Tubefilter News

The Bannen Way continues to drum up anticipation with their latest promo video (above) out today. This time it’s all about co-creator Mark Gantt who stars as protag Neal Bannen, aka “The Man.” We are still wondering just what kind of “research” went into this role… [Crackle]

The Guild: Season Three DVD is now available for pre-orders on Amazon, and is 10% off through January 4th. It didn’t quite make it in time for Holiday wish lists, but it still will be loaded with Goodies for Guildies, like a making-of featurette of the “Do You Want to Date My Avatar” music video and Guild Applicant Rejects, How to Build Vork’s Sword and interviews with the Axis of Anarchy. [Amazon]

Top Chef reality chefs The Voltaggio Brothers may be out of Bravo’s TV limelight, but they are now taking the family kitchen antics online with the launch of their new web series in January. EQAL is producing the series and their Umbrella-based web site that recently launched. Is the EQAL team a bunch of foodies? This marks the second cooking-themed series from them after having launched Paula Deen’s Get Cookin’ earlier this year. [Eater]

The Halloween 2010 lineup is already taking shape it looks like with news that Jonathan Moody will be launching his new Scream Queen Campfire web series next October. No video available yet, but a Facebook group is live along with their plug: “5 beautiful scream queens will tell 2 stories each giving us 10 terrifying and entertaining stories in the series during a campfire.” [Dread Central]

Take 180 put out a new sneak peek at season 2 of I Heart Vampires (I <3 Vampires) (below) where head writer Julie Restivo Murphy walks through what to expect this season—like “a bigger badder vampire” on the scene and news that episodes will now come out weekly instead of bi-weekly. Season 2 will premiere in January. [YouTube]

Twenty-five year old Jarrett Larson moved to Los Angeles to make it as a superhero-monkey cartoonist. For the moment, things are not going well. His Halo-intolerant girlfriend / sugar momma just dumped him, and he’s moved into an ominous, illegal commercial rental in a sketchy part of town with just a few boxes and his pug, Cheese. He still has his friends, of course (particularly his fellow Halo-playing teammates), and his sunny and bounding disposition is essentially intact.

But Jarrett’s voice-over tell us he has dreams of putting his cartoon character, Space Monkey, on the pajama pants of every kid in America by the age of 27. So, for the time being, he’s facing a mountain of feces (which may have been fired from his Space Monkey’s ‘feces canon’).

And so begins Singledom, an online series from the ‘stealth’ web TV outlet of Fox Television Studios, 15 Gigs. Singledom embraces a few flourishes of the experimental that you’d expect from a relatively new player in the digital content game. Unfortunately, it starts to feel ordinary once you realize it’s the confused twentysomething progeny of Sex andthe City and Superbad.

It’s not just that Jarrett and his core group of friends (two guys and a girl) banter at a table for four (albeit at a ‘rotisserie chicken-n-donuts’ joint vs. a SOHO brasserie), or that he and his buddies frequently engage in sex-related talk, or that the action plays out on top of a soundtrack all too reminiscent of Friends. It’s more that the creators have opted to take the well-worn path of introspective, post-collegiate man/woman/child making his/her way in a metropolis steaming with possibilities and disappointments.

Plus, it’s all accompanied by a fluffy voice-over. Don’t get me wrong, voice-overs can make a lot of sense for web video. They provide an opportunity to bring viewers up to speed within a limited time frame. But in Singledom, the added explanations dilutes the edgier elements of the series. The show loses some of its bite.

Singledom is created by Jonathan London, a young,accomplished film and commercial director and host of Geekscape. I suspect Fox TV must have had some say in the web series’ production,but for the sake of argument, let’s just say that London had total creative control. Who then, is the target audience? Gamers? No onscreen (game) play to speak of and the storyline doesn’t center around what happens when online addicts navigate real world relationships. Tweens? It’s a little too sexual.Folks in their twenties? Eh. It’s a little too immature. The more one tries to parse the question, the more it seems to be about portfolio-building for 15 Gigs and the director, and not much else.

