If there’s a single crippling irony to the explosion of web video over the last half decade, it’s this: no single piece of media created specifically for online distribution has so far engaged the masses as deeply as the bits of cultural detritus, from cat videos to classic films, that end up online unofficially, accidentally and/or illegally. Taking into account his own viewing habits and those of the post-internet generation, with Stingray SamCory McAbee set out to make a film that could be watched in discreet ten-minutes segments while still maintaining the narrative and image quality of the widescreen experience.
And so several months after premiering at Sundance, Stingray Sam became available for purchase in a variety of different formats from McAbee’s website, while the filmmaker continued to tour the world accompanying the film to festival screenings and other theatrical events. When the six-part musical space western screened last month at Fantastic Fest, McAbee and I met up at the new Alamo Drafthouse-adjacent clubhouse The Highball to talk about science fiction as political allegory, the peaks and valleys within the landscape of web video, and the further adventures of Stingray and the Quasar Kid.
At the screening last night, you said that Stingray Sam is political, whereas your earlier film, The American Astronaut, was personal. What are the politics, as you see them, in Stingray Sam?
Right after the US bombed Iraq, a woman from Copenhagen came and interviewed me for an art magazine. She was talking about American Astronaut, and she said, “Right now, Europeans are very angry at America because of what your government is doing, and they’re starting to feel like they don’t like Americans.” But, she said, Europeans always enjoyed loving American culture, and The American Astronaut had all the things they enjoyed loving about America.
I saw a couple of stories after hours yesterday touting the unveiling of YouTube’s new full-length Movies and TV sections. I didn’t have time to explore the offerings, but it seemed like a positive development. So why is that, when I Google “You Tube Movies” upon getting to the computer this morning, the first result was a story headlined, “YouTube Adds Movies, TV; Fails Miserably”? In it, writer Mark Hachman complains that the current library of ad-supported full-length films in the official Movies section is lacking in comparison to the wide variety of movies, uploaded illegally in installments by users, that remain on the site despite YouTube’s ostensible efforts to remove them.
It’s true that a lot of the good stuff — Slacker, Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail, Bobcat Goldthwait’s Sleeping Dogs Lie, a number of selections from Elvira’s Movie Macabre — was on YouTube already and/or is already available in a more elegant presentation on Hulu. And anyone looking for anything super recent and/or blockbusteriffic is likely to be disappointed. But even in the limited Day One offerings, I found a number of worthwhile surprises. Some of them are embedded after the jump.
One quibble: if YouTube is serious about redirecting eyeballs away from stolen content and towards the legit stuff, they need to at least restructure their search results so that video from their partners is highlighted above everything submitted by the rabble. As it is, the only way to really find anything in the Movies section is to browse for it, which I’m sure you’re eager to do with all your unlimited patience and time.
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?
In a warped way, it’s now comforting to see our childhood heroes be every bit as deranged and disappointed as we are, as adults, with the real world. Like The Venture Brothers’ sense of a future gone horribly mundane, DERRICK Comedy’s debut feature Mystery Team turns childhood dreams into a darkly funny hypothetical: what if you never bothered to move past them?
Premiering earlier this year at Sundance, Team focuses on the titular trio who, originally their town’s plucky mascots, forgot to grow out of their adorable roles of Jason the Boy Genius (DC Pierson), Duncan the Strongest Kid on the Block (Dominic Dierkes) and Charlie the Master of Disguise (Donald Glover). Of course their achievements never get past childish levels –– the genius can only recite quirky facts, the strongest kid can’t lift a dumbbell and the Master of Disguise relies on silly mustaches and sombreros to pass as a gentleman or a plumber. Annoyed that they’re not taken as “seriously” as they once were, the chocolate milk-drinking group find a silver lining when a little girl asks them to solve the mystery of who killed her parents.
