The long-promised SpoutBlog book is finally here!

An anthology of the posts that various SpoutBlog readers, trusted advisors and I consider to be my “greatest hits” as editor of this blog, The Portable SpoutBlog contains 41 previously published pieces, a new introductory essay (intended as a recap and a look forward; you can consider this a substitute for a sentimental final post by me on this blog), and notes and addendums contextualizing the included blog posts — dated and ephemeral by their very nature — for their new life in print.

The content is divided into four sections: RESPONSES, being the most bloggy of blog posts — that is, those inspired by other writings, usually other blog posts; DISPATCHES, being reports from film festivals and New York film events; CONVERSATIONS, being interviews and reports from intimate public discussions; and finally, REVIEWS, of festival films, theatrical releases, and DVDs.

Major topics discussed in the selected pieces include: Judd Apatow, mumblecore, The Hills and Michelangelo Antonioni, There Will Be Blood, Sex and the City, Woody Allen, the state of film criticism, the state of documentary film criticism, Jonathan Demme and liberal guilt, Che, Goodbye Solo and “neo-neo-realism”, CineVegas,Troma, Comic-Con, The Hurt Locker, Antichrist, Abel Ferrara, Whit Stillman, Alejandro Adams, Kelly Reichardt, Todd Sklar, Ti West, Southland Tales, Medicine for Melancholy, Synecdoche NY, and Inglorious Basterds (twice).

This was a low-budget, DIY, labor of love-type endeavor, and production was somewhat rushed so that the book could be ready for purchase by the time my employment with Spout came to an end. I’ve seen the finished product, and though it’s not perfectly polished, I think it’s an accurate survey of what I tried to do here.

You can buy The Portable SpoutBlog at Amazon. If you have any questions about the book, please leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them. Happy reading!

I’ll actually be dressing up as something non-film-related tomorrow (”Moss” from UK series The IT Crowd), but I do plan on watching some horror flicks (including Paranormal Activity), which I rarely do, on Halloween or any other day. Maybe if I’m feeling academic — and since my present job situation has me aiming to get my PhD in cinema studies — I’ll break out Mary Ann Sloan’s essay “Film and the Masquerade” and attempt to make it relative to the festivities (I know, it’s a real stretch).

What will you be doing? Comment with your film-related costumes and/or plans after checking out what the film blogs are posting Halloween-related after the jump:

• Michael Kaplan at The Huffington Post puts Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds radio hoax into perspective of today’s media:
  

  The newspapers made much of The War of the Worlds because they feared radio’s usurpation of the news audience; radio made much of it because an aura of “social manipulation” provided a powerful weapon in its campaign to gain advertising. Welles himself called it the “radio version of dressing up in a sheet and saying Boo!” - for he knew that tomorrow things would return to normal and we would continue to get our facts from responsible, conscientious sources. But now - as newspapers collapse, radio and television pander for shrinking audiences; as we get our news from the entertainers or controversialists whose opinions we already share - we may soon have no way to be sure what is honest reporting and what is just theatre of the air, nor whether those frightening figures in sheets are neighbor children… or real monsters. Happy Halloween.

• Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical shares a favorite villain in the latest of the blog’s month-long focus on bad guys:
  

  There are villains we love, and villains we’d love to be — at least fictionally, imaginatively within our own little dream worlds. These are worlds where we don’t have to really kill anybody or do anything bad, but can just lather ourselves in their badassedness, especially as the time ticks down towards Halloween. For me, there’s probably no villain I’d rather mimic than Kill Bill’s Elle Driver, California Mountain Snake.

• Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk shares a clip of his favorite Halloween costume ever:
  

  This guy’s Bumblebee costume would be awesome simply for looking like that and for having flashing lights.  But the best part is, he can actually transform into a car.  The sad part is, that means he (or whoever actually made it) spent way more time figuring out the actual logistics of this than anyone on the Transformers movies.

• Erik Davis at SciFi Squad shares and comments on the Halloween-themed Today Show segment from this morning, in which drunken Ewoks got a little out of control. (And just to add to the presumptions, I must note that I did see a lot of dwarves drinking at the Heartland Brewery near Rockefeller Plaza last night. Perhaps they never left?):
  

  The only one who seems mildly amused by the whole thing is Al Roker, who makes one or two comments about the fact that these tiny people got hammered prior to filming the segment. Either that or they’re just really trying to stay in character. After all, if real Ewoks were on the set, wouldn’t they be trying to mess with every little thing? Isn’t that what they do … cause trouble?

• Gabe Delahaye at Videogum, in addition to sharing a frightening Mickey Rourke in costume, points out it’s blog law that every blog must recommend a scary movie to watch on Halloween. His recycled pick:
  

  I am going to recommend that you watch the same movie that I recommended you watch last year, because it is hilarious, and because I am lazy. The movie is called The Gingerdead Man, and it stars the voice acting of Gary Busey as a possessed blood-thirsty gingerbread cookie wreaking havoc on a shitty bakery full of retarded teenagers.

• Ryan Adams at Awards Daily responds to a list compiled by Martin Scorsese of the filmmaker’s picks for scariest horror films of all time at Daily Beast:
  

  I’ve never seen The Entity or The Uninvited and now I want to.  But I can say without hesitation that the only thing scary to me about Dead of Night and Isle of the Dead is their hellishly stilted dialogue and paralyzing  pacing.   That said, I’m down with Scorsese’s other 9 choices, and I’m hoping his obvious affection for crazed  isolation helps him conjure up some of the same classic atmosphere on Shutter Island.

• Dustin Rowles at Pajiba offers a list of horror movies for the weak. Included is the one film that’s ever truly scared me (yes, even today):
  

  Poltergeist: While the most of you who haven’t seen it since your middle-school years may not be surprised to learn that it’s not nearly as scary as it was when you were watching it on that VCR with the wired remote from behind your fingers, you might be surprised to learn that it’s actually a very family-friendly “horror” film that’s about as dark and sinister as E. freakin’ T. But then again, Poltergeist isn’t a bad film, either. It’s just not particularly scary to adult, or even teenage, audiences (which is probably why so many of our parents had no problem allowing us to see it in our formative scarring years). I suppose, even, that it’s a decent way to introduce younger kids to horror films; it is rated PG after all, Just make sure to skip over the clown scenes or close your eyes.

• Neil Miller at Film School Rejects has a different view of Poltergeist in today’s installment of his site’s “31 Days of Horror” series:
  

  As I observed upon watching this film for the first time in a long time (see below for the rest of the story), it is one of the few truly great and terrifying horror films in which no one actually dies. At least, not during the runtime of the film. It involves plenty of dead people, all of whom died a long time ago, but no one actually dies (spoiler alert, straight from the early 80s). However, there is one badass scene in which the son (played by Oliver Robbins) is nearly swallowed whole by a tree. If that ain’t killer, I don’t know what is.

• Andrew O’Hehir at Salon’s Beyond the Multiplex has a list of alt-horror recommendations. Here’s my personal favorite of the bunch:
  

  “The Last Winter” One last big dose of love for Fessenden, who directed this atmospheric Alaska-set eco-catastrophe thriller that channels, or so he claims, both John Carpenter’s “The Thing” and Kurosawa’s “Dersu Uzala.” Frankly, Larry, the big spectral secret revealed at the end of the movie is pretty goofy, but that’s made up for by the tense, near-future setting in which an isolated oil-field crew is drilling through the melting Alaska permafrost — and things are starting to go very wrong. And that last shot, the one where this movie collides head-on with “An Inconvenient Truth”? Devastating.

• Rodrigo Perez at The Playlist has a list of recommended new horror DVDs. Here’s one of them:
  

  3. “Trick R Treat” (Warner Bros., DVD and Blu-ray, $27.98 and $35.99) Warner Bros. produced this anthology horror yarn from “Superman Returns” co-writer Mike Dougherty back in 2007. It sat on a shelf, collecting dust, occasionally rolled out for the odd screening. (We saw it last Halloween at a free Fangoria screening, crammed into the now-defunct Two Boots theatre.) This is odd because, well, the movie (a sort of post-modern cross between George Romero’s “Creepshow” and Paul Haggis’ “Crash”) is really, really good.

• Terri Schwartz and Jenni Miller at MTV Movies Blog discuss Trick ‘r Treat in their latest “Gore Girls” column:
  

  Jenni: It’s a fun party movie. But I didn’t love it. Have some people over, drink some beers, watch the movie the night before Halloween to get in the spirit!

  Terri: I feel like this is the movie you want to see the day before Halloween. That way when Halloween comes around, you’re especially freaked out.

