Indie Roundup: Swanberg Sex, Veterans Day Docs

Indie Roundup is your guide to what's new and cool in the indie film world.

On-Demand / Online Viewing. Love him or find him irritating, he's practically a category unto himself now. Joe Swanberg continues to explore the endlessly fascinating topic of twenty-something romantic relationships in Young American Bodies, a web series now on IFC.com. Season 4 debuted on Monday at IFC.com, and future episodes of the five-part series will premiere on a weekly basis. If you're a Swanberg fan, you'll want to check it out: it expands on his vision of sex and everything that leads up to it and follows afterward: elusive, kinda real, kinda fake, pretty messy.

In honor of Veterans Day, SnagFilms presents a selection of films appropriate for the occasion, covering a national shrine in Arlington: Field of Honor, dangerous missions in Baghdad Bound: Devil Dog Diaries, remembering the Battle for Midway, and so one. Truly, there's something for everyone to discover among the documentaries showcases. Similarly, Hulu has two films of interest: Jerabek, the tragic story of U.S. Marine Ryan Jerabek, and When I Came Home, which covers the troubling issue of homelessness among veterans.

Also newly available online: the enchanting "banjo player goes to Africa" doc Bela Fleck: Throw Down Your Heart (on iTunes) and a close-up (sorry) view of artist Chuck Close (also on iTunes).

Deals. As always, our friends at indieWIRE has been tracking recent acquisitions. The latest: romance My Year Without Sex (Strand Releasing, due spring 2010); drama The Good Heart, with Brian Cox and Paul Dano, directed by the very talented Dagur Kari (Magnolia Pictures, due next year); and social satire The Joneses, with David Duchovny and Demi Moore (Roadside Attractions, due spring 2010).

After the jump: more than Precious at the box office.

Indie Weekend Box Office. The most extraordinary draw last weekend, Precious, has already been covered by my colleague Eric D. Snider, with a detailed breakdown of the numbers, so let's turn our attention elsewhere. A handful of films opened on single screens and all acquitted themselves well, to various degrees, of course.

Splinterheads (pictured), my romantic comedy pick from last week, made $10,515, according to Box Office Mojo. That's a couple of hundred dollars less than the re-issue of Vittorio De Sica's classic of neo-realism, The Bicycle Thief. Both films, however, trailed La Danse: Le Ballet de L'Opera de Paris, Frederick Wiseman's 159-minute documentary on the production of seven ballets.

Soccer flick The Damned United reduced its theater count from 45 to three, yet held a very good $11,366 average. Meanwhile, Sony Pictures Classics, the film's distributor, added 35 location for coming of age romance An Education, resulting in an average of $7,137 per theater. Both films have been out for five weeks, but it's the latter film that has traction, both on the prospective awards side and with audiences, earning a very healthy $2.3 million so far.