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.)

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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."

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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...

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