Or as Christian folk might call it, “The Chicken Drop”.

Chicken Shit Bingo

Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon

Also by Rachel Meyrick: Bike Kill 2004

The Soul-stealing Camera and Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard
Twitch
open directory of music videos
The Eighties Tarot
Tom Cruise Gets Shot [WMV]
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

[culled from tags: film(s), movies, Hollywood]
Lucas vs. Spielberg
meta-subtitles
Dumb Money - The madness of movie advertising
Wired review of Batman Begins
Internet Movie Script DataBase (appears down at the moment)
Mexican movie posters
rapid afterimage (fun)
Star Wars Last Supper
The Man Who Shot Sin City
Mindscape trailer

I was taking a break from working on the fourth revision of Chicken Bridge (which, depending on how much money we can make selling our organs, will be 301’s feature-length debut) and ended up Googling some old friends and acquaintances from my time at UNC. Of course, Southern California is one of four or five places that artistically-inclined people go when they leave Chapel Hill, and Los Angeles is where you can now find twin brothers Rajeev and Elan Dassani. I, and many others, worked with Rajeev and Elan on a passionately-conceived but ultimately fruitless weekly paper (sort of a smaller, Chapel Hill-based version of The Independent Weekly) called Parallax.

Not having seen nor spoken to either of the brothers Dassani in years, I was happy to discover that they have achieved their daydream of making movies. For your consideration, here are a couple of their films, made at USC’s School of Cinema-Television (I don’t get the hyphen):

Wake Up Call: I found myself in a similar scenario to that portrayed in this short years ago, when I worked for FGI at their now-defunct subterranean call center off Franklin Street. [*skin crawls*]

Smoking pretty much speaks–or doesn’t speak, as it’s silent–for itself. I don’t know whether the silent treatment was intentional or happy accident, but it works.

It’s good to see people living out their dreams in beautiful, sunny Southern California. I’ll just crawl back into my dank hole and hunch over the keyboard now.

You can check out more of Rajeev and Elan’s student films here.

“Independence Day” takes us to “Godzilla,” a movie that even its makers did not like but which became the third-highest-grossing film of 1998; “Pearl Harbor,” a dud universally acknowledged that made more than four hundred and fifty million dollars; and the second and third “Matrix” movies, roundly panned, whose box-office total exceeds a billion. Giants like these continue to stalk through the multiplexes, shaking gold from the heavens with their thunderous, THX Certified footsteps; but inside their high-definition, digitized craniums their tiny brains are dead.

New Yorker link

Mega-chain drugstore CVS has released disposable DV cameras for 30 bucks a pop (plus a $12 processing fee). Of course, the hacking has commenced. (via MetaFilter)

Uh-oh. “He [Stallone] promises a film in the vein of Straw Dogs and Deliverance.”
Also: Quoth the Stallion, “Nevermore!”
[via Monkeyfilter]