Karina on SpoutBlog

Via CNN via Anne Thompson comes the full lineup for The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, the film festival thrown by recent Oscar winner Tilda Swinton and guest programmed by some of her and Joel Coen, starting this Friday in “Nairn in the North East of Scotland, a seaside town where Chaplin used to holiday and which has a balmy microclimate and vistas across the Moray Firth to the Black Isle, Cromarty and Sutherland.”

If you think that’s a lot to swallow, look at the line-up. Busby Berkeley’s Dames! Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant! Stuff by David Lynch and Roman Polanski, world premieres, an entire day devoted to singing! And, a mandate that the audience make a lot of noise at the end of each film. From the Ballerina website’s News page:

Our first thoughts were kazoos. Or balloons that we could burst at the end. But then our friend Phoebe suggested jam jars 1/4 full of dried peas, to rattle. We like this idea a lot. So, as well as your passion, humour, good will and cake, could you bring a jam jar of peas to rattle, or some other kind of noise-making instrument? Also if you have any of those glowy, torchy things that you get at Hogmanay or dodgy stadium concerts, they could be waved at the end of movies (though how that would work after The Bill Douglas Trilogy takes some imagining).

Okay, yes — all this, plus Swinton’s insistence that the audience sit on bean bag chairs and eat “home-made cakes and fish finger sandwiches,” might be just a little too cute for some of us cynical city folk. But the program certainly has enough grit to counterbalance the twee– in Petra Von Kant alone, if nowhere else. And at least attendees can probably be pretty damn sure that it’s going to be a Blackberry-free zone. How much are last minute fares to the outlands of Scotland going for nowadays?

Under discussion:

The Tiger and the Snow (La Tigre e la Neve)  (2006)

Yesterday saw the launch of iArthouse, a download-to-burn service offering a large selection of foreign films. According to Scott Kirsner, the site is an outgrowth of an existing service that I’ve never heard of called EZ Takes––Scott calls it “a rebranding of EZTakes.com without some of the schlockier stuff — no ‘Extreme Sports’ category, for instance, and no Troma movies like Toxic Avenger.” Currently promoted on the front page of iArthouse: Roberto Benigni’s much-maligned The Tiger and the Snow. Scott goes on to note that EZTakes’ traffic currently falls far short of iArthouse’s logical competitor, Jaman.com, although metrics for actual downloads on these kinds of sites are hard to come by.

Meanwhile, in news that’s so related as to seem ironic: today comes the news that both Starz!-owned Vongo and Morgan Freeman-owned ClickStar are shutting down.

Vongo had  big studio titles, but its profile never matched that of iTunes; Starz! will license its library for download through third parties, with Verizon being the first. Meanwhile, ClickStar’s stated mission of bringing indie-arm-ish releases (Brad Silberling’s 10 Items of Less, the John Travolta/Salma Hayek vehicle Lonely Hearts) to the download realm shortly after their traditional exhibition premiere failed, in large part because theater owners are still hesitant to book anything that’s going to be available in homes within a matter of weeks.

So with EZTakes looking to “indiefy” at the same time that download sites with higher star power are shutting down, is this evidence that highbrow content is in higher demand than “schlockier stuff” when it comes to downloads? Maybe. It does seem clear that while Jaman seems to be doing surprisingly well trafficking in festival films and classics (right now Teeth and the original The Italian Job are being promoted on the front page of site, which is ranked just inside Alexa’s Top 5,000 sites on the web), and iTunes––which of course benefits from being the top name brand in s selling 50,000 downloads a day (mostly of high-profile new releases like 21 and Harold and Kumar), the sites trying to hit the middle of the market are not having much luck.

Under discussion:

Tropic Thunder  (2008)

• In what is probably the only case on record of an oft-voted Sexiest Woman Alive replacing a defensively heterosexual male megastar in a Hollywood thriller, espionage film Edwin A. Salt is being rewritten to star Angelina Jolie instead of Tom Cruise.
• Does anyone else sort of wonder if this whole Tropic Thunder “retard” protest is actually just an “alternative” marketing thing, paid for by Dreamworks to make the film’s satire look “dangerous”? Although I have to admit, canceling the premiere after party would be going a little far for a campaign…
• Helen Mirren’s husband will direct a film about Tennessee Williams’ dysfunctional childhood. The Cloverfield guy will produce a movie about an earthquake. The Japanese girl from Babel will star as an undercover hit woman in the next film from Isabel Coixet.