Hasta La Gadget!

Do you find today’s films too exciting? Need to slow things down a bit? Perhaps get some shuteye in the process? Boy has Sondra Lowell got some flicks for you. The filmmaker has pioneered the new “film sleepy” genre–movies made for the sole purpose of putting their viewers to sleep.

Lowell used to make boring films by accident. Now she’s parlayed that skill into works of art.

“I’ve always wanted to make a movie but found I was good at putting people to sleep,” Lowell told AOL. “I took classes at UCLA and the teachers would fall apart when I made a script. People would tell me that I didn’t understand how to make a story and told me the scenes should build on each other. I thought I was doing that, but people fell asleep. It took me awhile to realize I was on to something.”

The first film in the genre is WebcamMurder.com. A reasonably exciting title sure, but the LA Times called the film “the most boring talkie ever made.” The film is largely comprised of people sitting around, wondering how to get people to watch them on their Webcams. “It sounds a lot more exciting than it is,” Lowell said of the film. You can watch an exceedingly dull excerpt after the jump.

Lowell describes its follow up Sublime Crime: A Subliminal Mystery thusly,

It is a big step forward in movies worth sleeping through. It is mostly a blank screen with flashes of plot and personal growth affirmations, accompanied by an unintelligible binaural soundtrack.

Andy Warhol’s infamous eight-hour boredom epic Sleep was a big influence on the director. “I actually did a stage musical version of it,” Lowell told the press. “The show started at midnight and I would sing and tap-dance before the audience went to sleep. Then I would wake up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom and then perform in the morning.”

Perhaps a Forever Lazy cross promotion is in order.http://www.gearlog.com/2010/12/forever_lazy_the_new_snuggie.php

Bieber fever is about to strike the film world. Never Say Never, a 3D new movie from the teenage Canadian pop star will be hitting theaters early next year. Paramount will be previewing the film in limited theaters on February 9th.

The studio offered up 100,000 tickets to the preview, along with a pair of 3D glasses, a glow stick, and a “souvenir lanyard.” More than 26,000 tickets were sold in the space of 12 hours.

Why so much enthusiasm? Well, Bieber is a performer on-par with Michael Jackson and Elvis, of course. At least that’s the story from his manager Scooter Braun, who told The Hollywood Reporter, “Like a Michael, an Elvis, an Usher, a Timberlake, Justin has a tremendous amount of talent. And as long as he’s able to maintain a good personal life, you can’t deny talent and you can’t deny good music. And hopefully he grows up to be a pretty good-looking dude and the girls can keep going crazy.”

Oprah? Total tech junkie. There are a number of gadgets dotting the queen of daytime’s lift of “favorite things.” At the top of the list is Apple’s iPad, which Winfrey told her audience is “the best invention of the century so far.”

As is her custom, Oprah gave the tablet away to customarily overzealous audience members. The free iPads were also stocked with a Scrabble app and a digital copy of O Magazine.

“Words cannot describe what I feel for this magnificent device,” she told the audience “Thanks to my iPad, I now read about four newspapers a day. I write my column for O magazine on the iPad way before the deadline because I love writing on it so much.”

Also on her list this year was a Sony BRAVIA LX900 3D HDTV ($3,600), a Nikon D3100 Digital SLR Camera ($700), and a five-year subscription to Netflix, which, as we all know, is worth more now than it was a few weeks ago.

The biggest prize prize? That fleet of 2012 VW Beetles.

Sharp Electronics today announced that it has been chosen to provide a “countdown clock” from the upcoming 9/11 Memorial and Museum set to open at the World Trade Center site on September 11, 2011–the tenth anniversary of the attacks.

The company’s CEO Kozo Takahashi will join the museum’s president Joe Daniels and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg for tomorrow morning’s unveiling at the 9/11 Memorial preview site.

The clock will be embedded into a 13 by seven foot video wall made up of nine Sharp LCDs, which will both count down the time until the memorial opens and feature renderings of what the site will look like finished.

There’s plenty of upsetting material on the television at any given moment. Thankfully, there are also plenty of ways to deal with the situation. You can change the channel or turn off the TV and take a walk. How about a book? People used to read those all the time.

Or you could shoot the TV, Elvis-style. That’s precisely what a 67-year-old Wisconsin resident did this week. What upset the man that much? An appearance by Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol on the game show Dancing with the Stars.

According to reports, Steven Cowan said, “the (expletive) politics,” and then shot his set. He then pointed the gun at his wife, who managed to escape.

A SWAT team surround the house, for a standup that lasted 15 hours, before Cowan finally surrendered. He was charged with 2nd degree reckless endangerment–a sentence that carries up to 15 years in prison.

Cowan is apparently bipolar and has been under a good deal of stress due to his financial situation.