The first documentary (that I’m aware of, at least) directly inspired by an unexpected YouTube hit (although I had hoped Thriller in Manilla was going to be about this instead of this), Ben Steinbauer’s Winnebago Man is a portrait of Jack Rebney, the Winnebago salesman whose profanity-filled outtakes for a commercial turned him into a reluctant YouTube star (and, apparently, a subject of controversy — his Wikipedia page has been deleted twice, once for abusive entries, once for incorporating “patent nonsense.”) Below the jump, the original Winnebago Man viral video. Plus, Steinbauer’s answers to The 5 Questions We Ask Everyone, in which he confesses to being Austin’s town slut, and also shares a memorable moment involving puke. …Read more
It certainly is a weird time to be a creative user of YouTube, as robotic programs troll user data in search of copyright materials, putting the users who submit it at risk of being banned or silenced. But over the course of nearly two years, Michael Agrusso has steadily picked up a die-hard geek following making videos that use his voice, action figures and nearly every bit of Apple software known to the world. He moves beyond pandering to fans with lame comic jokes, and instead plays up to inside jokes and broader commentary on the state of films and how comics have taken so long to break into that market.
Perhaps you know him better by his alter ego: It’sJustSomeRandomGuy. The series started with I’m A Marvel/I’m A DC, a creative response to the news that DC Comics had canceled their proposed plans of Wonder Woman and The Flash live-action films on the same day. Agrusso continued the parody ads between a Spider-Man and Superman action figure with Batman, Iron Man and even the Hulk. As he wrote the words, his partner and girlfriend Brianna Li (neé It’sJustSomeRandomGal) would wrangle figures and provide the ever-important ‘motion.’ Beyond the ads, the spin-off series After Hours and Happy Hour would emerge, drawing on fan reactions to recently released comic book films while remaining true to developments in the actual comics themselves–for example, Captain America visiting Superman as a ghost, or playing up the aspect that no one remembers Spider-Man was married after the controversial One More Day storyline.
More endearing than Robot Chicken’s take on “action figure comedy,” it’s been a geeky word-of-mouth phenomena, resonating with fans of both the comics and their film adaptations (even Jon Favreauadores Agrusso’s work). Recently, Agrusso has even been discussing the idea of “fan donations” for toys–the Spider-Hulk figure used in his NYCC promo was donated by a fan–-and may soon establish a means for fans to send him their figures. After Agrusso premiered the two-part Happy Hour season finale at a panel at New York Comic Con on Saturday, he took the time to chat about returning to NYCC, concerns about YouTube’s recent crack down on original content based on copyright material, and whether or not he’s yet a “web celebrity.”
Kevin B. Lee, who wrote for us about the best music videos of 2008 and whose video essays I’ve linked to of several times in the past, just informed me that his YouTube account has been “permanently disabled.” Kevin’s video essays wed critical commentary or conversation to clips from copyright films in a “teaching” context, and most of them were created as part of his project to “view every film on the list of 1000 greatest films of all time, as compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?.” Kevin says he received a copyright warning earlier today in regards to his video essay on …And God Created Woman. It was the first time YouTube had ever slapped his wrist over one of the video essays, although they had contacted him about two unaltered clips in the past, one from The Sorrow and Pity and one from Dames. Three strikes, and Kevin’s out — YouTube has removed all 70 of his videos, including 40 original video essays. If you’ve embedded one of these in your own blog, that embed will now be unplayable.
Way back in November, a Hollywood ReporterSundance prognostication story alerted the world to Paper Heart, a “part-documentary, part-scripted comedy” starring Michael Cera and his real-life girlfriend Charlyne Yi. The trade said the film’s sales agents were hoping “to limit advance word, presumably in the hopes of making a splash a la Sundance phenom Napoleon Dynamite.”
Said sales agents must have been really upset that the Reuters-syndicated trade wrote a big story about the movie weeks before the festival lineup was even announced, thus ensuring that this project previously known to virtually no one would not only suddenly become the hottest ticket of the festival, but that its extreme hotness would be telegraphed in publications potentially read by the suburban teenagers who will make up its target post-Sundance ticket-buying audience. Let’s all shake our fists in frustrated solidarity: darn you, Hollywood Reporter!
AJ Schnack is publishing a series of year-end email interviews with non-fiction filmmakers. So far, he’s talked to Man on Wire director James Marsh, Trouble the Water’s Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, and Jeremiah Zagar of In a Dream; today’s interview is with Patrick Creadon, director of Wordplay and the Oscar shortlisted debt doc, I.O.U.S.A. Amongst other things, Creadon talks about a potential pitfall of having such a timely film on the festival circuit: his story balooned so fast that between its Sundance premiere and its theatrical release in August, I.O.U.S.A. was screened in four different versions.
This reminds me of something that I’ve been meaning to post about for awhile: there’s yet another version of I.O.U.S.A, a 32-and-a-half minute version which has been posted on YouTube. This authorized re-edit, according to its YouTube description, was “designed specifically for watching and sharing on the web - for free.” So have at it — I’ve embedded it above.
