There has been a fair amount of press regarding the indie flick Four Eyed Monsters, not the least of which has been about how they show the entire thing on YouTube.
So I watched it. There's a lot of what I would call "creative imagery in it," though you've probably seen most of it before. The two main "characters" are total narcissists and frankly not all that likable. So over time, if you believe the legend of the film, the meeting and exchange of their ideas and video eventually became the film itself. If you can stand two people who don't have the emotional honesty to have face-to-face verbal communication, I suppose you would like it.
The novelty here is not so much the film, which I think is mediocre at best, but that it was self-produced and marketed via the Internet, using podcasts, MySpace and whatever. That's all well and good, but at what cost? According to them, about $100,000.
Are you kidding me? Toward the end of the movie you can see that they did shoot some stuff on a soundstage with sets and what not, but for what? So they could put the shit on the Internet? That's not a gutsy move, that's just fucking stupid. They should have read Rebel Without A Crew by Robert Rodriguez first. He did his first movie for $5k, and now he makes movies with Johnny Depp, Bruce Willis and Jessica Alba.
As much as I look forward to shooting my own film, I have to tell you that I'm not really very interested in the indie scene. For all the loathing toward the Hollywood studio system, the indie and festival scene is, quite frankly, even more pretentious. While I would never say that the quality of art is measured by number of people who appreciate it, don't you want to connect with people as much as possible? I suppose that's hypocritical of me as a guy who says he'd happily die knowing he made a difference in a few kids' lives by coaching, but I just don't get that. I think that far too much art is fucked up for the sake of being fucked up, and I hate gimmicky shit devoid of good story telling.
It's all subjective, I suppose. I fully expect my first film to suck though, and I'm OK with that.
100k is a lot of money. If you need to shoot on sets and can't afford it, make it work some other way.
They make such a statement about uploading it YouTube for free like that makes it cool or better. Their smug attitudes is enough to make me puke not want to watch it. But, they got it done and that counts for something.
I don't know if you know of Hilman Curtis at all, but he wrote a book about shooting short "films" for the web. His only budget is hiring actors, many of whom are his friends and web hosting costs. He writes it, shoots it, and edits it on a Powerbook and a firewire drive.
<a href="http://www.hillmancurtis.com/hc_web/film_video.shtml">This is his work if you want to check it out.</a>