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• “You know neither of us are really very creative people, Joe. I mean, I have filmmaker friends who walk around generating plot ideas all the time, but shit, when I walk down the street, all I do is brood about my friends and my loved ones and really zero in on all the attending barbs and snags and accrued resentments that seem to get in the way of closeness.” Ronnie Bronstein pulls back the curtain on himself and Joe Swanberg in the latest installment of our Butterknife interviews. See also: Butterknife stills.
• ??On this week’s podcast: An argument about No Country For Old Men, a love letter to Billy the Kid.
• Sundance goes trolling for submissions on YouTube. Slamdance, as far we know, doesn’t.
• Huey Lewis, Seth Rogen, and the return of the plot song.
• There Will Be Blood: more aptly titled than you might imagine.
• Why Billy the Kid is the anti-Juno.
• Karina is SUCH an Elliott Gould fangirl.
• Does Silent Light seem any less brilliant, now that we know it was inspired in part by freeware?
• Imagining a post-Gawker age of less-cynical criticism.
• The National Board of Review: Old, but generally inoffensive.
• Michel Gondry’s remake of Dancer in the Dark. Sort of.
• The Speed Racer trailer leads to an unexpected outpouring of love for The Postman.
• Chris looks into a couple of new techy things that feed on every cinephile’s desire to be alone with people.
• Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer: behold the bizarre.
• No one has C & Ded us on these Heath Ledger Joker pics. Yet.
• Knocking Knocked Up is SO boring.
• WIN AT YELLING!!!??

Under discussion:

The Matrix  (1999)

For their latest appropriation, The Wachowski Brothers have attempted to replicate the candilicious sense of J-Pop as only a Western, green-screen-happy directing duo can. Courtesy of AOL, here is the first trailer for their Speed Racer, technically the first movie from them as directors since The Matrix trilogy, and it looks like the boys might be trying too hard. From the blurred-background pans to the shot of Spritle and Chim-Chim in the trunk, this looks like a perfect live-action take on the classic anime series. But it also looks like a wannabe cartoon, and with so much CGI, it’s difficult to take seriously.

Nonetheless, my eyeballs are begging for me to take them to see this the first chance I get.

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Time for another link in our Butterknife email chain. This week, Butterknife creator Joe Swanberg interviews Ronnie Bronstein. In addition to starring in Butterknife, Ronnie is the writer/director of Frownland, for which he’s up for an Independent Spirit Award.

Over the next few weeks, we???ll be bringing you interviews with the cast and crew of Butterknife every Friday. Next week, Ronnie interviews Mary Bronstein, co-star of Butterknife and Frownland (and Ronnie’s wife). And do check out the Butterknife page on Spout for further updates.

Previous links in the chain: Karina interviews Joe.

JOE SWANBERG: Do you feel manipulated by me when you are working on Butterknife? Am I exploiting you and Mary for my own artistic and personal benefit?

RONNIE BRONSTEIN: Haha. Sure I feel manipulated by you, but only in the most benign sense of the word. I mean, by agreeing to be in the project, right, I’m essentially agreeing to let you ‘handle’ and ‘manage’ me and my time, which to be honest, is sort of unnerving.

But then again, we both know that we’d never ever shoot a single frame of the show if it was left up to me. I’m always groping to find some kind of petty weasel-ey excuse to put it off. Seriously, if I found out that a relative of mine died or something on a week we were supposed to shoot, deep down, amidst the grief, some part of me would actually be happy cause it would mean I wouldn’t have to shoot Butterknife that day. So yeah, you are kind of manipulating me???but more in the way a parent is forced to ‘manipulate’ their kid onto the school-bus or something.

As for exploitation???

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