Filmmaker Creates New Genre Designed to Make You Fall Asleep

Just when you thought every type of film had been done before, filmmaker Sondra Lowell has pioneered an entirely new genre called "Film Sleepy." As the name suggests, her films are slow and boring by design, and meant to induce audiences to sleep. To Lowell's credit, she started creating these films in order to play to her strengths after receiving unrelenting criticism from her professors and peers while taking film classes at UCLA. If only more film students would take criticism so constructively. That said, aren't there enough movies that already unintentionally fall into this genre?

Her two films so far are titled Webcammurder.com and Sublime Crime: A Subliminal Mystery (which is apparently not a sequel to Inception). Frankly, with such ridiculous titles, I'm a little bit disappointed that these are both designed to be boring. Maybe someone can buy the remake rights to Webcammurder.com.

In any case, the latter is described as "mostly shots of people sitting around in front of webcams 24/7, wondering how to get Web surfers to tune in on their uneventful lives." Hm. I feel like I could find that on the internet for free. But Sublime Crime sounds a bit more promising. Says Lowell, "It is mostly a blank screen with flashes of plot and personal growth affirmations, accompanied by an unintelligible binaural soundtrack."

Okay, so clearly she's an artist. She even gives props to Warhol's 620 minute film called Sleep which was, yes, just footage of a person sleeping for 8 hours. The entire interview is mostly tongue in cheek, though I've verified that the films actually do exist.

But with so many slow, boring or soothing films already at our fingertips, I'm not sure that we need this genre. If it's late, I can fall asleep any night to the soothing sounds of a Yasujiro Ozu family drama or the slow camera movements of a Bela Tarr film. And I'm too exhausted to think about anything besides sleep after trying to deconstruct an action scene in Transformers 2 or just watching the Sucker Punchtrailer.

In any case, here's one minute of Webcammurder.com. Check it out and see for yourself if "Film Sleepys" are the next wave of the avant-garde.

· Filmmaker Produces First Film Designed to Put You to Sleep [AOL]