karina longworth - The Screengrab

In Other Blogs: The Oxford Incident

Did you hear the one about the film blogger who couldn’t get a wifi connection? Last week, Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells reported the following: “I arrived in Oxford around 5:30 pm and checked into the Oxford Downtown Inn, courtesy of the Oxford Film Festival. And then the wireless issues began. It's now just before 6 am and the issues haven't stopped, and I've decided to cut bait as a result. That's right -- I'm outta here, flying back to NYC. Or maybe I'll drive south a bit and cruise around, find an adventure, something. Any place with decent wifi I call home…I can't do this. I won't do this. This is not 1997, and if a regional film festival is unable to provide easy, high-speed wifi to its journalist guests then no offense but it just shouldn't invite them down in the first place.”

The reaction from other participants in the Oxford Film Festival was swift and to the point. Eric D. Snider’s Blog puts it succinctly: Jeff Wells should be ashamed of himself.

Mondo Kim's is Coming to Your House

Hey, independent film fans! Do you have three thousand square feet of space to spare at your place? Would you be willing to let a bunch of New York cinemaphiles tromp around in your kitchen? Are you willing to maintain a collection of over 50,000 videotapes and DVDs, many of them rare or entirely out of print? If so, maybe Mondo Kim's could be coming to your house!

Via the indispensible Karina Longworth at Spout comes news that Mondo Kim's, the Saint Marks Place location of New York hipster favorite Kim's Video, is closing down for good, and rather than just unleashing their collection at bargain prices (like they did when their Avenue A location bit the dust a few years back), they'd like to keep it together -- most likely in the hands of an institution, university, or museum, but even with a business or a private collector if they can find the right film-freak folks for the job.

Happiness: The Video Game

It used to be a novelty worth commenting on that someone would make a movie based on a video game. Now, of course, in the Uwe Boll era, it's commonplace to make a movie out of a video-game franchise; for that matter, we also have movies based on amusement-park rides, board games, and for all we know, the lunch special at the Warner Brothers studio cafeteria. Video games based on movies are likewise no big deal anymore; any franchise picture worth its salt has a console adaptation on the shelves often before the movie actually gets made, and in at least one instance — the upcoming Ghostbusters game — the console game actually stands in place of a movie sequel.

Unfortunately, as Karina Longworth points out at Spout.com, indie films are left almost entirely out of the equation. In a highly amusing piece, she points out the notable dearth of video game adaptations based on successful independent films — and suggests ways in which this problem might be rectified.