Karina on SpoutBlog

• We’re giving away a Wii at the main site.
• Oh, Iron Man. You were beloved. You were remixed. Your best moment came after the credits. Your fans were more realistic about the nature of fantasy than women who are really into Sex and the City.
• 10 Avengers who should be in the Avengers movie.
• The Tribeca Film Festival recapped.
• Michel Gondry might have won a Webby for it, but we still don’t care about Sweding.
• Heath Ledger will haunt the Cannes market. Maybe while he’s there, he can pick up European distribution rights on Donnie Darko 2. Also, lots of people are buying Joker toys.
• Anna Nicole Smith comes back from the dead in what has to be the meta-est biopic of a former stripper ever made. Probably.
• How Brawndo lept through the screen.
• Lloyd Kaufman fights Tribeca. In a chicken suit.
• Oliver Stone hasn’t cast DIck Cheney yet, but his Bush movie nonetheless comes out in 5 months.
• So far, nobody likes Indiana Jones and the Kid From Transformers Props Up A Walking Corpse. Except for those who are using it as a vacation guide.
  
• Warner Brothers closed its 2 remaining stand-alone indie arms.
• The Simpsons go to Sundance.
• The best trailers of the year.
• On the podcast: a Warholian read of Speed Racer.
• The Tracey Fragments and Ellen Page as double-edged sword.
• The feminist read of Jessica Alba.
• Groundhog Day in politics, in 5 Seconds.
• Glenn Kenny lost his job, got a new blog.
• Festival lineups: Los Angeles, CineVegas
• Harold and Kumar advertorial on Keith Olbermann.
• The Met restores nerdiness to superhero culture.
• John Cusack to Diablo Cody: “Liz Phair lied to my face, why can’t you?”
• Mister Lonely is making money.
• Praising Battle For Haditha.
• Trailers: Tokyo!, Iron Sky

In a story published online last night, Variety’s Sharon Swart named the 15 films across both the Cannes Film Festival and the Cannes market that are expected to attract the most attention from buyers. At least one of the titles, Steve McQueen’s Hunger, has been bought in the hours since the story hit the website. At least one more, described as a “martial arts fantasy actioner, currently shooting in Romania…[starring] Woody Harrelson, Demi Moore and Japanese popstar Gackt,” sounds unspeakably (but not necessarily unsaleably) ridiculous.

Two more of the films on Swart’s list are related in that they were made the focus of unexpected and unwanted attention in January by the death of Heath Ledger.

One is Lucas Moodysson’s Mammoth, shooting of which was briefly suspended so that star Michelle Williams could return to Brooklyn to respond to her ex-fiancee’s death; when Williams returned to the set, the New York Post ran a paparazzi photo of the actress walking past a prop skeleton and bloggers smirked. The other is Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the film Ledger was shooting at the time of his death and in which he was replaced by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell. Neither film is finished, but both will look for distributors in the Cannes market.

Let’s see, what else? Blah blah blah, Charlie Kaufman (see also Anne Thompson’s profile of the first-time director). Blah blah blah, Che. Blah blah blah, “South Korean Western from horror-thriller maestro Kim Jee-woon” (!). Oh, and this!  Swart describes Terrence Malick’s in-production Brad Pitt/Sean Penn film Tree of Life as a “fantasy-sci-fier.” That’s the closest thing to a detail about that one that we’re likely to get for awhile.

A day after learning and announcing that his job at Premiere.com had been eliminated, Glenn Kenny has already set up a new personal blog, free of association with Premiere/Hachette. Well, sort of: the subtitle on the TypePad blog is, currently, “Film writer Glenn Kenny’s own bought-and-paid-for-blog, thank you very goddamn much.” The title-title is Some Came Running, and in the first entry, Kenny explains what he hopes to do with it: “Consider this space the drunken boat we stand in, trying to pull either and/or both of these figures in. Not to be loopy, or maudlin, or anything. Just a fancy way of saying…let’s hang, my friends.”

Related: “Hachette has always been an abortion of a magazine company,” writes Nick Denton at Gawker.

Under discussion:

Funny Games  (2007)

I’ve been in a really ominous mood all day. I thought it was just because the sky is grey and I’ve been been listening to this Belong EP, which basically sounds like a prolonged death rattle, but now that I’m reporting the second major story about people losing their jobs in the past couple of hours, I’m starting to feel like it’s not just me. The whole internet feels like the last scene of Madam Butterfly today––death now fills the air.

Anyway: the news. Warner Brothers has shut down its two remaining, dueling indie arms, Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse. Warner’s COO Alan Horn released a statement basically saying that the shell of New Line will handle all low budget fare going forward, and claimed to be “confident that the spirit of independent filmmaking and the opportunity to find and give a voice to new talent will continue to have a presence at Warner Bros.”

So. What about acquisitions? Will Warners be sending one of the ten New Line employees left standing to Cannes next week, or will they just cede that game to the other indie arms and focus on the cheap genre fare that the new New Line is allegedly committed to churning out? What about the WIP and Picturehouse movies already in the can and on the shelf––like Picturehouse’s remake of The Women, or WIP’s anti-climax waiting to happen, Towelhead? Your guesses are as good as mine. I’m just hung up on the fact that Funny Games was the last WIP release. Funny Games killed a studio!

