When it was announced that David Wain would be directing Role Models — taking over from The Girl Next Door’s Luke Greenfield — there was room for disappointment. After all, for Wain to follow up his anarchic cult favorites Wet Hot American Summer and The Ten with a seemingly mainstream man-child comedy — one more suited to the talents of Todd Phillips or, well, Greenfield — was to crush his fans’ hopes for something more along the lines of his wacky web series, such as Wainy Days and Stella, or the old MTV sketch comedy show, The State.

But Role Models does look funny, probably because Wain ended up rewriting (with Paul Rudd and Ken Marino) Timothy Dowling’s original script. And it’s not as if Wain has suddenly gone and sold out with a bunch of really broad family films, as did his former State mates Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, the screenwriting duo behind The Pacifier, Night at the Museum and Taxi. Still, many of us are holding out for that rumored State movie, or even better, a big screen adaptation of any of the following State sketches:

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One of the many fads for cinephilic YouTubers, perhaps next in popularity after mashups and sweded remakes, is the condensed movie. Actually, thanks to a recent Empire contest, the art of sweding and the art of fitting features into a 60-second time frame is now also a mashed-up fad (though I guess sweding has always involved shortened versions). But while in this day and age any fanboy can do a shortened remake of his or her favorite movie or an abridged recut that breaks a film down to its bare essentials (i.e. its use of the f-word), condensing a film is not necessarily a low art.

Just look at the 76-minute video Academy by R. Luke DuBois, a conceptual artist who works with both audio and visual mediums. A couple of years ago, using a time-lapse process, DuBois crafted this compilation of sped-up versions of Best Picture Oscar winners, which he says “allows us to explore the temporal, formal, and aesthetic progression of the first seventy-five years of the Academy awards by taking each film and compressing, sound and picture, into a single minute.”

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Aaron chats with Ron Henderson, the co-founder and artistic director of the Starz Denver Film Festival, about his take on this year’s opening night as well as some of his favorite film such as Midnight Cowboy, Blue, and West Side Story.

Starz Denver Film Festival, Spout podcast, Ron Henderson