Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

Quiet City  (2007)

• Erik Skillman, the Criterion designer who recently regaled us with tales of his process putting together the box image for Berlin Alexanderplatz, has applied some of the same techniques to a portrait of Barack Obama. “I’m not sure I quite captured him (there’s a little hint of Reinhold in there that’s kind of strange), but for a 20-minute sketch it’s not half bad…” [via Cinetrix]
• Mike Jones has already started blogging Berlin. We’ll be keeping an eye on Filmbrain, Twitch and of course Berlin-based David Hudson for updates over the next week or so.
• Jette Kernion on the magic trick of Quiet City: “You can’t watch a man and woman who become fast friends like this without wondering whether they’ll hook up, which provides a small amount of suspense. But you get so caught up watching these people and their friends that the romantic potential hardly seems to matter most of the time.”
• Kevin Kelly balks at Christina Ricci’s suggestion that there’s a “sad guy” thing in Speed Racer that will make the boys cry: “What’s a sad guy thing that’s not a sad girl thing? Does Speed lose his penis during one of the races and get told that he can’t have any Speed Juniors?”

LIBERTAS has an interesting post about how that Will.I.Am “Yes We Can” Obama video??????in which celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and Kate Walsh sing over and mug in front of Barack Obama’s New Hampshire primary “concession” speech??????is emblematic of a new kind of Hollywood political support. Dirty Harry riffs on a post by Jim Geraghty, who notes that the clip’s “substance-free message of ‘yes we can, unity is good, we have hope and the hopes of children are important’” is unobjectionable “because there???s no ideas in it; it???s entirely emotion.” He goes on to say that aligning oneself with that emotion is less a political action than participation in a “pop-culture phenomnenon.”And because pop culture is something American’s know how to participate in without thinking, by extension Barack Obama becomes the ready-made candidate for those who can’t really handle much more than passive consumption of an image as a stand-in for a feeling.

Dirty Harry actually sees this as a good thing. He likes the idea of ” a quiet advocacy from Hollywood for their guy (or gal)” because it stands in contrast to previous celebrity-led political spectacles, in which stars “have hurt their own careers and the candidate they want elected saying unbelievably stupid things.” But writing about the “Yes I Can’ video at NewTeeVee, Wagner James Au couldn’t disagree more…

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Funny: The 10 Star Wars Toys that Unintentionally Look Like Other Celebrities, via BoingBoing. Number 6: Slave Leia/Christian Bale. “To be fair, Carrie Fisher was not the daintiest of leading ladies, and Christian Bale is not the most rugged of leading men, so the fact that their action figures would kind of look alike isn???t so surprising. The fact that we???ve seen Bale naked and not Fisher? Not so much surprising as gravely disappointing.”