LG15: This Show is Yours is coming back next month as EQAL announced the winner of its fan contest to continue the original lonelygirl15 storyline in a blog post by EQAL’s Miles Beckett and Greg Goodfried naming LG15: Outbreak the season 2 premiering January 11. The trailer for the “8-week interactive thrill ride” is above. But it looks like the fun may have already started as a reversed clip of the same trailer has some hidden messages in it. [LG15.com]

Sports and cute girls have mixed well for ages, so why stop now? Sportz Nutz returned for its second season this week starring two attractive and knowledgeable post-college sports buffs Susannah Collins and Sam Raddock breaking down the college football bowl matchups from the Army-Navy tailgate. Who knew nitrous oxide was still popular? [YouTube]

Safety Geeks SVI wrapped up their first season releasing their 13-minute finale Ep. 11 “A Strange Sucking Sound” on KoldCast (below) and YouTube last week. The bumbling (and sexy) P.O.S.H. team, including calendar queen Brittney Powell and creators Tom Konkle and Dave Beeler seem to have nabbed their safety violator and tied up loose ends, for now. [Daveandtom.com]

We had heard rumors that they might do it, including some at the last Tubefilter Meetup, and sure enough they have. Sony has released three episodes of their sexy action romp The Bannen Way today just in time to qualify for this year’s Streamy Awards. While the series doesn’t officially bow until January 6th, it’s a move reminiscent of film studios doing a quiet “awards run” New York and Los Angeles to get it on the books for the year.

Clocking in at a brisk 7 minutes each, the first three eps (above and below) introduce us to the nooky drenched life of Neal Bannen (Mark Gantt), a gambling con man with a penchant for letting his love for the ladies spill into his work. We learn that his grandfather Bannen’s dated wisdom guides his criminal life through a set of ‘rules’ that give the show its name, The Bannen Way. Through some fast cut rewinds, we catch a glimpse of what’s to come, setting up Bannen’s 150k debt to a mobster name Sonny Carr as a main plot point.

And it didn’t take long, just a few minutes really, for the show (and Neal) to get its shag count up to one with a bout with the steaming storage room manager (Briana Lane). Somehow it managed to avoid steering into late night Cinemax territory despite the rather brief pre-shag setup. We also meet street thief Madison (Vanessa Marcil), who looks to be Bannen’s main squeeze. Without spoiling the rest, I’ll just say that Michael Ironside as police chief knows Bannen all too well, as does Neal’s mob boss uncle Mr B. (Robert Forster).

Everyone knows The Phantom Menace is a terrible movie. You know it. Little kids with Anakin backpacks know it. George Lucas knows it, as he lies awake on his pile of Star Wars licensed gold. Even prequel apologists like me know it.

So, does anyone really need a 70-minute video review to tell us why we hate such a mind-numbing piece of woefully disappointing cinema? Yes, at least when it’s produced by mad genius Mike Stoklasa of Red Letter Media.
Stoklasa’s review doesn’t simply trash The Phantom Menace, it explores the reasons the two Star Wars trilogies are so different, and examines the broader question of why some movies make people’s eyes glaze over in awe and other movies make them want to slit their wrists.

The Phantom Menace Review is conducted in the same style as other Red Letter Media reviews. It’s exhaustively illustrated with wall-to-wall footage from the film, features critiques from the perspective of an almost frightningly informed viewer, and narrated by a guy who kind of sounds like Brad Neeley if Brad Neeley was a backwoods codger who abducts and slaughters disoriented hikers. To clarify that last point, the narrator of RLM reviews is a character whose role is to sometimes stray from film critique and get into pitch black humor involving basement death chambers and eerily specific advice on how to kill prostitutes.

Fun as serial killer humor may be, the main reason to watch this review is for the review. Stoklasa points out tons of plotholes and poor dialogue, but the real insight comes from his examination of what connects a viewer to a movie. The first 10-mintute segment contains the sharpest piece of criticism in the whole 70-minute expose. Four average viewers are asked to describe the personality of certain Star Wars characters, and the ease with which they paint colorful adjective portraits of original trilogy characters like C-3PO (”prissy”, “anal-retenandtive”, “high-strung”) is contrasted with the near-impossible task of describing a main character from the prequels (Padme is best remembered as “monotone”).

