Karina on SpoutBlog

• Juno is honored as a work of “Cinema For Peace” on the same night a Czech party runs out of beer. Mike Jones enumerates those, and other signs of the apocalypse.
• Brit Withey isn’t feeling the doomsday vibe??????he’s just bored. “So, halfway into the festival and so far, at least the competition screenings have been met with a general ho-hum-ness.”
• Unfortunately, it looks like Brit is not alone. With half the competition slate already screened, There Will Be Blood is apparently the clear front-runner for the Golden Bear, but no one wants to give an award that’s supposed to be about discovery to an Oscar-nominated Hollywood film.
• Variety offers a pre-screening feature on Errol Morris’ Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure. Says Michael Barker of the film’s distributor, Sony Classics: “One of the things that I love about the film is that you watch it and you are in the shoes of the common soldier who committed all these acts, and you tell yourself, ???That could be me.???” We doubt such testimony will win over skeptics, but early word from the choir (ie: my super-liberal Facebook friend) is positive.

If I link to a blog set up a week ago by a woman who claims she’s going to kill herself after 90 days of posting, and in focusing on a post about movies, I gloss over the ethical issues??????is she really going to kill herself, or will the whole thing will end with a romantic “choose life” reversal worthy of a romantic comedy because all along she was just trying to get a book and/or movie deal, or is it just a conceptual piece to prove the point that once you’re dead to the internet, you might as well be dead in life???????am I then a horrible person, or am I just doing my job as a movie blogger? Or both?

I shouldn’t have even touched this, I’m sure. But here goes…
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In a dispatch from Berlin, David D’Arcy reports on a screening of a restored print of some works by experimental filmmaker/performance artist Jack Smith. D’arcy concisely sums up the drama surrounding Smith’s estate, which has thrown a wrench into further restorations:

Smith left his apartment a mess when he died of AIDS in 1989, and the material that was saved was salvaged by friends who were working in spite of the indifference of Smith’s family, who had spurned him for his homosexuality decades before that. Performance artist Penny Arcade and Village Voice film critic J Hoberman, as what would later be called the Plaster Foundation, sifted through cat shit and years of newspapers to save the materials in the 6th floor walkup, and put enough order into the mess to create several books and a museum exhibition. Within the last five years, however, Smith’s sister reappeared, at the prodding of the filmmakers behind Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, a bio-doc that played in theaters in 2006, which served the interests of its filmmakers more than it served Smith’s memory. Courts in New York have declared that the sister who abandoned Jack Smith is now the owner of the materials in his apartment that she abandoned when she saw them and recoiled in disgust in 1989. Now Smith’s sister is asking for those materials back, and the filmmakers of Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis are demanding access to the archive, and suing the Plaster Foundation for that access, which they say was promised them for the making of the film. It’s an object lesson in the notion that no good deed goes unpunished

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Interestingly, the fight over Smith is also being played out on YouTube, although there it’s more about what Smith stood for than the future of his archive. Above: a video apparently produced under the auspices of the New York Underground Museum, in which Penny Arcade explains how Jack Smith suffered for “turn[ing] his back on being an art star.” More details, and an opposing argument, after the jump.

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