Head Crammers

Indie collective

Boutique DVD distributor Benten Films, a two-man operation created by New York film critics Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis, has a knack for picking indie gems and creating terrific products around them. Think of it as The Criterion Collection but with lesser-known films. Take a look at the Quiet City release from earlier this year. Aaron Katz’s sweet mumblecore nugget is an impressive piece of low-budget, DIY filmmaking about a girl visiting Brooklyn and the boy she meets there. Also impressive is The Guatemalan Handshake, which drops later this month. The quirky debut from director Todd Rohal stars Will Oldham as Donald, an awkward young man who vanishes, setting into motion turns of events no one in his life could have seen coming. The two-disc set looks terrific and includes the director’s commentary, six short films made by Rohal and his cast and some other sweet extras. The film has music from Kimya Dawson, formerly of The Moldy Peaches and best known for her soundtrack contributions to Juno.
—Anders Wright

Greatest Headlines Ever!

If there’s one thing we can thank Rupert Murdoch for, it might be transforming the stodgy New York Post of the 1980s into the preposterous tabloid it is today. In Headless Body in Topless Bar, a coffee-table-type book released last month, Post publishers reproduce some of their best ever headlines. To wit: Art heist: “When you gotta Goya, you gotta Goya,” Wii-related home accidents: “Wii regret to deform you” and on Alex Rodriguez’ cheating ways: “Stray-Rod.” There’s plenty more where that came from.
—Eric Wolf

Trailer flash

“Sounds scary,” was my companion’s comment as I was watching the trailer for Scott Heim’s new book. Yep—trailer. Heim is the author of Mysterious Skin, the 1996 novel that was adapted into a film four years ago. The book is fantastic—a raw portrait of the aftereffects of child sexual abuse. The film, while good, didn’t quite do the book justice, despite featuring the talented Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who’s become the River Phoenix of the 2000s.
For his new book, We Disappear (full disclosure: It’s sitting on my desk, waiting to be read, but arrived highly recommended by a well-read friend), Heim filmed a trailer, similar to what you might expect for a film preview, minus dialog. He may be the first to ever do so. He came up with the idea while mulling over ways with his publisher, HarperCollins, to promote the book. He got some advice from Gordon-Levitt, borrowed a camera from a friend and edited it in Apple iMovie—it was completely a DIY venture for Heim.

One blogger, assuming the book’s publisher created the trailer, slammed it as “the triumph of the image over the written word.” It’s a legitimate point—though one has to wonder if the person’s take would be different if they’d known that Heim created the trailer—but in the age of multimedia, why not use every tool available? It’s a mesmerizing one-minute-48-seconds of film—quite eerie, a little Blair Witch-like, more of a visual gestalt than a marketing tool.
—Kelly Davis

Reeling in the chaos

Whether you’re a Mac or PC person, chances are you have five to 10 web-browser windows or tabs open at any given time. And unless you’ve tried iGoogle, Pageflakes or any of the dozens of so-called “personalized start pages” in the Web 2.0 World, you’ve probably come to the conclusion that you can only push ctrl-T (non-nerd user guide: open a new tab) so many times before stuff gets out of control. One of the better ways to organize the chaos is netvibes.com, a Paris-based company that’s killing it in the personal-start-page game. Netvibes.com let’s you piece together your most-used websites, blogs, e-mail accounts, social-networking sites, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts and widgets onto one single page that greets you every time you open your browser. Basically, you can check out the strange photos recently posted on Flickr while reading Twitter updates and checking your Gmail and MySpace inbox at the same time. Web-induced A.D.D. just got a whole lot better—or worse, depending on how you feel about focused real-life social interaction.
—Kinsee Morlan

The gentle magic of Steven Millhauser

There’s a deep quiet to Steven Millhauser’s writing, no matter the setting or time period. In “Opening Cartoon,” the lead story in his latest collection, Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories, he manages to take the raucous energy of a Tom & Jerry cartoon and infuse it with the solitary thoughts of the antagonists between chase scenes. It’s when he abandons that sense of peace, as in the story of a girl who literally commits suicide by laughter, that he seems to lose himself in a maze of weirdness. But the beauty of short stories is that when you don’t like one, you can flip ahead a few pages and find another. The best stories here are in a section titled “Impossible Architectures,” in which a town maintains an identical version of itself, a model maker builds a castle so small that even he can’t see it and a village erects a tower so tall that it punctures the floor of heaven. Only in a Millhauser work would heaven be deemed not that interesting.
—Eric Wolff

Zombies, robots and amazons, oh my!

What do comic-book guys like? Zombies. Robots. Busty Amazon warriors. And now, finally, all three are in one book, packaged nicely to be (almost) socially acceptable enough for the coffee table. Yes, local comic imprint IDW has come up with a sweet-looking hard-cover edition of the end of the world as we know it. Written by Chris Ryall, Zombies vs. Robots vs. Amazons delivers exactly what it advertises: A group of Amazons, the last humans on the planet following the (almost) species-ending war between the walking dead and their mechanical enemies, find themselves up against the obligatory wall of zombies. Ryall’s work is always sharp, never taking itself too seriously, and Ashley Wood’s gorgeous art raises the entire affair to a level of respectability that will (almost) allow fanboys to share this with the occasional girl they’ve somehow coaxed into their apartment.
—Anders Wright

TV on Demand

We’re not too good for TV. But we hate conforming to some megacorp’s schedule and we’re too cheap for TiVo. So we’ve gotten little work done lately, since the Internet is finally good for something. We’ve been catching up on Arrested Development on hulu.com, the online venture betwixt NBC and Fox that has episodes of more than 400 different shows and scads of movies available. For free. With minimal advertisements. Hell, even better is what Trey Parker and Matt Stone have done—put every single episode of South Park online at southparkstudios.com. Sure, it’s raunchy. Yep, it’s mean. And yes, South Park remains insightful, hilarious and one of the smartest shows on TV and, now, the Internet.
—Anders Wright