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Friend of Spout Stu VanAirsdale has launched his first blogathon over at The Reeler. From now through November 1, Stu is inviting film bloggers to write posts on their film blogs about anything they like, so long as it’s not about “filmgoing, filmmaking, film criticism, film news or anything else film-related.” The idea, says Stu, “is to aggregate a collection of what we think about when we’re not thinking about film.” He’s posted the first entry. It’s about Dionne Warwick. I’m planning on posting an entry here on Friday. It’s going to be about cheese.

I’m finishing up an entry this morning on David Fincher’s music videos for the Close-Up Blogathon. While I’m working on that, here’s a round-up of some of my favorite entries from other bloggers thus-far. There’s a full list of all entries at The House Next Door, which you should definitely check out–I don’t know how it happens, but somehow some of these blogathons manage to attract a median level of insight and writing that’s miles ahead of the average film journal or magazine.

• Hannah Frank on the problem of the close-up in animation: “[A]nimation confounds the whole notion of this blog-a-thon. There’s just not anything to be close to. And worse, when an animated film tries to get close, when it copies the patter of its live-action counterpart, it feels static and dull.”
• “I am in love with Cabiria, a woman who does not exist,” Steven Boone confesses. “How did this happen?” He offers a list of “clues.” Number 4: “Whenever Fellini wants to give us a cheat-sheet glimpse into Cabiria’s heart, he goes to a medium close-up. Only at the very end does he unleash one of the deadliest tight close-ups in cinema.”
• “In the Godardian spirit of making a movie as a critique/analysis of other movies,” Jim Emerson offers “a free-association visual essay/commentary on close-ups (with inserts, jump cuts, switchbacks, flashbacks, flash-forwards…) that got synapses firing in my brain as I flipped through shots in my memory — and my DVD collection.” Thanks to Jim for posting a Marlene Dietrich screencap that I’m going to use in my own Blogathon entry.
• Maul of America looks at a rare (for Hitchcock) bit of “gratuitous gore” in The Birds, and Camille Paglia’s theory that the film ultimately illustrates “a war between nature and culture, with the irrational and primitive vanquishing human illusions.”

Under discussion:

Lions for Lambs  (2007)

• While Tom Cruise continued to abstain from publicizing his own politics on the Lions For Lambs press tour, the film’s director and co-star Robert Redford “lash[ed] out against the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq” at a press conference in Rome yesterday. “We have lost lives, we’ve lost sacred freedoms, we’ve lost financial stability; we’ve lost our position of respect on the world stage,” said the sometime Sundance Kid.
• “The world’s first user-generated movie” begins shooting this week in London. MySpace users picked the director and some of the stars; Ewan Bremner’s in it, too. Be very afraid.
• I’m not sure exactly what “two-way plug-and-play technology” entails, but the MPAA thinks it puts their copyrights at risk, and they want the FCC to ban consumer electronics manufacturers from making and selling it.