Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

Varsity Blues  (1999)

• Naked pictures of a stripper? Not news. Naked pictures of a stripper-turned-Oscar-winning-screenwriter? Eh. Pictures of a stripper-turned-Oscar-winning-screenwriter emulating the naked-but-for-whipped-cream scene from the classic James Van Der Beek vehicle Varsity Blues? News enough!
• Meanwhile, proving that no good-intentioned attempt to bridge the cultural-political divide goes unpunished, some people are mad that soldiers presented Oscars. Interestingly, most of the complaints conflate the two documentary awards into the claim that the Academy implicitly mocked the soldiers by forcing them to give an award to the anti-Iraq war film Taxi to the Darkside. In fact, the soldiers presented the Best Documentary Short award, which went to Freeheld. Debbie Schlussel, probably the most hateful of the Hollywood haters, gets that part right, but she also repeatedly insists that Diablo Cody is fat, which, as the above pictures of her ribcage should show, is definitely wrong.
• David Bordwell credits “piracy” for ensuring the classic status of His Girl Friday. “If Columbia had renewed its copyright on schedule, would this film be so widely admired today?” Jason Mittel agrees in theory, but takes issue with Bordwell’s use of the p-word. “Once the film lapsed into the public domain, all of the resulting shoddy copies were legal and licit, not pirated. A more accurate term would be ‘unauthorized’…”
• I guess WIRED bloggers aren’t allowed to say “****.”

I’m a big fan of my AppleTV, and I was super supportive of the recently-announced AppleTV Take 2, which allows all 12 of us who have one to purchase music and movies from the iTunes store directly from the TV, with no computer required. I finally got around to installing the software a week or so ago, and rented Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (yes, seriously) without incident.

But apparently, I’m one of the lucky ones??????or, maybe it’s just that I have a newish (although kind of a shitty) TV which I connect to the AppleTV via RCA cables masquerading as component cables. BoingBoing passes along a report that iTunes movie rentals won’t play on some TVs, because of a DRM called High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection, or HBDCP. HBDCP apparently blocks rentals from being played on monitors that talk to the AppleTV via a DVI or HDMI connection??????basically, anyone using a video projector or computer monitor, and pretty much anyone using a flat-screen TV purchased before 2005.

So, essentially, Apple’s DRM is so constrictive that anyone who hasn’t bought a new TV in the last three years will be forced to do so in order to rent iTunes movies. As BoingBoing’s Cory Doctrow points out, this punishes consumers to the point where it becomes hard to see why anyone would go the legal way when DRM-free films are easier to get.

Tomorrow morning, I’m flying to St. Louis, then taking a bus to Columbia, Missouri to check out the True/False Film Festival. The festival brings together non-fiction films from recent major festivals, world premieres, and surprise screenings. Here’s a look at a few of the films that I plan to see before heading back to New York on Sunday. If you’re showing a film at the festival or will just be there hanging out and would like to meet up, send me an email at karina AT spout DOT com, and we’ll make it happen.

Shake The Devil Off: In post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, pastor Father LeDoux tries to stop the closing of St. Augustine’s church, a vital community center thought be some to be the birthplace of jazz. See the French-subtitled trailer (the film first premiered at Locarno) here.

Carny: A work-in-progress presentation of Allison Murphy’s doc on the personal lives and relationships of carnival workers, based on Virginia Lee Hunter’s photo book. Judging by the footage shown on Carny’s website, the film, which blends Super 8 film with video, looks amazing.

Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go: A cinema verite portrait of an English school for troubled kids, Kim Longinotto’s film won a special jury prize last fall at IDFA.

Gonzo: I missed the press screening of Alex Gibney’s Hunter S. Thompson doc at Sundance, but maybe it’s for the best: recent Oscar-winner Gibney is expected to to be in attendance at Gonzo’s Saturday True/False screening.

Very Young Girls: David Schisgal’s doc on teenage prostitutes premiered last fall at Toronto. At True/False, it’s being honored as part of the True Life Fund, though which the festival choose one film per year for which to “raise funds to support and honor those who appear in front of the camera.”