• Meanwhile, the MTV News Team has compiled a list of their favorite or most feared scary movies, also at MTV Movies Blog. Joel Hanek selects Ernest Scared Stupid:
  

  The troll is horrifying. I don’t know if it’s the fangs or the snarling or the perpetual mucous on its face, which consist of two noses, but it gave me nightmares.

  Seriously, who made the executive decision to have this in a kids movie? “Ernest Scared Stupid” wins the award for scariest movie because that inappropriate marketing accomplishes the goal of leaving you with something wholly unexpected.

• Cory Casciato at Topless Robot responds to Twilight’s wussification of vampires with a list of the “10 least wussy vampire movies ever.” At the bottom of the list is the answer to Twilight:
  

  10) The Lost Boys
  There’s nothing wrong with a vampire movie aimed at teens - The Lost Boys proved that. Not only is the greatest moment in the Coreys’ (Feldman and Haim) history, it’s also a damn fine vampire tale. Sure, it incorporates the fussy, “seductive” elements of vampirism that have been so horrifically distorted in modern vampdom, but it doesn’t forget to make the vamps brutal bastards, too. Also, it has that maggot eating scene. You won’t see that in Twilight.

• Joseph “Jon” Lanthier at Bright Lights After Dark offers an athiest’s guide to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”:
  

  While Irving’s Ichabod Crane embodies a firmer moral, one steeped in a classically frontier-American sense of chivalric propriety, Disney’s Ichabod propounds a far more useful (and a far more modern) message – the relevance of which extends far beyond love triangles encircling the lustless courtship of old money. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is a cautionary tale of belief, of the dangers of faith that hinders our success, and it’s likely the only one of its kind to be found in the slush of mainstream family animation.

• Movieweb has embedded a whole ton of horror flicks for Halloween viewing all on one page:
  

  this ghost-filled holiday wouldn’t be quite as much fun without a heavy dose of scary horror movies. Don’t fret, we have the fix you’ve been looking for. Here, gathered in one creepy corner, are a bleeding gut full of classic treats for your viewing pleasure. You better pull up a blanket to hide behind before diving into this treasure trove of icky goodness! These flicks are bound to scare the skin off your bones. To get started, click on any of the horrible, heinous titles below and prepare to cover your eyes!

• The following blogs have costume contests going on: The Movie Blog; Cinematical; and Cinema Blend.
• And I leave you with a video essay by Matt Zoller-Seitz made for The L Magazine (via The House Next Door) showcasing horror film locations:

First, a whole bunch from Mike Maguire:

1) Do you find yourself living an adequate/satisfied lifestyle with film criticism as your sole career (if it is) and source of income? A bit of a sore question at the moment, of course, but I’m confident you’ll find a new outlet.

I should have specified that I wouldn’t answer questions about money, but I didn’t, so I will: I did, and it was. I don’t know if it will be again.

3) Who is your favorite working female filmmaker?

I think answering that question would be a backhanded compliment to the filmmaker I chose. I mean, I don’t want to be anyone’s “favorite female critic” — I don’t want “critic” to have to be qualified. I want to be good, not good for a girl. Maybe that makes me a dick?

4) Why the fuck are certain people drooling over Bright Star?

I don’t know, I thought it was okay for a chick flick. (Okay, now I’m being a dick. I’m sorry.)

Look, people love a return to form, and Bright Star is the best Jane Campion film Jane Campion has made in a long while. It’s also, essentially, Twilight for lit majors (and, apparently, Quentin Tarantino).

And to sort of combine this into your query about Confessions of a Shopaholic, which I haven’t seen, I thought Coco Before Chanel did a better job at presenting a life-defining romance than Bright Star, and was more satisfying as a “fashion=sex –– and vice versa!” guilty pleasure than the Sex and the City movie. I am not every woman — it is not all in me — but I am certainly ready and willing to admit when escapism targeted right at me works (see my Coco review here). I don’t know how I could prove to your mom that I’m not manly … maybe have her contact me directly and I’ll give her my measurements?

WIll writes:

Did you ever get a DVD of The Walking Dead? It’s on the new Karloff-Lugosi collection from Warner.

I know! I haven’t bought the set yet, but it’s on my wishlist.

Karl Leschinsky asks:

I only now just discovered your awesome blogs after Jim Emerson (at Scanners) posted to your blog about a change of heart in regards to “IB” and how critics are real people that do change… One of the best articles I’ve read.I’m hoping if nothing else you’ll get a blog at blogger/blogspot but I’m sure you have some other plans lined up… I hope? Anyway, wish ya the best! Ps. Will your work here be archived on the site?

I do have a personal blog, and I will continue to freelance while I figure out my long term plans (I always post freelance pieces on Twitter and/or my personal blog; my most recent outlets include TimeOut NY, indieWIRE, and Slate’s DoubleX blog). You can also hear me on the radio almost every Friday morning. As far as I know, the SpoutBlog archive will stay up for the time being, but you can also buy a “greatest hits” of my posts (including that Basterds piece) in book form. More on that tomorrow.

Erin writes:

Personally, I’d like to Karina to talk about sentimental favorites from childhood–you know, the type of movie you liked when you were a kid, but you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole NOW. We all have them…

Related: daveed asks,

I’d be interested to know about your guilty film pleasures — those less-than artful creations that you love to watch over and over.

Honestly, most of the films I loved as a child hold up pretty well: Mary Poppins, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, the original Hairspray, Edward Scissorhands… I mean, I guess I could pretend I feel guilty about stuff like Fried Green Tomatoes or The Cutting Edge (my then-favorites of 1991 and 1992, respectively), but if either popped up on Lifetime right now, it’s not like I’d be able to change the channel. What’s crazy to me is that just a year and a half after my dad accompanied me to a matinee of The Cutting Edge, I was reading Entertainment Weekly obsessively and going alone to see movies like Dazed and Confused and Ruby in Paradise.

Really, if we’re going to talk about guilty pleasures — as in, films that I do actually feel guilty enjoying as much as I do — we can only talk about Adrian Lyne. I can’t even be critical about movies like Indecent Proposal and Flashdance — they just sink their claws into my ovaries and the rest of me is helpless to fight it.

Chris writes:

I was recently listening back to old episodes of FilmCouch, when i heard you discuss your love for Michael Mann’s Miami Vice on Episode 30. In particular, you expressed your joy at the way that the film gets derailed in order for Li Gong and Colin Farrell to jump on a speed boat (after Farrell’s smooth chat-up line worked a treat) and zoom away for their steamy affair…lf you have a chance to discuss this hugely misunderstood classic, I’d be interested to hear it.

Alas, I don’t have space enough or time right now, but if I do any sort of Best of the 00s end-of-decade roundup Miami Vice will definitely be part of it.

Kamera88 asks:

I’ve just recently started a film podcast and I’m writing for a blog. And things are not starting off so well. Do you have any advice for making an interesting podcast?

It’s difficult. I think the most important thing is to make if feel like a conversation. You have to either imagine that you’re talking to a friend, or … actually talk to a friend. And definitely don’t try to interview strangers before you’re comfortable enough with your own voice and confident enough to be direct about what you’re trying to get them to say.

Schuyler Bestkind writes:

Let all sensible persons uncork the champagne and dance a jig with Armond White on Karina Longworth’s grave!!! (Hey, maybe she can get a lucrative position as handmaiden to David Hudson, and the online film nerd incest fest of suck-ups can continue unabated forevermore?)

Now, now … in this climate, a lucrative position of any kind is nothing to look down on. Even if it does require incest.

The most popular lists on SpoutBlog have involved sex scenes or Halloween costumes. So, to give the people what they want we’ve decided to combine both topics for our final list ever. It makes sense anyway, seeing as how Halloween is this weekend and seeing as how the holiday has pretty much turned into a sex-based festivity — for adults, at least.

Surprisingly, with all the cosplay fans and other fetishists out there, sex scenes involving costumes aren’t too common. We’ve tried to exclude anything considered a uniform or transvestism, as neither of these is about masquerading. There are two job-related costumes, however, but both have been deemed qualified. And the single example of cross-dressing is more about disguise than transgenderism.

Feel free to add to the list if you think of any that we left out.

Louis Fools Betty With a Darth Vader Mask, in Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

In a highly questionable scene, one of the titular nerds (Robert Carradine) borrows a Darth Vader mask from the head Alpha Beta (Ted McGinley) during a costumed event in order to fool the guy’s girlfriend (Julia Montgomery) into having sex with him. Does it count as rape if she enjoyed the sex? That’s apparently debatable, but imagine how things would have been different if Louis had not been better than Stan in the sack (or “moon bounce,” as it were). The whole idea is far creepier than it is funny or romantic or whatever it’s meant to be.

