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  • My Blueberry Blog Round-Up: Blog Nosh 03/31/08

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    Under discussion:

    Dance Party, USA  (2006)

    Quiet City  (2007)

    • Jim Emerson has collated an incredibly comprehensive account of the events of the 1983 Telluride Film Festival, where Andrei Tarkovsky made some obtuse statements about cinema and art, and Richard Widmark offered an eloquent counterargument, which can essentially be reduced to its most powerful two words: “He stinks.”
    • An intern in the Paramount Vantage publicity office Martin Scorsese has a MySpace profile.
    • If you have $95, you can buy a My Blueberry Nights tee shirt.  Or, you can just go to indieWIRE’s Apple Store event tomorrow night and heckle Wong Kar Wai for indiscriminately distributing his branding rights for free.
    • Dance Party USA and Quiet City scorer Keegan DeWitt is working on a new album. You can listen to a preview here.

    Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
    Posted Monday, March 31, 2008 7:00 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments  

  • Slavoj Zizek Goes to Telluride

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    Under discussion:

    Zizek!  (2005)

    The Pervert's Guide to Cinema  (2006)

    It’s a good thing I work alone in an airtight concrete room, because I literally, audibly yelped when this press release landed in my inbox. Slavoj Zizek––the superstar Lacanian theorist who Sophie Fiennes bluescreened into Psycho, who analyzed 9/11 through terms set by The Matrix, who is probably the only former Princeton professor to star in a documentary with an exclamation point in the title––will Guest Direct the 2008 Telluride Film Festival. Telluride’s Guest Directors are charged with putting together a sidebar of films, and introducing the screenings at the Labor Day weekend fest. In keeping with Telluride tradition, Zizek’s picks, like the rest of the line up, will be kept secret until the week of the fest, but if anybody want to start putting money down on what Zizek might program, I’m game.


    Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
    Posted Monday, March 31, 2008 5:01 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments  

  • Nina Simone Meets Fassbinder. Clip of the Day.

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    The above montage of scenes from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, set to two songs by Nina Simone, was posted on Vinyl is Heavy by Stephen Boone. I’ll let him explain:

    The idea is that Ali: Fear Eats the Soul is two films. The first is about two lovers dealing with the terrible, disapproving world. The second is about the two lovers, having conquered the world, dealing with what poison it has left in each other’s system. Nina sings a song for each “film.”

    I’m generally a big fan of the YouTube musical montage/tribute’s ability to condense an entire film experience into a concentrated crack hit of pop-scored pure emotion. The second half of this clip especially nails the devastating strangeness of the film’s final moments.

    I recently wrote about Ali here.


    Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
    Posted Monday, March 31, 2008 4:00 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments  

  • More on the Polanski Thing

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    On Friday, we learned that HBO had quietly opened the Sundance hit doc Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired in one theater on 181st Street in Manhattan, so that the film could qualify for an Oscar nomination before it runs on the cable channel in June. The doc wasn’t screened for the press, because the release is obligatory and presumably TV critics will have at it soon enough. But the New York Times, who have a mandate to review every film that open in any theatrical venue in Manhattan, put Manohla Dargis on an A train up to 181st street and ran her review in today’s paper. The circumstances of the film’s virtual non-release were deemed remarkable enough for inclusion in the review’s second paragraph, where Dargis backhands the doc with praise and notes that the token, Academy-baiting theatrical release could be an exercise in futility. “Its one-week theatrical run will make it eligible for Academy Award consideration, though given that organization’s often pitiful record when it comes to nonfiction film, it seems unlikely that a movie this subtly intelligent would make its short list.”

    AJ Schnack argues that a film which so stealthily end-runs an actual theatrical audience doesn’t deserve the slot on the short list that it’s so baldy fishing for. (more…)


    Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
    Posted Monday, March 31, 2008 3:01 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments  

  • 5 Films for Yankees Fans to Hate

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    Under discussion:

    Damn Yankees  (1958)

    One, Two, Three  (1961)

    Weather permitting, I should be at Yankees Stadium this afternoon for opening day. So, I figured I’d share one of my favorite jokes from Billy Wilder’s One, Two, Three (a film I also wrote about last week). James Cagney plays a Coca-Cola executive in West Berlin who’s supposed to be making sure his boss’ 17-year-old daughter, Scarlett (Pamela Tiffin), stays out of trouble. He does a bad job, though, because Scarlett sneaks into East Berlin, marries a young communist and gets pregnant with his child. When Cagney’s character asks the girl why she’s been helping to blow up balloons featuring the words, “Yankee Go Home”, she replies that where she comes from (Atlanta), everyone hates Yankees.

    I know it’s not meant to be baseball-related, but I sometimes like to pretend that Scarlett has foreseen the ‘96 and ‘99 World Series (the film takes place a few years after the Braves beat the Yankees in the 1957 World Series, but the team wasn’t yet in Atlanta at that time). And I wonder if most Yankees fans would appreciate that line or see it as a reason to hate One, Two, Three. I’ve encountered a lot of fans of the team who are just that serious that they would probably boycott a movie that makes their Bombers sound or look bad. Here’s five such films I figure no “true” Yankees fan can admit to enjoying:

    1. Damn Yankees - Obviously it’s in the title that this is anti-Yankees propaganda. Adapted from a stage musical of the same name, the 1958 film is about a Washington Senators fan who sells his soul to the devil in order to play for the team and help them defeat the Yanks for the league pennant. (more…)


      Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
    Posted Monday, March 31, 2008 1:00 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments  

  • Trade Roughage 08/31/08

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    Under discussion:

    21  (2008)

    • As expected, 21 came in at the top of the box office this weekend, with a not-huge $23.7 million. And as hoped for by many––maybe even Paramount, who opened the thing on suspiciously few screens––Stop-Loss tanked with $4.5 million.
    • Just three months before their mutual contract expires, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have severed ties. AFTRA president Roberta Reardon said the move was prompted by her former sister union’s dirty dealings in the contract negotiation process. Actual quote: “We can’t trust SAG.”
    • A group of British directors has formed their own union of sorts, called Directors U.K. The goal, according to Variety, is “securing a standard collective bargaining agreement with British employers.”

    Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
    Posted Monday, March 31, 2008 1:00 PM by SpoutBlog | with 0 comments  

 


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