- guardian.co.uk, Thursday May 1 2008 00.00 BST
Getting Away With Murder
Forget Cannes, and those 18 euro bottled beers and jury prizes carried off by Albanian auteurs. This month it's all about the Webbys, the "online Oscars" for those of us in the wired world. So we've trawled the acres of online film and video from 2008 to sort the plums from the duff for you, all topped off with a sprinkling of other competition crackers and festival favourites. In the best writing category, we fell first and hard for this hilarious, blood-spattered coal-black slacker comedy about a nerdy hitman juggling his job while living with his mother, which was inexplicably denied the prize despite its sparky premise and zingy dialogue. We'll be keyboard-heckling at the Webby Awards from June 8-10, and eating up all 13 episodes with a spoon in the meantime, as Seth Silver hones his skills with gun, garrotte and hammer while dodging the FBI, and persuading the interfering Rhonda that cookies do indeed constitute a proper breakfast.
The West Side
This laconic urban western, made for less than US$1,000 but looking like a million bucks, will deservedly sweep up the best online drama series award at the Webbys. Plastic bags roll like tumbleweed down these mean, monochrome streets, as gunslinger Quasim lopes into town and starts blowing away the bad guys like a regular huckleberry. Directors Ryan Bilsborrow-Koo and Zachary Lieberman have somehow reimagined the western for the city and the smallest screen, using Sergio Leone-style looming close-ups and tense, drawn-out sequences, to great effect. Dialogue is kept to a John Wayne-worthy minimum, which means its creators shouldn't have any problem with the Webby's famous five-word-limit acceptance speech.
Wainy Days: The Pick-Up Artist
Adorned with the best comedy series Webby, there are now two seasons of professional dweeb David Wain's single-in-the-city comedy available at My Damn Channel, which will significantly enliven your currently rainy days. Kick off with this painfully funny outing, in which David pays top dollar to Paul Rudd's rude, crude master seducer MC Alias to learn how to "step up, to get your rep up". Tell a girl that "your hair smells like the carpet in a cheap apartment building" and she'll be humping your leg like a Labrador, apparently. But is David's instant girl conquest a stayer, or a playa?
Field
Though he took a critical kicking on the Croisette last week with his first feature Better Things, we retain a special tendresse for the very talented British miserablist Duane Hopkins. Get a taste for his austere Cotswolds-set rural realist dramas with Field, a superb, spare short which also debuted at Cannes in 2001. With painfully poetic images but without melodrama, it captures the boredom and frustration that drives three truanting teenagers to an act of unimaginable violence, as well as the dissonant beauty of the landscape they slouch through, and slash at. Hopkins' trademark cast of non-professionals rivet the eye with deeply felt performances, particularly Kevin Firkin's Tom, who radiates a fierce and feral menace.
I Love Sarah Jane
Spencer Susser's finely-crafted, scary-sad short about first love during a zombie plague, enchanted audiences at the Sundance online film festival this year, and carried off the prestigious Prix Canal at the Clermont-Ferrand short film festival 2008 to boot. Almost impossible to describe without suggesting a mad mash-up of Louis Malle and 28 Days Later, it's actually a smart, sensitive tale of orphan Jimbo's dogged obsession with a brittle older girl, despite the rival distractions of jealous, death-dealing lads and foaming, snarling members of the walking dead. Ignore the Italian subtitles (it's on Qoob, the modishly bi-lingual online film channel) and just enjoy Susser's deft mix of Troma-worthy horror with the smell of teen spirit. Or is that kerosene?
Beyond the Rave
This glossy MySpace horror-webisodic hasn't won anything, frankly, apart from the opprobrium of die-hard Hammer Horror fans, who object to the venerable name being exhumed to launch it. But Cybercinema has become strangely addicted to its flashy, trashy Hi-Def charms and the pills-thrills-and-kills storyline, so like one of its ravey-wavey undead victims, I'm looking to pull you in too. Catching up with lantern-jawed squaddie Ed as he chases a gang of vampire squat ravers who have stolen his girl and are trashing his mates and his head, will take you a matter of minutes - it's like a movie cut into mini-rolls. Those cinematic big-screen shots will make your head spin, plus there's Lois "Daughter of Ray" Winstone sulking in leather as punky blood-sucker Lilith, and Les "The Descent" Simpson as the truly terrifying Belial. Admittedly it can't manage either character development or cliff-hangers, but who needs stuffy old-school shit like that when you're tracking clues through MySpace character profiles and dabbling in the Beyond the Rave interactive game. Fly, my pretties, fly!
Babelgum online film festival: Officer Down
"You have no excuses now. If you have a film, and you are talented, and someone is not seeing it, it's your fault." Spike Lee, as diplomatic with the undiscovered web talent of the Babelgum online film festival as he is with his fellow-directors, has finally unleashed his choice of winning films on the world. First among equals is Richard Recco's gritty, sentimental cop-thriller, which took the best short film award , with a tale of a crooked cop whose drug-dealing, snitch-beating life is turned upside down when his son is gravely injured in a hit and run accident. It's got a rather watchable style and swagger about it, and lashings of that Catholic guilt guaranteed to appeal to lovers of The Bad Lieutenant. To watch the whole 20-minute movie, you'll need to download Babelgum software, and once set up, use the search function to find it in the Festival channel, but it handsomely repays all the faff once it's up and running.
