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You couldn't turn a corner in Telluride this year without hearing a festival manager or volunteer gushing thanks to the festival's many sponsors for continuing to support Telluride despite, to quote Charlie Kaufman, today's wintry economic climate. Telluride, a posh film industry mainstay, appeared to weather the storm: the $680 "Festival Passes" -- the most common, middle-of-the-road choice for Telluride pass-holders (passes run from around $300 to over $3000) -- didn't sell out for the first time in recent memory, but the festival was well-attended, the movies plentiful, and apart from the speech-making, the only sign of trouble was that Omaha Steaks provided flatiron instead of sirloin for the event's annual Labor Day picnic.

Some of the less entrenched film events apparently are not so lucky. The increasingly popular CineVegas, for example, recently announced a hiatus for 2010, so that regular attendees -- of whom Cinematical is one (or more) -- had better make other plans for next June. Part of the problem, as The Hollywood Reporter notes, is that unlike Telluride and a great many other film festivals, CineVegas is not a non-profit, which makes sponsorships harder to come by.

Still, though CineVegas may have been minor compared to Toronto, Sundance, etc., it was certainly a major regional player. Several of the lower-profile events with which I'm familiar -- the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival, the Philadelphia Film Festival -- have gone ahead as planned this year. (The latter was affected by a feud among two major Philly film scene heavyweights, but that's neither here nor there.) The Hollywood Reporter article linked above notes a number of other events that have felt the pinch, though it only cites one other one -- the Jackson Hole Film Festival -- that was canceled entirely for budgetary reasons. How have festivals, repertory venues, and indie art houses fared in your neck of the woods?

Attention, wannabe writers: Josh Olson won't read your f***ing script. Last week in the Village Voice, the History of Violence screenwriter posted an open diatribe against amateur writers who seek the counsel of professional scribes with script/outline/treatment in hand, an expletive-filled rant that caught on like wildfire on the interwebs. This week Olson's manifesto got an added boost from his friend, the notoriously cantankerous writer Harlan Ellison, who recorded a dramatic reading of the essay after it was adapted into Dr. Seuss-speak by writer Steve Jarrett:

"I will not read your f***ing script
I will not read it in a car
I will not read it in a bar
I will not have it in my house
I will not click it with my mouse
I will not read it here or there
I will not read it anywhere
I'd rather be tied up and whipped
Than have to read your f***ing script" – Excerpted from Steve Jarrett's "I Will Not Read Your F***ing Script"

[Above center, Olson and Ellison (along with Elvis Mitchell) at SXSW 2008. Photo by Jette Kernion.]

Yes, we all knew it would come to this (har har). In the darkest recesses of the Internet, people have been writing slash-fiction for years -- fantasies of what fans wished would happen between Sam and Frodo, Willow and Tara, and yes, even Kirk and Spock. A quick search for slash fic will give you more info on the hobby than you probably ever needed or wanted to know.

Of course, the adult industry picked up on this trend, offering up plenty of XXX take-offs of franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Trek, and the tongue-in-cheek horror-porn take on Re-Animator, cheekily called Re-Penetrator. Local NYC "cinema of transgression" filmmaker Nick Zedd even made a film that took its name from Lord of the Rings, in a play on words that I'm sure you can decipher or Google for your edification. Let's not even discuss the adult parody of Edward Scissorhands.

So now there's not only a sparkly Twilight sex toy, but two Twilight naughty knock-offs. First there was Twilight of Virginity (shot in the home of Nikki Sixx!), and now there's a new one called This Isn't Twilight: The XXX Parody coming your way October 15th, just over a month before Twilight: New Moon is unleashed on audiences.

The real question is, who are these marketed to? Even the grown-ups who enjoy the Twilight franchise say that the fun is because of the way it portrays high school crushes -- yearning, unconsummated, and most certainly virginal, especially in the case of this sex-phobic book series. And Twilight fans, don't spoil the plot for the rest of us if they do get it on. OK?

Someone check these out and report back. I want to know if the term "spider monkey" is used in any context. Thanks!

Unlike some people, I've always been a fan of Ben Affleck. Sure he went through his own Pitt-Jolie phase back when he was dating JLo, and because of that a lot of people began to despise Affleck, but I hung in there and admired the choices he's made later on in his career, not to mention really enjoyed his directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone. For me, though, Affleck has always been at his best when he plays villain or wise ass or bully. One of my favorite roles of his is when he played O'Bannion in Dazed and Confused, and he's also fantastic in a brief supporting appearance in Boiler Room.

