The Screengrab : myspace

"I Am Atrios!": Kirk Douglas, MySpace Celebrity

Phil Nugent — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

MySpace has honored its "oldest celebrity blogger" who, it turns out, is Kirk Douglas. Guy Adams reports Douglas "began blogging last year, as part of a temporary initiative to promote his memoir Let's Face It, but decided to continue after seeing the level of interest his comments sparked. In one entry, he writes that he now receives too many messages to answer them personally, his goal at the start. 'But I want you to know that I appreciate each comment that I receive – positive or negative. And I enjoy the opportunity to talk to so many people much younger than I am.' " (Kirk, man, we love you, but you're 92 years old. Odds are pretty solid that you have the opportunity to talk to someone younger than you are whenever someone calls to ask if you're satisfied with your long distance carrier.)

According to his MySpace page, Kirk is white/caucasian, Jewish, married, straight, and a Sagittarian. (Hey, high five, my fellow archer.) At the time of this writing he has 695 friends, though that number is likely to go up as word spreads that this "Kirk Douglas" on MySpace is, whoa, Kirk Douglas. (There are other "Kirk Douglases" and even a Spartacus or three on MySpace, but they are other people.) His favorite movies are Champion starring Lola Albright, Spartacus starring Tony Curtis, Paths of Glory starring Timothy Carey, and Lonely Are the Brave starring Walter Matthau. Dude! No love for The Fury!? It's nice to see that, five years after he formally retired from acting, the man who broke the Hollywood blacklist by hiring Dalton Trumbo to work on the script for Spartacus and telling him he didn't have to use the kitchen entrance is still in touch and keeping up with politics: he's so pleased with the election of Barack Obama that he could plotz. "I express my opinion, and I tell them that they don't have to agree with me because it's a free country," he has said, by way of explaining his blogging philosophy. "And their answers are very, very interesting. I take it seriously. Otherwise I wouldn't do it. I don't have to do it, I don't make money. It's something that gives me personal satisfaction."

Hammer Films Rises from Grave, Gets a MySpace Page

Phil Nugent — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The run of horror movies produced by the British studio Hammer pumped new blood into the genre from the mid-1950s through the '60s before being reduced to a bone-dry husk by the time of 1976' To the Devil...a Daughter. Now, the first new Hammer horror film in more than thirty years--Beyond the Rave, described as "a blood-spattered tale of vampires on the rampage among hardcore dance fans"--is about to hit theaters. And when I say "theaters", I of course mean "computer screens and iPods." The movie, which stars Jamie Dornan and Nora-Jane Noone, with cameos by Sadie Frost and the now seventy-year-old veteran Hammer cutie Ingrid Pitt, is going into "distribution" on MySpace, where it will be serialized in twenty five-minute chunks. The first-time director, Matthias Hoene, is an old-school Hammer fan and duly humble about the responsibility he faces as the designated resurrector of the brand. "What I love about horror," he says, "is that you can take certain serious subjects - political, social - and talk about them in an entertaining way that would be impossible in another sort of drama. You can deliver messages in a horror film that you couldn't otherwise." (Yes, the new movie has an Iraq-war plot element. But, inevitably, his the first thing on his mind with this project had to be the tricky demands of the "webisode" format. "Normally in a feature film, you would spend the first 10 or 15 minutes setting up the characters and the background. But in this project we had to ensure that every five minutes there would be character development, thrills, fun - the whole package that you'd expect from a full-length film. And, of course, not every episode could end in a cliffhanger - that would be too forced." There were also content-restriction issues: some of the gore had to be cut to appease MySpace.

Hoene rejects the idea that the format itself is just a gimmick, though: "This is just another way of telling stories. Dickens wrote serialised stories - were they bad for being short? It can be a great format." Hammer Films CEO Simon Oakes chimes in: "This was not designed cynically; it was designed creatively. And it is not about the death of cinema. It's actually the reverse. It is about making film available to people who don't watch movies that often." As Oakes sees it, making films for the Internet is both a means of reaching a "younger generation" and the latest manifestation of the "real can-do attitude in British filmmaking" that gave rise to Hammer in the first place. (He wants it understood, though, that the studio isn't looking to go exclusively into on-line product but will also be making new films for theaters.) The first "webisode" of Beyond the Rave goes on-line April 2, but for those who still prefer to ingest their feature films at full length, the whole thing will be issued on DVD this summer. With, to Matthias Hoene's great relief, all the Internet-unfriendly gore restored.

Spotlight on Shorts: "gravida" and the Now Film Festival

Paul Clark — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

There was a time when short films were a part of practically everyone’s theatrical experience. In the days of double features, short films would be included in the program, sandwiched in somewhere between the serial and the newsreel. Sadly, those days are over. The small number of short films that do get projected tend to do so in a festival context, or as part of the occasional short-film program at your local arthouse.

The rest of them show online, on YouTube or MySpace, or any number of sites that specialize in short films. In the past decade, more websites have brought attention to young filmmakers by mounting online short film festivals, and the currently-in-progress Now Film Festival is no exception. Since October, the festivals review committee has been selecting one submitted movie per week to post on their site. Then the viewers give feedback on the films, and the best-received entries will progress to the final round of voting to be eligible win a new camera package.

There have been a number of worthy films to date, but the best of the lot thusfar is this week’s featured short, Lucas McNelly’s gravida. A far cry from the genre spoofery and juvenile humor many people have grown to expect from online shorts, gravida is a mature character study about a young pregnant woman trying to keep her loneliness at bay. From my original review of the film:

"gravida has much the same power as a good short story. It never overreaches for effect or tries to shoehorn too much into its relatively brief running time. It merely follows a situation to its logical end. We know just enough about its two characters to sympathize with where they’re coming from, and why they do what they do. . . Lucas McNelly has made a serenely confident short film, with which he shows a real facility as a director. He never tries to dazzle the audience with flashy technique or camera work, preferring his style to be dictated by his material. . . McNelly’s direction is subtle enough not to overwhelm the film, but strong enough to assure us that there’s a firm hand on the wheel. I’m eager to see what he does next."

Check out gravida and all of the selected shorts at the Now Film Festival web site, and don’t forget to vote for your favorites on MySpace's film page. The official gravida web site, which features links to other reviews of the film, can be found here.