So imagine my surprise when I discovered that some 3,500 users from Metafilter.com found out about Great Moments In Movie History. All I can say is thanks for visiting and thanks for not totally trashing the rest of the site in your comments section. One comment, however, I felt needed addressing - the one about our shitty content scroll bar. I totally hear you. The good news is, depending on how much you care I suppose, is that we’re revamping the Great Moments Page (as well as the Music Gone Bad page - more on that later) to allow easier access to clips. All this will be coming this week, along with clips from In The Line of Fire and Indiana Jones 4. Stay tuned.

Tags: content, Great Moments In Movie History, metafilter.com

Funny thing happened last week, we were unintentionally featured on national television - and I’m talking about American TV, not that small-potatoes Canadian thing I keep hearing about. Sadly - well, depends on who you ask I suppose - it happened on TMZ TV. Seems when creating a story about Leelee Sobieski’s (must have been a slow news day) miserable film career they looked to the internet for a clip from the recent remake of The Wicker Man. Lucky for us, we provide such a service in the form of Great Moments In Movie History. What’s surprising and comical, is that whoever put the piece together, decided not to remove our watermark from the footage. Did they believe that N.A.C.P.E.M. was a real organization charged with the documentation of movie clips? We shall never know.

Either way, that’s our watermark, featured on national television. Ironically, I can’t be angry for the lack of permission sought by TMZ. All Great Moments are made with footage that is not approved by the original owner (although we don’t make any money off the bits, nor intend too), therefore TMZ has now become the second tier of internet copyright infringement. Unless, of course, they got the clip approved by Warner - which makes me wonder if that extends to us?

Anyways, I’m happy to report that this exposure did NOTHING for our numbers and we remain the same lovable indie website you know and love. In fact, I can promise you that when we do finally sell out, it will be with much more style and grace then a simple appearance on TMZ. I’m thinking ‘Wife Swap’ or ‘Rock of Love Bus’. Actually, is the XFL still happening?

Tags: Great Moments In Movie History, Leelee Sobieski, television, The Wicker Man, TMZ TV

A while back I went to see The Happening in theaters (don’t ask) and was dumb-founded by the level of mediocrity on the screen. Here were good actors, acting lifeless for an hour and a half, quoting some of the most miserable dialogue since maybe The English Patient. Perhaps what really got to me is how this movie passed through the studio system seemingly untouched. There was certainly no attempt to cut out the many lengthy-awkward stares from both Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel. Nor an immediate call for shoot additional action sequence that were a tab bit more thrilling than a group of people running from the wind. It’s rather baffling, but then again, it did come from 20th Century Fox.

It was during that screening where I got the idea for Great Moments In Movie History, our new web series. In short, it’s to become an archive of all the worst scenes from major motion pictures. The key word is major. It would be far to easy to take apart any number of the films featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Yet, to find something truly awful in a film backed by real money and star-power is frankly all the more hilarious and interesting. Think of it as the Criterion Collection for bad scenes.

What didn’t immediately occur to me, is that I’ve doomed myself to re-watching a bulk of bad movies over the next few weeks. Sure, The Happening was enjoyable the first time around due to its pure shittiness. Second time around, it’s kinda painful. The remake of Planet of the Apes - not fun. Not fun at all. Don’t even get me started on Wing Commander. So while I can’t help but be pleased by the response I’m getting from communities like Funny or Die, I cautiously watch the stack of DVDs grow on my desk (its amazing how quickly friends get behind a concept) and wonder if such a hobby can eventually drive a person mad? I suppose we’ll soon see.

my current stack of bad films to watch.

For now the clips can be found on either our YouTube page or Funny or Die page. When the official site is ready, I’ll post a link here. Enjoy. Oh, please share these, spread the love (read: hate) to other people. Let know that no cinematic injustice go unseen. Likewise, I welcome any and all suggestion from you guys. Just shoot me an email with the title of a movie and a specific scene(s) and I’ll throw it up.

Finally, the first episode of Whatever is nearly complete. We tried to have it done for the end of January, but I was struck with the cold for a week and it threw off our post time. Kinda hard to record voice-overs when you have no voice. We’re back on track and are looking to release it next week. Likewise, the relaunch of our ‘On Location/Interview’ segments will happen either later this month or early next month. We’ve already got new pieces in the works, so look forward to those as well.

Until then, I have some watching to do.

