A great on-line movie, well worth watching.
- From: The Highlander <micheil@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2007 14:56:53 GMT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8rRFFi_stY
A blockbuster for the Facebook age
By Jim White, Telegraph.
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 18/06/2007
If you've got 71 minutes to spare today, type
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= k8rRFFi-stY into your web browser. You
won't be disappointed.
It will take you to a full-length feature film being premiered on
YouTube. But hurry. It is only there for a week. In fact, by the time
you read this, it may already have gone. (in fact it will be on-line
until August 15)
If you don't make it in time, let me fill you in. Four Eyed Monsters
is the work of twentysomething New York film students Arin Crumley and
Susan Buice.
It is the tale of two young people trying to date in the modern city
and it is very, very good. Anyone who enjoyed Woody Allen in the days
when he was still making movies in his home town (and was capable of
still making jokes) will find its take on urban neuroses hugely
entertaining.
The four-eyed monsters of the title are loving couples, the smug
marrieds of Bridget Jones's loathing. More to the point, they are a
daily slap in the face for our narrator, Arin.
There he is, out and about in a city, so legend has it, awash with
eligible females on the lookout for a pretty straight guy, and yet he
is getting nowhere. Very funny he is about it, too.
Witty, sharp and shrewdly observed as it is, the plot is not what
makes their work stand out. It is more what it represents that
commands attention. Eschewing the traditional path of film-making, the
pair put it together without any outside assistance.
As they explain in the short introduction they have made for YouTube,
they financed it in a very modern way: through credit-card debt. Arin
fans out a great fistful of plastic to the camera to demonstrate where
they found the necessary $100,000 (a sum which, in Hollywood would
barely cover a star's cappuccino bill).
Once the film was finished, they did not bother with traditional
things like distribution deals or video rights, they simply posted it
on their own website, then, for a week, on YouTube.
Plus, perhaps not surprisingly given its internet provenance, it has
also been available to watch on Second Life, the bizarre role-playing
computer game that has taken over many a nerd's first life.
The results of this internet-only exposure have been astonishing. In
the first four days on YouTube, more than half a million people
watched it - far more than the average blockbuster would attract if
shown in every multiplex in Britain simultaneously.
Without any marketing, it has achieved the kind of reach studio moguls
encounter solely in their wildest dreams. Moreover, gloriously, it is
the work of amateurs.
But what makes it all the more encouraging for those of us of a
certain age, inclined to doom-mongering about the destructive
influence of modern inventions on art, are the creative possibilities
this film throws up.
As befits a work disseminated on the internet, its plot, jokes and
relationships are dominated by technology - not in a self-conscious
way, but because technology is at the core of these young people's
lives.
It is the first feature film I have encountered for and by the
wired-up generation, those people whose first impulse is to check on
their Facebook page, whose interaction is via MySpace and txt msg,
whose life is lived through screens.
The funny thing is that, far from destroying artistic opportunity,
such technophilia adds to it: the possibilities for comic
misunderstanding and misinterpretation are enhanced.
For hundreds of years, the only vehicle of communication that
novelists, playwrights and poets had to work with was the letter, used
from Romeo and Juliet to Les Liaisons Dangereuses as a pivotal plot
device. Thomas Hardy based much of his literary career on what happens
when written missives go astray.
Now, Four Eyed Monsters suggests, farcical confusion can crop up in so
many more ways: through texting, webchats, conversations on the
webcam, mobile phone video messaging. Mere letters and phone calls
look rather two-dimensional in comparison.
Indeed, those who worry how biographers are going to manage now that
nobody writes (or keeps) letters should watch this film.
In the modern world, we all leave behind a deep technical footprint of
our own history. Here, the film makers cunningly use such a footprint
- videos, emails, texts - to piece together the story of a
relationship.
Which is a useful lead for anyone who comes to research the biography
of Arin Crumley and Susan Buice. As surely they will, because
Hollywood won't ignore talent like this for long.
The Highlander
Tilgibh smucaid air do làmhan,
togaibh a' bhratach dhubh agus
toisichibh a' geàrradh na sgòrnanan!
.
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