Towards the end of the review, Stoklasa uses behind-the-scenes production footage of The Phantom Menace to examine the film’s problems at their source. Stoklasa concedes he can only speculate on what went wrong during filming, but his implications are clear when he asks us to see the fear in the eyes of Lucas’ production team, unable to question or critique their master.

On one level, the news here is rather straightforward—a new comedy web series, The Suffersons, debuted online today from creator Blair Singer. The New York based playwright and staff writer on TV hits Weeds and Monk, has crafted a minimalist comedy about an out-of-work accountant arduously trying to pen his first novel under the chastising eye of his acerbic wife.

Michael Chernus (Bored to Death, Mercy) stars as the budding novelist Josh Sufferson alongside Susan Pourfar as his mocking wife Dana. As it unfolds, Dana’s mocking turns competitive as she learns he’s writing about their marriage, prompting her to start crafting her own account of the

For Your Consideration – The Battery’s Down, the musical theater loving web series from New York-based creator Jake Wilson put out today what appears to be the first ever musical For Your Consideration video for The Streamy Awards (above). The riff on “All I Want For Christmas” stars former Wicked star Shoshana Bean and doubles as the show’s holiday release. Wilson and co. have officially raised the bar for FYI campaigns this year. [YouTube]

TheStream.tv raised over $7300 in 24hrs for a charity—The Pablove Foundation—that helps kids with cancer this past weekend during their live on-air #streamathon. Now that’s making good use of live web shows! [theStream.tv]

Dinosaur Diorama made a holiday video of their own, a “special extra-funny” episode of their Greg & Donny series—”Gregeneezer and the Three Monsters” (below). Will Gregeneezer avoid the fate of his old partner, Jacob Donny? [Dinosaur Diorama]

Rodrigo Blaas, a Pixar Studios animator, released his first ever independent short film, Alma, online this week for a limited time. [almasortfilm]

The Bannen Way hasn’t officially launched online yet, but that didn’t stop them from getting it up on Amazon as a pre-order. The action web series will premiere on Crackle on January 6th, and it’s making its Amazon debut January 8th. [Amazon]

Green Screens are everywhere. This ChromaKey video out of Russia mashes up the hundreds of TV shows that use green screen to beef up their environments. [YouTube]

Turmeric (Olivia Poulet) and Deborah (Sarah Solemani) are two hippy Brit idealist environmentalists living together in a meager shed in Turmeric’s parent’s backyard. They believe that every action they make has genocidal consequences. Maybe you’ve heard of the butterfly effect. Well that’s just in movies. In the web series ‘mentalists, the concept is much more straightforward.

Here in the world that Turmeric and Deborah live in, the real world, it is more like the superginormous, skyscraper huge, gorilla with batwings spewing carbon emissions effect. That’s right. These two know that when we, the industrialized nation giant gorilla with batwings people, flush our refuse down our swimming pool sized toilets at least 300 baby white tigers die. That is the type of impact we are talking about here, people. It is severe.

So what are these two bashful birds doing about this? They have decided to start a regular podcast documenting their efforts to save the planet hoping to enlighten the rest of us. Their heroic efforts include bathing and brushing their teeth and taking with a single cup of cold water, living as freegans, and SWAT team style street clean ups.

Poulet and Solemani have a well developed chemistry together and their comedic interactions seem natural and not at all stiff. The jokes are original and their timing is excellent. The self-inflicted situations these two bring themselves into are funny enough, but the real payoff is watching their painful reactions. The scene in episode two where Deborah strips down to her bra and panties in the freezing cold to take a bath with a small cup of water shows she’s committed to saving the world, but perhaps hasn’t quite thought the whole thing through. She squirms and shivers, unsure of what to do or where to clean next. The whole while Turmeric, the clear task master of the two, prods Deborah on telling her where to bathe and how to feel about it.