This episode of Butterknife co-stars Sean Prince Williams (again), the cinematographer of Frownland. You can go to Spout.com’s Butterknife page for more info on the series, to watch future episodes, to talk about the show, and to sign up for email updates.
LIBERTAS has an interesting post about how that Will.I.Am “Yes We Can” Obama video––in which celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and Kate Walsh sing over and mug in front of Barack Obama’s New Hampshire primary “concession” speech––is emblematic of a new kind of Hollywood political support. Dirty Harry riffs on a post by Jim Geraghty, who notes that the clip’s “substance-free message of ‘yes we can, unity is good, we have hope and the hopes of children are important’” is unobjectionable “because there’s no ideas in it; it’s entirely emotion.” He goes on to say that aligning oneself with that emotion is less a political action than participation in a “pop-culture phenomnenon.”And because pop culture is something American’s know how to participate in without thinking, by extension Barack Obama becomes the ready-made candidate for those who can’t really handle much more than passive consumption of an image as a stand-in for a feeling.
Dirty Harry actually sees this as a good thing. He likes the idea of ” a quiet advocacy from Hollywood for their guy (or gal)” because it stands in contrast to previous celebrity-led political spectacles, in which stars “have hurt their own careers and the candidate they want elected saying unbelievably stupid things.” But writing about the “Yes I Can’ video at NewTeeVee, Wagner James Au couldn’t disagree more…
It’s finally here: we happily present the first episode of Joe Swanberg’s latest web series, Butterknife, embedded above.
Butterknife stars Ronald Bronstein (Frownland director/star and Joe’s Sundance Video partner) as a private detective whose frustration on the job is counterbalanced by his happy home life with his wife (played by Ronnie’s real-life wife, Mary Bronstein). We’ve done tons of coverage of Butterknife over the past few months here on SpoutBlog, all of which you can check out here. You can also go to Spout.com’s Butterknife page for more info, to watch future episodes, to talk about the show, and to sign up for email updates.
The show is a kind of comedy of manners, tracking Bronstein’s private investigator from professional foibles and communication breakdowns on the streets of Brooklyn, to the blissful home life he shares with his adorable wife (played by Ronnie’s real-life wife Mary, who co-starred in Frownland). It’s sort of like Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Early Years, except Larry’s a detective, and Cheryl can actually stand to be around him.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be bringing you interviews with the cast and crew of Butterknife every Friday. We’re doing this as an email chain: I sent Joe some questions, he sent Ronnie some questions, Ronnie sent Mary some questions, and so on. Below the jump, you’ll find my interview with Joe. Check out the Butterknife page on Spout, and check back here next week for some Joe-on-Ronnie action. But not in, like, a dirty way. You know what I mean.
Yet another filmmaker moonlighting as an ad director: Harmony Korine directed the above TV advert for Thornton’s, a British department store chocolate store [thanks, Marie!]. There are some unmistakeable Korine touches here (and even vague references to images from julien donkey-boy and the upcoming Mister Lonely–which, by the way, is AWESOME). But still, it’s somewhat ironic that I’m able to show you a more-or-less conventional, Holiday season-timed TV ad directed by the bad boy of 90s independent cinema, and a short film made specifically for the web by a canonized, old-guard, Oscar winning filmmaker that goes out of its way to upend standard conceptions about online advertising. Interesting, no?
The West Side, a web series by Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Lieberman, defies online video stereotypes in virtually every meaningful way. It’s not a quick-and-shoddy, webcam-in-a-dorm-room production; there are real scripts, costumes, score and locations. It’s presented in wide screen, in crisp, meticulously lit and After Effected black-and-white. Plus, it’s a Western, a period piece, and a gangster fantasy. But it’s also a truly independent production, produced with more ingenuity than cash, taking inspiration from existing genres but twisting them to fit its own unique iconography and mythology.
This is likely one of the reasons for the four month gap between the debut of the first episode (which I wrote about here) and the posting, this week, of the second. In the interim, the filmmakers’ blog has become an essential read, not just for details on their tech struggles and triumphs, but as a source for tips and tricks for DIY filmmakers making work specifically for the web.
This is truly a serialized work, so if you haven’t seen Episode One, watch it here before moving on to Episode 2. They’re not embeddable, but that’s okay, because they look really pretty on the plain white page.
Full disclosure: Ryan and I both used to work for this company, but we’ve never met.
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.
“No filmmaker has more daringly and relentlessly explored what it means to be human than David Cronenberg,” writes Jim Emerson at Scanners. He’s put together a 12 minute highlight reel to prove that point. Written in the Flesh: A Crash Course in David Cronenberg incorporates images from nine Cronenberg classics, including Videodrome, The Fly and A History of Violence. It doesn’t seem to be embeddable, but you can watch it here.
Kent Nichols is the creator of Ask a Ninja, a web series produced independently by a crew of three that has become so popular that you can buy a DVD of its first 30 episodes at Urban Outfitters. Nichols is not in the WGA or any other guild, so he’ll be able to continue to work regardless of what happens with a strike. He’s written an interesting post about this at Metroblogging Los Angeles:
The current studio system is based on work for hire — which is fine since it gives predictable income in exchange for ownership of your work. But you end up losing out if you create a hit. Talk to Mike Judge about Beavis and Butthead.
I’ve successfully crafted a show that lives in it’s own channel that I create with a small team (my writing/producing partner and a freelance editor) that is not only popular on the net, but is also financially successful.
