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Under discussion:

One From the Heart  (1982)

Youth Without Youth  (2007)

Some of these links still date back to before the weekend. What can I say? It took a couple of days to make it all the way through my feeds. Only freshies tomorrow, I promise.

• John Brownlee offers a sneak peak at Ghostbusters 3, the videogame-only continuation of the saga, featuring a script by Dan Ackroyd and the voices of Ackroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. “Will Ghostbusters 3 be a worthy successor to the franchise? It’s still too early to say, but early game footage of Ghostbusters 3 has leaked out, and it looks incredible.” That footage is embedded above.
• We’re sure Ronnie Bronstein is very excited about his Spirit Award nomination, but Frownland is also up for an award at the Gothams, the New York-centric film awards put on by Find Independent’s former parent company, IFP, which takes place tonight. And as if the stakes weren’t high enough already, Michael Tully has declared, “if Frownland doesn’t win the Gotham tonight I will eat my iPod.” Of course, we’d rather see Ronnie win, but should the iPod eating actually go down, I’ll try to get photo evidence.
• What’s this? High praise for Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, which was almost universally dismissed at the Rome Film Festival? Hmmm. Jurgen Fauth says: “I know, I know ??? there???s nothing duller than listening to other people???s dreams. And yet??? the shared fantasy Coppola created from Mircea Eliade???s novella weaves a strange magic, mysterious, playful, philosophical, and loopy with romance. I???d like to hold on to that gossamer enchantment for just a little while longer, privately, before it???s time to take out the stainless steel critical apparatus and cut this one open.”
• Speaking of Coppola, The Playlist weighs in on FFC’s One From the Heart: “This neon, highly stylized break-up film might be a failed experiment, but man, is it one of the most pretty failures to look at ever.”
• Ray Pride passes along exciting news: David Cronenberg is writing a novel. Says Nicole Winstanley, the Penguin Editor who nabbed the rights, “I wrote David Cronenberg several months ago to inquire about whether or not he???d consider writing a novel. His films demonstrate a deep understanding of the human condition that could translate into fiction brilliantly.”
• “Noah Baumbach is one relentlessly bleak filmmaker, and that???s not a compliment,” writes Daniel Carlson at Pajiba. “It???s not that his films are necessarily evil, or even completely off-target; rather, one of the things that makes Baumbach so slippery is his habit of stumbling onto moments of slight emotional truth in the middle of a film completely devoid of it.”

Under discussion:

Great World of Sound  (2007)

I’m sure a press release will be forthcoming, and when I get it I’ll post it, but here’s what I deem to be the exciting news from this morning’s Independent Spirit Awards announcement, most of which involve friends and/or pet projects of Spout:

• Aaron Katz’s Quiet City is nominated for the John Cassavetes Award for the best feature made for $500,000. Also nominated in that category: Shotgun Stories and The Pool, two films I’ve heard great things about but have yet to see.
• The Monastery, which was disqualified for Oscar consideration after it was broadcast against the filmmaker’s wishes on European television, got a Spirit nomination for Best Documentary.
• Ronnie Bronstein (director of Frownland and star of Joe Swanberg’s upcoming Spout web series Butterknife) and Ramin Bahrani (director of Man Push Cart and Chop Shop) have both been nominated for the IFC/Acura Someone to Watch Award, which comes with a grant worth (I think) $20,000.
• Craig Zobel and Julie Delpy were nominated for Best First Film, for Great World of Sound and 2 Days in Paris, respectively.?? Sound’s Kene Holliday was also nominated for Best Supporting Male.
• Broken English, a film which was dismissed by many but which I really enjoyed, earned nominations for Best Actress (Parker Posey) and Best First Screenplay (Zoe Cassavetes).

Otherwise, the usual suspects are all there: lots of I’m Not There, Diving Bell, A Mighty Heart and Juno. More later.

Actor/game show host/former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein published a love letter to the soon-to-close Hollywood eatery Morton’s in Sunday’s New York Times. A splooge sample:

My wife and I and all of our friends are devastated. I guess we???ll eat seaweed at Mr Chow. But as far as I know, there now is no Hollywood-center-of-power cafe. Mr Chow would be the closest, especially for the music business. Yet for television and movies, it???s a sad, sad time. For those of us who considered Morton???s as much of a home as our own kitchens, it???s tragic.

Dana Harris had a markedly different take, writing up the closing on Variety’s The Knife blog in May:

But have you been to Mortons lately? I don’t think we’re going to be missing much. Nothing is wrong with the restaurant, but beyond its storied reputation, there isn’t much right. The booths are comfy and the servers are pro, but the menu is as dull and innocuous as its French-vanilla walls.

The two paragraphs above seem to reveal an evolution in the notion of Hollywood public space.

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