Thompson On Hollywood

Wall-E Op-Ed, Presto Goes Online

Here's a clip from Presto, the slapstick Pixar short that precedes Wall-E in theaters. Loved this. [Hat Tip: Underwire.]

The NYT columnist Frank Rich puts Wall-E to use in a presidential politics context. UPDATE: And Time Magazine asks the Big Oscar Question.

SXSW Clicks Shorts

SXSW is calling for entries for its 5th annual summertime SXSWclick Festival of digital shorts. Winners in each of five categories will be invited to screen at the next SXSW Film Festival, scheduled for March 13-21, 2009 in Austin, TX.

The final submission deadline is June 13, 2008. Enter submissions here. Projects cannot exceed 10 minutes in length. Fifteen finalists will be announced in five categories on June 24, with the winners announced on July 15. Both audiences and a jury will vote. Confirmed jurors include: Jeffrey Tambor, Eugene Mirman and Doug Benson, Ron Mann, Anish Savjani, and Mary Sweeney.

41 Hours in an Elevator

Nick Paumgarten's harrowing New Yorker piece details how Businessweek writer Nick White goes out for a smoke one day and is trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. It ruins his life. He wants to blame someone for negligence. He loses his job. And he's still unemployed.

Here's a video short of shots from the elevator camera. Oh my god. I'd have gone bonkers.

[Hat Tip The Circuit.]

Video Trend: Man to Man Dating

At ShoWest, Shrek star Mike Myers admitted that he had a "man crush" on Jeffrey Katzenberg, and kept looking at his ass. Easy laugh.

When Sarah Silverman made a video announcing that she was shtupping Matt Damon, the obvious response from her boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel was to do the same with Ben Affleck.

Now the latest attention-grabbing SNL comedy short has Superbad chub-star Jonah Hill dating Andy Samberg's Dad:

Bust a taboo, kiss a man, easy laugh.

Paramount Provides Film Clips to Facebook

What took Hollywood so long to miss this clear marketing opportunity? Paramount, FanRocket, VooZoo and Facebook are joining forces to make thousands of clips from Paramount movies available on Facebook. Other studios may follow suit. I've been looking at more film clips on Facebook via Flixster, and I have no doubt that viral exposure to fave clips will boost DVD rentals and sales down the line. This is one sign that studios are prepping for the long tail world.

Meanwhile, at SXSW, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's key note speech was a huge sell-out, as rooms full of folks watched him on videoscreens. PaidContent has coverage and video. UPDATE: Zuckerberg's interlocuter got twittered by a hostile crowd.

Here's the 2002 Paramount logo with fanfare:

And a history of the Paramount mountain logo with stars:

Sundance Shorts Online

The Oscar-nominated Canadian short Madame Tutli-Putli and 42 other short films from the 2008 Sundance Film Festival are available for download on the iTunes Store, Netflix and Xbox 360. Check sundanceshorts for more info on how to see the shorts, which cost $1.99 on iTunes and Xbox and can be streamed for free on Netflix.

The Sundance Institute is trying to build audiences for shorts by partnering first with iTunes in 2007 and this year, Netflix and Xbox. Short films at Sundance have helped break out such directors as Jason Reitman, Todd Haynes, Spike Jonze, Paul Thomas Anderson, Trey Park and Matt Stone, Wes Anderson, David O. Russell, Tamara Jenkins, Nicole Holofcener and Alexander Payne.

Oscar Watch: Reviews of Nominated Shorts

[Posted by Peter Debruge]
2008 Oscar Animated Shorts
The trouble with watching the Academy's animated short nominees (which you can do in theaters or online now, thanks to the efforts of Magnolia Pictures, Shorts International and iTunes) is that it practically forces you to think about these five exquisite entries in competitive terms-- which is best? which will win? -- when in fact, this is the strongest and most diverse crop I've ever seen in the category. From stop motion to CG to paint on glass, the techniques reflect the full range of possibility open to animators today, and I strongly encourage anyone to seize the opportunity to see them not as Oscar-season rivals but as a diverse medium's collective best efforts.

