Good news!  As you can tell by this professionally-created video, After Last Season is coming to DVD.  Though its four-city theatrical run was tragically cut short (damn you, Rochester and North Aurora, you lucky bastards!), come September 30th, we’ll all have a chance to experience the supposed five-million-dollar-budgeted majesty.  The whole After Last Season phenomenon takes a bit of explaining, but basically, it’s like performance art.  Not that the movie is performance art, more the idea of someone writing it and making it and releasing it is.  It’s almost too good to be true.  The DVD trailer is par for course, considering that course involves an MRI machine made of cardboard.  It looks like writer/director/producer Mark Region cut it himself and solicited voice over work from an Asian guy, probably a family member.  The audio’s even funnier when you type it out:

“One of the most intriguing, and amazing films of the year… Is also a frightening experience!”
“These are the chips?”
“THE CHAIR!”

That does it, I’m sold.  You can order it on their website, plus see not-necessarily-that-positive-sounding testimonials like, “My mind has melted out my ears after seeing this!” and “What an impressive film.  Or was it a film?”  There you have it, folks — After Last Season: it’s maybe a film.

As you know, After Last Season opened in Lancaster, North Aurora, Austin, and Rochester over the weekend.  It doesn’t show up on boxofficemojo‘s list of the top 50 highest-grossing movies, which seems to indicate that it earned less than Herb & Dorothy‘s $1000.  Which, according to these five guys who saw it in Lancaster, is a shame as it is an experience not to be missed.  Some of their observations:

• “If I had to sum it up, I’d say it’s about a lot of blank walls with paper on them.  And furniture.”
• “40% of the movie was MS Paint-style graphics.”
• “Another third of that is like still shots, shots of cabinets, of chairs, of paper, tape…”
• “The movie is very effective in that after a while you start to feel schizophrenic.”
• “Most of the movie was set in one room, and by the end of the movie, I still had no idea of what the geography of the room was.”

So far, no one has taken credit for this as a joke, so it just may be the real deal.  If you live near where it’s playing, please go see it.  The world needs to see this film.  As far as I can gather, it’s like if spaghetti cat was an entire movie.

From another review:

We are treated to inane fragments of conversation by characters who have little to do with whatever plot there is, snippets of discussions about towns people have lived in, markets they haven’t been to, computer printers that don’t work. Most of the characters appear to be grad students studying psychology, and some sort of story finally gets underway when Matthew (Jason Kulas) engages Sarah (Peggy McClellan) in the psychology test mentioned above. It’s the usual “tape a computer chip to your temple and read each other’s thoughts, which are represented as blocky geometric computer animation you could have whipped up on your Commodore 64 in 1983″ sort of test.

This. Sounds. Amazing.

Opening this weekend:

After Last Season
This is either a prank or the future cult-hit of the decade.  If you want to see it, all you have to do is make your way to Austin, Rochester, Lancaster, or North Aurora.  First 10,000 guest receive a complimentary cardboard MRI machine.  “They’ve got, uh, printers in the basement you can use.”

The Hangover
The triumphant return of Todd Philips.  Most people are saying it’s pretty damn funny.  It’s got Zach Galifianakis, Mike Tyson, a tiger, and a baby in sunglasses. Pretty much everything you could ask for.

Land of the Lost
Man is this thing getting some terrible reviews.  But Ebert liked it.  Movieline calls it “a pretty good stoner comedy being mismarketed as a kids’ movie.”  Isn’t that exactly what the original show was?  Anyway, your results may vary. In related news I think a good poster would just be Will Ferrell running from a dinosaur with “LOL!” written on it.

My Life in Ruins
Nia Vardalos’ follow-up to My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the only film getting worse reviews than LOL. Hey, have I mentioned Nia Vardalos is Greek?  Because she is!  I think that’s why she’s so zany!  Hey, Nia, ethnicities are like assholes.  That’s probably why ethnic types are smelly.

Away We Go (limited release)
Sam Mendes (American Beauty) directs a script by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, a coming-of-age/non-traditional rom-dramedy.  College boner!  It’s just so hard to decide between this and grad school.

