Our reviewers select and review the best independent and foreign films on amazon.com, cd universe, and netflix

Every conceivable solution has been proposed for the current dearth of financing for independent movies. Every major film festival offers a seminar where desperate filmmakers can pay to hear how much money they can make on YouTube and iTunes. The only people usually making money are the event organizers.

What is the solution to a broken system where advertising and promotion costs have jumped out of reach of most filmmakers, and theaters are even reluctant to rent a screen for a week? My solution is Penny Movies. That doesn’t mean making films for a penny. The costs of production have dropped because of ever cheaper digital cameras and computer post-production. But even filmmakers need to eat.

Penny movies are an idea that goes back to penny novels. Penny novels, or dime novels as they became with inflation, were popular from the 1850′s. They were eight page newspaper-like weekly publications featuring romance, adventure, crime, and fantasy. All the genres that are still popular today on TV and in the movies.

The nearest we have to them are probably South American telenovelas on Spanish TV. One of the most popular genres is called “narconovelas:”telenovelas about the romance of the illegal drug trade. A Colombian production that has swept the rating is Sin Senos No Hay Paraiso. Translation: “Without Breasts there is no Paradise.” Don’t tell me that wouldn’t clean up on A&E slotted just after “Breaking Bad.”

How can struggle filmmakers cash in on this? The first step is making films people want to see. Someone in Hollywood once said, “Genuine artistic merit is a great reason to make a movie but let us not forget that simple melodrama, rough action, and sexual desire have been the mainstays of drama for 3000 years.”

Here’s my plan. Filmmakers will post their first installment of three minutes on YouTube with a link to a pay site for further installments. The second installment costs a penny. If you like that, you can see the third for a little more, and if that proves popular, the price of every succeeding installment goes up according to demand. Filmmakers would need to create installments that left you wanting more. Difficult, but isn’t that what we call storytelling?

You say this can’t work? Go to Amiestreet.com. This is a music site where the price of songs is determined by listener demand. The more who like it, the more it costs. Of course, Aime Street’s biggest hit was Ashley Dupre’s What We Want. (She was Eliot Spitzer’s call girl). But they are still in business despite no new scandal singers.

I’ve registered PennyMovies. All filmmakers are welcome to test their first installments on the “Contender” page of MovieWithMe.com. Let’s hope it’s time some hot, original story ideas start appearing-hopefully in English.

Thank You For Smoking (USA, 2005, 92 min, dir: Jason Reitman, cast: Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello)

Why are Hollywood moguls always portrayed as hucksters in movies? Because they are brilliant con men. Thank You for Smoking is a puff that will be remembered because it was director Jason Reitman’s first feature (based on Christopher Buckley’s book). Most of it doesn’t rise above Saturday Night Live: a very low bar to jump. One exception is the Hollywood mogul scene (see clip). “Mogul” is a term Hollywood appropriated from “Mughul:” a dynasty of kings descended from Genghis Kahn. That’s like claiming you own the Brooklyn Bridge because Washington Roebling (who built it) was your great great uncle.

In an effort to forward the tobacco lobby’s campaign to get people smoking again, their chief spokesman, Nick, visits a Hollywood super agent. In short order, in front of a Japanese print meant to invoke the Hollywood mogul’s bible, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War; the Powerful One outlines a movie to promote smoking. Set it in the future, he consuls. People are put off by smoking now, but in a future, on a space station, it could be cool again.

It is parody. It is also brilliant. His description of a future couple lighting up cigarettes after weightless sex evokes an image of kinky sensuality. Therein lies the contradiction that goes through dozens of films where the Hollywood mogul scene is played out: he is always a misanthropic con man who is brilliant. Take a look at the mogul scenes in these movies: Alex in Wonderland (1970), The Last Tycoon (1976), The Player (1992), Swimming With Sharks (1994), Wag the Dog (1997), Tropic Thunder (2008) and don’t forget six years of the HBO series, Entourage.

Even the Motion Picture Academy has noted this brilliance by inventing a special mogul Oscar award. They call it the Irving G. Thalberg Award for “Creative producers, whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production.” Thalberg, a Hollywood exec and producer of the 1930′s, was the prototype for the Hollywood mogul. He cast a shadow so long that F. Scott Fitzgerald used him for his hero, Monroe Stahr, in his unfinished novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western. (Robert De Niro played him in the movie, The Last Tycoon).

Producers fight to force the Academy to give them a “Thalberg.” It’s not a regular Oscar, it’s a separate award modeled on the head of Irving Thalberg. The question I asked myself when I saw the Hollywood mogul scene in Thank You for Smoking was: what motivates such extraordinary brilliance that we never tire of parodying it? Most Hollywood insiders would give you a short answer: money. They are wrong. You can make money lots of other ways and you don’t have to read screenplays all weekend. I think it is the need to tell stories.