I did this by applying principles of Indie Film financing and creating a show that was easy and fun to produce with only two people.
Sure, my site AskANinja.com, doesn’t pull in the sweet dough of Pirates of the Caribbean, but I’ll probably make as much cash over its lifetime as the writers and director on that film did.
Brandon Harris sent me a note about his stylish short film, Happiness is No Fun, which purports to be “a short blaxploitation tinged remake of Godard’s seminal Breathless.” It’s not as jokey or spoofy as that logline might lead you to believe–which might lead to some initial disappointments. On the whole, I thought it’s refusal to go to the genre+genre=joke route was refreshing, if at times it gets a little didactic and speechy in its insertion of racial politics. Watch it above, and check out Brandon’s blog here.
1. “We’re going to create a relationship with all of you, our friends on MySpace.” Wow, un-obfuscated marketing language right in the intro!
2. They peek out the window at the “cute” paperboy? Are they going to invite him in to fix their plumbing?
3. There’s no timecounter on the video player, but I’m guessing that first “accidental” bra-and-panties shot happens less than two minutes in.
4. “Living in a house with these girls is gonna be wild, and sexy.” Oh my god–it’s not even soft enough to be softcore. It’s Playboy Confessions for cybertweens!
5. Multiple fart jokes? Check.
6. If the comments garnered by the first episode are to be believed, then a substantial portion of the audience missed the memo that this is scripted.
7. When they get that memo and realize that MySpace plans to “take input from viewers from Seattle to Stuttgart who will have a say on where the show should go,” it’s hard to imagine any suggestion trumping “more catfights.” Except for maybe “less clothes.”
Fox Searchlight has (wisely, I think) decided to tack Hotel Chevalier onto prints of The Darjeeling Limited when the feature expands into wide release this weekend. According to this story in the NY Times, Searchlight is hoping that the short, which “in contrast to the feature, received nearly universal praise when it was shown alongside the longer film at some festivals,” and which has been downloaded legally on iTunes over 500,000 times, will lure audiences who would otherwise wait on Darjeeling for the DVD.
Surely, there will be some rib-cage fetishists who maintain that a big screen is mandatory in order to appreciate that single profile shot of Natalie Portman’s naked body in full, so it’s a gamble that might pay off. But it seems to me that the real crux of the story is the last sentence, in which Lia Miller reports that the studio “also is hoping the short is Oscar-worthy and plans to promote it as a contender in the best live-action short category.” This would be significant, because as far as I know, it would make Chevalier the first short film to garner Oscar attention after officially premiering on the Internet.
But doesn’t AMPAS have rules about that? I know documentaries can’t qualify for Oscars if they’ve been distributed online before meeting their theatrical requirements. I consulted AMPAS’ Live Action Short rules, and found that a Chevalier campaign would be shady proposition at best. More after the jump.
If you have a recent picture of yourself in a costume and can make the appropriate value judgements about John Carpenter flicks, you could attend Harry Knowles’ 24-hour film festival.
Film theorist Rudolf Arnheim died, but commenter Marco didn’t have anything to do with it.
You can download a free issue of Film Quarterly that includes out takes from the script of Mark Rappaport’s From The Journals of Jean Seberg. I read them on the subway and they were awesome.
Think Tyler Perry’s a hack and Judd Apatow’s a genius? Armond White says that’s because you’re white.
On FilmCouch: Paul and Kevin mull over Mike Mills’ depression in Japan doc Does Your Soul Have A Cold? and finally got around to seeing The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — no thanks to Warner Brothers. And Karina tries to explain why a four hour Tom Petty documentary directed by Peter Bogdanovich makes perfect sense.
Will Ferrell and Adam McKay’s video sharing site FunnyOrDie exploded over the summer with The Landlord, a one-joke short featuring Ferrell and a little girl with a dirty mouth. But the site has been widely criticized lately for failing to sustain the high levels of traffic delivered every time Ferrell is featured in a clip. A Hollywood Reporter piece last week pegged Landlord as both a blessing and a curse for the infant start-up: it attracted a huge amount of attention, but Ferrell and crew didn’t have enough quality content in the vault to keep visitors around, and though they’ve solicited successful contributions from stars such as Eva Longoria and Bill Murray, since there’s no compensation involved, no one with a Los Angeles mortgage to pay can afford to devote too much time to it. The conclusion: FunnyOrDie needs to pull from a wider talent pool in order to survive.
This week, they’ve expanded that talent pool with one key name, although whether or not it’ll solve Funny’s core problem is still debatable. In the clip above, Ferrell and McKay welcome Judd Apatow, writer/director of Knocked Up and producer of SuperBad. It’s a clever clip, clearly referencing if not the THR story specifically, then the general buzz that FunnyOrDie needs to become a money-making business, or die. But will Apatow, the busiest comedy producer in town, really prove to be a reliable fount of content?
Add to My Profile | More VideosLance Weiler of Head Trauma fame has launched a new web series on MySpace called Hope is Missing. Loosely intended as a companion to Head Trauma, which is being released on VOD on October 23, the series is a true cross-platform event unfolding over MySpace, Twitter, and even real life. Two episodes are live so far; I’ve been having fun sorting through the comments, watching the users go from taking it at face value that these are “real” clips about a real missing girl, to questioning that assumption, to making the connection to Head Trauma. The first episode is above, and the whole series can be found here.