Apparently Keanu Reeves can play an 18th century Japanese warrior in Universal’s samurai epic 47 Ronin because he’s “half-Asian.” Specifically, he’s half Hawaiian-Chinese, which is only the same as Japanese in the disappointing sort of Orientalism still practiced in Hollywood.
Ben Affleck may follow up Gone Baby Gone by directing Arizona, the true story of an investigative journalist killed while uncovering political corruption. This could be Affleck’s third work as a director if he’s still helming The Town, which he was linked to back in September.
New trend in Hollywood: kid writers. While Paramount’s got that 12-year-old food critic film, Fox now has the rights to 9-year-old love expert Alec Greven’s advice series How to Talk to Girls.
I wonder if Columbia’s untitled bounty hunter project starring Gerard Butler as a man hired to retrieve his ex-wife (played by Jennifer Aniston) will be more like It Happened One Night or His Girl Friday or neither of the above.
Another YouTube documentary: this one details the online love affair of an Australian and an American whose relationship played out on the video site for all to see. Wait, so why do we need the film?
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.
You’d think a movie about YouTube users would have a great viral campaign, but the trailer for Chuck Potter’s I Want My Three Minutes Backis rather simple. I think it’s in the documentary’s best interest, though, to have a series of spots, each created by a different YouTuber showcased in the film. One trailer would be made by Kevin Nalty (“Nalts”) and employ a lot of fart noises. Struggling filmmaker Nick James (“nickynik”) could do something awkward and reflective. And Cory Williams (“Mr. Safety”) could do a music video for an original rap he’s written about the film. Other users featured in the doc should contribute their own personal take, as well. While we wait for that to happen, though, check out the basic trailer (via YouTube, of course) below.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: when is this film going to get a proper release? And I wonder, too, when we’ll be able to see this thing for free on YouTube. Well, for now it’s apparently being submitted to the festival circuit, so it may be awhile before it’ll be available in its entirety online. Wouldn’t it be ironic, though, if some big studio like Paramount bought it at a film fest and then refused to allow it to be uploaded to YouTube? If they can believe Cloverfieldis worth seeing on a big screen, they’d probably go with a theatrical release for this thing, too.
Michael Tully informs us that the Wholpin boys have made ourmuchbelovedGlory at Sea available for viewing in its entirety on YouTube. The 25 minute short is embedded above.
It finally happened: my obsession with MSNBC has dovetailed with legitimate movie news! Sort of!
Tonight the New York Times broke the news that over a year ago, Dan Mirvish (filmmaker and co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival) and Eitan Gorlin (whose directorial debut, The Holy Land, won the Grand Jury Prize at that festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award) made up a fake adviser to John McCain named Martin Eisenstadt. On Monday, MSNBC’s David Schuster reported on air that Martin Eisenstadt had taken credit for the “Palin thinks Africa is a country” leak. Eisenstadt had indeed published a post on his blog (tagline: “Because freedom isn’t free”) claiming to be the leaker, which no one at MSNBC bothered to look into deeply before Schuster’s report, otherwise they might have discovered that Eisenstadt a) is a made up person, and b) didn’t actually talk to Carl Cameron, the Fox news reporter who broke the “anonymous sources say Palin doesn’t know Africa is a continent” story.
As Chris briefly noted earlier this morning, MGM has confirmed last week’s CNET rumors and announced that they’re slowly rolling some of their feature film library on to YouTube. But the New York Times story about this, by Brad Stone and the always-skeptical Brooks Barnes, warns us not to get too excited — because MGM certainly isn’t.
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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I saw a couple of stories after hours yesterday touting the unveiling of YouTube’s new full-length Movies and TV sections. I didn’t have time to explore the offerings, but it seemed like a positive development. So why is that, when I Google “You Tube Movies” upon getting to the computer this morning, the first result was a story headlined, “YouTube Adds Movies, TV; Fails Miserably”? In it, writer Mark Hachman complains that the current library of ad-supported full-length films in the official Movies section is lacking in comparison to the wide variety of movies, uploaded illegally in installments by users, that remain on the site despite YouTube’s ostensible efforts to remove them.
The first documentary (that I’m aware of, at least) directly inspired by an unexpected YouTube hit (although I had hoped 
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