I got this rather intimidating email a couple of days ago: A friend told me to take 70 minutes of my time and watch a YouTube movie named "Four Eyed Monsters". 70 minutes. Scary. I considered my possibilities:

1. Ignore him.
2. Reply, starting with "Who the hell has 70 minutes for anything these days?!"
3. Watch the first 5 minutes, pretend I saw the whole thing and hope he'll never ask me about it.

Being the lazy ass that I am, I ended up ignoring the email, but leaving it "unread" in my inbox - which would have been great if I didn't have my minor case of OCD. I, personally, just can't stand that "you've got 1 unread email" notification. I need things to be nice and orderly.

And so, after finally giving the local pub a chance the other day, I got back home and decided that even though it's late, there's just no choice but watching those first 5 minutes...

I get easily influenced by the way things are designed, so I was hooked before the movie even started - the movie's logo looks like something out of a sketchbook. In fact, the whole movie sort of feels like it was taken out of someone's sketchbook, and so I watched the whole thing, and didn't even take any snack breaks.

I'm not very sure how much of an autobiography this movie is, but it generally is the story of this guy who meets this girl online, who are both that-good-kind-of-artistic geeks. I'm not really into spoilers, so I'll just tell you they have a very interesting, different beginning of a relationship, and they end up turning their whole story into this movie.

Sorry for sounding like a 12 year old girl, but the story's Beautiful. I'm actually sort of sorry I watched their relationship in a movie - now I can't try anything like it in real life without feeling like I'm copying someone else's... erm, ideas.

The Happy Couple

As for the movie's design, acting, and all that - well - I could tell this didn't cost the millions it took to make Titanic, But I really preferred it this way. The movie sometimes feels a little more like an art project than a feature, but that really just made it feel more real. The sets, the compositions, the writing, animation, music - they all feel like these guys dove deep into their minds (or guts) to show us exactly how it was for them.

So, why not take 70 minutes of your time and watch a good movie? It's definitely 70 minutes you'll enjoy more than, well, wasting time in front of cable TV - and you all know you do it.

One more note, while I'm here: Four Eyed Monsters actually participated in festivals and all that, but the creators spent so much money on making it, that they've sort of turned to the internet for help. They've added the movie to YouTube so that more people could watch it, and have somehow gotten a cool deal from this new movie-related social network site called Spout - Spout agreed to pay them a shiny dollar for every Four Eyed Monsters viewer that follows a link to join the network. Personally, I think they really deserve this money, so follow the instructions at the beginning of their movie, and help them out.