I Met the Walrus
The wars change, but John Lennon's message remains the same: "Piss for peace, smile for peace --but whatever you do, do it for peace." It's been nearly four decades since 14-year-old Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon's hotel room with a reel-to-reel tape recorder and grilled the Beatles legend on topics ( as Juno puts it) way beyond his maturity level, but today, the pop prophet's words seem more relevant than ever.

Rather than make a traditional documentary about the event, Canadian helmer Josh Raskin edits the 40-minute interview down to a punchy, five-minute collection of soundbites, animating the session in what looks like a cross between Terry Gilliam's gonzo Monty Python style and Lennon's own doodles. Raskin's interpretation is amusing, maybe even ingenious in spots. The only problem: He seems to be doing it for laughs, not for peace, and the images frequently overwhelm the message.

Levitan, no doubt bewildered by the opportunity, is reduced to a slack-mouthed hand puppet, while Lennon's ideas explode like firecrackers around him. It's a technique better suited for parody than reverence (as evidenced by J.J. Sedelmeier's recurring "TV Funhouse" sketch on Saturday Night Live), but the essence of Lennon's message survives intact.

Madame Tutli-Putli
Of all the filmmaking arts, animation comes closest to dreaming -- a sensation I've seldom experienced with the head-over-heals delirium Madame Tutli-Putli accomplishes as it shadows a rather overburdened Virginia Woolf type on a supernaturally tinged night-train ride. That dreamlike quality comes down to creating not just hallucinatory images (in that department, Japan's anime titans reign supreme) but a certain porousness between the real and the impossible (such as the sight of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray playing chess on the luggage rack). And while the result is probably too dark for the Academy's taste, this was far and away my favorite of the entries.

The magic of Madame Tutli-Putli is in the eyes, a finishing touch Jason Walker added to Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski's already impressive stop-motion work (the moving train effects are particularly astonishing). Using Adobe After Affects, Walker composited real eyes onto the mannequins' crude, hand-sculpted faces, bringing an uncanny level of performance to the title character and her fellow travelers. But Mme. Tutli-Putli's performance comes through every bit as strongly through her body language as it does in butterfly blinks and nervous glances. Not since Aardman's first Wallace and Gromit short has the medium impressed me so much.

Meme les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven)
Funniest of the entries is this droll French bit about a greedy priest who rescues his careless parishioners from death, then turns around and tries to sell them an elaborate contraption that will ensure the pour souls' passage to heaven. Interesting, too, that the year's only computer-animated entry was actually designed to look like stop-motion; in fact, it may even take your eyes a few seconds to realize that French animator Samuel Tourneux rendered everything virtually. But I suspect it was the story, not the technique, that attracted the Academy to this comic parable.

Though the concept supports some amusing character animation between the crafty priest and skeptical peasant, a last-second twist makes clear that Tourneux's entire scenario exists primarily to set up its final punchline. In that way, the short reminds me of last year's Maestro (in which a bird prepares backstage for a concert performance, only to be launched from a cuckoo clock at the last minute), although Pigeons is more consistently entertaining -- not to mention more impressively animated. Even Hollywood's top toon studios haven't mastered CG humans, yet character design comes naturally to Tourneux, who claims to have taped and studied real actors to get the performances right.

My Love (Moya Lyubov)
Oscar vet Alexander Petrov returns with another stunning literary adaptation rendered in his luminous paint-on-glass style (nominated three times before, Petrov won in 2000 for his take on Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea). But gorgeous as My Love appears, Americans don't know Ivan Shmelyov's A Love Story and may even be taken aback by this vintage Russian tale of a 16-year-old boy, Tonichka, torn between the shy, lower-class maid who works for his family and the mysterious, more mature beauty who lives next door.

