The Screengrab : karina longworth

In Other Blogs: The Oxford Incident

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:00:00 GMT

Did you hear the one about the film blogger who couldn’t get a wifi connection? Last week, Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells reported the following: “I arrived in Oxford around 5:30 pm and checked into the Oxford Downtown Inn, courtesy of the Oxford Film Festival. And then the wireless issues began. It's now just before 6 am and the issues haven't stopped, and I've decided to cut bait as a result. That's right -- I'm outta here, flying back to NYC. Or maybe I'll drive south a bit and cruise around, find an adventure, something. Any place with decent wifi I call home…I can't do this. I won't do this. This is not 1997, and if a regional film festival is unable to provide easy, high-speed wifi to its journalist guests then no offense but it just shouldn't invite them down in the first place.”

The reaction from other participants in the Oxford Film Festival was swift and to the point. Eric D. Snider’s Blog puts it succinctly: Jeff Wells should be ashamed of himself. “He was one of the people invited to appear on the panel about film criticism this morning at the Oxford Film Festival, and I was eager to meet him. Though we’ve been attending many of the same festivals for several years, I’d never actually talked to him, and I was curious to learn whether he was as much of a condescending, humorless curmudgeon as he seems in his blog…Our introduction was affable enough, and we chatted briefly at the opening-night party. My impression was that maybe he plays the role of the ever-offended grouch online because it’s interesting and is perfectly reasonable in everyday life. And then he refused to appear on the film criticism panel because he couldn’t get wifi in his hotel room. I’m not making this up. I’m not even exaggerating. The festival invited him here ONLY to be on the panel. I’m sure they hoped he’d write about it on his blog, too, but his official reason for being there was the panel. They paid for his plane ticket. They covered his hotel room. And he refused to do the panel — remember, the ONE THING HE WAS THERE FOR — because of the unreliable Internet access in the hotel. (The free hotel.).. .Let me make this clear. This small film festival, which operates primarily on donations and the tireless work of volunteers, paid several hundred dollars to fly Jeffrey Wells out here and get him a hotel room, all so that he could be a guest on the panel. They hoped his relatively high profile in the movie blogosphere would help create cachet for the still-growing young festival. And then he repaid them by snottily refusing to fulfill his obligation.”

At SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth writes a mild defense of Wells. “In his first of three anti-Wells posts this weekend, Snider pumps the party line that Wells shouldn’t have missed the panel over concern that he wouldn’t be able to file coverage of the festival –– which is probably true –– but then proceeds with the fallacy that Wells’ coverage was less important to the festival than his appearance on the panel…Sure, no reputable festival would tell a journalist that they’d pay for their trip chiefly because the festival wants the coverage, and no reputable journalist or blogger would take that deal. But anybody who pretends like festivals don’t extend panel and jury invitations to journalists in the interest of increasing their profile with the press is delusional…But as of now, by creating a firestorm of bloggy press around a festival that none of the other invited journalists killed themselves to cover, isn’t Jeff Wells the Oxford Film Festival’s de facto best friend?”

He may not be the festival’s best friend, but at least they got an amusing short film out of the whole ordeal:

Mondo Kim's is Coming to Your House

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 14:45:00 GMT

Hey, independent film fans! Do you have three thousand square feet of space to spare at your place? Would you be willing to let a bunch of New York cinemaphiles tromp around in your kitchen? Are you willing to maintain a collection of over 50,000 videotapes and DVDs, many of them rare or entirely out of print? If so, maybe Mondo Kim's could be coming to your house!

Via the indispensible Karina Longworth at Spout comes news that Mondo Kim's, the Saint Marks Place location of New York hipster favorite Kim's Video, is closing down for good, and rather than just unleashing their collection at bargain prices (like they did when their Avenue A location bit the dust a few years back), they'd like to keep it together -- most likely in the hands of an institution, university, or museum, but even with a business or a private collector if they can find the right film-freak folks for the job.

If you think you've got what it takes, you can take a look at the requirements here (courtesy of Chicago's own Ray Pride at Movie City Indie), or contact Yongman Kim at Kim's directly: ironkim at kimsvideo dot com is how to do it.

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Happiness: The Video Game

Leonard Pierce — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:55:00 GMT

It used to be a novelty worth commenting on that someone would make a movie based on a video game. Now, of course, in the Uwe Boll era, it's commonplace to make a movie out of a video-game franchise; for that matter, we also have movies based on amusement-park rides, board games, and for all we know, the lunch special at the Warner Brothers studio cafeteria. Video games based on movies are likewise no big deal anymore; any franchise picture worth its salt has a console adaptation on the shelves often before the movie actually gets made, and in at least one instance — the upcoming Ghostbusters game — the console game actually stands in place of a movie sequel.

Unfortunately, as Karina Longworth points out at Spout.com, indie films are left almost entirely out of the equation. In a highly amusing piece, she points out the notable dearth of video game adaptations based on successful independent films — and suggests ways in which this problem might be rectified.

Her online MMORPG based on Todd Solondz's Happiness seems like a real winner, especially (given that similar games like World of Warcraft are massive time- and money-pits) since she proposes that "because true, lasting happiness can never be achieved, no one can ever win and the game goes on forever." We're likewise fond of the idea of a Gummo first-person shooter with an all-black-metal soundtrack. But the best idea by far is a racing game based on Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny where "you're the only one on the road, and when you finish the race, instead of a trophy you get an absurdly long blow job from your dead girlfriend." Someone get Prince Vince on the line — I have a feeling he'll pay for this himself.