In the soul of every great con man is a great storyteller. How else can you convince the mark to put down his money? Motion pictures were merely a new medium for the flimflammer’s art. And who is to say all great art doesn’t have at least a little of the same brilliance? If we could get Michelangelo to kick back and talk in his office, he’d probably tell us he had a great idea for a naked David placed right in the public’s eye: where they’d have to look up at his penis from below. “Wow, ” he’d say with his feet on his desk and his hands gesturing, “I can see the crowds!”

Americans hate cable. They hate the price, they hate the service, they hate the selection. Now there is something new to hate: cable wars with broadcast networks. The major broadcast networks have always had the option of offering their programs to the cable companies on the basis of either “must carry” or “retransmission.”

Under the FCC’s “must carry” rule, a network (through its local station) has the right to insist that the local cable operator transmit its programming. If the network does not insist, and the cable operator still wants to carry the programming, he must pay the network for the cable retransmission of network programs at a rate negotiated between the two parties.None of this mattered much for many years, but now the networks say they need those cable fees to survive.

This new desire for cash has led to the Cable Wars. The biggest so far is Cablevision vs. ABC/Disney. ABC threatened to cut off the Academy Awards 2010 show to New York City area subscribers if Cablevision did not meet its subscriber fee demands. The show is always pretty bad, but people wanted to at least have the option to see it. The war went to the newspapers where Cablevision subscribers read between the lines and saw both sides preparing them for rate increases. (We didn’t want to raise you bill but they made us do it!)

Too much has been written about this. The one guy who sees beyond it (besides me) is Holman W. Jenkins writing the World Business column on the Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal (be careful using this link, the Journal has a pay wall).

There’s no doubt the cable companies’ current business plan is doomed. (Unload your stock in the next few years.) The systems are too old to fix, the fees too high, and the three-in-one plan with VOIP phone service is about $35 a month more than Skype. (Skype is free). The only place cable companies can raise revenue is by offering you higher speeds and more content on their broadband pipes.

The broadband explosion already underway is toward video. How will a system designed in the 1960′s for military data be expected to transmit iTunes movies and Google Earth? Any plumber who ever cut costs and put in a one-inch water pipe instead of a two-inch one knows the answer: drip drip drip.

The ready solution to this cyber gridlock is expanding the bandwidth allocated to broadband wifi and mobile. This is why Google is rushing to build super speed wifi networks in cities across the country. They are counting on citizen delighted with the results pressuring the FCC to free up more bandwidth.

Where will it come from? The bandwidth hogs are the over-the-air TV stations who have been hoarding bandwidth since the analogue days when they needed lots more of it than they do with new digital transmission. The easy answer to the coming download doomsday is to snatch this unused reserve bandwidth and award it to wifi and mobile.

But the Internet is still as fast as the slowest part. If packets are routed to Venezuela on their way to New York, “loading” will mean “slow” in two languages. The longer view solution says we should modify the way digital video is delivered to portable devices so that it can use a wider spectrum. The old word for that spectrum is Television.

In the future, TV will send packets rather than programs, and mobile receivers will filter these to give you only the movie you want, just like broadband Internet. “As fast as the slowest part” will no longer apply. But getting there takes vision; and a lot of courage not to give in to the technology of the near moment at the expense of the technology of the farther future.

In the 1960′s, Los Angeles dug up a magnificent interurban rail system and replaced it with roads. Cars were faster and did not need rails. In the 1990′s Los Angles began the expensive process of re-acquiring and re-railing the old rights-of-way to put in a new interurban rail system. Now rails are faster than cars. Think what they could have saved by just leaving things alone for thirty years?

Hopefully, this will be the last word on the Academy Awards: get out of high school. The Golden Globes has grown into a slick TV show while the Oscars is still a high school musical. The problem with Oscar is he thinks he is the BMOC (big man on campus). But while he is waiting his college acceptance letter s to the top schools, kids like Grammy and Globe are kicking butt.

The biggest embarrassment this year was the banishment of The Hurt Locker producer Nick Chartier because he wrote emails to Academy members asking votes for his team and cited the unfairness of the other team’s (Avatar) giant budget for uniforms and equipment. Oscar punished him by banning him from awards night and not allowing him to collect his trophy on stage with the other kids..

Now doesn’t this sound like high school? Kids would call it pathetic. Parents and teachers would call it silly. Only at Hollywood High is this kind of behavior taken seriously. You can just hear the kids saying, “But Mom, it’s REALLY important.”

