Screen Rush is the blog of film critic and journalist Eric Kohn, whose work regularly appears in indieWIRE, New York Press, Filmmaker, Moviemaker, Heeb Magazine and a half dozen other outlets. A true twenty-first century movie buff, his writing centers around the impact of new media on the moving image, the changing face of film criticism, and the tempestuous relationship between pop culture and independent artistry. This site includes links to his recently published work and allows for additional thoughts on cinema's modern state. E-mail Eric at erichkohn(at)gmail(dot)com.
I finally got around to watching that leaked video made by Ben Stiller’s Red Eye production company to celebrate its move from Dreamworks to 20th Century Fox. Take a moment to watch it if you haven’t done so already. It’s a hilarious indictment of showbiz extremes (“I’m gonna kill ME!”) — Tropic Thunder in the real world.
According to Stiller, the video was never meant to be shared with the whole world, but Fox didn’t mind it, anyway. Still, it’s interesting to note that Stiller recently launched his own Twitter account, perhaps as a means of directly addressing situations such as this one. Yet another incident where it makes more sense to collaborate with the unwieldy forces of the web rather than trying to work around them. Smart move.
Stiller’s decision to create a personalized web presence reflects a larger phenomenon: Even people who aren’t tech-savvy have learned that the Internet can become the ultimate equalizer. That appears to be the central theme of Jim Killeen’s bittersweet documentary Google Me, now available on iTunes, in which the filmmaker goes on a journey connecting with other people whose lives turn up when he googles his own name. Here’s the trailer:
Oddly enough, the movie launched right at the time that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board of directors.
I’ve been a fan of Sita Sings the Blues since first catching it at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. It seemed destined to build a steady fan base and define the modern standards of DIY animation. It may or may not have done that, but director Nina Paley certainly had trouble getting it out there. Fortunately, she managed to come up with a wholly original strategy for giving the film away for free while charging for merchandise, DVDs and other ancillary revenue streams. In The Wrap, I share the details.
PR vet Reid Rosefelt’s intriguing side project, Speedcine, officially launched its beta version today (the URL has been active to showcase a “demo” version of the site since March). Although there’s certainly room for it to grow, this search engine offers a unique niche that you can’t really find anywhere else, as it allows users to search for film titles to see if they are available for legal viewing online. I like the simplistic interface and division of availability into various categories. However, I think it’s unfortunate that you can only search for titles, considering how many of today’s digitally-oriented audiences make viewing decisions on the basis of other data, such as directors, genres and other keywords. Also, it seems like Amazon VOD, Hulu and Netflix Watch Instantly are the main sites that come up for most searches. What about Jaman, The Auteurs or The YouTube Screening Room? And what about movies like We Are the Strange or Steal this Film that were voluntarily uploaded to Bittorent by their creators? Fortunately, it sounds like the library will deepen. “We currently index over 13,000 films from Netflix, Amazon VOD, Hulu, and many other sites,” Rosefelt explains. “We’re adding more movies every day, and will have iTunes in our system by the end of the month.”
The site has potential. For now, it primarily suggests a systematic alternative to googling “Where can I watch X movie online?” and, if you have certain moral standards in place, only going with the legal options. If you are the sort of upstanding citizen inclined to follow that routine, Speedcine will make things easier for you. If not, the site is still fun to poke around, and effectively illustrates the range of movies legitimately available in the digital realm, a relatively new phenomenon if you consider what things were like ten years ago.
The current “New Rules for Digital Gentlemen” issue of Wired Magazine belongs to cover man Brad Pitt, of course, with his witty asides about technological etiquette. (On answering a cell during a movie: “It may be a brief interruption…but what if someone sitting next to you is trying to make a decent bootleg?”)
To me, however, the best piece in the issue is Brian Raftery’s chronicle of Dilbert creator Scott Adams as he sought to recover his missing voice. Fascinating stuff.
...you don’t have the DVD, the video stores are closed, and for some reason movie isn’t available on Hulu, iTunes, or anywhere else online. It is OK to download it illegally? Yes. But there’s a catch: There’s only one way to morally and ethically justify breaking the law, and that’s an act of protest. So downloading something that isn’t available online has to be done as act of civil disobedience.
I don’t get Showtime, but I love watching Weeds. So if I want to find a shifty method of catching last week’s episode (which, by the way, was solid), do I have to put my love of Weeds aside and let activism lead the way? But…I love Weeds. What a strange, confusing and slightly contradictory situation.
In truth, I completely disagree with the angle in the article. We media folks shouldn’t encourage piracy, no matter how one chooses to contextualize it. The act itself will apparently continue ad infinitum — and many of us are secretly complicit in this fact. But, to borrow a term recently applied by Barack Obama to describe the actions of a Cambridge police officer, openly endorsing it strikes me as kinda stupid.
I believe in the prospects of distributing movies online. New home entertainment options don’t seem to supplant the theatrical experience so much as provide an alternative to it. (However, they will eventually become the only alternative. DVDs, we hardly knew ye.)
Still, I was a little taken aback by the idea of watching the full two hours and thirty seven minutes of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo on the small screen — with commercials! No, this one will require the aid of my projector. But I’m assuming the 1,875 people who have viewed the movie on YouTube’s new movies page as I type this probably did not go that far, nor did most of them make it to the credits.
Since the late 1970s, cinephila has greatly benefited from the proliferation of home video. Young people are now more capable of educating themselves about film history than ever before. It seems natural to continue the process of preserving important cinematic accomplishments by making them available on the web, but we have yet to arrive at a point where a good amount of people will watch films of this caliber in this format from start to finish. But it’s something.
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