I hope this does not come across as an advertisement for Comcast. I’m no fonder of them than anyone, and hate the way my bill seems to creep up a couple of dollars every month or two for not apparent reason. But I did make some good discoveries via the On Demand menu yesterday: if you go to the “free movies” area and then choose “independent,” you’ll find Oscar-winning and nominated short films. We watched some last night, including the excellent Ryan and disturbing Six Shooter. For a tiny bit more whimsy, there was Harvie Krumpet. The only thing about all six or seven films we watched is that they seemed to be from a male perspective and done by male filmmakers. At Sundance a couple of years ago, we saw Wasp, a short film with a very female perspective that ended up winning the Oscar, but all-in-all the shorts seem guy-heavy. Which is I guess par for the course all around, as (I think) the majority of feature films are male-made, too. Watching the short films really made me want to try some guerilla filmmaking a la renaissance woman Cecil Castellucci.

Speaking of guerilla filmmaking or at least do-it-yourselfing, available on the same On Demand menu is Ellie Parker, which started as a short film and then grew into feature-length. I loved this movie. It’s kind of Living In Oblivion-esque, but specifically about acting and with much more heart (and to me, more authentic humor). There are parallels for writers to draw from watching Ellie’s taxing journey trying to make it in Hollywood…When do you give up? What do you do when you don’t enjoy it anymore? How do you recover passion? It was written and directed by Scott Coffey, who I’ve always had a strange attachment to since his appearance in many of the so-bad-they-are-good movies of the late eighties and early nineties. If, like me, you “accidentally” watched Satisfaction about 900 times on TV, you will know him as Nickie. He also got his hand get caught in the shredder in The Temp, was a waiter in The Big Picture, and played Chip in Shag (come on, you know you saw it).

Hey! Cynthia Leitich Smith’s blogs are back up, so hurray for that! I’m very excited to read her new novel, Tantalize. Gothic horror! In a restaurant! Also, remember when I mentioned scrotums the other day? Now everyone is talking about them! Read about it in the NYT, and weigh in with your opinion over at the AS IF! blog. As many other bloggers have pointed out, one of the oddest sentences in the NYT article is, Authors of children’s books sometimes sneak in a single touchy word or paragraph, leaving librarians to choose whether to ban an entire book over one offending phrase. “Sneak in.” It’s true. Kind of like subliminal advertising, you know? We just like to see what we can get away with. I like to really be tricky, like, “Bobby’s mother explained how their house was in escrow. ‘Tummy ache?’ she asked, when Bobby made a face.” See how I did that? Sneaky! But really, we are not even talking about a bad word, here. And in case you didn’t already know this, the scrotum in question in the book is a dog’s. You can Google scrotum lucky to find lots of blog posts about this issue, and also information about cute little purses they make in Australia.