Scott Howard is Seduced by a Costar, in Teen Wolf (1985)

No, we didn’t confuse wolfing out with wearing a costume. If Scott Howard (Michael J. Fox) merely got it on as The Wolf, he wouldn’t be on this list. But if you recall, he wasn’t transformed when his dream girl Pamela (Lorie Griffin) seduces him in the dressing room following their play rehearsal. However, he is wearing his costume from the play, a Civil War uniform. Offscreen it is implied that he wolfs out in the act, but that’s neither here nor there.

Mikey Dry Humps Nixon, in The Ice Storm (1997)

Remember in Dazed and Confused when Adam Goldberg tells of a dream in which he’s getting it on with a perfect female body with the head of Abe Lincoln? He had it better than little Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood) whose first sexual experience is with a cute neighbor (Christina Ricci) wearing a Nixon mask. Sure, it was real and not a dream, but it was merely a bit of dry humping, and really, having to go through life associating Tricky Dick’s face with sex is far more unfortunate than being confused by a fleeting image from your subconscious, no matter how disturbing. (watch the scene here)

William Shakespeare Unwraps Viola, in Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Considered to be one of the sexiest love scenes ever, the first time William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) beds Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow) is following his discovery that she’s been disguising herself as a boy in order to act in one of his plays. “I do not know how to undress a man,” the young Bard says before removing her masculine attire, including a bandage wrapped tightly around her chest, which he must unravel and unravel and unravel to reveal her bosom.

Masked Orgy, in Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Don’t try to argue that mere masks don’t count as costumes. If they adequately disguise an otherwise naked person, it qualifies. Anyway, many of the characters in this infamous orgy scene are additionally wearing capes or cloaks. Though it needs no description, the scene follows Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) as he infiltrates a top secret, high-class sex party. As he’s led through a mansion, we join him in witnessing multiple sex acts involving multiple partners. And depending on whether you only saw the film in a U.S. theater, most of these acts were obscured through censoring figures.

Tiffany and Curtis Get the KISS of Death, in Idle Hands (1999)

On their way to a Halloween dance, high school students Tiffany (Kelly Monaco) and Curtis (Steve Van Wormer), dressed up as KISS members “The Starchild”/Paul Stanley and “The Demon”/Gene Simmons, respectively, make out heavily in the car. Before they can go all the way, though, a zombified, disembodied hand crashes their party and kills them.

Fat Guy Has a Threesome, in Rules of Attraction (2002)

In one of many amusing bits of background action in this film, Sean Bateman (James Van Der Beek) and Lara (Jessica Biel) are chatting in the kitchen during the “Dress to Get Screwed Party” while a masked fat guy is making out very heavily with two girls who are both naked and clearly out of his league. It’s a simple gag, but like a combination of the Revenge of the Nerds and Eyes Wide Shut scenes it gives otherwise unattractive guys hope that they can get laid if they just frequent costumed events.

Willie Does Anal in the Dressing Room, in Bad Santa (2003)

Santa outfits are usually only considered sexy on women, but apparently it works for some male Santas, as long as they’re as “bad” as Willie (Billy Bob Thornton), a burglar who infiltrates department stores by getting a job portraying ol’ Saint Nick at Christmastime. In this scene, Willie is discovered, red velvet pants around his ankles, having anal sex with a presumably large woman in a dressing room in the big and tall section of the store. How do we know it’s anal, even though the act is concealed behind the dressing room door? The wonderfully nasty line, “You ain’t gonna shit right for a week!”

Tom and Edie Role Play, in A History of Violence (2005)

In the most realistic scene of this list, husband and wife Tom and Edie Stall (Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello) spice up their love life by role-playing when Edie puts on her high school cheerleader uniform and initiates what turns into the most graphic ‘69’ performed in a non-pornographic film.

Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II Have Superhero Sex, in Watchmen (2009)

In an earlier scene, Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) and Laurie Jupiter (Malin Ackerman) attempt to have sex, but it doesn’t work out. Probably because they’re in boring old civilian clothes. Once they get into their superhero costumes, however, and become Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II, Dreiberg, who went impotent the first time, is much more turned on. And they have an over-the-top first time set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Apparently once you do it in a superhero costume you can’t go back, judging by claims that both Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry like to have sex with their X-Men costumes on, and Will Smith likes to do it as Hancock.

To fill some space, though, let me just say, “Giovanni Ribisi is in this????” And his little interaction with Sigourney Weaver makes me think he’s this film’s equivalent of Paul Reiser in James Cameron’s Aliens. Of course, that’s a positive comparison. If I wanted to make another negative list of films Avatar resembles, I’d point out that cliche Braveheart-like speech heard at the end.

Check out what the other film blogs are saying about the new and improved Avatar trailer after the jump:

• Steve Weintraub at Collider has changed his mind:
  

  after watching the just released three and a half minute trailer for James Cameron’s return to movie theaters, I am now officially on board and shutting up.  This movie looks fantastic and any bit of hesitation has vanished.  If you were in the same boat as me about the first trailer, you absolutely need to watch this new one.  You’ll be sold.

• Peter Hall at Cinematical thinks this trailer shall wash away all skepticism:
  

  If, like myself, you were disappointed with that first teaser, and if, like myself, you avoided Avatar Day and any subsequent new marketing tactics outside of the normal trailer build up, then maybe this new, full trailer for Cameron’s return to science fiction will be the first time you set aside your cynicism and think “Alright, I get what all the fuss is about now.”

• Alex Billington at FirstShowing raves about the trailer:
  

  This is the trailer we’ve been waiting for, the one that finally shows that there’s more to Avatar than just giant blue Na’vi aliens, that it’s a story about love and survival and the importance of life. And it looks absolutely incredible. I think this could be one of the best trailers of the entire year, it’s truly epic, and truly exciting.

• Craig Kennedy at Living in Cinema is still not on board:
  

  If corny lines like “Ladies and gentlemen, you are not in Kansas anymore. You are on Pandora” give you a masculine chill, then you’ll probably be all over this thing. Me? Despite the fact the trailer gives a much more detailed look at what the movie is all about (we even get to see Giovani Ribisi doing the Paul Reiser part from Aliens), I’m having a hard time letting go of my skepticism.

• Kevin Jagernauth at The Playlist still has some issues with the marketing of the film:
  

  we’re still not quite convinced. Cameron has never had a great ear for dialogue, and that continues to be evidenced by in this trailer with a lot of tired tough guy speak we’ve heard in other films. But the biggest problem for us is that the supposed eye-melting special effects are still nowhere to be seen or even hinted at. What this trailer does is deliver a lot of military guys, big machines, flying creatures and glimpses of the still odd-looking Na’vi on a grand scale, but we still feel like we’ve seen it all before. It also strikes us as odd that the word “3D” is never mentioned once, when it’s supposed to be the most impressive visual component of the film.

• Dustin Rowles at Pajiba is also still skeptical:
  

  Yes: The visuals are impressive, and the blue people are cool — cooler, at least, than skinny, blue Koo-Aid pitchers. But if you ask me, the story feels very … conventional, maybe a little ham-fisted, and racked with cliches. And while I will grant that the Avatar universe is eye-popping, it’s still not particularly compelling for me.

• Sean at Film Junk is also having trouble letting go of doubts:
  

  Fortunately for Cameron, this new trailer is a huge improvement over the initial teaser trailer [...] However, it certainly reinforces the fact that most of the action will be 100% CG animation (albeit very high quality CG animation) while it remains to be seen just how much more thrilling the 3-D viewing experience will be.

• Kyle Buchanan at Movieline fears the CG, too, but he’s at least anticipating a decent movie:
  

  I’m still not completely convinced by the Na’Vi, and I’m not eagerly anticipating airless scenes of CG monsters whomping on each other (the climax of The Incredible Hulk kind of cured me of that), but at least this trailer seems to be touting the film effectively. For years, we’ve been told that we’re compelled to go watch Avatar, that it will reinvent our whole cinematic experience. This trailer simply asks us if we want to watch a good movie.

• Neil Miller at Film School Rejects also thinks it’s going to be good enough:
  

  Our own Cole Abaius asked yesterday if this was the trailer to turn all of the naysayers around? The trailer to give all of us the hope we once had for an epic sci-fi adventure unlike anything we’ve ever seen? And from what I can see, it isn’t changing the world overnight — but it still looks pretty cool.

• Anne Thompson at Thompson on Hollywood looks forward to seeing something that’s like nothing she’s seen before:
  

  I know there are a lot of Avatar naysayers out there but when the hairs rise on the back of my neck I know there’s something real going on. I felt it with Twilight and I feel it with this latest Avatar trailer

• Mark at I Watch Stuff sees additional films Avatar resembles:
  

  I knew wheelchair guy became a blue alien at some point, but until this trailer, I hadn’t realized he’d also eventually turn into a mix between William Wallace and President Bill Pullman.

• David Oliver at CHUD.com is also still focused on comparisons:
  

  There’s a new trailer for Avatar floating around out there.  Scoping it out gives one a better feel of what the film is: it’s Dances With Wolves on another planet.  If those Pandoran horses are called C’isco and there’s a Na’vi running around named Two Socks, I’m alerting Kevin Costner.

Check out the trailer below:

Extraordinary forces — knee-jerk wariness of capitalism, ordinary standards of human decency in the face death — conspire to give This is It the stench of a robbed grave. A rushed release of footage documenting rehearsals for a series of concerts Michael Jackson was about to launch when he died in of a drug overdose in June 2009, bought in a bidding war by Sony for a reported $60 million and edited by concert director Kenny Ortega (whose most impressive cinematic credits heretofore consist of Newsies and all three widgets in the High School Musical franchise), This is It exists on this earth only because Michael Jackson no longer does.

The problem is not just that Jackson’s death has changed the commodity value of this material from questionable to infinite, but also that it’s so clear that the Michael Jackson presented in the footage would never have sanctioned this release. Depicted here as a gentle genius who insists on having the last word in every aspect of the massive production (even if that word sometimes takes the form of impenetrable similes such as  “play it like you’re getting out of bed” — which takes on extra mystery coming from a man who apparently used intravenous anesthetic as a sleeping aid), it’s unfathomable that Michael Jackson would have allowed the world to see footage of him shuffling through blocking and stopping mid-number to nitpick, often dressed in mismatched layers (a bomber jacket and massive Ed Hardy sweats, a boxy silver lame blazer and orange jeans) that fail to obscure the boniness of his frame. How does he look? Like a 50 year old man who has had a lot of surgical procedures. This is not exactly a revelation, but it’s not flattering, either.

And so, it goes without saying that This is It is vile. But it’s also fascinating as a portrait of how far one man would go (and how many millions of dollars and thousands of workers and hours of labor he’d be able to employ) to restore his public persona in the image of his ego after years of undeniable damage.

The rehearsal scene is set via breathless testimonials from Jackson’s dancers. Later they’ll be glimpsed in crotch grabbing clinics and taught to jump “like a piece of toast,” but here they can barely hold back their emotions when talking about The Man, The Myth, The MJ. “Life is hard, right?” croaks a small, greasy Timerblake-alike with tears in his eyes. Titles tell us this footage was shot at auditions in April, which may or may not be ingenuous, but obviously the idea is to point out that even before his death, some people responded genuinely to Jackson as an untainted godhead who gave them some sort of inspiration when times were tough. This is It, then, is presented as a final gift from Michael Jackson to us.

It’s fitting, then, that the entire show-within-the-film is about Jackson as death-defying hero. He creates a digital militia to back him on “They Don’t Care About Us” to fight … racism? He digitally inserts himself into Gilda, then turns tommy-gun-toting “Smooth Criminal” to outrun Bogie in The Big Sleep. In the show/film’s pièce de résistance (which comes a way before the end, which is a problem — at least to someone who would never voluntarily listen to MJ off a dancefloor/without the aid of cocktails), Michael sings “Earth Song” in front of a pre-filmed segment in which a phantom bulldozer burns down a rainforest, thus destroying the home of an orphan girl of unidentifiable mixed race. Suddenly we switch to a digital recreation of what presumably would happen in the live show, had it ever happened: an actual bulldozer appears on stage and heads straight for MJ, but stops just short of hitting him … presumably blocked by the purity of Jackson’s love for the planet? Who knows how or why he concocted this fractured persona as stylish gangster militia leader cum savior of rainforests — anything but accused child molester and walking embodiment of The Picture of Dorian Gray, right?

The segments that deal with more local, specific sorts of love are much more problematic, and they give This is It a sick, voyeuristic kick. (In a good way — what seems like it would be bad for the concert is only good for the behind-the-scenes film.) Though he claims to be reserving his voice and his energy (he leaves the spectacular physical work to his back-up dancers, and in most of the rehearsed numbers doesn’t seem to perform choreography as much as cycle through a series of signature moves that come naturally when he hears his own music), Jackson seems generally capable and on-top-of-it in all but a few sequences. The first, and most jarring, is a segment of the show devoted to Jackson 5 songs. Here Jackson seems unable to find a voice to sing, and when he stops the rehearsal to address a technical issue, his incoherent complaints about fists in his ears seem to confuse even the unflappable, off-camera Ortega. Later, a number set against a Fosse-esque cityscape backdrop and to an extended version of “The Way You Make Me Feel” starts spectacularly, but Jackson fumbles awkwardly when trying to pantomime sexual attraction young female dancer. And this is nothing compared Jackson’s cringe-worthy mugging through “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You.” Maybe it’s just impossible to see Jackson performing a romantic duet with a female singer and not project his baggage onto the scene, but in this number Jackson’s declarations of love seem exponentially more genuine when he turns out of a staged embrace to face the audience.

This is, of course, is the true tragedy of Jackson’s life, which in itself is an almost unthinkably extreme replay of the tragedies of dozens of superstar performers before him: they have something like a love relationship with millions, and yet are totally, maybe even criminally incapable of having anything resembling normal one-on-one personal/romantic relations. This is It’s attempt to whitewash the scandal out of the Jackson myth is reprehensible, but the couple of moments where the undeniable pathos of his plight peeks through are indispensable.

Our first look comes via this new trailer, which shows us Invictus has a winning combination of biopic and underdog sports drama. The only thing that would make it even more Academy-friendly would be something Holocaust-related. Yet apartheid should be enough of a substitute given the film’s other worthy elements.

Personally, as much as I appreciate the obvious Morgan Freeman casting, I kinda wish Nelson Mandela was playing himself. I’d love to see him get the Oscar that Freeman will probably be up for. As for Matt Damon, I’m unfortunately having trouble distinguishing his performance in this trailer so soon after watching him recycling his Jason Bourne act in the Green Zone trailer that hit yesterday. Still, it is his year for a nomination, so hopefully he’s better here than he was in The Informant!

Check out what the other film blogs are saying about the trailer after the jump:

• Dan Hopper at Best Week Ever thinks this couldn’t be more “Oscary” if Mandela were handicapped and gay:
  

  The true story itself is already amazing, and Eastwood’s about as reliable a director as there is, so I’m gonna assume this film will fly above the standard inspiring sports movie. I just wonder if Morgan Freeman will finally have the opportunity to do some narration in a film

• S.T. VanAirsdale at Movieline wonders if being so “Oscary” necessarily equates with being worth seeing:
  

  Even these 151 seconds have catharsis to spare; you don’t have to be the world’s biggest cynic to wonder what more the full feature has to offer beyond more exotic chopper shots of South Africa and more of Damon shirtless (he had to do something to make up for the accent). But at least the spot does what it needs to do in a time of year when perception is everything and when Eastwood can’t help but slap some Hollywood gloss on an increasingly inward-looking, indie-veering Oscar culture. Don’t you wish you were just more… excited?

• Noel Murray at A.V. Club also puts some doubt into the mix:
  

  We’ll be frank: The crop of awards-bait movies on the schedule for November and December are leaving us generally unenthusiastic. But a Clint Eastwood movie will always be worth checking out, even if it looks (judging by this trailer anyway) to be a combination of stock underdog sports drama and stock racial reconciliation drama.

• Lane Brown at Vulture foresees Eastwood having a better year at the Oscars than last:
  

  Freeman is at his saintliest, Damon’s accent doesn’t seem half bad, and as long as Mandela at no point commands any rugby players to get off his lawn, we bet the Academy will at least like Invictus more than it did Gran Torino.

• Neil Miller at Film School Rejects notes the obviousness of the film’s Oscar candidacy:
  

  I’m sure the film will be a rousing success, as Eastwood is no slouch. As well, he’s packed his film full of great actors (Freeman and Damon) playing characters of other nationalities. So if they stick the accents, they’re in for some Oscar love. It’s the awards season equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.

• Tony Lang at JoBlo.com agrees this is the biggest sure-thing out there:
  

  If it wasn’t already assumed that a film directed by Clint Eastwood will make the Oscars watchlist, this one surely will seal the deal - Matt Damon alongside Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela; Everybody else should just be happy to be nominated at all.

• Alex Billington at FirstShowing is nearly calling this film to win the whole shebang:
  

  Is this 2009’s Best Picture? [...] At first glance, it looks like Freeman should be getting an Oscar nomination out of this, as should Eastwood. Let’s just hope his pacing isn’t off in this one.

• Ross Miller at Screen Rant is primarily seeing acting nominations for this one:
  

  If you can get past the jarring accent being put on by Freeman as Mandela, as well as the odd structure of the trailer itself, I think this is a shoe-in for at least a couple of acting Oscars, if not some noms for the film itself.

• Krystal Clark at ScreenCrave addresses Damon’s accent over Freeman’s:
  

  I have a bad feeling that after watching this trailer a lot of people are going to compare Damon’s accent to Leonardo DiCaprio’s in Blood Diamond. You don’t get to hear it much in this trailer, but it’s not horrible, it’s just not as pronounced.

• Katey Rich at Cinema Blend doesn’t see Freeman’s casting as being completely perfect:
  

  And while Damon seems to be doing well with his Afrikaans accent, and Freeman obviously looks the part, it’s hard to listen to his voiceover and think of anyone but Morgan Freeman. I’m sure that given time he’ll slip seamlessly into the role, but right now, seeing someone so famous play someone else so famous, it feels a little tricky.

• Rodrigo Perez at ThePlaylist also criticizes the lead performances:
  

  On one hand, the sun-bleached look of the film in the trailer is interesting, Morgan Freeman’s reading of the poem from which the story gets it’s title is kind of haunting, and Damon looks and sounds the part (is he wearing a prosthetic nose?). On the other hand, Freeman’s accent seems to fade in and out (as does Damon’s towards the end), and from the “From Director Clint Eastwood” title card on, the music kills the drama and waters down the dialogue (especially Damon’s last line).

• Craig Kennedy at Living in Cinema is downright negative:
  

  I’m still not buying it. It looks earnest, socially conscious and borderline unbearable right down to the Ladysmith Black Mambazo music. Ok, I’m being a little harsh. Arent I?

• Steve Pond at The Wrap is another one of the naysayers:
  

  Some people seem to love it, but it seems a bit by-the-numbers inspirational to me until the undeniable South African music kicks in near the end.

• Kristopher Tapley at In Contention looks beyond the negative factors:
  

  when you get around the initial akward shock of Morgan Freeman’s accent, work around the oddly structured but still somehow streamlined nature of the trailer, read the writing on the wall, etc., I think it becomes clear pretty quick what we all, rightly or wrongly, have assumed sight-unseen since day one: this looks like a bona fide Oscar contender.

• Gina Telaroli at TakePart may well speak for the attitude of the Academy here:
  

  Seriously, this just looks like a very well made movie about inspiring people doing inspiring things–and that makes me quite happy.

• Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk warns us not to be duped by cinematic inspirationalism:
  

  Hot damn, I don’t know about you guys, but I’m already inspired as sh-t.  Maybe it’s because I played college and men’s club rugby (you should’ve seen me, why, I bet I could kick a ball over those mountains), but actually it’s probably because of all the African choir music a la Paul Simon’s Graceland.  You could play that music over a prison-rape scene and it’d feel life affirming.

• Gabe Delahaye at Videogum points out why Invictus will shut District 9 out of the Best Picture race:
  

  The best part about this movie, though, isn’t the surprising triumph of the South African rugby team against all odds, but how it reminds us that racism is over and everyone in South Africa has moved from the shanty towns into modern homes with electricity and running water and windows for windows instead of mud-slicked garbage bags. That is why District 9 was such a failure, because it didn’t make any sense. “Metaphor? What metaphor? If you want to talk metaphors, why aren’t the prawns and the humans uniting over their mutual love of rugby?”

• Gregory Ellwood at HitFix says the hell with Oscar consideration, just enjoy the film:
  

  Considering all the hype, it would have been shocking if Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus” didn’t turn out to be a true awards season contender.  The subject matter, the stars and the filmmaker’s resume are an eye-popping combination that is the textbook definition of Oscar bait if there ever was one.  After watching the film’s brand new trailer, screw the awards perspective.  This just looks like one damn good movie.

Check out the trailer:

Ti West’s The House of the Devil finds its sweet spot in the paranoid shadow of misdirection, so it’s best not to reveal much of the plot beyond what you’ll know from watching the trailer: it’s the 80s, and a sleepy college town is obsessed with an impeding eclipse, and a young, pretty co-ed in desperate need of some quick cash takes a mysterious babysitting job in a big, secluded manse, for a creepy couple who don’t actually have a kid. What actually happens is less important than what West teases could happen. Duality is the order of the day: there are two houses that could potentially be devilish, two girls — serious brunette Sam (Jocelin Donahue) and the more playful blonde Megan (Greta Gerwig) –– at the mercy of two men (Tom Noonan and AJ Bowen), each with two evident personalities. The final punchline even sets up a new twosome whose story could easily fuel a second film.

It would be easy to peg Devil as a superficial exercise in vintage pastiche –– the film non-ironically borrows the look and feel of the horror produced in the era in which it’s set — but West’s more impressive nod at classic horror is his mastery of misdirection. I was recently asked to make a list of my favorite horror films of all time, and it shouldn’t be a surprise to readers of this blog that all five films I chose were made before 1980, and three of them before 1950. If horror films weren’t unequivocably better before gore and graphic violence and were standard practices available to makers of mainstream scary films, a lot of the Code-restricted frighteners that have survived to become classics (cult or otherwise) are richer in subtext, more evocative of base human fears, and more effectively politically and/or philosophically provocative. In other words, in the classic horror and sci-fi films that I love, there tends to be more than one thing going on: there’s what we see, there’s what we don’t see but imagine or infer is also happening, and there’s what, as a product of the clash between the actual visible evidence and what our psyches produce as an extension or embroidery on what we see, there’s what we leave believing it all really means.

This kind of multi-faceted address requires an active viewer, and is very different from the wink-wink, self-important pseudo social commentary that’s been recently injected into the Saw franchise, and which itself seems like a retread of what Eli Roth claimed as the driving force behind both Hostel movies. Both recent torture porn franchises are ideal for a jaded, passive audience: they delight in showing everything in gruesome, fetishistic detail (hence the “porn”), while telling us that all the sadism is really about our real, contemporary anxieties. They don’t trust the viewer to actually access those anxieties on their own.

The House of the Devil is nothing if not a monumental feat of director-on-viewer trust. When I interviewed Ti West in April of 2009, he was upset that the production company that owned the rights to the film, his fourth feature, was screening Devil at the Tribeca Film Festival with four minutes gutted from its midsection against the director’s wishes. The producers thought the director’s cut of the film took too long to get to its bloody climax. “It’s called The House of the fucking Devil,” West sighed. “It’s gonna get there.” Now Magnolia is releasing The House of the Devil (in theaters on Friday, on VOD and Amazon already) with the four minute chunk reinstated, and it’s hard to imagine anything coming along in the next two months that disabuses me of the notion that this is the best horror film of the year.
Devil does, still, get there, but much of the film’s genius lies in West’s comittment to setting the viewer’s brain spinning through nearly unbearable anticipation. The House of the Devil takes the old-fashioned, low-budget horror trick of presenting the ordinary with just enough aural enhancement to send imaginations into overdrive. We become increasingly certain that something horrible is going to happen, but beyond a brief, brutal early taste West withholds actual horror over and over again. Eventually the viewer’s paranoia becomes so tangled in the protagonist’s paranoia that we — on the other side of the screen and ostensibly safe from danger — cease to know better than the people on screen. This is scary in a way that unrelenting brutality could never be.

West’s third feature was a sequel to Roth’s Cabin Fever; after a series of conflicts and budget issues, he walked off the project last year. That movie has just recently screened in Austin and LA, in a form which West has vocally disowned. I haven’t seen Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, but it seems clear that somehow this less-than-ideal experience helming a (relatively) big budget franchise film functioned as the missing link between West’s 2007 SXSW premiere Trigger Man, and the more accomplished Devil. The latter film offers an advanced iteration of stylistic building blocks that were evident in the former: bravely long stretches in which dread mounts but ultimately “nothing” happens, tied together with a control over atmosphere that shares DNA with the slow cinema of a festivalist’s dreams, and all of it very suddenly resolving in a violent climax that’s just graphic enough to work as visceral payoff for the long investment. West was right to be frustrated at the unnecessary, if temporary, truncating of his cut. It is a horror film — it is going to get there. The excruciatingly tight windup makes the release that much of a relief.

Obviously it’s more important to make money than a good movie, which may explain why Peli is reportedly having trouble securing distribution (and his asking price) for his follow-up, a sci-fi horror flick titled Area 51, despite the fact that his film just topped the weekend box office, has earned more than $60 million over five weeks of limited release and has been a Twitter trending topic consistently for about a month now. Neither of those things is at all thanks to him, right?

Maybe it isn’t helping him that his film looks like it was a piece of cake to make, and he kind of makes it seem that it was in fact easy peasy. But this was no Blair Witch Project, which was good in concept but not so much in execution. Paranormal Activity is structured terrifically and there’s nary a dull moment, even during the non-scary daytime scenes, which deserve a lot of credit for providing some very natural humor to balance with the sometimes silly paranormal thrills. Peli may not be a master filmmaker, but he did a pretty good job.

But whatever. Since when does Hollywood care if a filmmaker is actually great at making films, anyway? Didn’t I just hear that Steve Carr landed another gig? Did Paul Blart: Mall Cop make so much money because of his talent or because of Sony’s ability to sell stupid comedies to the masses?

Who wants to set up an Eventful “Demand It!” campaign for Area 51?

Check out what other film blogs are saying about Oren Peli’s troubles after the jump:

• First, Hollywood’s apprehensive and defensive take, from the original article by Michael Cieply at The New York Times:
  

  One problem is that studios will not be able to push the new movie as a sleeper hit, the way Paramount did with “Paranormal Activity,” whose Web campaign required audiences to “demand” the film before it would be shown in theaters.

  “In a world of grass-roots wildfires, Hollywood realized that this would not have the same force without the underlying buzz — the confusion between reality and drama — that the rough original film clearly delivered,” said Peter Dekom, a longtime entertainment lawyer and co-author of “Not on My Watch: Hollywood vs. the Future.”

• Seth Abramovitch at Movieline acknowledges the true nature of Hollywood:
  

  So far, Paramount, Lionsgate, Overture and at least three other studios have passed. Foreign rights, meanwhile, will be put up for sale at the American Film Market in Santa Monica next week — a harder sell if no one is ready to pony up for U.S. rights. Does this all have to end like The Blair Witch Project? We’d prefer to think that in Hollywood, talent prevails. But as we well know — chaos reigns.

• Lane Brown at Vulture wonders how this sort of thing influences future filmmakers:
  

  Cieply also notes the problems Daniel Myrick and Nia Vardalos had following up The Blair Witch Project and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. We’re sure Peli will pawn Area 51 off on some studio soon, but we hope not before his story serves as a lesson to young filmmakers out there foolishly considering making a wildly successful movie on a shoestring budget during a time of recession.

• Katey Rich at Cinema Blend stands up for Peli’s talent and worthiness:
  

  I’m convinced that Peli’s next film will be good, or at least worth watching, because of the filmmaking skill on display in Paranormal Activity. Unlike The Blair Witch Project, which had shaky cams going willy nilly and only a basic mythology keeping the story going, Paranormal Activity succeeds because of meticulous filmmaking, use of tension and cleverly executed special effects. It doesn’t scare you by disorienting you or convincing you that something is about to jump out from behind the corner; Peli structures the film so that tension builds with each scene, and even though you know he doesn’t have the budget for real special effects, you’re still convinced you might see something awful.

• Sean P. Means at Movie Cricket actually sees the positive in Cieply’s article, focusing on the fact there is in fact a bidding war:
  

  Why does “Area 51″ have bidders swarming like UFOs around an unsuspecting redneck? Because its writer-director, Oren Peli (pictured), made “Paranormal Activity,” the little thriller made on a shoestring budget ($15,000 initially) and has made $62.5 million so far at the box office.

• Mike Sampson at JoBlo.com offers an alternative to Demanding Peli’s next film:
  

  If you’re interested in alien thrillers, you could always just go see THE FOURTH KIND…

Medicine for Melancholy, which you’ve had to endure me raving about since virtually the beginning of this blog, comes out on DVD today. Here’s another look at my review…

Visually more sophisticated than the bulk of features to yet come out of the new wave of DIY independent American cinema, narratively smoother and yet still boundless in mold-breaking ambition, triple-Independent Spirit Award nominee Medicine for Melancholy offers a self-contained rebuttal to claims that precious, naturalistic dramas about the existential dilemmas of hipster singles are exclusively a white man’s game. But the most exciting thing about the film is that director Barry Jenkins doesn’t seem interested in rebutting anything, or in playing any sort of game but his own. His mission: to talk about what it feels like to be young, black and artsy in a city in which people who fit that description make up a minuscule fraction of the population.

Formally and thematically, Melancholy is, in fact, driven by fractions. African-Americans currently make up less than 7 percent of the city of San Francisco. Several decades of gentrification have all but whitewashed the city’s historically non-white communities south of Market Street; the few non-gentrified pockets still standing are under constant threat of being steamrolled by the luxury housing boom. To make that point visually, Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton literally drain the color almost completely from their digital video image. On first viewing, I guessed that the entirety of the film had been desaturated 93 percent to match the racial breakdown, but in Jenkins has said the level of desaturation actually fluctuates). The resulting image is soft and smoggy, mostly gray with pastel hints. Melancholy may be more committed to certain of the city’s un-pretty social truths than any other recent fiction film set in San Francisco, but ironically, as a sheer portrait of the city, it’s also maybe the most beautiful.

Jenkins wants us to know that, in such a literally colorless landscape, it’s a freak occurrence that our protagonists have met at all. Micah and Joanne wake up in the same bed the morning after a house party. They’ve apparently had sex, but have neglected to exchange names. An awkward brunch ensues, then a silent shared cab ride. Apparently embarrassed and certainly hungover, she storms out of the car when it reaches the top of Russian Hill, but leaves her wallet behind. He tracks her down, convinces her that they should spend the day together. The day turns into another drunken night.

As they explore the city together, Micah and Jo spend an awful lot of time talking self-consciously about race, even going as far as to argue over “what two black people do on a Sunday afternoon.” This is, initially, jarring, not just because it’s something you almost never see in a film not directed by Spike Lee, but because as a white girl, my knee jerk response was, “Shouldn’t black people know what it means to be a black person?”

Of course, Jenkins’ point is that, as if anybody ever really knows what it means to be what they are, these two certainly don’t, because for the most part, their racial role models are few and far between, and they can only define themselves against what they know they are not. For Micah, this seems to be Jo’s biggest selling point: she represents something he’s fantasized about, and like many of us would, once he stumbles on the embodiment of that fantasy he’s determined to hold on to it and not let it get away. But Joanne senses this, and doesn’t like it. The last thing she wants is to be wanted just because she’s the only black girl in town who silkscreens her own t-shirts and shops at the organic food co-op.

Over the course of the film, Jenkins subtly shifts our perspective, from Micah’s gaze to Joanne’s, all the while refusing to antagonize or fully sympathize with either. Somehow, by the end, we want to see these two kids cinch a traditional a happy ending. But Jenkins instead chooses realistic difficulty over the easy answer fantasy. A weekend coupling might work as a temporary salve for melancholy, but it never solves the problems it momentarily obscures. 24 hours after we enter the picture, we exit, carrying with us a perfectly molded portrait of a place in the form of this fling.

This post is in response to a question asked in the Ask Karina thread by eugene: “You referenced this in your “Bagger” post, but what do you think is the future of film blogging? Where is all this going?”

I generally feel uncomfortable predicting the future, but I feel very comfortable diagnosing what’s wrong with the present!

Here is what I wrote about the general state of blogging in my post about the changes at the Carpetbagger blog:

I’m concerned that Oscar blogging has lost its urgency –– as has much of year-round film blogging, as so many of us either waste time bickering amongst ourselves, or piling on the same semi-stories in a desperate quest to chase the traffic that keeps us alive.

Anything of interest currently happening in the film blogosphere is hidden behind a wall of noise. I’m no math wiz, but I’d be willing to hazard a guess that at least 90% of content published on a given day on medium-to-high profile film blogs (that is, any site you’ve actually heard of) falls into one of three categories: 1) reblogged news, often given a snarky/skeptical spin; 2) personal attacks on other bloggers/writers; 3) traffic bait designed to give a mass audience (ie: Google searchers, Digg users) more of what they’ve already proven they like. SpoutBlog has, at times, been guilty of all three of these things, but mostly number 3. Whoops. Sorry.

When I started editing Cinematical in 2005, I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I did have this crazy idea that blogging offered a chance to approach a conversation about movies in a way that felt different from what I was getting as a reader from the existing (mostly print) outlets. In so far as a blog was a legitimate, not un-hostile alternative to the print media, it made sense that people like Peter Bart were vocally against it, and I was fine with that. And then blogging became a business, or at least a lot of people looked at the few money-making frequently-updated publications and tried to replicate their success, and so major media titles (including Variety) jumped into the fray. We’ve now come to the point where most of the interesting, idiosyncratic voices left are drowned out by the noise made from the hundreds of traffic-chasers, who are essentially blaring the same thing, at the same time, all day long. About a year and a half ago, I wouldn’t have been able to get through a day without my Google Reader. A few months ago, I had to abandon my RSS feeds, because every time I opened up Reader I felt like I was being yelled at about the same two or three things, by hundreds of voices in unison who are apparently convinced that if they’re not part of the pile-on, their readers will lose interest.

People keep asking me what I’m going to do after this week, and at this point I have no idea, but if I do know that I’d only be interested in going back to daily blogging if I had the freedom to ignore the received wisdom about what makes a blog a success, and particularly the assumptions as to what kind of content the audience is looking for. As a reader, I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m bored with everything I know I want. I want to be surprised.

This post is a response to several comments in the Ask Karina thread, asking me about my favorite films of all time.

I find it extraordinarily difficult to make “top” or “best” lists of any kind; I’m uncomfortable making reductive decisions and I feel silly standing behind them. For years, when asked to name my favorite films of all time, I’ve listed three, in no particular order: A Star is Born (the 1954 version, directed by George Cukor and starring Judy Garland and James Mason); Barry Lyndon; and Ghostbusters. I’m both very serious about that, and also sort of not at all. A Star is Born, Barry Lyndon and Ghostbusters are films that I genuinely love and could watch and discuss endlessly, but they reached their status as My Favorite Films Evar almost arbitrarily. I needed to have something in my back pocket to throw out there, and those three films encompass much of what I love about all of the films I love, while at the same time maybe deflating the notion that one could sum up over a hundred years of art/product by naming a few movies they’ve seen and liked.

But since you asked, after the jump I’ve listed a few other things, off the top of my head, that I’ve seen and liked very much, in alphabetical order. I’m sure I will regret omissions to this list as soon as I publish it, so expect updates. I’ve also been asked to talk about guilty pleasures and films I once loved but have abandoned over time; I imagine those lists will be more interesting than this one, which probably won’t include any surprises for anyone who’s ever read this blog.

Ali: Fear Eats The Soul; Paul Thomas Anderson (everything but Hard Eight, really); most Antonioni, but I saw Red Desert first and will never pass up a chance to see it on a screen; Bride of Frankenstein; early Albert Brooks (through Lost in America; I like Defending My Life but that’s clearly where the plane starts to point down); California Split; Chronicle of a Summer; Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly; Eyes Wide Shut; Friday Night; Gimme Shelter; A Hard Day’s Night; Holiday; In a Lonely Place; the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers; Chris Marker; Pandora’s Box; Pierrot Le Fou; The Rules of the Game; Steven Soderbergh’s movies about criminals (particularly Out of Sight and The Limey, but you could define this loosely and pretty much cover my favorite aspects of his filmography); Joseph Von Sternberg (particularly Morocco, The Scarlet Empress and Macao); Sunset Boulevard; Swing Time; They All Laughed; Trouble in Paradise; pre-In the Mood For Love Wong Kar Wai and, of course, The Walking Dead.

This post is a response to a query posed by gokinsmen in the Ask Karina thread: “Avant-garde and short films. Your favorites, ‘the state of…’”

I’m not sure I know what “avant-garde” means anymore, and the only reason I admit that is because the very haziness of the concept seems to be the crux of the issue. What could avant garde possibly mean, in an time and place where Jonas Mekas takes to his video blog to drop wisdom from the Kabballah and defend Paris Hilton, and anyone can watch clips of Out 1 on YouTube (which is pretty much the only place to watch music videos such as the above), and an incest-heavy work of poorsploitation with riffs on Italian neorealism is poised for major mainstream success –– and all the while the general public shows little to no interest in movies starring movie stars, over and over and over again?

I feel semi-qualified to talk about this only because I studied film in two undergraduate art programs, and thus I do have a pretty solid grounding in cinema that could be described as short and/or avant-garde. Before grad school, I was much more familiar with the works of Brakhage, Benning and Connor than I was with, say, Bergman, Spielberg or Welles. I was left to my own devices to explore most classical Hollywood and European cinema, and when I did, I decided that I had more to say about it, or maybe it had more to say about me. So I applied to graduate programs that were more mainstream in focus, and I went to NYU, and here I am today! Even if I eventually turned away from the art film canon, I do think much of the way I look at cinema stems from the fact that I was, in my formative years, invited to think about film as four-dimensional painting (and, also, that I was forced to write about painting).

If I had gone to college ten or even five years later, in terms of my primary interests, I think I still would have made the trade (although thanks to the whole blog rumpus, I might have skipped academia and headed straight into more populist writing). But I also used to make films, and I wonder all the time if I would have stopped when I did (which was essentially the day I closed the book on my BFA) had I been in art school during the explosion of web video. This world sprung up so quickly that one has to make an effort to remember that it was very different very recently. When I first started making stuff in 1998, my school had AVIDs and what not, but they were reserved for upper classmen. I learned how to edit on a VHS tape-to-tape system and a Steenbeck simultaneously, and then by 1999 graduated to a pre-G-series Mac running Adobe Premiere. Final Cut Pro soon followed, but the technology was still comparatively ancient. We saved large files on Jaz disks or gigantic portable drives or data tapes. I didn’t own a computer that could burn one of my short films to DVD until shortly before I stopped making short films.

Looking back, it’s incredible that I went through all the trouble, because I certainly wasn’t having any fun. I mostly made diary-style films about my pop culture fascinations, with found footage montages set to my own narration. They weren’t gallery art, and they were too copyright-infringey for any kind of TV broadcast, and if there were festivals that they were appropriate for, certainly no one told me. So most of them went unseen by anyone but me and a few professors (usually kind but not terribly enthusiastic) and classmates (usually hostile). I ultimately stopped making films because it became clear that there was no niche for what I was doing. If I had only held on a couple of years, YouTube would have come along and with it, my movies would have suddenly had a context. Alas.

Which is not to say that YouTube has solved the problem of every short-form or experimentally minded filmmaker. I’ve written quite a bit about the pros and cons of web video — for starters, see my interview with Cory McAbee from earlier this week, and my piece on David Lynch’s Interview Project, and etc –– but it’s no secret that the format privileges the unexpected over the contrived, to an extent where forethought of any kind (nevermind creative energy) may be a liability. The most of the most loved web videos are standalone, discreet gestures that often defy our expectations of narrative. Or, to borrow from Tom Gunning’s writings on very early silent film, the web is kindest to videos that embody “both climax and resolution” without leading “to a series of incidents or the creation of characters with discernible traits.” YouTube has been widely interrogated by academics as the new home of the cinema of attractions, yet everything about it seems to be anti-cinema.

So the refuge of the short film lacking obvious spectacle remains the film festival, which is problematic. Events dedicated to shorts and/or non-traditional films are necessarily marginalized. Too many general festivals program too many short films, and few schedule them imaginatively. So something like Glory at Sea, which could and probably should easily stand on its own, plays on a program with half a dozen other films, with no air in between. Meanwhile, shorts tacked on to features, where thematically appropriate or not, too often become something to sit through rather than something to be seen.

And this has now become a lot of words to simply say that I don’t envy anyone trying to do anything interesting in shorter formats in this climate. However, here are some people who are succeeding, whose work you can watch online: Rob Parrish’s webseries Next to Heaven, which we featured on the podcast awhile back; Fiddlestixx, and other delights from David and Nathan Zellner; Chonto, and more from Carson Mell; Jerry Ruis, Can We Do This and the rest of the Red Bucket Films stuff; and finally if anything is avant garde, it is Cute Porn, who produced this. It also can’t hurt to invest time and money in Wholphin, who have done as much in recent years to legitimize unusual short filmmaking as anyone.

In the past 24 hours the film blogosphere experienced what I believe to be the worst movie rumor of all time: a “supported” claim by MarketSaw that George Lucas is planning a new Star Wars trilogy that would be shot in digital 3-D and directed by such prestigious filmmakers as Lucas buds Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola. Fortunately there wasn’t a whole lot of people fooled and the rumor was debunked right away, but it still made me slap my forehead to see so many sites running the story, even if to comment on how unlikely it sounded or to relay its lack of truth.

