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SpoutBlog on spout.com

  • Billy the Kid, August Evening Win LAFF

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    Under discussion:

    Billy the Kid  (2007)

    Via indieWIRE comes news that Jennifer Vendetti's Billy the Kid has won Target-sponsored Best Documentary jury prize at the Los Angeles Film Festival. If you're keeping score, that makes two big festival awards for the controversial doc, which might be enough to conquer its brutal Variety review. Meanwhile, August Evening won the LAFF jury prize for Best Narrative Feature. The immigration-themed drama was acquired earlier this week by Maya Entertainment.


    Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

  • Watch Festival Films (And Sci-Fi Softcore) on Your AppleTV

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    According to Om Malik, world cinema download site Jaman will soon release a plug-in that will allow you to watch films acquired through their site on an AppleTV. The plug-in will allow users to find and download Jaman content directly from the AppleTV--kind of like the new YouTube plug-in, except presumably less limited in terms of what you can actually access (Dear YouTube: please let me access my subscriptions via her AppleTV. Your Friend, Karina). Also, Jaman's downloads cost money -- usually, $1.99 for a 7-day rental, or $4.99 for a permanent download.

    Jaman currently has about 500 titles available online. Their library skews heavily towards semi-obscure foreign festival films, but they're also building a small cache of 70s-era American "erotic classics," such as Cinderella 2000, which is described thusly: "Braving the Fornication Police, a wise-cracking, sex-sniffing robot, and the government's impotent omnipotent leader who's not "up" to the task, sexy Cindy must overcome every erotic obstacle and funky musical interlude to be with her prince." And yes, this one sentence has motivated me to start a Jaman account.


    Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

  • FilmCouch #26

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    We love artists when their tortured, to the point that they've become an archetype in cinema. You're Gonna Miss Me, The Devil and Daniel Johnston and In the Realms of the Unreal take us to a favorite vacation spot: The murky swamp between madness and brilliance.




    Download FilmCouch #26 or subscribe in the iTunes store (search for "filmcouch" or click here to launch iTunes) and a new free episode will download every Friday. Join the FilmCouch group


    Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

  • Can McClane Beat a Rat? Trade Roughage, 6/29/07

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    ***"McClane, who has handily defeated effete Eurotrash in the past, is destined to find himself overshadowed this weekend by a Parisian rat with a refined palette." Gregg Kilday can't hold back the snark in reporting that Ratatouille is looking likely to beat Live Free or Die Hard at the box office this weekend.

    ***Variety seems to think the odds are with McClane. Pamela McClintock notes that Live Free's $9 million opening day is not only Bruce Willis' best opening since the mega hit Armageddon, it's the best first-day tally for a Die Hard film, ever.

    ***What kinds of unsavory things did Marc Forster have to do in order to get two jobs in two weeks? The newly anointed Bond director is partnering with Mandate Pictures to develop Land of Roses , about "a suburban mother who, with the support of her fellow outraged townspeople, attempts to exonerate a hardworking Middle Eastern father falsely imprisoned as a terrorist by Homeland Security."

    ***Speaking of unsavory, Jim Carrey has been hired to star in and produce Sober, a Universal-based comedy poking fun at addiction. According to Variety, hilarity ensues when "a hard-partying software exec [is] assigned a court-appointed Sober Buddy to keep him under control during a critical business trip to Las Vegas. A perfect plan falls apart when the Sober Buddy (Carrey) falls off the wagon." Delightful!



    Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

  • Roger Ebert Turns 65

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    For the occasion of the 65th birthday of Roger Ebert, Richard Corliss has published a lengthy appreciation of America's best-known living film critic in TIME. It is a bit of a fawn-job--a birthday gift from an admitted "trusted friend...of three decades"--but there's a lot of good stuff here. I think there's one paragraph specifically where Corliss really gets to the heart of what makes Ebert's criticism interesting:

    When he doesn't like a movie, he will often go out of his way to mention some attractive element amid the carnage, giving what amounts to a review that says, "Yes, but! Big but!" And when he decides that a movie rates a pan — a "Bah, thumbug," if you will — he tends to approach the task not with the hot rage of a jilted suitor, or the curled lip of contempt that is the occupational habit of other critics (this one included), but with the fretful brow of a knowing, caring family doctor. He diagnoses the symptoms, then calmly and compassionately explains the nature of your ailment...more than any critic I know, he brings the informed discussion of film out from under the lamp, into daylight. He has used his fame to elevate the conversation, challenging audiences to attend not just to the dramatic and ethical aspects of films but to their visual strategies. (Roger is one of the few film critics who actually, and knowledgeably, looks at movies.)

    Roger Ebert's criticism is fundamentally a "yes" act--productive, as opposed to destructive. He looks at what 's there and considers it on its own terms. The actual meat of his reviews, then, in their refusal to adhere to the binary dialectics of "good" or "bad", fly in the face of the reductive nature of the thumb system that he's become best known for.

    I'm fully aware that it's a little too early in the morning for a comprehensive discussion of affirmative dialectics, so for further appreciation of our friend Roge, go here and here and here.


    Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

  • Hannah Takes the Stairs To Premiere in Theaters and on TV Via IFC

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    I type this from the Cleveland Airport, where I'm heading into hour 3 of an indefinite layover, but I couldn't wait to get out of purgatory to tell you about a press release I've just received. Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs, the current hallmark of the burgeoning "mumblecore" wave, will screen in New York and on cable this August, courtesy of IFC's First Take day-and-date program. The film, which you surely remember from Spout's SXSW coverage and from the recent mumblecore episode of FilmCouch, opens August 22 at the IFC Center in the West Village; it should be available for on-demand rental several days later. As a huge fan of both Swanberg and the IFC In Theaters model, I think this is great news--this hyper-intimate character study is ideally suited to the on-demand experience.

    If you made it to SXSW this year, you saw at least one of the Festival trailers, directed by Swanberg and starring the Hannah crew. My favorite is embedded below.


    Originally posted on:SpoutBlog

 


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