HALF-SHARE Show Debuts For Free On The Web Tonight

A couple years ago, I co-produced a pilot for a half-hour comedy called HALF-SHARE, about life in a group house on Fire Island. While the trailer's been online for a while, many people have asked me where they can see the entire show. Well, now I have an answer. Tonight, the show will be "airing" as a free streaming program on the HALF-SHARE website at 10pm EST.  If you miss that, you can also purchase it on Amazon.com at 3 different levels; $1.99 to rent, $4.99 to buy as a digital download, and $14.99 to owne a copy of the DVD.  As an extra incentive to buy, 50% of all net profits from the sales of HALF-SHARE are going to the Ali Forney Center for homeless LGBT youth, which was devastated by flooding during Superstorm Sandy.

The show has actually been available at Amazon for the last few weeks and has received an amazing 5-star review on the site with one word used in most of the reviews--"hilarious".  I may be biased but I would have to agree. This show has an incredibly funny cast, including Alec Mapa, Jack Plotnick and Sam Pancake as well as indie film star Jesse Archer (who also co-wrote and co-directed the show with Sean Hanley, who previously wrote for THE NANNY). So please check it out and support your local indie film/TV friends. I guarantee that, if you do, you will be thankful for the extra laughs this week of Thanksgiving! :)

Nate Silver Is Kinda Cute

In the nervous months leading up to this year's Presidential elections, my friends were all freaking out. They said it's gonna be close, Obama might loose, panic, scream, etc.  However, I was relatively certain this was not going to be the case. Why? I was following Nate Silver's weekly 538 blog on the NY TIMES website.  Silver, a super-nerdy statistician, predicted the final electoral results with 100% accuracy in the end. And now he is a superstar.  Oh yeah, and he's also gay.

Silver officially came out in a piece published in the UK's Guardian today. It turns out this 34 year old wunderkind is also kinda cute, too, so I'm adding him today to the Pantheon of "Kinda Cute" here on Hi-Fi Bri. You can read all about Nate and his mastery of the Presidential numbers game here. Before he got into politics, Silver was a baseball stats geek and before that gamed online poker sites for more then 400K. So let's do the math here...young + smart + gay + rich + kinda cute = total husband material. 

SATURDAY SPECIAL: Look Out! Gay Men Will Marry Your Girlfriends

This is one of the funnier skits I've seen on College Humor. It has a nice soft political spin too in that it is a big argument for marriage equality. Because if we can't have our man, we're gonna take your women! :)  Best line--the quiche.

CollegeHumor's Favorite Funny Videos

Two Articles This Week In The NY TIMES and NEXT Magazine

In an unusual confluence, two feature articles I've been working on for the past couple of months were published in the last two days. I wrote an article about the emergence and growing popularity of Boylesque for the NY TIMES style section, which appeared in Thursday's paper. And then I have a feature in NEXT magazine's "State of Drag" issue, about the sex and dating lives of drag queens. 

The TIMES piece came about as I've been a bit of a Boylesque fan-boy since attending Tigger's "Man-A-Tease" at the Coney Island Sideshow By The Seashore three summers ago. I think it's a fascinating twist to the whole neo-burlesque revival and really puts an unusual male spin on a traditionally female art form. My story in NEXT came about as they were searching for ideas for the state of drag issue. A friend of mine who has recently been performing in drag told me how it had greatly improved his sex life and that intrigued me.  Not enough to don drag but so much so that it got me to write about the dating lives of drag queens, something I feel is not discussed or heard about even. 

Anyway, hope you enjoy these stories as some weekend reading. And you can look for a couple more stories from me in the TIMES style section in the coming weeks.

The Top 250 Movies On IMDB Get Mashed Up

This is a fun mega-edit of the top 250 ranked films on IMDB.  I found it on the IMDB home page last week and quite liked it for the editing as well as the challenge of trying to identify the source of most of these micro clips. But overall all it's just fun to watch some great movie classics mixed to some seriously hot beats--Joan Jett meets the Beatles meets Cypress Hill. The editor is Jonathan Keough and this is his third clips compilation on YouTube but the first one to go truly viral and get more than 2 million hits. Enjoy!

