Homeland security classifies TRON as "Sensitive"

BURBANK, CA - Reports are emerging from members of the movie industry that the Department of Homeland Security has designated the 1982 film TRON as "sensitive", and ordered Walt Disney Studios to turn over all copies of the film in its posession. Retailers are also receiving notices to remove all copies of the film from stock shelves and turn them over to Federal officials. The reports have industry insiders bewildered and outraged.

Apparently portions of the movie were filmed at a nuclear research facility, and new high-resolution versions of the film would reveal too much of interest to terrorists. I think.

Read the full story about TRON at kuro5hin.org for more.

Edit: True? Not true? Aren't we a few days early for April Fools? And can anyone be faulted for readily believing that the current administration would pull a bonehead move like this?

Frankenstein Conquers the World on DVD - at last!

SciFi Japan reports that the long-unreleased Frankenstein Conquers the World will finally get its home video debut in North America this summer. Since it never came out on DVD or even VHS, FCtW has been a staple of the bootleg video world for years -- it's kind of sad that it took this long for the darn thing to come out legitimately.

For those of you wondering about the different versions of the film:

To accommodate the variant editions of the movie, the Tokyo Shock DVD will be a 2-Disc set with both the American version FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD and the Japanese version FRANKENSTEIN VS BARAGON (hence the two titles displayed on the packaging art).

Get your geek on by reading all about the tech specs over at SciFi Japan.

More "Mac vs. PC" parodies

Laurie McGuinness made some parodies of those ubiquitous "Mac vs. PC" ads and -- wait, come back! These are actually pretty funny.

[Via Daring Fireball]

What's that sound?

That distant cry like a thousand thousand nerds wailing in the wilderness?

It's the sound of a devoted fan base that just got told they have to wait until 2008 for more episodes of Battlestar Galactica.

If I were to guess (and why not guess, given that I have no journalistic integrity to uphold?) I'd say that there are some actors (and crew members?) on that show who are anxious to flex their newly-developed market muscle by taking an extended break to do some movie work, or maybe just take some time off from Cylon life. For us it's a pleasant diversion once a week; for them it's been three-plus years of constant life on the set of a space opera.

I'm looking forward to the next (and presumably last) season of Battlestar Galactica as much as the next geek, but I'm happy to give them their hiatus. Plenty of stuff on cable and DVD to occupy my time until then.

Just one question: when the heck does Veronica Mars start back up?

Edit: Looks like the answer to that last question is May 1st. Whee.

Download This: Inquisitor for Safari

There are days when you stumble upon a new bit of software that makes your life just a little bit easier. I find myself smiling just a little bit more on those days. Inquisitor is one of those tools -- it takes a task that I do many times a day (perform a Google search using Safari's toolbar) and makes it faster, better, more fun. Inquisitor bills itself as "Spotlight for the web," but I never found Spotlight anything to write home about. Inquisitor, on the other hand, adds type-ahead features where they are actually useful and pops up the most likely suspects before you even finish typing. Somehow it does this without slowing down the search process, which is one of my main beefs about the "search as you type" process. (This is especially true on my comparatively pokey iBook G4, which was a speedy little puppy when purchased in October of 2005 but has since been left in the dust by the Macbooks and their damned Intel chips.)

Inquisitor apparently also has features I haven't even tapped into yet -- additional search engines? Oh, and hey -- it's free. Ya gotta like free.

It's only for Safari, which is OK as Firefox is a memory hog and really slow on my machine. (See earlier comment about relative pokiness of iBook G4.)

Download Inquisitor now.

What do you mean it's over?

Ze Frank's one year experiment draws to a close.

Go say nice things about "Sugar"

Filmmaker and friend Scott Allen Perry (The Outdoorsmen: Blood, Sweat, and Beers and Bro Back Mountain) has a film playing on "The Lot." It's called Sugar, and if it does well enough Scott will be chosen -- one of twelve filmmakers out of 16,000 -- to appear on "The Lot" to be judged by Steven Spielberg. So go register on The Lot web site and say nice things about Sugar. Please.

SxSW 2007 and new review: American Zombie

My sudden drop off the face of the Earth? Oh, that. Completely attributed to the invasion of South by Southwest 2007. If you're in town for the festival or conference (be it interactive, music, or film), welcome to Austin. Take a gander at the Other Side Guide, an unofficial guide to the movies and panels (both Film and Interactive) of this year's conference.

Since I'm working the conference I've only seen one movie so far, but it was exciting enough to inspire me to sit down and bang out a complete review for the first time in -- what? A month? Got most of it down last night upon returning from the theater and finished it up this morning once I could think clearly. It felt really good to write a full review again.

That movie (and review) is American Zombie; please check it out.

More, hopefully, from SxSW in the coming week.

NY Times: For Obscure DVDs, a Precarious Future

New York Times article talks about the overabundance of DVDs that come out each week. Even if my time (and expendable income) weren't consumed by work and family these days, I think it would be impossible to keep up.

In effect the video market is glutted. For big studios that means more jousting over future formats that may restart sales. But for specialty companies that have traded otherwise unavailable horror, action, art-house and exploitation titles, the glut has meant a struggle to survive.

“I started in this business in 1992, and this is the worst I’ve ever seen the market,” said Don May Jr., president of Synapse Films, which has released “Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural” and the controversial Leni Riefenstahl documentary “Triumph of the Will.” “We’re all drowning in a sea of DVDs. Five or six years ago maybe a hundred titles a week would come out. Now we’re fighting 200 or 300 titles every Tuesday.”

Read the full NY Times article here (requires free registration).

Digital downloads aren't mentioned here but there's no question that the oversupply of DVDs is bad news for independent filmmakers and distribution houses for films both new and old. Fortunately the economics of DVD are such that it's entirely possible for a title to find success on the internet alone. Digital downloads make selling a movie even easier and will further shift the market away from brick-and-mortar stores, but with only 45% (approximately) of Americans using broadband internet at home, don't expect this problem to go away soon.

Where has Bob Burnham been?

Two months ago, Bob Burnham posted three videos on YouTube. This is one of them. It made me laugh.




The others are here.

Still here, still alive.

February was a crazy-busy month for me. Over at work we launched a bunch of new film festival sites, some of which are live now – some of which even have festivals happening this weekend or coming up. These include: Omaha FF, the Gasparilla FF (Tampa, FL), the Lake County FF (Chicago, IL), the Sedona IFF, and the Sacramento Film Festival. If you live in any of those areas I encourage you to check out the sites and consider taking in a screening or two; there's some real indie film goodness in there.

The rest of my life has been taken up by the business of being a dad; I don't think that requires much in the way of explanation. You've heard other fathers talk about the exhaustion and sleep deprivation and how it's all worth it. I'll just say ditto. And that my entire day has been shifted two hours earlier due to the fact that my little girl sleeps almost precisely from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. every night.

As mentioned earlier, I did watch a Godzilla movie the other night (Godzilla vs. Spacegodzilla, the last movie in the Big G's repertoire left for us to review) in the hopes of having it reviewed for this weekend's B-Masters Roundtable Review. Given that I haven't started writing yet – and I bet Scott hasn't either – we'll see how successful that ends up being.

I'm also hoping to get back into posting to FilmBuffStuff; I have some ideas for turning it into more than just a products blog, though I will still be doing a certain amount of that. But first: South by Southwest. Lots of cool movies are previewing and premiering there, and I hope to actually see a few when I'm not manning the company booth. If you're attending SxSW film or interactive, come through the trade show and say hello.