Karina

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St. Nick

ST. NICK Review
By Karina in Karina on SpoutBlog
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"Two kids — a boy of 11, and a girl of 9, brother and sister, apparent runaways — drag a duffel bag into a crumbly, seemingly abandoned house. Now they live there. No one seems to be looking for them, and they offer no explanation as to where they came from or why they ran away. They could as likely be aliens as lost little children. It’s almost as if they’ve drifted off into another realm, some kind of Oz. The first half of David Lowery’s feature directorial debut St. Nick is devoted to the ways in which this family unit spends their days building a life in their new home. Procuring provisions for cheese sandwiches, salvaging furniture, fixing the toilet. Arguing about the fate of the dog they left behind, and whether or not he misses his under-age owners. Virtually wordless for long stretches of time, St. Nick relies heavily on contemplative imagery to convey meaning –– particularly, the clear-lit landscape or a Texas winter in juxtaposition with the pink-and-white faces of his tw ... " [More]

THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE Review
By Karina in Karina on SpoutBlog
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"The September Issue is an irresistible pop culture mashup: imagine the Teen Vogue segments of The Hills (though her royal highness Anna Wintour is swapped in for cut-rate LA imitation Lisa Love, the MTV reality show’s masterful manner of spinning diegetic commentary out of eye rolls taken out of context is left intact), genetically blended into an alternate universe version of The Office. Except in this office, the workers actually work, and in fact are terrified not to because their boss is Michael Scott’s polar opposite: impatient, undemonstrative, and absolutely incapable of taking no for an answer. As a portrait of Wintour the person, RJ Cutler’s documentary does little to dig under the surface of Wintour’s iconic, impassive under bangs image. But as a meditation on art vs commerce, emotion vs rationality, and the role of fantasy merchants in the recently-burst economic bubble, The September Issue is both cerebral and accessible. If it’s not as provocative as it could be, it’s ... " [More]

LACMA Film Program Saved! For Now!
By Karina in Karina on SpoutBlog
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"The LA Times’ Culture Monster blog is reporting that, thanks to donations totaling $150,000 from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Time Warner Cable/Ovation TV, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has reversed their decision to end their film program in October, and will now keep the program alive “at least through the end of the fiscal year in June 2010.” The Culture Monster post doesn’t indicate whether or not the LACMA’s Michael Govan and the film fan activist group Save Film at LACMA will go through with the much-hyped “popcorn summit”, scheduled to take place on September 1, to discuss LACMA’s film future, but apparently the Museum is newly committed to “thinking about the history and future of film as art as well as film’s increasing importance in the larger narrative of art history.” Interesting side fact/road to conspiracy theory: David Segal’s recent NY Times profile of The Weinstein Company blamed Harvey’s acquisition of Ovation as one of TWC’s biggest missteps ... " [More]

We Live in Public

WE LIVE IN PUBLIC Review
By Karina in Karina on SpoutBlog
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"“I was the smartest kid in town, and the reporters knew it,” brags Josh Harris in We Live in Public, Ondi Timoner’s documentary on the rise and fall of the Internet’s first (and still its most charismatic) video mogul. It’s a telling statement, in that it points to both Harris’ 1990s raison d’etre, and also his Achilles heel: it’s not what you do that matters, it’s that people are watching you do it. Timoner’s portrait of the prescient (and quite possibly crazy) web pioneer will be a must see for anyone interested in internet fame and the phenomenon of casual over-sharing, even if her storytelling tactics are surprisingly stale. A quick-cut pileup of stock footage, video captured by Timoner over a decade on Harris’ trail, and footage recorded during his surveillance projects, Public outlines Harris’ troubled childhood and tricky relationship with his alcoholic mom before clicking into its comfort zone with Harris’ founding of Pseudo.com. Pseudo, launched in 1993, morphed from a Pr ... " [More]

Quiet City

Luke and Brie are on Amazon
By Karina in Karina on SpoutBlog
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"The following review appeared during the 2008 Hamptons Film Festival. Luke and Brie Are On a First Date is now available for rental or purchase via Amazon Video on Demand. Luke and Brie Are On a First Date, which world premiered in the Hamptons last weekend, is the debut feature by Chad Hartigan, a frequent collaborator of Aaron Katz, and there are definitely some superficial similarities between the two filmmakers’ work. Like Katz’s Quiet City, Luke and Brie follows two attractive young people (George Ducker and Meghan Webster) around a city as they break through awkward uncertainty to forge a tentative romantic connection, and with their dreamy, super-intimate videography, both films have a way of enveloping a viewer in the action (or what passes for action), ultimately serving as delivery vehicles for the kind of heightened realism that marks an unexpectedly life-changing night out. But Luke and Brie plays its drama much closer to the surface, and through a little bit of self ... " [More]

SpoutBlog: The Book
By Karina in Karina on SpoutBlog
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"In the 26 months or so since I started editing SpoutBlog full time, we have published thousands of posts, covered dozens of festivals, and reviewed hundreds of films. In that time, blogging has become the default format for online content, while at the same time what it means to be a professional film critic has — to put it kindly — evolved. The meme is that the media is dying, but more precisely, information distribution is in a weird kind of limbo: blogs still seem ephemeral, printed matter legitimate. So! We are going to publish a book, a compilation of SpoutBlog’s “greatest hits,” with special emphasis on my reports from festivals, writings on below-the-radar films, and posts that reflect the evolution in online film culture. We’re going to publish it through CreateSpace, then sell it on Amazon and at film festivals and like events. The goal is not necessarily to make money (although we do hope to break even on publishing costs), but to create a physical snapshot of this thing ... " [More]

Is That *Really* Lauren Bacall ...
By Karina in Karina on SpoutBlog
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"Twitter hasn’t “verified” her account so it could be a fraud, but here’s hoping that this really is Hollywood legend Lauren Bacall mixing it up on the Twitters. It’s plausible — if you condensed the bitchy, dishy voice of her autobiography into 140 character missives, this Twitterstream is what it would look like. My ten favorite moments of her Twitter stream thus far: 10. When she posted the Twitpic of her walking out of Max’s Kansas City en route to Studio 54 to meet “Mr.Warhol and Mr.Nureyev”. 9. Her response to people complaining about her lit cigarette in said picture, spread out over five tweets, including this commentary on the perks of old age: “The good thing about being 84 is that I can smoke as much as I want, If I was smoking 2 packs a day on the set of To Have and Have Not…..when I was 19 and I am still around 65 years later I can continue smoking as much as i want.” 8. “in LA to discuss with Mr. Scorsese his Sinatra biopic in the works, I wonder who he is going to ca ... " [More]

Aaron Katz, Lena Dunham shorts ...
By Karina in Karina on SpoutBlog
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"Chapters 1-12 of R. Kelly’s Trapped In The Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously (2006) by Michael Bell-Smith. Courtesy EAI. from Why + Wherefore on Vimeo. The Zero Film Festival, dedicated to serving “a niche in the independent film community, which has been under appreciated and ignored” by “screening self-financed and zero budget films from filmmakers all over the world”, kicks off tonight with a party in DUMBO, Brooklyn. They’ll be screening short films by some familiar names, including Lena Dunham, Mary Bronstein, Zach Clark and Aaron Katz. According to the fest, Katz’s SXSW 2008 selection Let’s Get Down to Brass Tacks will screen, and Dunham will premiere a new short called Misfire, “about two friends discussing the semantics of a reply to an IM, but it ‘misfires’ when they accidentally hit send.” The lineup also includes Mike Smith’s Chapters 13-22 of R. Kelly’s Trapped In The Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously (see chapters 1-12 above). There’s more info on the event ... " [More]

Rethinking INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS
By Karina in Karina on SpoutBlog
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"When I first saw Inglourious Basterds at Cannes, I walked out of the theater and felt like something was … off. I rushed to my computer and wrote a dismissive review. “Quentin Tarantino,” I wrote, “has never seemed to strain so hard to just make A Quentin Tarantino Film.” I complained about the film’s pacing, the quality of its dialogue, the excessive exposition. “Basterds plays almost like an assembly edit, defiantly presented as-is,” I concluded. And then I saw the film again, this week, in New York, in a version said to be different from the one I saw at Cannes. Some scenes are said to be shorter, although I couldn’t tell you specifically which ones; one scene excised before the French premiere has been reinstated. After that screening, I went back and read what I wrote about the film from France, and cringed. The review of Inglourious Basterds I wrote in May simply does not apply to the film I saw with the same title this week. This happens sometimes. We don’t talk about it muc ... " [More]

Cinema Eye Honors move to January
By Karina in Karina on SpoutBlog
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"Lots to of changes to report at the Cinema Eye Honors. Held in the spring for the first two years of its existence, in 2010 the awards dedicated to nonfiction film will take place in January. The calendar move will change the identity of the event from a footnote to the long awards season to a potential pre-Oscar indicator. Also, filmmaker Esther B. Robinson and newly installed San Francisco Film Society programmer Rachel Rosen will join Cinema Eye Founder AJ Schnack as co-chairs of the event, and former co-chair Thom Powers will now chair the Nominations Committee. Finally, the nominees for January’s awards will be announced at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in England in November, thus somewhat internationalizing the affair. Coverage of past Cinema Eyes. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth " [More]

THE HEADLESS WOMAN Review
By Karina in Karina on SpoutBlog
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"“It’s like an Antonioni film without the ennui,” I said to a friend after seeing Lucretia Martel’s impeccably opaque The Headless Woman, which opens at Film Forum today. This, he said, was what he liked about it — that Martel one-ups her forebears in the Cinema of Disorientation by refusing to seduce the audience with a mirror to their own emotional dissatisfaction. And that is great, and skillful, and interesting … but I miss the ennui. It’s likely that this is the point of The Headless Woman – Martel rips Antonioniennui off its foundations by refusing to throw the audience a bone of indentification via the disorienting effects of lust/love. The Headless Woman deals with sex twice, in two separate encounters both coded as inappropriate; the film seemingly has no use for desire beyond its ability to show up depravity and mental disability. ‘ But on further contemplation, I think Martel does, in fact, ask the viewer to find ways to relate to the post-traumatic stress/psychosis of V ... " [More]

World's Greatest Dad

Bobcat Goldthwait Interview
By Karina in Karina on SpoutBlog
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"This interview was originally published during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. World’s Greatest Dad debuts in New York this week, and it’s already available on VOD. In the director’s statement slipped into the press notes for his Robin Williams-starring Sundance entry World’s Greatest Dad, Bobcat Goldthwait says it took him 25 years in show business to figure out that what he really wants to do is direct movies, and doing so makes him feel like he’s “getting away with murder.” That’s a fair description of what he pulls off in Dad, in which a frustrated novelist/high school teacher (Williams) exploits the death of a loved one to plump up his own popularity. Though far more polished than Goldthwait’s 2006 Sundance competition film Sleeping Dogs Lie (also known as Stay), Dad rides the same line between obscene satire and almost mushy sincerity. I talked to Goldthwait about self-Googling, why he has no desire for his stand-up fans to see his movies, and why he’s not going on Celebrit ... " [More]