Online viewing, 2/5.

Let's start with two via Jeffrey Wells, Killers Kill, Dead Men Die, a video preview of Vanity Fair's annual Hollywood issue, and Steve Colbert's "Movies That Are Destroying America: Oscars Edition."

But of course, what most people are watching right now are the Super Bowl ads, which can be found at iFilm and Alternet.

Related: Film Threat's top ten.

Evaluating the ads: Aaron Barnhart and Paul Harris at TV Barn, Destiny at 10 Zen Monkeys, Stuart Elliott in the New York Times, James Poniewozik for Time, Seth Stevenson for Slate and Sacha Zimmerman for the New Republic.

Related: Eric Harvey on Prince's half-time show:

Don't tell me you didn't get goosebumps when he started into "Purple Rain," and there were actual raindrops all over the camera lens, and the glowing, Tron-ish marching band marching in sync, and the lights went out except for the purple ones circling the stadium, because it means you're lying. Almost forty years after Elvis' '68 Comeback Special, when the average television has 700 channels and television shows premiere on YouTube or whatever, Prince reaffirming his legacy (what a lot of us knew he'd do the whole time) during halftime of the Super Bowl is the closest chance there is for unified, (inter)national recognition of an iconic live performer while he's still around to enjoy it. He was on a stage in front of billions of people, he's two years shy of 50, and he just fucking killed it.

In the run-up to Oscar Night, Gabriel Shanks gathers "clips or the entirety of almost all of the 2007 Best Animated, Best Live Action, and Best Documentary Shorts."

"It all feels like childhood before it goes weird." At Twitch, Todd points to A Very Sunny Morning. Also: Trailers and a site for The History of America.

The Machine is Us/ing Us. "Web 2.0 in just under five minutes." From Digital Ethnography.

Pitch 'n' Putt with Joyce 'n' Beckett. Via Fimoculous.

For the Seattle Channel, Robert Horton talks with James Longley about Iraq in Fragments; and a look back on the films of 2006 with Horton, Sheila Benson, Kathleen Murphy, Andrew Wright and Tom Tangney.

"Just as early tsk-tskers of such derided mass products as comic books (today they're called graphic novels), radio (people will stop reading books!), dime paperbacks (people won't read the right books!) and TV (two words: Paddy Chayefsky) were proven wrong, those who summarily relegate YouTube to the low-cultural ashcan are missing not only its artistic potential, but the artistry that can already be found there." Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post, via Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker.

Wandering through YouTube, Dave Roos stopped to watch one clip all the way to the end:

Nothing terribly original, but the pace was fast, the jokes mildly crude and the message clear: Eat more Wendy's!

Eat more Wendy's?

It turns out the clip in question wasn't the product of two dudes in a basement in Bethesda, but 20 suits in a Madison Avenue high-rise.

And they're marketing to what he calls in the new issue of MovieMaker the "Jackass Generation" - who, in turn, are often willing to play along: "'It's kind of like the 1970s again,' says LonelyGirl15 creator [Mesh] Flinders, 'when the cultural revolution took place and the studios went and hired all these "Young Turk" filmmakers - Scorsese, Fellini, Coppola - and let them come in and help with big studio pictures. Hopefully that's going to happen now.'"

Fellini? Well, you know what he means. Right?

Posted by dwhudson at February 5, 2007 4:50 PM