch for free on Reel 13. Sita Sings the Blues won the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award at the 2008 Gotham Awards. In Karina’s review from Tribeca 2008, she called it, “a strange and beautiful little film, a potentially wispy slice of autobiography smartly elevated through irresistible, orgiastic style.”

Watch the movie and read Brandon Harris’ interview with director Nina Paley from last November (republished) after the jump.

…Read more

Welcome to the first in our second annual series of SXSW previews! As the festival approaches we’ll be asking filmmakers to spill the superficial details about their films, to tell us all the deep personal details of what makes them tick, and –– new this year! –– reveal who they had to sleep with, in the incestuous conspiracy-minded secret society that is the wider SXSW community, in order to get their film programmed at the festival.

Chosen as our first preview simply because I very much support the naming films after Flock of Seagulls songs, Modern Love is Automatic is the debut directorial effort from Zach Clark, who edited SXSW 2006 entry Dance Party, USA. Above, check out the stylish, winky trailer for the movie. Below the jump, Clark describes his Emerging Visions entry as a “a No-Wave Douglas Sirk movie”, professes his love for salsa and “Three’s Company style misunderstandings”, and drops the name of a Bollywood-related work-out video that I feel I must purchase immediately.

…Read more

So Etta James doesn’t like Beyonce’s redition of her signature song, “At Last”, and that reminded me that I’ve never linked to Andrew Chan’s piece on Cadillac Records, the only serious appraisal of the film that I saw concurrent with its release. To quote at length, Chan has nothing but praise for Beyonce:

In the film’s climactic number, Beyoncé seals the deal with her rendition of “I’d Rather Go Blind”…as an actress and a singer, she finds ways to make her interpretation both faithful and fresh. Sung directly to an impossible, already-married love interest, label founder Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody), the performance begins from the point-of-view of the male, gazing at Etta from behind with his puppy-dog eyes. From the start, the pace and phrasing of Beyoncé’s vocals follow Etta’s with surprising fidelity. Then, as the camera inches forward, eventually framing the singer’s face in close-up, the scene builds in intensity, climaxing with a sneer at the corner of her mouth, and a few defiant, gut-wrenching wails. It’s clear her version is not the original’s moan of resignation, but an enactment of all the bitterness and resentment on which Etta James based her take-no-prisoners persona….

By the time Beyoncé is finished with “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she has achieved what neither Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles nor Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash could manage: a respectful embodiment as well an expansion of a mythic figure. She takes us across a curiously underexplored frontier, where the emotional and physical abandon of an R&B performance becomes both the means and the substance of great melodramatic acting.

Etta’s version of “I’d Rather Go Blind” is embedded above, and Beyonce’s is down below. Judge for yourself.

…Read more

HEY EVERYONE!

GUESS WHAT!

THE TINY ASIAN SCHOOL GIRL CAN KICK REALLY HIGH! HOW HIGH? SO HIGH.

KAWAII HIGH.

Oh yes, I expect everyone to take this film so seriously. Even after reading the plot. Seriously, this is like someone actually made Cockpuncher.

Also, Dear Grady Hendrix and Subway Cinema crew:
Bring it to the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival.
We’ll sing your praises forever.

Thanks.

Sincerely,
-John.

[via Warren Ellis]

Free. Totally gratis. No pay. If you’re reluctant to contribute to The Day the Earth Stood Still’s box office gross (or if you already have, and need a cleansing), we’ve unearthed some science fiction classics that you can view online, completely free of charge.

The People That Time Forgot

Made in 1977, this movie didn’t blow cash on the special effects. It seems like they poured everything into the cavegirl’s fake boobs and her fur-bespangled outfit. But, the acting and the story in this is actually pretty darn good. If you can get past the the terrible dinosaur costumes, this is actually pretty decent, and ripe for a remake.

…Read more

If you’ve read this blog with any regularity, you’ll know that, as a work of stand-alone cinema, I am not crazy about Che. However, that doesn’t mean that I was anything but thrilled to hear that the Steven Soderbergh film sold out most of its weekend shows at the Ziegfeld in New York and the Landmark in Los Angeles. Here are five reasons why Che’s +$30k opening weekend per screen average is –– say it with me now –– Good For Cinema:

…Read more

Writer / director Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes opens in various locations over the next few weeks, starting with Austin, Texas this weekend. If you’ve heard about this film, then you’ve probably been waiting on it at least since it played Sundance earlier this year (it premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2007). If you haven’t heard about it, then you need to.

Nacho is one of those filmmakers who could make an amazing film with five million dollars, or with five bucks, because he’s all about the writing. Some of his short films feature only one camera setup, but they are incredibly funny because of the writing. One even features the same shot, over and over, and somehow it gets funnier each time.

Below is our primer to the best of Nacho on YouTube, which you can watch and explore as Timecrimes gets closer. It won’t exactly prepare you for the movie, but it’ll give you some insight into his sense of humor. We explored a few of these during our interview with Nacho at Fantastic Fest (where they showed many of these on a big screen in a theater), but here’s a guide chock full of shortage.

…Read more

I missed it when it aired over the weekend, but apparently there was a short film on Saturday Night Live this past Saturday starring guest host Paul Rudd, Bill Hader and an out-of-Obama-costume Fred Armisen, directed by none other than Noah Baumbach. Via Whatevs, I’ve embedded it above. It’s a cute bit of bromance–they’re all sleeping with the same girl, because they all really love each other! It’s no Mr. Jealousy (ah, Chris Eigeman and Peter Bogdanovich, together at last), but at the very least, it’s considerably more subtle than anything I’ve seen on SNL in awhile.

The leaves are turning, the air is crisp, it could only mean one thing: the time is now for the best Simpsons episode of the year, The Treehouse of Horror Halloween Special. They’ve done a good job this year of building buzz, especially around the portion of the episode that spoofs Mad Men. The episode airs Sunday, November 2, and 8 pm on Fox.

In the above video we get a glimpse of the segment’s title, How to Get Ahead in Dead-Vertising. This is fantastic news: it means that the piece will be properly ghoulish, and it also means that it may not be only an homage to Mad Men, but also to the classic 1989 advertising satire How to Get Ahead in Advertising. In that film, a successful ad executive suffers from a horrible boil on his neck. One day he wakes to find that the boil has developed into a face, which becomes his evil alter-ego. I would love to see that scenario played out with Homer on the Madison Avenue of the 1960’s.

This also gets to the point of why The Simpsons Halloween episodes are always the best: there are way more movie references than usual. I was an obsessive Simpsons fan as a kid, and the Halloween episodes alone upped my pop culture literacy by several notches. The segment based on The Shining is a favorite of mine, and the Frankenstein spoof where Mr. Burns’ head ends up grafted on Homer’s shoulder gave me nightmares for weeks.

Today’s video is a brilliantly simple mash-up: The Nightmare Before Christmas meets the song “Halloween”, by everyone’s favorite goth-punkers, The Misfits. The attempts to sync the lyrics with characters’ mouth movements are only so-so. But what makes the clip really work is how the tempo of the song highlights the kinetic energy of the film.

The Nightmare Before Christmas, while being a widely-loved family film, never betrays its spooky aesthetic. “Halloween” by The Misfits is decidedly less kid-friendly, with lines like, “This day anything goes / Burning bodies hanging from poles / I remember Halloween.” But there is an undeniable kick to the beat that makes it feel celebratory.

For more upbeat Misfits fun, check out the video for their cover of The Cryptkickers’ classic The Monster Mash. It’s cut together with stop-motion animation from the 1969 Halloween special Mad Monster Party.