It’s interesting to see what different people call a Webisode. With video sharing being new and quickly becoming popular on the internet, a web episode could be anything. I am just disappointed that movie companies are using the word to mean a movie trailer intertwined with behind the scenes cast and crew commentary. I am just not sure how this translates to an “episode” of something. I could watch that kind of footage on something like Entertainment Tonight on TV. I want something a little different on the internet.
Something else that strikes me as interesting is that these clips were not put up on the movie website, they were put up on Myspace and most of the movie promotion seems to be taking place through Myspace. From what I can tell, this movie deserves more. Not that Myspace isn’t great, to a certain extent, for social networking, so much more could be done to promote this movie, and so much more should be done, limited release or not. If only more movies like this one were being made I might be more inclined to go to the theater.
From IMDB: Trapped in his mother’s Lower East Side apartment, sixteen-year-old Finn wants nothing more than to escape New York and spend the summer in South America studying the Iskanani Indians, or “Fierce People,” with the anthropologist father he’s never met. But Finn’s dreams are shattered when he is arrested in a desperate effort to help his drug-dependent mother, Liz, who scrapes by working as a masseuse. Determined to get their lives back on track, Liz moves the two of them into a guest house on the vast country estate of her ex-client, the aging aristocratic billionaire, Ogden C. Osbourne. In Osbourne’s close world of privilege and power, Finn and Liz encounter a tribe fiercer and more mysterious than anything they might find in the South American jungle: the super rich. While Liz battles her substance abuse and struggles to win back her son’s love and trust, Finn falls in love with Osbourne’s beautiful granddaughter, Maya, befriends her charismatic older brother, Bryce, and even wins the favor of Osbourne himself. But when a shocking act of violence shatters Finn’s ascension within the Osbourne clan, the golden promises of this lush world quickly sour. And both Finn and Liz, caught in a harrowing struggle for their dignity, discover that membership always comes at a price.
After watching the three clips of this movie with the cast commentary I want to see the movie and I will be looking for the DVD as soon as it’s available. I hope it’s going to be made available on DVD. It’s a shame that this movie only enjoyed a limited release. I think that it would have been a surprise favorite at the box office. David Sutherland alone could draw in a crowd. Add Diane Lane and Chris Evans to the mix and I am sure that an entire different group of people would have taken notice. This movie could have easily put Autonomous Films up there with some of the bigger movie companies.