Entertainment Weekly’s cover story is peek at pre-production on W, Oliver Stone’s much-discussed George W. Bush biopic. That’s Josh Brolin above, in makeup for the lead role. In the story, we learn:

• That script that seemed too parodic to be true was apparently at least two drafts away from the shooting script.
• Bush historian Robert Draper on that early script: “[I]t just misses the guy…You come away with an even more hyperbolized caricature of Bush the Cowboy President than is already out there.”
• Dick Cheney had yet to be cast by the time the EW story went to press, but Stone is reportedly considering Paul Giamatti. Which would be AWESOME.
• In the effort to produce this thing quickly and cheaply (the projected release date for this yet-to-be made film has now inched up to October[!]), Stone is taking advantage of Louisiana’s massive tax breaks, presumably using The Bayou State as a stand in for Texas, D.C. and Yale.
• Speaking of that improbable release date: Stone’s producers are said to be “planning to run TV spots opposite McCain’s ads this fall.”
• Stone on W’s jokiness: “This movie can be funnier because Bush is funny. He’s awkward and goofy and makes faces all the time. He’s not your average president. So let’s have some fun with it. What are they going to do? ‘Discredit’ me again?’

A friendly bit of Spout promotion: over on the main site, we’re running a contest and giving away a Nintendo Wii. Just go here, agree to the legalese, follow the clues and find the treasure chests. You could be starring in your own injury clip in no time.

Under discussion:

The Tracey Fragments  (2007)

I’ve been tracking the odd pop cultural situation that awaits this month’s release of The Tracey Fragments for awhile now. The film, which I’ve written about before, stars Juno phenom Ellen Page; it premiered at Berlin in 2007 and played tons of festivals, but by year’s end had failed to secure U.S. theatrical distribution. Then, in February of this year, when Page was at the peak of her powers as a precocious Oscar nominee and face of one of the biggest “surprise” hits in recent memory, Tracey was picked up by ThinkFilm for domestic distribution.

This is a film which, despite positive reviews and an award from Berlin, went almost completely unnoticed when it screened at Toronto in September, largely because it didn’t have a distributor that could afford to hire track suited boys to pass out branded Tic Tacs on its behalf. And yet, as soon as ThinkFilm put out a new trailer for the film, it promptly attracted a bunch of negative blog attention, ranging from unfair to inaccurate.

There seems to be a common, incorrect assumption that Tracey was built in a lab to capitalize on Page’s presumed post-Juno hipster cred; about a month ago, Gawker branded Tracey “the trendiest, most mind-suckingly irritating movie ever to exist”––sight unseen, of course. But yesterday, Stu VanAirsdale at Gawker’s sister blog Defamer suggested that Tracey’s problem is its lack of trendiness, indicating that the film is being quietly “dumped” by its distributor.

Someone who didn’t know the history of The Tracey Fragments could read Stu’s post and assume that the film is a loser because it’s getting a (much) smaller release than Juno on a (much, much, MUCH) smaller marketing budget. But the fact is, it’s only getting a North American theatrical release at all because of Juno, and that’s not necessarily a sign of its quality, but a reflection of the fact that there’s no such thing as a North American distribution market for experimental film. There’s a difference between a film being “dumped”, and a non-commercial, non-studio film getting a chance at theatrical life because its star happens to be more famous now than she was 15 months ago when it first appeared on the festival circuit. ThinkFilm is not known for the huge media buys and coy platformed wide releases that the indie arms specialize in, and as far as I can tell, their handling of Tracey is pretty much business as usual.

All of this chatter points to the fact that Page’s involvement is a double-eged sword. Yes, her newfound fame has made Tracey a more viable commodity than it would have been otherwise, but it also attracts a brighter spotlight than a little Canadian art film can be expected to withstand gracefully. I just imagine Guy Maddin must wake up every morning and thank God that no one in My Winnipeg has become the subject of lesbian rumors on gossip blogs. (Actually, never mind––Guy Maddin would probably love that).

An exhibit called Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy opens today at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and runs through the end of the summer. From the Met’s website:

Fashion not only shares the superhero’s metaphoric malleability, but actually embraces and responds to the particular metaphors that the superhero represents, notably that of the power of transformation. Fashion celebrates metamorphosis, providing unlimited opportunities to remake and reshape the flesh and the self. Through fashion and the superhero, we gain the freedom to fantasize, to escape the banal, the ordinary, and the quotidian. The fashionable body and the superhero body are sites upon which we can project our fantasies, offering a virtuosic transcendence beyond the moribund and utilitarian.

I complain a lot about how the rise of the comic book blockbuster (which I’m not knocking out of hand––obviously, when they’re good they’re really, really good), has made the typical connoisseur of comic book mythology less likely to be an introspective smarty and more likely to resemble your typical aggro frat boy; like just about everything, geek culture becomes duller and less potent as it becomes more mainstream. By tying it the body/identity politics (thus adding the complications of sex) and making it completely intellectually obtuse in the process, the Met’s show takes back comic book love and restores a bit of its lost nerdiness. Sign me up!

The Met’s site has a lot of small pictures from the show and much, much more information; the above photo is excerpted from the Jaman blog.