NY Artist Gives Time Lapse Photography A New Twist

There was a story on the CBS's Sunday Morning news magazine about a local photographer Steven Wilkes. He has an unusual approach to photography which creates stunning photos like the one above. Wilkes rents a Condor crane and sits atop it for 16 hours, taking hundreds of photographers of a New York City scene both during the day and night. Then he composites all these pictures into one super-sized photo in which day transitions into night, from left to right. Though it takes one day to take the pictures, it takes months to paste them together and recreate a "time-lapse" photo of, as is the case above, a day in the park. Gorgeous.

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA Is Back With BLOOD AND CHROME

Over the weekend, I watched the first two episodes of the new BSG show, BLOOD AND CHROME. It is currently on YouTube as a web series with ten episodes going online in the next four weeks. Then, early next year, the entire feature length version of BLOOD AND CHROME will be seen on SyFy. Finally, an unrated version will be available for DVD and download. Got all that? Distribution in the modern age...

Anyway, I was a huge fan of the SyFy's BSG reboot a few years back.  This show, which is a prequel following a young Adama in the First Cylon War, is very well made using amazing effects and is certainly fun to watch. However, it doesn't have the same smarts and nuance as its predecessor. That series, which was something of an analogy to post-9/11 America and the "War on Terror", worked on many different levels while this web series seems more analogous to WWII-era America. BLOOD AND CRHOME has the same rat-a-tat dialogue and fighting spirit of a Warner Bros. flyboy movie from the mid-1940s. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have much beyond that...so far at least. But I will be watching as I'm hooked on Cylons and the Capricans who battle them. And I am always up for a good CGI dogfight too---and on that front, this series delivers.

SATURDAY SPECIAL: Tom Goss's Sexy New Music Video

Tom Goss is an DC-based out artist and performer with a new video that is both sexy and incredibly beautiful too. It reminded me of Peter Gabriel's SLEDGEHAMMER, though on a much smaller more intimate (literally!) scale. In the video, Tom lies nearly naked as artists and animators paint a fairy tale landscape and story around him over the course of an hour and a half. You can read the details about the shoot here and learn more about this talented young guy at his website, http://tomgossmusic.net/wordpress/.

From LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE to STAR WARS, The Writer For Episode VII

When Disney made the surprise announcement last week that they were acquiring Lucasfilm, the bigger news was that they were planning on reviving the STAR WARS franchise with a sequel to the original trilogy. Episode VII would pick up decades later with an aged Luke Skywalker, as well as elder Han Solo and cougar Princess Leia.  While the actors who played these iconic roles have yet to sign on to the project, the studio does has a screenwriter; Michael Arndt.

New York Magazine's Vulture column reports that Arndt (who wrote indie darling LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE) has been working on a lengthy treatment of the film for months. Apparently, he got the nod earlier this year due to his extensive knowledge of the STAR WARS universe and his detailed lectures on the film series at screenwriting conferences around the country. I think he's a great choice for the franchise for one reason--he clearly has a sense of humor.  Besides the incredible effects and the action, the truly great thing about the first STAR WARS was the real sense of fun the film had, a quality lacking in the dour, self-serious prequels. Hopefully that will return in the new version, which should arrive in theaters in 2015.

Diane Sawyer Steals Spotlight On Election Night

If you happened to watch any of ABC's election night coverage, you got to see the odd sight of Diane Sawyer seeming a bit drunk as she slurred her words, made weird hand gestures, and said very odd things for a network news anchor co-hosting live coverage of a Presidential election.  Things like "OK--I wanna--can we have our music because this is another big one here? Minnesota. We're ready to project Minnestoa rrrright now. Well, tonight we know that President Barack has won Minnesota." Party on Diane!

With behavior like this, she quickly became a trending topic on Twitter  and even inspired a couple insta-feeds too. Oddly, ABC's election studio lost power for about 20 minutes, at which point they went to crowds in Time Square. After that, apparently Sawyer's performance seemed a little less embarrassing and more sober. But it turns out that this is not the first time she's had incident like this. During Obama's inauguration she was also seemed a bit tipsy as seen above (maybe she just loves celebrating the Obama's victories?). And, in another crazy YouTube video below from the 1990's, she is seen drinking wine and popping pills on the set of her old show Prime Time Live.

ABC said she was exhausted and Sawyer, on her Twitter feed, seemed to have a sense of humor about the whole thing. She was back on the air, as normal, on World News last night sounding more like a network anchor.