'Full Monty' writer premieres new film on Net

Register UK:

A new film from the writer of The Full Monty, Simon Beaufoy, will today become the first film to be launched on the Internet.

This Is Not a Love Song, a low-budget British thriller directed by Bille Eltringham and starring lesser-known actors, will be streamed online today from the film's site at a cost of between £2 and £3. The film, which was shot in just two weeks for a budget of only 500,000 pounds, will also get a limited theatrical release for the next two weeks. ...

Early reviews (here and here) of the film are favourable. The film has been described as a British thriller in the tradition of Deliverance and Straw Dogs, with a pair of mismatched friends on the run from a group of vigilante farmers following a tragic death.

If the film's unusual distribution route proves successful it'll be interesting to see whether other indie filmmakers follow suit.

The Register story carries an update that notes: "Due to overwhelming demand, this site is temporarily unavailable."

Thanks to Samara for the pointer.

Bowling for Columbine

Just saw Bowling for Columbine on DVD (with a 4-year-old, we don't get out much at night). Sure, it's overwrought, didactic and preachy on the subject of gun violence -- and I'm even on Michael Moore's side -- but its message is so simple and straightforward that it's hard to fathom why it kicked up such controversy. And you just have to love the good-natured Canadians who come off looking so much better than these gun-toting American wack jobs.

Craigslist -- the movie

Wired News: Craigslist -- the movie.

New movies section at NYT

The NY Times has launched an ambitious national Movies section. The section includes:

• National Showtimes and Ticketing: Find a movie and buy your tickets right on the spot.

• Rate and Review: Rate movies and write your own reviews.

• Critics' Picks: Find movies recommended by New York Times critics including The Times's "Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made."

• Review Archive: A complete list of New York Times movie reviews dating back to 1983, as well as selected reviews back to 1929.

• Box-Office Charts: Weekend and all-time data for the U.S. and Canada, New York City and the U.K.

• DVD/Home Video: A complete section devoted to new releases.

Gotta like it. This was something city guides were good at. Glad to see the Times get ambitious here.

'Matrix Reloaded' reviewed

Here are some reviews of The Matrix Reloaded:

Joe Baltake (my ol' bud) in The Sacramento Bee: 3 1/2 stars. "What seemed like faux braininess in the first movie comes off as genuine here."

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times: 3 1/2 stars. "An immensely skillful sci-fi adventure."

Kenneth Turan in the LA Times: The film packs a visceral visual wallop, but lacks emotional power.

Bruce Newman in the San Jose Merc: 3 stars.

Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times: elegant but dispiriting.

Mike Clark in USA Today: visuals save the day.

Tim Lammers on WNBC.com: mind-blowing visual effects, but story lags.

David Germain in the Associated Press: "possibly the worst sequel to a really good film ever made."

Paul Clinton on CNN.com: visually stunning, but empty.

yupi msn (en espaÒol): Obsesionados por rÈcord de taquilla lanzan "The Matrix Reloaded"

Everybody gets a cut

From the NY Times Sunday Magazine: DVDs give viewers dozens of choices -- and that's the problem.

Disney on the digital frontier

LA Times: Disney Plans to Be on Digital Frontier. Excerpt:

In the future, [Disney Chairman Michael] Eisner said, movie studios will need to be more flexible about the way they distribute movies. He suggested that in place of the current sequence of studio releases -- from theaters to video to pay per view to television -- studios would need to offer faster distribution, directly to consumers.

"If we don't provide consumers with our product in a timely manner, pirates will," he said.

Also, CNET News.com has a story on Disney's plans to test an on-demand film service later this year that will download recent first-run film releases onto a TV set-top box.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointers.

Public hasn't embraced Movielink

Wired News: My friend Katie Dean has a report from Universal City on Movielink's efforts to win the hearts and minds of film lovers.

Michael Moore's Oscar moves

For those of us who grew up during the Vietnam War, tonight's brief appearance by Michael Moore on stage during the Academy Awards telecast probably brought back memories of the divisiveness of that war. That war was incredibly painful on many levels, and still reopens wounds 30 years later.

