The gays love their cult classics. In film we’ve worshipped John Waters, BABY JANE, SHOWGIRLS, and GLITTER. TV: Absolutely Fabulous and The Comeback. Sometimes the television and films we embrace become mainstream hits. Sometimes, the straight world ignores them completely.

READ MORE >>

Yes, I am a sucker for stupid YouTube videos and blogs that take me away from real work. You must be too. Why else are you reading this?

This video, done by Throw’d TV, had me LOLing. Or better yet, LMAOing. It is a send up of an all too familiar story these days: the Facebook break up. Be prepared to laugh. Really hard.

The New York Times today ran an interesting story on an old topic: beef between rappers in the hip-hop community. The article focuses on Joe Budden, a new school rapper, and Raekwon, a 90s rap relic, famous for being a member of Wu-Tang Clan.

Budden has built a following, and a means of attack, via the internet. He actively posts YouTube videos and Tweets about other hip-hop artists. Raekwon, however, is one of the old guard. Then rappers talked shit about one another over the radio or on bootleg records. Times have changed.

After Budden’s recent internet attacks on Method Man, another member of  Wu-Tang, Raekwon fought back with fists and camera. He and his entourage jumped Budden, beating him badly. This time it was caught on video and will likely surface online giving Budden a taste of his own medicine. Hip-hop stars are fighting via new media. How very savvy.

We are halfway through summer and many of us have dedicated countless hours in the gym in the hopes of having that perfect beach body. Now if only I’d found Shake Weight sooner!

At first I thought this commercial was a joke from SNL. I kept looking for Kristen Wiig. But think again. The product is legit. And the commercial, and all the ridiculous sexual imagery included, is the real deal. Start shaking. In your seat with laughter that is.

Hello there. I am Bradford Shellhammer and I am new around these parts.

While my fellow SUNfiltered bloggers have done a bang up job finding unique culture, film and music stories across the globe I intend to shake things up differently around here. I’m here to gay it up. Bedazzle the blog. Bring a disco beat. So in the spirit of Gay Pride Month (which lasts the whole month of June) I give you this YouTube video to set the mood. It is what we homos call a classic. It’s two naked French guys doing interpretive dance to Daft Punk. High art or pornography?

However you answer that question I know one thing: you’ll hit repeat.

If singing isn’t your thing, and you’d rather not have Simon Cowell dress you down in front of millions of people, the Organic Institute and Organic Trade Association are holding a greener, friendlier version of American Idol. These organizations have taken their search for a consumer ambassador on organic farming and products to YouTube, and invite you to submit a thirty-second video “explaining the moment you realized organic products are worth it.”

READ MORE >>

Mashable, the site devoted to coverage of the social-media industry, posted a cool report about SplashCast, a widget that adds revolutionary commenting capabilities to offerings from Hulu and other online video providers. It’s easy to add a comment to the discussion thread on, say, a YouTube page, but SplashCast, or “Social TV,” as they call it, is different.

READ MORE >>

This is a weekly column written by Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson, two filmmakers and film professors who are wondering where modern storytelling is heading.

What’s the shortest film you’ve seen that’s been satisfying as a story?

In turn, what’s the longest screen story experience you’ve ever sustained?

I’m flashing back to my long long movie-going experiences … a five hour documentary on Cassavetes, A CONSTANT FORGE—THE LIFE AND ART OF JOHN CASSAVETES, dir. Charles Kiselyak, at SXSW in 2001. (After the movie, my husband Michael and I bonded with the five other people in the theatre, including Blaine Thurier of The New Pornographers, a Cassavetes fan and the winner of that year’s Best Narrative Feature for his film, LOW SELF-ESTEEM GIRL.)

The work of Hungarian director Béla Tarr. (Okay, that wasn’t me that endured the 7.5 hour SATAN’S TANGO, it was Michael again, and he stayed for the whole thing at Brooklyn Academy of Music — even after Gus Van Sant left.)

