Little Minx, a commercial production company founded in 1998, has set up a website designed to give their directors a chance to strut their stuff via a series of very short films made under the umbrella title of "Exquisite Corpse". As in the Surrealists' parlor game of the same name, the concept is a sort of creative pass-the-baton game: the chief rule is that each filmmaker has to pick up with the last line of the script from the preceding film. (Typical titles: "She Turns Back and Faces Forward, At Peace" and "Without Missing A Beat, She Asks, 'Waffles For Breakfast?'") Handsomely produced (by Little Minx company founder Rhea Scott), the five films currently available for viewing are as easy on the eyes as they are soft in content. They range in style from urban-gangbanger-violence with arty flashback structure to New Age-feminist music video, and if the worst that can be said for most of the best of them is that they don't have anything new to say however snazzily they say it, the best that can be said of the worst of them is that they're over before you've had a chance to mind them much. The one that seems to have gotten the most attention, Josh Miller's "Waffles", is built around a plot twist that you can see coming from a mile off, but it does have a great opening line ("I guess what I'm tryin' to say is that if the good lord put hair there, it's probably for a reason."), some well-placed waka-jawaka on the soundtrack, and good acting by a cast headed by Stephen Mendillo, a familiar face from '90s episodes of classic Law and Order, and a fetching young actress named Aviva, who was in Superbad. And Chris Nelson's "She Turns Back..." leavens its standard-issue picture of the horrors of a TV casting call with a striking performance by Cara Failer as a conflicted kid actress trying to hang onto some self-respect. Well-executed but unsurprising, these are ideal for viewing on an iPod--which is only a put-down if the filmmakers had grander ambitions than that.
Other websites are popping up now (such as Wonderland) that aim to use the Internet to bring together talented new filmmakers and give viewers access to their work. "Exquisite Corpse" seems like the vanguard for a more business-minded approach that might be called cutting-edge practical: by giving commercial directors the chance to show how they might do if given the chance to stretch a little--say, behind the camera on a theatrical feature film--it may serve industry people as the latest concept in audition reels, while attracting moviegoers who are curious to see where the next Ridley Scott or Brett Ratner might be coming from. My own favorite of the films posted so far may actually be the first, Laurent Briet's "With the Eyes of Every Man Riveted Upon Her," a pulse-driven little vignette set in a gym that makes canny use of its teenaged lead actress and the Black Strobe song "Shining Bright Star." It would make a great commercial for something, which seems to be the idea.