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Whole lotta Wholphin PRESS PLAY What do you get when you cross big names in indie film with shorts that pack a sizable impact into 20 minutes or fewer? Something like the mysterious, sexy offspring of a 4,000-pound false killer whale and a 400-pound bottlenose dolphin — a Wholphin, if you will, which turns out to be the perfect name for McSweeney's new quarterly DVD magazine, an elegant bastard hybrid of original shorts, industrial nuggets, animated gems, and compelling submissions culled from a moving-picture slush pile. It's a moniker that's "emblematic of these strange but beautiful films that no one is aware of," says former Daily Show writer Brett Hoff, who dreamed up the concept after viewing some amazing short films at Sundance, only to realize they might never been seen again. "I'm completely unqualified for this job!" the recent NYC-to-SF transplant yelps. (He's worked for VH1, written a book on the history of disease, and won a feature role as Dave Eggers's road-trip bud in the latter's book You Shall Know Our Velocity.) But Hoff does have the imagination — and the multitasking skills — of an editor: As he spoke, he was boarding a plane to LA to film Andy Richter and a crying competition ("Five actors. Like a hot dog–eating contest. We blow the whistle, and the first tear to hit the table wins") for a future installment. The maiden issue includes such highlights as the elliptical Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?, written by Miranda July and shot by Miguel Arteta (Chuck and Buck), and J. Lisa Chang and Newton Thomas Siegel's elegiac all-star short The Big Empty, with Selma Blair and, don't blink, House's Hugh Laurie. There's an excerpt from David O. Russell's Soldier's Pay documentary; hilarious epigrams like Brian Dewan's animated Death of a Hen and Scott Prendergast's ode-to-dress-up The Delicious; and "found" submissions such as the Turkish sitcom Tatli Hayat (The Sweet Life) — "It literally came sent in an unmarked package from Istanbul," Hoff says — resubtitled by ex-Conan and Spin City scribes, and Ali Akbar Sadeghi's beauteous and cryptic animated Iranian folktale Malek Khorshid ("The eyebrow curls alone made it worth it to me"). Then there's the stuff of urban legend, like Spike Jonze's untitled Al Gore documentary, a handheld version of Man From Hope that humanizes the Democratic presidential candidate as a down-to-earth, only slightly wonky, passionate dad, to the degree that it might have conceivably swung the election had it been broadcast on national TV. "Well, you were looking at about a couple hundred votes in Florida ...," Hoff says now. "And I've talked to at least a couple Nader voters who would have changed their vote had they seen it. I'm one of them!" But the sleeper piece that had me and my pals howling is artist Jeroen Offerman's In-through-the-out-Door forward-via-backward-masking performance of "Stairway to Heaven" in which the Jehovah's Witness–raised Offerman sings "sweet Satan" 's song backward, then reverses the tape and plays it forward. "Apparently he gets paid quite well to perform that in Europe," Hoff marvels. "It was a long, tenuous negotiation to get Jerome to agree. Now he's getting immense." (Kimberly Chun) |
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