READ MORE >>

This is a weekly column written by Annie Howell and Lisa Robinson, two filmmakers and film professors who are wondering where modern storytelling is heading.

I’ve been thinking about the number of people who are streaming their lives as open stories over the web. All these personal narratives are unfolding by short sentences or photos or blog entries on sites like YouTube, Facebook and Flickr. How does this proliferation of millions of bite-size stories affect the way we generally experience, understand and create story and our life?

Big questions. I surely don’t have all the answers but let’s look at “geriatric1927” on YouTube. It’s Peter Oakley, a pensioner from England, who made his debut in 2006 and has since become a major YouTube star with more than 47,000 regular subscribers. His first video, book ended with blues music, has been viewed about 3 million times! In looking through his stuff I was taken by the fact that so many YouTubers respond to his posts, either in writing or with video, creating an endless chain letter of intertwined personal stories riffing around a theme.

For example if you look at his post Response to Cookalong the Geriatric Way, you’ll see that he is actually responding to Gordon Ramsey’s Cookalong Challenge (a chef and TV personality with a YouTube channel). Peter’s “geriatric” approach to cooking primarily involves a bit of humor, a glass of wine and a microwave. Also this video inspired responses of its own… including Cooking with Jon – a young man making a strange looking desert out of 3 packaged ingredients.

I wonder if part of our fascination with these tiny (sometimes mundane) episodes of people doing what they do is not about what’s actually there… but what’s missing. Suspense is created by the sheer shortness of it… and as we ponder why today’s photo on Flickr is melancholy and yesterday’s was goofily happy, we anticipate what might come next. I’ve been talking about suspense a lot in one of my classes and reminding my students that suspense fuels stories, whether thrillers, romantic comedies or documentaries. As long as we wonder what will happen next, we are engaged… we are imagining… and in a sense we are participating, even collaborating, with the story. This is addictive whether on the level of a Hitchcock masterpiece or perhaps even in the trickle of updates on a Facebook page.

And what about the truly collaborative open stories? Will we see more of these in the future? One that I love just by the sheer variety of people and their creative ingenuity is Google’s Collaborative Video… a true video chain letter (complete with envelope) passed through impossible time and space…. over high peaks, underwater, through people’s heads and more. I know it was a promotional stunt but… watch it below.

-LR

Image: NASA

On its 39th anniversary, Earth Day still feels vital to me, but I know that some of you out there think that its time has passed. Every day should be Earth Day, you say. Choosing just one, single day to say you care about the planet we call home — what good is that?

The first Earth Day came at the end of a decade in which social activism drove this nation’s political agenda. Moved by a desire to create that better world, we got together to fight for change the only way a large group of like-minded people could: we laced up our shoes and walked side-by-side. When you have to get together in person, well, you obviously need a specific day to meet up. And that day turned out to be Wednesday, April 29, 1970.

Some of us who fought for this country’s first environmental protections make the mistake of assuming that because young people today are less likely to be found marching down the National Mall as the shopping mall, that they must not care as deeply as we did when we were young. But apathy has not replaced idealism. Idealism just looks a little different these days.

This generation uses new tools to express itself and influence political decisions. They connect with one another in more ways than we could have imagined back in 1970: blogs, email petitions, YouTube videos, Twitter and Facebook. They’re finding new ways to express their political views, and they do it every second of every day.

Lately, I’ve come around to their way of thinking. I’m still standing up for environmental protections for the places I hold dear, but like so many of today’s new activists, I’ve hung up my marching boots and taken to the blogosphere. You’ll find me expressing my views at the Huffington Post, NRDC’s Greenlight, and Sundance Channel.

So what good is Earth Day? It’s a day that reminds us to take a stand every day and fight for the places we hold dear. So today, pause for a moment and take full advantage of the unprecedented array of tools we have for connecting with others and expressing our views. Speak up on Facebook, or Twitter, or go one step further and join me at NRDC’s Greenlight. In today’s world, you’re a reporter too. Stand up for the people, creatures, and lands that inspire you to protect the environment. Reach out and tell the world about what’s happening in the places you hold dear. Make your voices heard.

