- guardian.co.uk, Saturday April 1 2006 00.00 BST
X-treme Holiday Superfriendz : The Easter Commie
"Nothing says Easter like an Easter-egg-and-mocha-bunny soy cafe latte!" Superheroes MC Clawz, Captain Kwanzaa and Holee Moses are consumer crusaders with a difference - they want you to spend, spend, spend like a sailor on shore leave, throughout every religious holiday. So when anti-materialist spoilsport Doctor Scrooge pickets Mega Jumbo Mart, he and his psychotic Easter bunny Cottontail are due for some superhero stomping. Can the capitalist dogs carry the day, or just premium coffees to go? Eyes peeled please, for our favourite credit ("Crappy voices and singing by Dave") and the hilariously un-subliminal "BUY" message that flashes through this high-energy cartoon satire.
Divorce Lemonade
Now that the Sundance film festival is kind enough to host their short film showcase online from January to balmy June, it seems almost rude not to have a second helping. Justin Hayward's beautifully sparse and bitter comedy, in which a resourceful teenager protects her dead-drunk divorced dad from her mother's wrath, is the kind of low-key gem that gets overlooked on the first pass. Ashleigh Kennington's sullen, scowling performance as Sarah has a fierce truthfulness that pierces even the most casual viewer.
The Madness of MySpace: Current TV's Supernews
With his poll ratings at a rock-bottom 37%, what's a president to do when he's accused of being out of touch with ordinary people? Get George W Bush his own MySpace page of course, with the help of rapping special consultant Kevin Federline, who promises the leader of the free world "About a million friends/ Do ya want to be popular, or pretend". Super News gets in its trademark low-brow cartoon licks at MySpace's puffed-up user profiles and online perving potential, and shows Dubya that "My Top 8" doesn't have to mean the cabinet.
JibJab's Matzah!
Hip-hopper Eric Schwartz aka Smooth-E has some urgent queries about the Passover story that let his people go. For instance, "How could one bread get so famous/ When it has the flavour of the box it came in?" The Spiridellis Brothers present a rather cheeky and cheerfully irreligious account of the story of Moses and his unleavened bread on the flight from Egypt, which relies heavily on an animated Charlton Heston and a chorus of matzah-munching rabbis.
Hello Hello Hello
When he's not stealing all the best lines in Basic Instinct 2, David Thewlis has the occasional outing as a director, such as this appealingly offbeat two-handed drama, in which Kathy Burke's skip-thieving artist finds herself at loggerheads with an art-loving policeman. "I nearly arrested Francis Bacon once" is his proud boast, and blows are nearly exchanged over the differences between Dadaist and surrealist art. Robert Pugh, who plays the cultivated copper, shakes Thewlis's dialogue around like a Jack Russell with a rat, filling this brief encounter with splenetic energy.
Chicktionary
Our last Easter offering is an appropriately eggy interactive diversion, a farm-fresh spelling game in which you create as many words as possible, Boggle-style, from the scrambled letters plopped out by a line of roosting hens. To keep things lively, place a hefty (virtual) bet on yourself before each round, to rack up say, 13 words for 13,000 bonus points. The hens will punish your hubris if you fall short of the target, and squawk unnervingly at any duff submitted words, or when a cancelled letter shoots back up into their feathery carcasses. There're 60 minutes of free play in the Shockwave download, but if the four-day holiday is weighing heavy on your hands, feel free to waste a few precious moments chasing eggs and baby chicks around Easter Egg Hop, where the hens are positively homicidal.