It's easy to identify with the premise, about a youth who overlooks the suitor right in front of him for some fanciful ideal of perfection, but the key moment when he realizes his error doesn't quite translate (as it turns out, the neighbor woman's alluring blue spectacles hide a freakish deformity, the discovery of which sends Tonichka into a near-fatal fever and triggers the story's final tragedy). And yet, Petrov's artistry is simply breathtaking, like witnessing an impressionist painting come to life-- the gestures so natural, the faces so tender, I could've sworn I was watching some trick done with live-action footage rather than the crowning achievement of a master animator.

Peter and the Wolf
If I had to predict a winner, this would be it. Over the years, many storytellers and animators have tried their hand at adapting Sergei Prokofiev's classic, and Suzie Templeton's rich, textured stop-motion take is the first I've seen to do away with the narration and let the image and music tell the story. Unlike the Disney version you undoubtedly remember well (in which Peter looks more than a little like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits with his non-threatening popgun), Templeton's interpretation seems to favor the animals and even features a mushy new twist: after capturing the wolf, Peter lets the misunderstood beast go free, revealing the hunters as the true villains of the story.

Kids'll love it, and Templeton's animal-friendly instincts certainly make the central showdown engaging, as bird, duck, cat and wolf interact in perfect harmony with Prokofiev's score. She fleshes out the world with splendid detail, from her creatures' fur and feathers to the raw wood and rusty metal environments, and yet the human characters seem curiously inanimate (although big, bejeweled eyes that half-excuse the fact that their faces don't move). Still, it's a strange choice, considering what an important element body language is to stop-motion animators like Henry Selick and the Tutli-Putli crew.
Though not as consistently top-notch as their animated counterparts, Oscar's live-action short nominees still offer a more consistently entertaining experience than any feature release you're likely to find in theaters this season. The big surprise here is that none of the nominees are American, and four feature subtitles (keep that in mind when picking your seats, as big heads butted into our viewing experience), but the sheer variety is astounding. Though a better crop overall than previous years, this year's batch features no obvious frontrunner. The cynic in me can see the Academy going for At Night, although it would make my day to see France's The Mozart of the Pickpockets win.

More of Debruge's reviews of the live action shorts and documentary shorts are on the jump.

Oscar Animated Shorts

Beyond the Multiplex reviews the Oscar animated shorts.

Diary of the Dead Horror Shorts Contest

From January 30 through February 29th, MySpace Film members who submit their horror shorts via the Diary of the Dead MySpace profile can try to win a spot on George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead DVD. Visitors to the Diary of the Dead MySpace profile can vote for their favorite short films; the top ten will be judged by Romero, who will pick the five best for inclusion on the DVD. (The film, which was reviewed out of Toronto, hits theaters on February 15.)

Here's the Diary of the Dead trailer.

Cinevegas Launches Shorts Contest

The Cinevegas Film Fest invites American residents who travel between now and February 15 to submit original travel shorts (under 5 minutes) to their new Trip Takes online film contest. (Condé Nast Traveler is co-sponsoring the contest.) Trip Takes will post the shorts on the Trip Takes website, where they will be judged by both an online audience and a jury of experts, including Dennis Hopper, who is chair of the CineVegas Creative Advisory Board. The jury's top five finalists will be flown to Vegas so they can accompany their films to the 10th CineVegas Film Fest, which runs June 12 – 21. The winner gets a $5,000; the audience award winner, selected by both online and live festgoers, lands $2,500.

The Shock Doctrine: Cuaron Short

Filmmaker Naomi Klein met unexpected cooperation and support when she sent some documentary footage to Children of Men director Alfonso Cuaron. Here's the five-minute short film that he helped her make:

Wong Kar Wai Short

This Wong Kar Wai short is stunning. Very mod. Very beautiful. Does anyone know how this came to be made?

[Thanks B. Ruby Rich.]