DIGITAL DISTRIBUTION PANEL

A lot of themes have emerged at Sundance this year. The environment. The economy. Noisy gum-chewers.

But the most popular topic, at least in my experience, has been the question of digital distribution: How the hell are filmmakers supposed to make money when, every year, more and more people are downloading movies for free? No one on the “What’s Next? The Digital Distribution Imperative” panel today had an answer to that question, but everyone agreed that the industry needs a solution—and fast.

“Guys, we gotta make this happen now, or this industry could collapse a little,” Jeffrey Winter, a panel programmer, said in introducing the panel at New Frontier.

Jordan Hoffner, head of content partnerships for YouTube, said what’s obvious is that filmmakers “have got to get paid somehow,” and that right now the main models are either consumer-based (movie ticket sales, Netflix subscriptions, etc.), which is being threatened by internet piracy, or advertising-based. The latter may not suit certain films, he said, using the Doors documentary WHEN YOU’RE STRANGE as an example.

“Was there nudity?” he asked. “Yes. Was there profanity? Yes. Does that appeal to big-box advertisers? No.”

YouTube has quietly launched a movies section where users can watch full-length films (with the occasional pop-up ad). The company inks standard revenue-sharing contracts with filmmakers, who then get paid based on how many users watch their film. “If you don’t have a lot of views and don’t have a lot of ads—because you don’t have a lot of views—you’re not going to get paid,” he said. (The Sundance Channel is testing the YouTube waters with the doc CRAZY LOVE.)

Still, as several panelists said, the ad model has never made anyone more than a couple hundred thousand dollars, which isn’t nearly enough to pay for the production costs of most independent films.

As for current trends in digital distribution, Variety’s Anne Thompson said, “There’s a big gap between what everybody wants and what they can get.” People might not want to watch long videos (TV shows or films) on their iPhones or BlackBerries, she added, “but I think they want to watch it one their computer,” citing Hulu.com as an example.

I’d say that’s an accurate read—of my generation anyway. Some of my friends pay for cable and rent movies via Netflix. Just as many them, however, watch whatever’s available online (at ad-based sites like Hulu or NBC.com, or streaming on Netflix.com) or buy digital content through iTunes or Amazon. Still others, like me, download shows and movies using torrents—without paying a cent or viewing a single ad. Video-on-demand is growing at the moment, as Thompson noted, and may be “what’s next”—the immediate future—but it doesn’t strike me as the future.

“People are showing a huge aversion to paying—we have to acknowledge that,” said Efe Cakarel, the founder and CEO of The Auteurs, which streams indie and foreign films online (for a price). “We have to be way more creative about making money.” (Still in beta mode—with just 100 films and 45,000 users—his company is backed by Criterion stateside.)

Cakarel, who struck me as the most forward-thinking panelist, said he often looks to Asia for insight because of its overwhelmingly young and tech-savvy consumer base, not to mention that their broadband speeds put ours to shame and there’s “a healthy disrespect for copyright” there. In Korea, said Cakarel, people download an average of 54 movies per year, compared to about the same number in minutes in the U.S.

“The challenge is when you have all of this clutter,” said Hoffner, who described the experience of perusing video content online—including, to a certain extent, on YouTube—as a “random walk.” Sean Carey, executive vice president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, argued that “you need a champion, whether that’s a wider network or a distributor,” to help filter content.

Cakarel disagreed, contending that users, not companies, will decide what’s of value and what’s not—that content will separate from the pack based on word-of-mouth, most likely via social networking platforms like Facebook. All of this talk about VOD and hi-def, he said, and yet people are watching low-res, low-bit rate videos on Hulu. The future of film and TV is online, he concluded. Not in the next few years, “but at some point it will hit like there’s no tomorrow.”