In Boiler Room -- which follows a young college dropout (Giovanni Ribisi in one of his best roles) up through the ranks of a Chop Shop out on Long Island -- Affleck plays Jim Young, the firm's trainer of new recruits. He's the guy they bring in to give all these newbies a taste of success, of money, of power -- and in this classic scene, he works the room like a stripper at a bachelor party, teasing these kids with visions of being millionaires within three years from their first day on the job. Of course we soon learn the job is a lot less glamorous than Young makes it out to be, but that's why he's so good at what he does: he knows how to turn nothing into a whole bunch of something. Boiler Room is currently making the rounds on cable; it's a pretty solid movie with some great, seedy performances. Definitely check it out.

Watch the NSFW clip after the jump

During an exclusive telephone interview to promote his role as Pvt. Donny Donowitz in Quentin Tarantino's WWII epic Inglourious Basterds, Eli Roth told Cinematical that Thanksgiving is not the next film he's set to direct, but it's definitely going to get made. "That movie, the financing, the money is in a bank account," Roth said. "I mean, I could literally say I'm starting production tomorrow and we'd start. It's 100 percent up to me, but I'm just working on the script with Jeff Rendell, the co-writer. Jeff's the one who in the trailer, he plays the Pilgrim, and we're just writing it. We're just figuring it out and we're just coming up with the kills and the characters."

Thanksgiving was initially created as a fake movie trailer that connected the two theatrical halves of Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez' Grindhouse, but its own popularity inspired the director to blow it up from a 16mm short into a feature film. Roth actually indicated that Endangered Species, a PG-13 sci-fi film in the vein of Cloverfield, was to be his next directorial effort. "I want to be finished with Endangered, and then Jeff is supposed to come out to Los Angeles probably some time in August and we'll probably bang out the script," he explained, indicating that the disparate content of the two films may ultimately complement his enthusiasm creatively.

Read the rest (and see the infamous trailer) at HorrorSquad!

I've never seen this mash-up before, and when I came across it on Buzzfeed earlier today it absolutely blew my mind to see how well this scene from The Muppets Take Manhattan matched up with the tipping scene from Reservoir Dogs. It's like the two were made for each other! (Plus there's just something about Muppets and foul-mouthedness that just cracks me up. Double plus: I haven't listened to this scene in awhile, and I forgot how much I loved it.) I think Quentin Tarantino should move on from Inglourious Basterds and write and direct a small film like Reservoir Dogs, with limited sets and powerful performances. But that's me. Meanwhile, the Muppets will soon return to the big screen, with Jason Segel currently hard at work developing a new film. Yay! Perhaps he and Tarantino should collaborate on something that resembles this ...

(Warning: This is the tipping scene from Reservoir Dogs, and as such there's a lot of nasty language that definitely makes this clip NSFW. Watch at your own risk.)

We here at Cinematical haven't missed an episode of Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifinakis, and we're not about to now since the damn show keeps getting funnier and funnier with each absurd interview. Essentially, this Funny or Die original series stars Galifinakis (the fat, bearded dude in The Hangover) as the ridiculously jaded host of a show that interviews celebrities and asks really bizarre, insulting questions. Of course the celebs know it's not real, but even so this staged version is just as funny.

In the latest installment, Galifinakis interviews his Hangover co-star Bradley Cooper -- who's up for just about every major role you can think of these days, from Green Lantern to the live-action Fat Albert (kidding about that last one, though you never know). The Hangover is definitely shaping up be this summer's most memorable R-rated raunch-fest; in their review of the film, Variety called it a "profanely funny comedy" that "satisfies as a boys-gone-wild laff riot that also clicks as a seriocomic beat-the-clock detective story." Needless to say, the comedy geek in me is itching to see this one. We'll have our full review and interview with director Todd Phillips real soon. In the meantime, check out the NSFW video below ...

Warning: The following includes foul language and is NSFW

We've posted tons of exclusive clips, trailers, images and posters in the past, but this one has to take the cake as one of the strangest, most bizarre pieces of eeriness to ever grace the main page of Cinematical. And that's totally not a bad thing, because the project -- titled ONEDREAMRUSH -- is a very cool-sounding collaborative effort between filmmakers, writers, actors and actresses that was created by the New Zealand Vodka brand 42BELOW and, as such, is the first implicitly branded content ever admitted to the Cannes Film Festival.

Essentially, a bunch of world-renowned artists were brought together to create 42 films, each 42 seconds long and all of them about the interpretation of dreams. Among those featured are Abel Ferrara, David Lynch, Asia Argento, James Franco, Kenneth Anger, Arden Wohl, Sean Lennon, Mike Figgis, Harmony Korine and so many more. Each director's film will be featured at this website for one year, and the complete work will begin a tour following Cannes that will take it through New York, London and Rome. Check out the trailer below, and please know that there is brief topless nudity and disturbing images, thus making it NSFW. Enjoy.