Ratings were up this year; proving turmoil and more nominees do make it more interesting. But the audience is fickle, and higher ratings might be a blip on the Neilsen graph. Here are some suggestions to make Oscar more telegenic. Produce an Oscar YouTube race where contestants vie for the amateur Oscar (voted by the Academy members). Interview Academy members waiting in Hollywood unemployment lines and hear how anger they are and how that effects how they will cast their vote. Organize and annual Academy versus Golden Globes softball game.

Once you leave high school for the real world, you’ve got to learn to compete or the next guy will get your job.

Before the Academy Awards spouts and blows, let’s credit a Muse that surely influenced director/writer Jim Cameron, the self-proclaimed King of the World and master of movies. The name of the Muse is C.J. Cherryh and she’s one of the best American science fiction writers ever. Back in 1981 she published Down Below Station.

That’s the same year Jim Cameron directed his first movie, Piranha Part II: The Spawning. Ever see that one? You can rent it on Netflix or buy it on Amazon.com for less than four dollars. That doesn’t suggest a lot of demand. But Down Below Station won the Hugo Award, is an all-time classic, and never out of print.

In the thirty years since Down Below Station, C.J. has written many wonderful and popular books. Cameron as directed several good movies and written one good screenplay (The Terminator 1984). In private, many in Hollywood say Avatar is, “movie 3D, screenplay 1D”. So where did the inspiration come from for the beautiful and gentle creatures who inhabit Avatar?

Down Below Station is set on a permanent space station hovering over a distant planet we are trying to exploit for its natural resources. But many among us see the beautiful and gentle creatures who inhabit this world as threatened by out intrusion. Some go down to the planet on a mission to save these creatures and protect their primitive, naturalistic way of life. Some actually “go native” and begin living among the alien creatures. Sound familiar?

Movies don’t know the word plagiarism, and that is as it should be. Ideas are the soul of creativity, and they can come from anywhere and everywhere. But it would be nice if the King of The World could stand on one of those stages while receiving one of those awards and say, “years ago I read a book by a gifted woman who was, at that time, teaching school in Oklahoma City each day, and writing at home every night. Her imagination and her characters inspired me to think up Avatar, and I would like to thank C.J. Cherryh for being my main Muse.”

Of course, if James Cameron every even thought those words, the 20th/Fox lawyers would cut out his tongue. But they don’t need to worry. His ego long ago erased everyone from his creative universe save himself. Some say he even believes he sunk the real Titanic. When the Academy Awards and Avatar have come and gone; curl up with a copy of Down Below Station or Cyteen or Hellburner or any of the other books in her Alliance-Union series. You don’t need to put on 3-D glasses either.

The big news of the day in the American movie biz is a footnote to the rest of the world. After a decade of playing “you pay for it,” the American movie industry has finally found outside investors to convert chain movie theaters all over the country to digital projection. About 14,000 screens in multiplex theaters are involved. Wall Street Journal readers from Australia to France might puzzle at why it takes J.P. Morgan Chase bankers to do this.

The American theater owners are giants: AMC, Cinemark, and Regal control most of the theaters in the US. You mean to tell me they can’t finance their own modernization? Apparently they’d rather be in the popcorn business. The acronym for this stimulus package is: KASIMA. The bankers coined this. It stands for “Kicking And Screaming Into the Modern Age.”

The real motivation for these later-day conversos to digital is their failing business model. Movie-going in the US has become a weekend recreation. Monday through Wednesday you can throw a bowling bowl down the aisle of any theater and not hit anyone. Digital projection means theaters can import signals from a variety of events from sporting matches to Glenn Beck. (Mr. Beck already appears on about 450 screens already converted, as does the Metropolitan Opera-though not together. Both are very popular).

Freedom to dip into multiple sources of programming and not depend exclusively on the Hollywood pipeline is the dream of movie theater chains. But having the means is not having the motivation. Once Hollywood is not the only source of product for the theaters, who books the shows and who does the promotion? Even though it might cost $250,000 to equip a Regal Cinema, it costs less than $5000 to put the same capabilities for simulcast satellite delivery in any playhouse, club, or restaurant. These venues become competition for the theater chain oligarchy. Do you want to watch a soccer match munching popcorn or eating steak and drinking beer?

MovieWithMe.com’s sister company, AudienceSource.us is already busy programming for all of these venues. The future of digital delivery of special simulcast events belongs to the packagers and their wiliness in promotion. It’s relatively easy to push people into movie theaters with 25 million dollars of Hollywood ad money, but how do you do it on two dollars and ninety-five cents? That’s the real conundrum for the digital future, and the KASIMA crowd hasn’t a clue.

Don’t be misled by the headline, I really mean Vudu, the company that was trying to stay afloat selling overpriced boxes pre-loaded with Hollywood movies. Then they made the wise choice to ditch the boxes in favor of a website only, pay per view approach. Now that has paid off handsomely with Walmart buying them out. Walmart (Wal-Mart) plans to run their own streaming service onto the new streaming capable TVs and Blu-rays they sell.

