Karina on SpoutBlog

• Surfer Girl devotes two posts to the meme that there may be an “interactive There Will Be Blood milkshake drinking” game in the works. I think the Juno game meme was the final straw??????I think I have finally, fully slipped into a state in which the ironic walls have closed in so tight that I can no longer even tell when I’m being fucked with. Via Scanners.
• Maybe I’m Not There would have worked better if more of Todd Haynes’ collaborators actually cared about Bob Dylan. Says Stephen Malkmus, who recorded several Dylan songs that appear in the movie, “I was more into Creedence Clearwater Revival…Dylan was a punk-rock guy and his records are undeniably genius. But you don’t know what’s going to speak to you, and his music didn’t for me.”
• Chris Thilk approves of the poster for Fool’s Gold. I think. “[T]his poster is good at selling the movie based on the personalities (and breasts) of the two actors involved. Get them smiling at each other, turn them a shade of yellow that???s only slightly removed from the residents of Springfield, hint at a tropical location by putting water in the background and you???re finished.”
• Brit Withey of Denver Film Festival fame has surprising news from the Berlinale: “…you can no longer smoke anywhere. I???m fine with this in the United States and I knew it was coming in France???but Berlin? Christ…”

Odienator at Big Media Vandalism is publishing one essay per day this month, in honor of “Black History Mumf,” in an attempt, as he puts it, to “explore the movies Black folks love, regardless of how I personally feel about them.” I’m loving this series, even though the fact that I haven’t seen many of the movies being written about makes me feel like whitest White girl in White City. Here are some of my favorite pullquotes from the nine chapters published so far. You can check out all of these essays and future editions to the series here.

• On Sidney Poitier and No Way Out: “No Way Out is the cynical shocker in [Joe] Mankiewicz’s canon, a film about racial hatred that dropped my jaw. I can’t imagine the reaction people had when they saw this picture in 1950, but it couldn’t have been good…Finally, in a movie, passing for White helps the entire community!”
• On Joel Schumacher’s early career as scripter of Sparkle, Car Wash and The Wiz: “Perhaps the guys who assumed Joel Schumacher was the foremost authority on Black culture were the same ones who left the blackface aspect of The Jazz Singer in the 1980 remake…I don’t even think Car Wash has a screenplay. Yet, I must point out that his characterizations aren’t offensive; he tries and for that I must give some credit.”
• On the arranged marriage scene in Coming to America: “Now, a note to the bougie Negroes and liberal White folks who thought this section of the film was some kind of offensive representation of African culture: SIT YO??? ASS DOWN. Find me another movie where this much glitz and glamour, on such a grand scale, has been afforded people of color.”

• Jurgen Fauth twitters: “Highlight of my day: Paul Thomas Anderson telling me he loves idrinkyourmilkshake.com and Daniel-Day Lewis giving me two thumbs up. Yay!”
• Shane Danielson’s Shine a Light review at indieWIRE focuses mainly on how the Rolling Stones concert doc completely fails at relevancy. But if the film itself represents “a sixtysomething non-Berliner’s idea of cool” complete with “a cameo from guest-star Jack White, to drag the show all the way into 1937!”, as a red carpet spectacle it seems to have been a success.
• When asked at a Berlin press conference to diagnose what’s “wrong” with George W. Bush, Neil Young declined on the grounds that “it would take too long.” Instead, he struggled to come up with something “right about Bush,” and eventually concluded, “Well, he’s a good physical specimen.”
• In a single paragraph on Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, David Hudson not only notes that he had “a marvelous time,” he also manages to get Freudian: “Two rivers form ‘the Forks,’ lines directly paralleled with ‘the Lap’ - his mother’s. The pull is inescapable.”