In April 2012, comedian Mark Malkoff embarked on an extraordinary challenge when he set out to use his Netflix account to watch as many streaming movies as possible over the course of one month. Reasoning that he wanted to get the best value possible for his $7.99 monthly subscription, Malkoff pushed Netflix’s promise of a deep catalog of streaming movies to absurd lengths, managing to watch 252 movies — about eight titles per day — and bringing his cost per film to an impressively low three cents. The stunt helped to illustrate how easily and cheaply consumers can access and […]

Here are a few articles of interest I’ve stored in my Instapaper. There’s a new website for Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and it takes something of a transmedia approach. Chuck Tryon explains: As you enter the website, it invites you to follow one of two forking paths, the father’s way or the mother’s way, while a haunting, almost mournful score plays in the background. Once you choose, you encounter a split screen with half the screen filled by a semi-circle of video clips and the other a white space with some cryptic text that evokes a moral parable. […]

Here are a few of the articles in my Instapaper this week. At Bad Lit, Mike Everleth has his usual excellent selection of Underground Film Links, including this link to “Foreign Cinema: Whither San Francisco’s Experimental Film Legacy,” by Kimberly Chun at the Bold Italic. She visits Canyon Cinema and and various local filmmakers, looking for scene described in the Pacific Film Archive’s first book, Radical Light. Chuck Tryon watches (and likes) The Fighter with his Massachusetts-born fiance and notes the reference to the documentary High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell: A look back at the documentary shows […]

Here are some articles of interest I’ve sent to my Instapaper this week. At Script Shadow, Carson Reeves lists the 10 ways he knows he’s reading an amateur script. All of these are quotable, but here’s one: BORING ON-THE-NOSE DIALOGUE – This is probably the biggest clue that you’re dealing with an amateur. The dialogue is really straightforward and boring. Characters say exactly what they mean: “You make me so angry!’ Characters get way more specific than people in real life would: “I’m going to head over to get a cheeseburger at Portillo’s and then call my mom.” (instead of […]