The reasoning is okay as far as it goes, but I don’t think that is far enough.First let’s take the Blu-ray. Nobody has come up with a good reason to buy it unless you are a gamer, or you enjoy seeing movie images so sharp you can see the sweat under every actor’s arms. But people have been buying the players because it’s a cheap way to get streaming movies. The reasoning: for the price of the player, you get streaming services AND Blu-ray (if you ever choose to buy an overpriced Blu-ray disk).

But is Walmart missing something? The reason streaming devices are exciting is because everyone wants total access to the net on their TVs. Why keep a cable subscription if you can get Hulu on your 50 inch flat screen TV? Movies are a small part of it, though an important part. That’s why God invented Netflix. What we don’t need is more add-on devices giving us the ability to pay to buy and rent movies that are the same movies we can get other places (no studio allows movies to go on any of the services including Netflix, Vudu or Roxio Cinema Now before the DVDs are in the stores).

I think I would rather put a new movie in my Netflix queue and wait until it shows up in my mailbox(or streaming) like an old friend I forgot. Walmart would probably argue that their new Vudu service is not for me, it is for the less sophisticated movie watcher. Okay, if you are buying and promoting a service for the unwashed, why are you selling organic produce in your Walmart food markets? I think Mr. Organic is the same shopper that might be interested in a new TV with a streaming device. And if he reads Cnet, he’ll know your Vudu is, at least at present, way behind the curve (it can’t be used on MAC, it requires its own player to be downloaded etc).

Congratulations to the venture capitalists who just got a big pay day on Vudu. I am sure they are breathing a sigh of relief all the way to the bank.

The old joke about the Golden Globes is they can’t find a restaurant for the awards dinner because all the members are waiters. It’s fashionable for anybody with a blog, column, show, or street corner shopping cart to comment on the awards: so it’s my turn. Certainly The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), which gives out the Golden Globes, has its best days behind it. Who can forget 1981 when they all got Rolex watches from Pia Zadora’s husband and decided to award her the Golden Globe for her role in Butterfly?

That was the Hollywood that made us smile. Journalists could be bought just like anyone else. The world was in balance. The HFPA show was banned from TV after that incident, but it didn’t last. They had a good name, “Golden Globes,” a nice statuette that looked good clutched to bosoms, and a date early enough that cable TV could use the news to tub thump for the Oscars. For the last decade the HFPA’s biggest problem has been where to spend all the money.

Now there is a new problem: no press. World-class newspapers like the Zagreb Daily Star and the Kharkiv Sun are going out of business fast. The HFPA members are out of jobs. So are they still a foreign press association when the presses have stopped? Legitimate journalists who work for well-known papers in London and Paris were never welcome at the HFPA. They preferred to draw their membership from the obscure (if you couldn’t write well, at least you could wait tables well).

They may need to change the name to the HFA and forget the word “press.” Nobody would notice. The irony: 90 plus waiters, horse players, and lottery squatters who make up the HFPA pick pretty much the same winners as over 5000 supposed film professionals in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Can Hollywood go back to the future and reclaim streaming and digital copying of movies? This week they’ll give us all what we haven’t been waiting for. January brings snow and cold as surely as it brings the Consumer Electronics Show back to Las Vegas. This annual gadget fest has become very important because there is usually so little to write about in the recovery week after New Year’s Eve.

A gaggle of Hollywood Studios along with Comcast, Best Buy, and the usual suspects is about to tell us they have a better way for us to watch movies. D.E.C.E. (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem) will let us buy movies and see them on any approved device (yet to be defined) that we like. Amazon already does some of this with DVD+ and Netflix does it with Watch Instantly. But DECE is intended to do it with everything. The theory is that if you give people the choice of how to watch, they will stop pirating movies on the internet and start paying for them. With DECE, you only need to pay once and then you can stream to TV, computer, netbook, smartphone and any future device still unknown in the universe.

DECE is supposed to be an answer to both piracy and price point. The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) estimates that between 50 and 80 percent of internet content is illegal. (Bernstein Research calls the size of this estimate “an urban legend”).

The bigger problem is price point. Hollywood complains that iTunes has a monopoly to set prices. This is unfair. Hollywood has a monopoly to set movie ticket prices and DVD prices. This is fair. We’re told the business needs price competition. By this they mean themselves (DECE), but nobody else. When I was producing, I was found of referring to a dusted up old concept as “an idea whose time has came.” DECE may be just that. Perhaps I’m rushing to judgment. Like an executive hearing a pitch, I like to say, “surprise me.”

Meanwhile, at MovieWithMe.com we keep chugging along on our own; searching to bring you the best suggestions for what to watch on any machine you like. Regardless of the delivery system, the story is still all that matters.