Tags: bad movies, Great Moments In Movie History, Help Me!!!!, Mark Wahlberg, Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Happening, Zooey Deschanel

Funny thing happened last week - well, depends on your definition of funny, really - our site temporarily became one of those google ads infested domain pages. You know, the kind you get when you accidentally type in Googlk.com. So instead of offering podcasts and videos, we had great deals on Shark Vacuum cleaners and Steam Bath Doors. Mind you none of this way intentional, rather, a gross mistake by myself. You see, we’ve been meaning to put google ads on the site for some time now. Not because we believe they’ll make us any money, rather because it will create the ‘illusion’ of something that could make us money.

So last week, I finally got my shit together, decided to place the ads into the site and wouldn’t you believe it - I registered us for the wrong service. Instead of plain ‘AdSense Content’ I accidentally when through the ‘AdSense for Domains’ set up, mind you, I was lead to believe this was the correct course of action. Honestly, I suspected something was afoot, when I had bugging Danny and his server guy to fix some DNS properties in our .com. Sometimes a service will require you to authenticate your site - but adding google code into our DNS seemed a little excessive. My suspicions were validated when early Friday afternoon our site mysteriously showed up as a 404 error. Upon further troubleshooting, Danny assured me everything on his end was correct and that Google AdSense was now waiting for me to complete some crucial step. Sure enough, this was the case and it was only a short while after I told Google to authenticate the site that the 404 error disappeared and our new life as an authorized Shark Vacuum reseller began.

Suffice it to say, this was both hilarious and frightening.  

It only took a couple of minutes to realize the AdSense service I should have selected (too bad I hadn’t realized this earlier) and quickly emailed Danny to reset the DNS properties to their previous state. The next morning, everything returned to normal and work resumed on the site.

To those who tried visiting us in those dark days last week, I apologize. I can assure you, however, that there’s no money in selling Shark Vacuums. So I doubt that’s a road we’ll ever take again.

Tags: Danny Keyes, google ads, paul fucked up, Shark Vacuum cleaners, site update, whoops

By now you’ve probably seen the teaser for Whatever., our new web show starting later this month. If not, here’s a link - pretty, isn’t it? What you might not know is that the isn’t entirely mine. Well, maybe a little. Well, okay, it’s not. The show is in fact based off ‘Top Gear’, the successful british television show about men and their love of things that go fast. Now, mind you, Whatever. is not about cars, and its actually based on one segment they do (although the whole program is brilliant - honestly, do yourself a favor and download all of it. Well, expect season 1, which lacks James May) where the hosts are presented a challenge and forced to figure it out - generally leading to lots of mucking-about and chaos. In short, it’s very funny. Suffice it to say, I thought to myself, you could easily apply these sort of challenges to stuff other than cars, and low and behold, Whatever. was born.

So let it never be said that I didn’t cop up to borrowing their idea - although an argument could be made that ‘Mythbusters’ has a similar concept. And, to be fair, we are doing things our way, though, ‘Top Gear’ has severed as an excellent blueprint - particularly their lavish production values, which we WISH we had, but try to emulate in Final Cut. So until our first episode is ready, I offer you some YouTube clips of ‘Top Gear’ to better illustrate what inspired me so much. Perhaps like so many of their challenges, our show will be ultimately ‘ambitious, but rubbish’.

» Second Amphibious Boat Challenge

» Robin Reliant Space Shuttle

Tags: top gear, whatever

So lately I’ve been torn between working on the site and finishing the first cut of our new show ‘Whatever.’ Sadly, the later has been winning out, although, I am happy to report that initial viewings of the work in progress have been astoundingly positive. I say this not to toot my own horn or build up any sort of hype, but because I’m rather happy that what we set out to do seems to be resonating. Without giving to much away, this new show is based loosely on an element from a very popular british program, so the fact we seem to be capturing some of that… magic maybe? No wait, that sounds gay. Um, silliness… yeah, that will do. The fact we’ve captured some of that silliness is quite reassuring. Suffice it to say, I look forward to showing it to you guys early next month and working on future installments.

As for the site, it’s coming along. The templates for the shorts, shows and interviewers are almost complete and will be implemented soon. Although everything works now, so feel free to keep watching our shows and shorts. However, you will have HD versions, audio commentaries and yes, comments to look forward to in the future.

Probably my favorite new addition will be the ability to podcast the entire site. A lot of this is thanks to the fact all of ours videos are moving from Flash format to H.264. So The Offline, in its entirety, will be coming to an iPod, iPhone or Zune near you (although who really uses a Zune?).

Tags: is anyone really surprised we never update this blog?, the british, the offline, updates