Early in the year 2000, Scott Coffey picked up his one-chip consumer Sony video camera and shot a short with his not-yet-famous friend, Naomi Watts. They had so much fun satirizing their lives as struggling actors in LA, their short became a feature. N.P. Thompson talks to him about Ellie Parker and a few films in the 70s that had great roles for women.

Renegade filmmaker and Slamdance co-founder Dan Mirvish has made a musical comedy about real estate. Film Threat calls Open House [read more here] "a funny, fast-paced and above all very unique film." In "LA to Omaha and Back With Dan Mirvish," Jonathan Marlow asks him about his Oscar campaign, starting a film festival and the film scene in Nebraska.

And keep an eye out for more features coming soon, including a piece on what David Lynch has been up to lately and on a fascinating documentary about former presidential candidate George McGovern.

With apologies to John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath, wherever something is happening in the world of film, the GreenCine Daily will be there.

Video-on-Demand: Scumrock (2003).

Just added to our collection of films by Jon Moritsugu you can watch right now is Scumrock, winner of Best Feature awards at the New York Underground Film Festival and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. "Is Scumrock punk or something post?" asked Edward Crouse in the Village Voice last year. "Who cares? By the end, when death, nature, shit jobs, and school seem to be all that's left for the characters, Moritsugu's insouciant mangling of the undie scene - which has never taken anything, including punk's built-in death drive, totally straight - makes Scumrock gripping, strangely beautiful, and poignant." E! Online calls Scumrock "his latest and most successfully realized flick...[I]n less creative hands, these would be people to avoid, but here their stories are made poignant and sad by Moritsugu's love of his scum and their not-so-bright futures. How wonderfully trashy." Watch Scumrock now, and filmmakers: Consider submitting your own work, too!

GreenCine Staff Pick of the Week: Les Carabiniers (1963).

Our staff pick this week actually comes straight outta one of our primers: French New Wave. And for some reason, a forty year-old anti-war allegory which depicts the whole idea of warfare as a dirty exercise built on lies and deceit seems sort of timely. In that primer, Craig Phillips wrote of Jean Luc-Godard's Les Carabiniers (The Riflemen): "Godard's fairly extreme expose on the stupidity of war, is one of his (and this is saying a lot) strangest movies; archival footage is mixed with the story of two idiots who become soldiers. It's dark, cold, and worthy of study for Godard fans." It's also surprisingly funny, in a twisted sort of way, of course. "This is an antiwar film in the same sense Breathless was a gangster movie," wrote Roger Ebert, and he's right. Absolument unique.

Just a few highlights from this week's new DVD releases:

Speaking of films now timely again: Point of Order (1964). It's high time the work of Emile de Antonio began to appear on DVD. "[F]rom 1964 until his death in 1989, he made some of the left's most important political documentaries," wrote David Greenberg in Slate last year. "A radical Marxist and bon vivant, de Antonio was a man of passions and intensities that make Michael Moore look like Tom Ridge.... De Antonio's first movie, Point of Order (1964) was a fairly straightforward record of the televised 1954 Senate hearings that helped bring down the witch-hunting Sen. Joe McCarthy."

"The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) is, in a way, all about Romain Duris's performance," wrote David Hudson at the Daily when he caught the film in Berlin earlier this year. "To the great pleasure of the audience, he doesn't simply carry the film, he drives it. Sure, there are moments when he goes over the top, but that urge is inherent to the entire project, a remake of James Toback's Fingers and, I'd argue, one of those rare remakes that surpasses the original. Roars past, headlights flashing, horn honking."

Thanks to Good Bye, Lenin!, and now, The Edukators (2004), the first German film to screen at Cannes in years, young actor Daniel Brühl is quickly becoming one of the all-too-few internationally recognizable faces of German film, an ambassador along the order of a Franka Potente. And given the accolades for her recent performance as Nazi resistor Sophie Scholl in a film of the same name, Julia Jentsch may well be on her way to the same aura of starlight. Interesting, then, that many critics in Germany have singled out the relatively unknown Stipe Erceg for particular praise, though, of course, they've lavished praise (as well as awards and nominations) on all three and on director Hans Weingartner.

"The plot, which follows three occasionally colliding stories, is a messy pileup of convenience and contrivance, but damn it all, I didn't mind a lick," wrote Kimberley Jones in the Austin Chronicle. "Happy Endings (2005) is unabashedly sentimental (cheekily couched in a black-comic guise), with [director Don] Roos acting as a sort of benevolent god over his characters." The terrific cast features Maggie Gyllenhaal, Lisa Kudrow, Steve Coogan and, in a surprisingly sensitive turn, Tom Arnold.

"Directed by [the aforementioned] Dan Mirvish, Open House (2004) is a funny, fast paced and above all very unique film," writes Jim Agnew in Film Threat. "A film filled with interesting and hilarious songs about real estate that you won't be able to get out of your head. Who would have guessed real estate could actually be fun for someone other than a real estate agent in one of those ugly golden jackets?" With Anthony Rapp, James Duval, the great Sally Kellerman and Jerry Doyle.

New Anime:

Gantz Volume 9: Judge, Jury and Executioner (2005). This summer, Battie went back to update her original review of the first volume: "The first two episodes were largely off-putting, thanks to my initial repulsion to characters who seemed very immoral and the overall perverse tone it sometimes took, but watching a little longer gave much more insight into the main characters and the reasons behind their actions and thoughts. It also made it necessary to keep watching."

As always, if you want to see a complete, more detailed list of all this week's new releases, do drop by our new releases page.

Congratulations are in order for the winners of our Two for the Road/Orchestra Wives/The Rains Came trivia contest: PDull and Mistyhazee (the answer was the best special effects Oscar). Meanwhile, check the homepage this week for two new contests, including today's classic musical edition, in which we're giving away three Rogers and Hammerstein-scored films: Sound of Music (40th Anniversary Edition), Oklahoma! (50th Anniversary Edition) and State Fair (60th Anniversary Edition).

The member list of the week: zch2a's darned cool A Bucket Full of Cinema.

The next GreenCine-sponsored screening at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco will be on Wednesday, December 7, as we proudly present Mau Mau Sex Sex. When GreenCine launched its Video-on-Demand service two years ago, our very first title was this wonderful, unconventional documentary on legendary exploitation film producers Dan Sonney and David F. Friedman. Unlike most bio-pics overwhelmed by clips, the film expertly intermingles their earlier work with candid footage of the gentlemen in their twilight years. Join us for the fifth anniversary of Mau Mau Sex Sex's release, followed by an extensive Q&A with the filmmakers. More details on this and other forthcoming screenings to appear here soon.