indie film "crisis"?

via Anne Thompson (Variety), Mark Gill's LA Film Festival address on the proliferation of filmmaking potential, market news, and a shared film-community sense that "The Sky is Falling." 

Read to the end for Gill's hopeful minimalist and pragmatic view of the potential we might salvage from "the carnage."

hodgman. love.

via hodgman (aka "expert"): 

"DECEMBER 22, 1992, NEW YORK: Anthony Robbins publishes the bestselling success manual Awaken the Giant Within, in which he encourages personal and spiritual growth via guided meditation, deep-breathing techniques, firewalking and, most controversially, the ritualistic “molting” of one’s human skin to reveal the gigantic Anthony Robbins clone that lives inside all of us. To date, according to the book, only Robbins himself has been able to achieve this final step."

best of 2008

a comment posted somewhere in response to the "breaking news" story about a bigfoot capture. my nomination for best comment of 2008: "A dead bear, a gorilla mask, and for who knows why, some intestines laid on top. awesome."

i would post the picture of the "captured" bigfoot, but even in its sad inauthenticity, it's too horrible.

yyAAYyyeee!

dear santa,

you didn't even know it existed?
me neither! but you can find it here. 

you're welcome.

video games (torture)

@ Wired, Clive Thompson argues that we need more (and better) torture in video games as a way of inspiring public debate on torture more generally, that is, beyond the borders of gaming.

slide #1

sundance film fesitval 2009

the film guide is here. see what's playing at SFF 2009. and here is the calendar version of the film guide featuring what's screening at our venue ("our" being Mike and i, who, along with Kathleen Broyles, comprise the Theater Management team at the Sundance Screening Room).

scroll to the bottom and use "day/date" menu at top and "next" button to move through the days/screening times.

on sundance 2009 (boycott options)

from The New York Times' Michael Cieply, Sundance Film Festival Director Geoffrey Gilmore explains options for festivalgoers who plan to avoid screenings at Park City's Holiday Theater (run by Cinemark). Gilmore is responding to claims that some would-be festivalgoers plan to "boycott" the festival (or at least the 4 out of 14 total SFF Cinemark venues) because of the Cinemark CEO's donation to the LDS-lead campaign for California's Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage. Gilmore says that every film screening at the Holiday will also screen at other festival theaters, and in this way, a patron wanting to see that film will have an opportunity to see it in an alternate venue.

knowing what i know about the logistics of staging the festival, this seems at least one reasonable move, and perhaps one of the only reasonable moves festival leadership might make in light of the timeline (the festival is less than 2 months away). and, as i've said before, Sundance is not the enemy of gay people; queer cinema has found and continues to find a great deal of its momentum via Sundance.

"i'm like ... professional" (intro clip: backstory)

for my documentary on M Dot Strange. learn more at my CCCC's session, where i will screen what i have completed by that time. for now, enjoy a brief teaser -- really, a reassemblage of stuff that M has released on YouTube, stuff i'm trying to employ as a way of telling M's story and stories of self-distribution and 21st Century literacies and whatnot.

so but enjoy: