Four Eyed Monsters opens today

Arin and Susan got their NY Times review, and it's as positive as these things get. But I thought it was interesting that Laura Kern implied that Four Eyed Monsters, the feature grew out of Four Eyed Monsters, the online presence:

Susan Buice and Arin Crumley, two young Brooklynites searching for new and exciting ways to express their creativity, met online and decided to approach their developing relationship as if it were an art project. Opting to avoid verbal communication, they instead exchanged handwritten notes, e-mail messages and personal videos and began sharing their progress via podcasts and then a feature film, “Four Eyed Monsters.”

Of course, that's not really exactly how it went down -- the film grew out of the materials produced by the relationship, and the podcasts and web sites grew out of a desire to push the film, which premiered at Slamdance 2005, to the audience that would naturally be most receptive to it: web-savvy hipsters, young people who use the internet as their primary mode of communication and who try, via MySpace and blogs and whatever else you crazy kids are into this week, to paint over the inherent coldness of the technology with genuine personal creativity. Stated that way, it may sound like a small niche, but Arin and Susan have proved that it's not -- it's an entire generation.

In other words, though Arin and Susan have turned themselves into vlog stars on the order of Amanda Congdon and Ze Frank, this is not the case of a vlog breaking through to the mainstream. There are two paraparallelcess stories here. On the marketing end, Arin and Susan's stroke of genius was to treat their filmmaking partnership like a band: each podcast released was like a single or an EP, leading up to the release of the whole album. They used MySpace the way bands do, to leverage their output so that their overall brand became something -- just like the latest Pitchfork-sanctioned sensation -- essential for the hip kids to display familiarity with. On that score, the Spirit nominations are not the big sign that Four Eyed Monsters has found its audience -- that came when Four Eyed Monsters showed up on Ultragrrrl.

So yes, they ingeniously used the internet to make their movie cool. But none of that would matter if Arin and Susan hadn't made a genuinely good film. I think the lesson here is not, "Filmmakers need to learn how to use MySpace." If anything, the lesson is, "figure out who your audience is, and then figure out exactly how to reach them." This is something I've tried to articulate many times, but have had a hard time putting into words in the face of Web 2.0 mania -- especially considering the fact that, as an employee of a major social networking site, I'm suppsupposedbe never-say-die evangelizing this stuff. The thing is, the internet is the biggest fad factory in human history, and there's nothing but trouble ahead for all of us -- filmmakers, bloggers, the audience, whatever -- if we overvalue what these new forms of communication can do for us. I was sure that I failed in my attempt to say this at the IFP conference in September -- I walked away from that panel nearly in tears, with Charlie Brown's theme song playing in my head -- but Brian Clark later told me that I did actually get my point across. Maybe it's alarmist to suggest it, but I just think filmmakers need to concentrate on making films, and I think most of what's going on in the online video sphere doesn't have a whole lot to do with filmmaking.
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The bottom line is that You Tube and MySpace aren't going to help anyone who doesn't actually have a movie. Arin and Susan happen to have too much movie -- they're so passionate, so endlessly creative, that the material keeps spilling out of them, almost two years after the premiere of their film. And it's quality material: as far as I'm concerned, the money quote in the Times review is the part that touches on the lasting poignancy of the film, which bleeds out from under the technical experimentation: "[T]his innovative chronicle of a truly modern romance also conveys, in a painful, darkly humorous way, a variety of ultra-identifiable truths, including the loneliness often suffered by big-city inhabitants and the complexities of sexual intimacy."

Once again, here's the latest podcast. Four Eyed Monsters opens at the Cinema Village tonight, and there's an afterparty this evening. My original review of the film, from SXSW 2005, is here.