After many many months of playing the waiting game, MTV will finally start streaming $5 Cover: Seattle starting tomorrow, December 15. Local filmmaker Lynn Shelton (Humpday) directed the web series which features the members of 13 local bands in short, scripted, documentary-style webisodes as they gallivant about Seattle over the course of a weekend. Local music fans have been patiently waiting for the series to hit the web since it finished filming in the summer of 2009. The series follows 13 well-loved Seattle bands of all genres, including: the Moondoggies, the Maldives, Sean Nelson, Champage Champagne, THEESatisfaction, Tea Cozies, Thee Emergency, Whiskey Tango, the Lights, Weekend, God, the Spite and Corespondents. more ›

CHANNELING BARBRA STREISAND: If you love everything Neil Diamond, Bette Midler, or Barbra Streisand, you are in for a treat. The vocally gifted illusionist Edwards Twins, Anthony and Eddie Edwards (no joke), are in Seattle for a limited time to sing their asses off and impersonate many of the greats. People raves: "The Edwards Twins in many ways are better than watching the real thing." If you don't believe it, you will now. Seating can be hard to come by, so get there early. As a perk, on Tuesdays there's a two-for-one dinner special. Not bad! 6:30 p.m. dinner, 8:30 p.m. show // Julia's on Broadway, 300 Broadway East // Tickets: $25-35 more ›

Clearly, everybody's new favorite website is The Awl, the delightfully (or not-so-delightfully) low-tech, low- and high-culture smartypants venture from former Gawker-ers Alex Balk and Choire Sicha. Last week, they noted an anecdote about taco trucks in Walla Walla suffering from a severe drop in business over fears of swine flu. Today, they direct us to a meandering thinkpiece in The Rumpus--Stephen Elliott's new online culture mag, which recently hosted an event at the NWFF--about the trials and tribulations of being mistaken for someone famous (and larger issues of identity in These Modern Times™) that kicks off with a story about Lynn Shelton's My Effortless Brilliance. Once again, we are all connected on the internets. more ›

SIFF is making a big deal out of snagging local director Lynn Shelton's Humpday for its Northwest Connections program; it'll be the SIFF Centerpiece Gala on Friday, June 5, and hopefully help raise money to help SIFF pay for their office relocation to the Seattle Center's Alki Room. We saw--and liked-- the "mumblecore bromance" Humpday at Sundance. We'll assume you know the HumpFest backstory. The "local" emphasis of the Northwest Connections program makes for a grab-bag experience: Sundance hit The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle will rub elbows with the filmed-in-Wallingford World's Greatest Dad, starring Robin Williams, and Sandy Cioffi's documentary, Sweet Crude. more ›

The big Seattle news at Sundance was Humpday. Late Monday night, Lynn Shelton's film got a mid-six figure deal. Apparently, Shelton had her pick of the litter, as there were five other offers and a protracted bidding war. But she ends up with "an unorthodox release plan [that] will see Magnolia [Pictures] launch the pic on video-on-demand before an August theatrical release." more ›

The stats geeks at Deconstructing Sundance aim to be the FiveThirtyEight of the film festival world by predicting the future box office success of Sundance films, using the words in their festival guide descriptions (and a Bayesian algorithm) alone. Example: 62% of Sundance competition films in the last 15 years whose descriptions included the words "gay," "gays," or "homosexual" went on to commercial success. So "gay" becomes a positive indicator of success, and so on and so forth. more ›