During an Oscars devoid of any semblance of spontaneity (anyone else notice that Jack Valenti and Mickey Mouse both made appearances?), Moore took too didactic an approach, even if he was speaking the truth about the fictious grounds for our going into Iraq. He should have called for bringing our troops home. No doubt he'll be roundly condemned in tomorrow's press coverage for breaking the Hollywood taboo of not addressing political issues during an acceptance speech. (He won for "Bowling for Columbine," a documentary film that dared to speak the truth about the gun lobby's hold over the political elites.)

Contrast that with the heartfelt speech by best-actor winner Adrien Brody, who got a standing ovation for praying for a "peaceful and swift resolution" to the war.

Later: Well, the Arizona Republic liked Moore's shtick.

Valenti's moral crusade

Here's the text of Jack Valenti's speech yesterday at Duke University about the immorality of Internet piracy.

As Declan McCullagh noted, "The buzz when I was at the law school there last week is that he got a nice, circa $20K speaking fee. Not bad for an hour's worth of
public relations on behalf of his employer. Wonder if anyone asked him
about the morality of forcibly implanting copy protection technology in all
electronic devices at the behest of one industry group?"

Later: Valenti's office sent a correction to Declan, noting that Valenti received a $5,000 honorarium for his speech, and that "whenever an honorarium is presented, he contributes that sum to a Washington-based charity called Woodley House."

Room for movie bloggers in the blogosphere?

Alisa Weinstein has a new piece in Salon: Hollyblog -- Are movie bloggers part of weblogging's natural evolution, or just a sign that another cool Net thing has been co-opted?

I was one of four bloggers Alisa interviewed for her Salon piece. My comments didn't make it into the final cut -- Meg Hourihan's views and mine were pretty similar -- so I'll post them here.

Alisa initially wrote:

I'm writing a story for Salon.com about a blogger who was hired by a film production company to be the official blogger on the set of their latest project, a movie called I Like Your Work, directed by Adam Goldberg (Saving Private Ryan) and starring Christina Ricci, Jason Lee, Joshua Jackson, Elvis Costello and Franke Potenta, among others. The blogger, Helen Jane, keeps her own web log, called helenjane.com. One of the film's young executive producers (also a blogger) knew of her site, liked her writing style, and offered her the job via an email message. The only ground rules were, no talking to the actors between takes and stay out of the way.

I am curious to know what you, as a part of the Blogging community, think of all of this. Will it be successful? Is it a good thing?

Sure, it's a terrific thing. Most bloggers aren't just sending bits off into the void -- they want some reaction, they want to set off a spark. And if someone will pay us for our random thoughts and random observations, so much the better. Say, do you have that producer's business card handy?

Is the commercialization of blogs inevitable?

No, the end of unpaid, doing-it-for-the-love-of-it bogging is not at hand. Unfortunatley. For Helen Jane, this seems like a great confluence of talent and luck. But it goes to show that if you're a decent writer, you should put your stuff out there on the Web. You never know how someone's going to trip across your work.

Is Helen Jane compromising her integrity by doing a Hollywood web log
that is being edited?
Not at all. Plenty of bloggers, such as newspaper bloggers, have editors and layers of approval. What's important is full disclosure: Let the Web community know up front what the deal is and who has final say. That's important information.

Is this going to be well-received by other bloggers?

It depends. The trick is simple: Keep it honest. The more free form, unscripted and unsanitized it reads, the more likely we'll accept it as a blogger's glimpse of movie set doings, rather than as an official version stamped with the seal of corporate approval, which would be far less interesting.

Will bloggers be hired out like this in the future? In other words, will they be able to market themselves as expert bloggers for hire to corporations and Hollywood?

Don't look for a tidal wave of bloggers as film consultants or official chroniclers of life on a Hollywood set. But if lightning strikes, make the most of it.

They're not sure if they're going to reveal that the blog is not in real time. What do you think about that?

That would be a major mistake. You can't withhold information like that. When I was an editor at BabyCenter, we didn't mention the fact that a mother's journal of her pregnancy was not taking place in real time, and got crucified for it.

Also, they're not going to allow people to post comments right away, only send emails. They want to see what kinds of emails come in first and make sure they're not getting emails from angry crew members or various other scandalous messages.

That's another mistake. If you don't trust your readers, what does that say? All they need to do is set up terms and conditions for posting right at the outset, and they can remove any comments that violate those precepts.

JD Lasica is senior editor of the Online Journalism Review and a daily blogger.