I keep getting emails regarding After Last Season, a strange movie trailer I posted back in March that I assumed was an April Fool’s Joke. It’s scheduled to be released tomorrow in, get this, Lancaster, CA; North Aurora, IL; Rochester, NY; and Austin, TX (tough luck, Moosejaw Sasketchawan).  The trailer (which even made it on Apple) is one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen. It looks like it was shot in a garage with a camcorder – all the actors have huge shadows behind them and the unmixed audio sounds like it was recorded on the camera mic, or a cell phone (I could watch the reaction shot at the 30-second mark over and over for hours). 

But according to an interview with “Mark Region”, the fake-sounding writer-director, it cost $5 million and was 10 years in the making (to put the budget in perspective, Adventureland was also made for less than $10 mil). Most recently, I received an email from a guy calling himself Jason Kulas, the lead actor.  He assured me it was a real movie, and described the process of making it in great detail:

I’ve done around 20 shorts & features, as lead and supporting roles.  But this was my first on film (35mm), which made things interesting.  The shooting method was pretty efficient, both on time, and film stock.  To use time, and film stock efficiently, a number of times Mark didn’t shoot the scene, but rather just individual lines from various scenes, out-of-sequence, in close-up.  He planned to assemble these shots in editing to form the scene.  Mark seemed to already have the entire film visually in his head, right down to what shots, angles, masters, and close-ups would be in a scene.  Because of this he could shoot only what he knew he needed, and time and budget didn’t get expended on extraneous coverage. [...so where did all the money go?]

This allowed him to do things like have 1 setup, like a close-up on one actor, and he’d have them perform just line 18 from scene 80, then line 12 from scene 20, etc.  With a little attention to remaining footage, this approach let him pack dialog lines into every last bit of film before retiring that reel, and without having to move the camera or lights.

This all sounds perfectly reasonable, except that in the trailer it doesn’t look like there were any lighting setups (or closeups, for that matter). And I have a hard time believing that the visual he had in his head had huge out-of-context shadows everywhere.  Not to mention the insanely mundane (munsane?) dialog:

• “There are places I’d like to visit. I still haven’t been to the main market.”
• “My uncle stayed in the area last year.  He showed me a picture.”
• “My hometown is near Terralind.”
• “I’ve never been to that town, but I’ve driven though it.”
• “They’ve got, uh, printers in the basement you can use.”

And to top it off, the actor guy links his online profile at the bottom of the email… to a freakin’ geocities site.  Come on, man, did you email me from 1996?  You guys are messing with me, right?  Sadly, I can’t be in any of the towns where it’s premiering, but everything it seems a little too cryptic/strange to be true. Yet I can’t find anything for sure that would indicate it’s a stunt or a hoax or viral marketing of some kind.  Is After Last Season some Joaquin Phoenix-type performance art, or is this Mark Region guy the modern-day Ed Wood?

The delightfully bizarre trailer above, for After Last Season, first showed up on Videogum a few weeks ago.  As you can see, it consists entirely of context-free small talk and banal randomness. Even aside from the cardboard MRI machine, it’s hard to believe it’s real.  But the trailer has a rating from the MPAA, has a page at Apple, and supposedly a theatrical release on June 5th.  The blog Knox Road even tracked down the film’s writer/director, who not only claims it’s a serious film, but that it cost $5 MILLION DOLLARS and will have a “regular-wide release.”  Here’s the equally strange/vague:

The end of another season has brought more than the usual change in temperature to the residents of a city. As they go through some tragic events, the residents, and especially a group of medical students, must reevaluate their lives and face new questions.

What the hell is going on?  A CHUD reader recently discovered this blog entry from one of the film’s “stars”:

I am getting ready for my top secret project, which I am just about ready to let you all know about…! We are “working” on it this Thursday with some wonderful people. Let me put it this way…the surprise will be unleashed April 1st, 2009. That’s not too much longer to wait, right? Right.

Hmm, sounds like an elaborate hoax of some kind. Nonetheless, I’m intrigued.  As you can clearly see by my raised eyebrow and smoking jacket.