• foureyedmonsters.jpgYou may not be able to see their film in a multiplex, but with today's Sunday Times, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice have hit some kind of big time – they, and Four Eyed Monsters, are Charles Lyon's local in for a piece on the dire state of indie distribution. "If the result was going to be this," Crumley says, "a film with no distributor, no way for anyone to ever get a chance to see it beyond those who saw it at a few festivals, would I have done it? ... The answer is, 'no'." Lyon's also talks to Lloyd Kaufman (Troma), Emliy Morse (star of I Am a Sex Addict and director of See How They Run), and others.
  • Caryn James on this year's most popular awards bait stunt: playing gay. A great deal of her argument centers around the fact that we know just enough about, say, Heath Ledger's private life, to be able to simply appreciate his performance in Brokeback Mountain as Good Acting, and not a threat to the dominant paradigm: "Our awareness of these nonfiction roles makes it easier and maybe more acceptable for middle-class heterosexual viewers - a group that does, after all, include most of us in the audience - to embrace characters whose sexual preferences we don't share."
  • Franz Linz files a long profile on Nick Goosen, whose Grandma's Boy – a stoner comedy about video game testers – is about to hit theaters. Goosen, the son of an LAPD detective who worked the Black Dahlia case, got his big break playing basketball with Adam Sandler.
  • Andrew Adam Newman reports on the International Dog Film Festival. No comment.