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Under discussion:

My Effortless Brilliance  (2008)

• Chris Thilk points to Mark Bell’s take on that “asinine piece that appeared in The Hollywood Reporter that seems to hang the failure of independent movies on their inability to get a major newspaper reviewer.” Says Bell: “I know that an audience exists for indie film; I am a part of that audience. I don’t think that audience is waiting or needing to be pandered to by the print promotion and corporation whores anymore, though.”
• In a recent New York Times column, Maureen Dowd made an offhanded analogy comparing George W. Bush to the late Gene Kelly. Kelly’s widow was not amused. “To suggest that “George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly” represents not only an implausible transformation but a considerable slight,” fumes Patricia Ward Kelly at the Huffington Post. “If Gene were in a grave, he would have turned over in it.”
• Sean Nelson, star of Lynn Shelton’s SXSW Competition entry My Effortless Brilliance (see review here) blogged his festival experience for The Stranger.  “Though there are several competitions—narrative, documentary, short, etc.—within the festival, the atmosphere among the artists is 100 percent noncompetitive. Even when you’re all drunk.” Via GreenCine Daily.

Under discussion:

Sex and the City  (2008)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and/or have better things to do than spend your days on trashy filth-peddling websites like, um, FOX News and MSNBC), you’ll have already heard that two stars of the upcoming Sex and the City movie have been in the tabloid news this week. First, news broke that Kristin “The Cute, Demure One” Davis had starred in a sex tape; by late Tuesday, the scandal had been downgraded from “sex tape” to “just sex photos” (see them in their very not-safe-for-work glory here). Then, blogs started passing around an excerpt from a British magazine interview with Sarah Jessica Parker, in which the SATC star/executive producer reacted defensively towards a MAXIM article designating her “the unsexiest woman alive.”

Imagine, two actresses from the same heavily-anticipated film with “Sex” in the title, making headlines for their sexiness of lack therof in the same week! What an incredible coincidence, right? No matter how furiously both actresses camps try to paint their clients as women wronged totally independently of each other or the multi-million dollar project both are promoting, there’s evidence that the SJP story, at least, was fully manufactured.

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Annie Waldman has posted her elegant and affecting short doc, So The Wind Won’t Blow Us Away, at the Huffington Post, along with an artist statement/essay. The ten minute film, a glimpse at the lives of three teenagers living without parents in FEMA trailers and ravaged houses post-Hurricane Katrina, was funded by Cinereach’s Reach Film Fellowship, “a contest designed to encourage young, emerging talent to produce socially aware media” through which the selected filmmakers were given grants of $5,000 and are teamed up with established mentors in the documentary field.

I think it’s really amazing to see a short film (especially a fairly lyrical short doc that looks more like art than reportage) being presented on a major web portal, alongside news and editorials, with no special marking or qualification. I found Wind by clicking on a headline, assuming I was going to get a standard blog post, and I had no idea a full film would be embedded into the page. This week’s Cinema Eye Awards gave many independent non-fiction filmmakers a chance to vent about the difficulties of getting their work seen by mass audiences, but I don’t think the topic of online distribution alternatives came up once. This kind of presentation isn’t going to work for every film or every filmmaker, but for a short topical doc, integration into an online news site like Huff Post is probably going to put the work in front of more eyeballs than would see it at any festival. It’s something I’d like to see more of.