Apple Preems Anderson Short Hotel Chevalier

While Wes Anderson's Darjeeling Express makes the fest rounds, from Venice to opening night in New York to London, he's also unspooling Part I, the prologue of the film, the 13-minute short Hotel Chevalier. Featuring Natalie Portman in her first nude scene, Anderson shot the short film with her and Jason Schwartzman back in 2005. Fox Searchlight will make Hotel Chevalier available in four Apple stores, ahead of the movie's October 5 release date, on Tuesday, September 25. Here's today's LAT story.

Anderson, Schwartzman and Portman will intro the film and answer questions at the Apple Store SoHo; co-writer Roman Coppola will intro the short at the Apple Store North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. After-hours events will also take place at the Apple Store Third Street Promenade (Santa Monica) and Apple Store San Francisco (Union Square). (Check here.) Beginning on September 26th, Hotel Chevalier will be available as a free download exclusively on iTunes.

The Darjeeling Limited tells the story of three American brothers who have not talked in a year and travel through India by train. Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody also star.

UPDATE: Here's coverage of the New York event.

Errol Morris: Reading the Truth in Photos

You can easily get lost in filmmaker Errol Morris's website. He makes Oscar-winning docus (The Fog of War), 30-second commercials on beer and bacon, and those extraordinarily brief but entertaining Oscar shorts. Here's my column on last year's Oscar short, and here's a more recent NYT Morris blog on truth and context in photographs.

On the Lot Adjusts Sked

On the Lot, Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg's new reality TV show for short filmmakers, debuted while I was in Cannes and has not started off well in the ratings.

I just got around to Tivoing it, finally, so I can see what's going on. Already ABC Fox is moving to one show a week. EW tries to explain what went wrong--and wonders what happened to judge Brett Ratner? Here's Cynthia Littleton's blog entry on week one. And here's the official site, which has mucho information on the show's 18 contestants, three of whom have already been voted off. One of six women is now gone; only one person over 40 made the cut: New York's Shira-Lee Shalit.

[Zach Lipovsky, age 23, Vancouver, Canada]

Chacun Son Cinema On Sale

It's now possible to order the DVD in France of the Cannes collection of 33 shorts, Chacun Son Cinema, although Filmbrain didn't get the one by the Coens for some reason (which is particularly funny, starring No Country For Old Men's Josh Brolin). He ordered his from FNAC.

UPDATE: According to Variety's Todd McCarthy, who couldn't score a DVD in Cannes, David Lynch handed his short in too late to make the official unveiling, so it was shown in front of Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights, and will be included, along with a second Walter Salles short, on a deluxe pre-holiday DVD in October.

The Toronto Star's Peter Howell "tried mightily to buy one in person at the FNAC store in Cannes," he writes."They sold out of all their copies on the first day of release."

Comedy Shorts Grow Online

Comedy Shorts are the "killer app" of the new video world, writes Thomas K. Arnold in USA Today:

So it's no surprise that websites devoted solely to comedy videos are proliferating, from amateur sites to big-budget efforts backed by entertainment heavyweights.

Among the latter: SuperDeluxe.com, a comedy broadband network launched in January by Turner Broadcasting, and FunnyOrDie.com, a partnership between Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's Gary Sanchez Productions and Sequoia Capital, venture capital firm behind YouTube and Google.

The business model is simple: Build it, make it funny enough, and the public will come. And once you get enough eyeballs, you can make money through advertising, just like regular TV networks.

Ferrell's Shorts Pull Hits

Will Ferrell and Adam McCay's short video experiment funnyordie.com has taken off, reports Wired.com. Their two-minute short The Landlord scored 7 million hits in 24 hours:

Given all his hit movies -- McKay co-wrote and directed Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy -- what drew McKay to the internet?

"On the web you do ideas you can't use anywhere else," McKay says. "Like, a baby landlord would never work as a movie. We were excited by getting this chance to goof around with those kinds of ideas."

McKay can't help riffing when asked about the site's business model. "It's what we call TCBY -- the yogurt chain. We want to be that. Our business model is the career arc of the Eagles. We want to be exactly like that."