Have you seen South Korean director Ki-duk Kim’s The Young Teacher? (1983)?
If not, here’s a brief synopsis and review: sugar-sweet young woman teaches kids despite opposition from kids’ parents and, in a word: dreadful.
How about Twister? You probably saw that one. It made £14.5 million at the UK box office in 1996 and starred Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as warring meteorologists (that’s right, warring meteorologists). Its tagline was “The Dark Side of Nature” …
Finally, anyone willing to admit to shelling out on one of the following: SWAT (2003), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) or XXX (2002)?
If you’re congratulating yourself on your good sense at missing the above then maybe the news that you’ve missed landmark events in movie history might wipe the smirk from your face. The Young Teacher was the first ever movie to be released on VHS, Twister the first on DVD and the unholy trinity of SWAT, Resident Evil: Apocalypse and XXX were amongst the first batch of titles released on the current medium-of-mediums, Blu-ray.
These movies – as generic, predictable and downright God-awful as they may be – will be remembered because of the technology that arrived with them.
The same will be said of New York-based film-makers Arin Crumley and Susan Buice’s Four-Eyed Monsters, a fictionalised account of the couple’s own tempestuous relationship, which on June 8 2007 became the first feature film to be shown on YouTube in its entirety.
Before that Crumley and Bruice had had some critical success – Four-Eyed Monsters premiered at indie film Mecca Slamdance in 2005 – but they had failed to find a distributor willing to take on the film.
Unperturbed they swotted up on their Web 2.0 skills and posted a series of documentaries on YouTube that followed the production of a movie that, at that point, no-one had seen.
The first of the mini-docs was purposely released on the same day that Apple launched the video-playing ipod, a canny move partly responsible for the steady increase in viewers and the growth in demand for the full movie to be released. By episode 8 it had been, with the support of video hosting site, which until August was paying the pair $1 for every user that registered to watch the movie on YouTube.
Four-Eyed Monsters is not a good movie. It plays like a traditional YouTube clip, in that it’s largely a frenetic showcase of its makers’ self-obsession and vanity. But it’s also a triumph in the struggle by truly independent film-makers to distribute (and make money from) their work.
It’s the next generation in a dodgy lineage of movies that have advanced film technology.
Because of that you should see it, however bad it is.
It’s out on DVD on September 1st.
