August 14, 2006

MySpace.com/Cool Movies

Recently, Matty and Cinecultist had been having this conversation about whether or not certain recent films using MySpace as their official website is annoying or cool. On one hand, something like John Tucker Must Die or Step Up is going to find it's best audience on MySpace because that's where the kids hang out these days. On the other hand, doesn't it seem a bit lazy not to spend the big studio bucks on some decent web presence?

Cinecultist got to thinking that surely there must be some cool little indie pictures using MySpace for some grassroots marketing, just like the indie and not so indie rock bands are. We started trolling through the film subtab in search of such folks.

Analog Days is a feature film made in a suburb outside of Los Angeles about young people coping with those "in between days," after childhood but before real adulthood. They recently premiered their movie at the Los Angeles Film Festival and based on the trailer posted to their page, it looks sort of Slacker meets Clerks. This seems to be most of the filmmakers' first major project from the film's composer, Derek Fudesco, who is in the band Pretty Girls Make Graves, to director/writer Mike Ott, who previously made music videos.

• Perhaps pictures from Last Night's Party and Cobrasnake aren't voyeuristic enough for you. You long to see more drunk models, more rich yuppies, more downtown assholes mugging for the video camera. If so, you're in luck because Tribeca-based photographer Shawn Regruto captures them all in his New York scenester podcast, Point and Shoot. You can download the full episodes on iTunes for free and Regruto promises the full feature length film will be out this summer. Oh and FYI, this is racy stuff, iTunes tags it as explicit.

We also should note that a bunch of film fests, like the Austin Film Festival, the Illinois International Film Festival and the Hollywood Film Festival have MySpace pages, as do indie film publications like Filmmaker Magazine and indieWire. Jeez, this MySpace thing really is getting ubiquitous. Pretty soon the line for art house movie will no longer be the pick up spot* it once was, we won't even need to leave the house to commune with other indie film geeks.

As always, Cinecultist loves hearing from indie filmmakers. If you're on MySpace and want to shoot us a message, request an add or send us your film, please do. You'll find us here at MySpace.com/cinecultist.

*Full disclosure: CC has never been picked up nor picked up on anyone in line for a movie, subtitles or not. We just always thought it sounded like a totally brilliant idea.

Posted by karen at August 14, 2006 10:18 PM