Of course, by featuring the topic for this Bloggery post, I’m contributing to the unfortunate attention the rumor is receiving. But with a week left before SpoutBlog discontinues original content, I figure it’s more important than ever to focus on what’s wrong with the movie blogs, so others are able to fluorish.

To add my own two cents to the concept behind the rumor, though, I’d just like to say that nobody should ever be excited about the idea of either Spielberg or Coppola helming a Star Wars movie. We’re already aware that the former can make a terrible flick out of Lucas’ writing, and you must realize that Coppola’s installment would be more Captain EO (a 3-D movie co-written by Lucas) than The Godfather. Or, worse, like Jack in outer space.

Check out the other film blogs’ coverage of and response to this ridiculous hoax after the jump:

• Jim Dorey at MarketSaw recognizes the need to address the validity of this rumor in his original firestarter:
  

  How seriously should you consider these rumors? Well it is coming from a source that SHOULD KNOW. This source is absolutely connected. So odds are it is seriously being talked about at Lucasfilm. Right now. Will it happen? AVATAR will have to hit and hit big and then all the stars have to align properly - all I can do is pass on the info.

• Kevin Coll at Fused Film is all kinds of excited about the “news”:
  

  This is wild but not far from out of the ordinary. Lucas is smart and knows loyal fans were less than happy with the prequel trilogies and its over-hyped, over marketed crap-fest. With the emergence of 3D he understands the how he bring his most prized possession into a whole new medium of visual candy. Star Wars has always been part of the cutting edge of film making so why wouldn’t continue to be? I also wonder if this will be the trilogy that will bring back the original cast (Hamil, Ford, Fisher) as a sequel trilogy set 20 or so years after the Return of the Jedi would be interesting to see.

• Devin Faraci at CHUD.com likes the reasoning but doesn’t believe it one bit:
  

  I do like Jim’s theory as to why Lucas would be doing a new Star Wars trilogy: I could see Lucas getting a little jealous over a successful launch of AVATAR - jealous because it is a fully articulated universe, like his. And if he doesn’t act on it - his franchise may well be relegated to a back seat as potentially the records will start falling to Pandora.

  Do I believe that Lucas is planning a new trilogy of films? I think it’s going to take all of my wordsmithery to get the nuance of this across:

  No.

• Erik Davis at SciFi Squad doesn’t buy it for a second:
  

  he’d pass them off to other directors like Steven Spielberg or Francis Ford Coppola (who Market Saw claims their source mentioned directly as a potential candidate). Yeah, definitely let me know when Coppola decides to direct a Star Wars film so I can look out my window and watch all the pigs flying.

• Meredith Woerner at io9 is suspicious of the real purpose of this rumor:
  

  This wouldn’t at all be about promoting Avatar, would it? I can see the PR meeting now, “I know let’s tell the space nerds if they watch Avatar they’ll get more Star Warszes, that’ll get ‘em in the theaters!” Sounds like somebody is whispering nonsense to drum up Avatar excitement, and you know how these things carry like a game of telephone.

• Quint at Ain’t It Cool News confirms the rumor is untrue via a correspondence with a rep from Lucasfilm and offers added reasoning to it’s unliklihood:
  

  Now, I will say that Lucasfilm would be the last place to confirm a rumor as true… even if it is (they did that a lot back in the day… I remember them denying Ewan McGregor was cast as Obi-Wan for the entire month leading up to their announcement), but this story already stinks of untruth (especially with Coppola’s name being thrown in there… read this), so I think it’s pretty safe to call BS on this one… especially with Lucas so engulfed in the live action TV show at the moment.

• Oli Lyttelton at The Playlist makes me sad that we’ve come to this: congratulating Ain’t It Cool News for being the credibility beacon in a bloggery bullshitstorm:
  

  in news slightly less surprising than the sun rising this morning, it’s been denied by a Lucasfilm representative. Kudos to Ain’t It Cool for doing what MarketSaw should have done in the first place. You know, proper journalism.

• Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk addresses the rumormill format, always a sign of fail:
  

  Question marks in the headline can mean only one thing: it’s time to prognosticate!  This story has no facts, so we’re free to speculate wildly!  Yee haw, now who wants to take a shot in the dark?  And remember, address all responses in the form of a question!
  

• Rodney at The Movie Blog acknowledges that it’s harder to tell when a rumor this big is spread on any other day but April 1:
  

  I nearly had a stroke as my inner geek (which looks a lot like my outer geek) heard that Lucasfilm was planning on remastering the Star Wars films in 3D, and that a new Trilogy was planned.

  After I regained consciousness and changed my shorts I realized this had to be too good to be true. Well it seems that it was total bullshit and far more cruel than my April Fools gag because as soon as people saw the date, they knew it was a trick.

• Orlando Parfitt at IGN feels the need to relay even a debunked rumor because it’s such an important franchise:
  

  Just as IGN was getting cautiously excited, however, we saw that AintItCool had quizzed Lucasfilm’s PR department about the news. The studio had promptly nixed the gossip, telling the site: “We do not have any Star Wars theatrical movies planned.”

  So there’s a 99 percent chance that said rumours were Internet-invented nonsense, but as it’s Star Wars we thought we should let you know the latest.

• Matt Goldberg at Collider didn’t think the franchise was still so important as to cause so much embarrassment:
  

  I didn’t think that people really cared about “Star Wars” anymore but apparently a big enough rumor regarding new “Star Wars” movies can send people into a frenzy for all of 30 seconds before they stop and say, “That makes no fucking sense.”  But such is the way of the Internet and its just good that movie websites have developed relationships with people who can swat down these ridiculous rumors before you can send out the link to everyone you know and make yourself look like a total idiot.

• Dustin Rowles at Pajiba doesn’t even want to talk about the rumor:
  

  I can’t imagine there are that many folks interested in a big-screen rock musical directed by Hairspray’s Adam Shankman. But, it’s either this or the bullshit rumor that there’s another Star Wars trilogy in the works.

• Kofi Outlaw at ScreenRant isn’t ready to give up on this rumor just yet:
  

  Collider and Ain’t It Cool are shooting this one down as a wild rumor prematurely reported by Market Saw. I’m a bit fairer, so I’ll keep in open mind that anything can happen in the world of movies, but I would NOT get your hopes up for a new Star Wars trilogy coming anytime soon.

• Dave Davis at JoBlo.com won’t completely kill the rumor yet, either:
  

  those party poopertroopers over at AICN went straight to Lucasfilm for verification, and received an official denial from the PR droid on duty. Which, of course, is both expected and meaningless, since if there’s any truth to the rumor, they’re surely not going to announce anything until they’re ready. And at a place like Comic Con.

  So for now, perhaps we should encase this rumor in carbonite

• Ben Child at the Guardian Film Blog also still believes it’s possible, because “Ultimately, [Lucas] has a business to run, employees to pay, and Star Wars is by far his greatest asset.” But he disagrees with the idea of old friends directing the new films:
  

  if Star Wars must come back now, it’s vital that younger directors with fresh ideas be appointed. Though no spring chicken these days, I’d pay good money to see a Peter Jackson-directed trilogy. Ditto one by Abrams, or even Joss Whedon, who did a great job on the similarly themed Serenity. The Dark Knight’s Christopher Nolan is interested in science fiction – his forthcoming film Inception is set to venture into the genre, and he knows how to craft a series that’s classy and meaningful, without losing the blockbuster clout.

• Josh Tyler at Cinema Blend doesn’t believe the rumor, but just in case it is true, he also wants to chime in on the directorial choices:
  

  Personally I hope he avoids Spielberg, Coppola, or any of his old school director friends and brings in someone with even more different, fresh ideas. Otherwise, why bother? We don’t need the Star Wars equivalent of Kingdom and the Crystal Skull. Keep Spielberg away from the land of a galaxy far, far away.

• Adam Rosenberg at MTV Movies Blog does some rounding up of his own on the rumor progression and now believes MarketSaw is simply one of those untrustworthy blogs:
  

  In short, a “Star Wars” junkie’s happiest dream. All from a “trusted source.” It’s hard to swallow though, especially given MarketSaw’s rumormill track record.

So! What do you really want to talk about?

I have a couple of reviews and such that I plan to publish between now and Halloween, but I would also really like to hear what you’d like to see on this blog over the next week. Is there a movie/filmmaker/genre/concern that I’ve never written about that you’d like me to? Do you want me to revisit a topic that I have written about, from another angle or in further depth? Do you have a question for me, about films or something I’ve written or, like, life? Let me know. I’m not going to say that any topic is totally off limits, but if you ask me a question regarding my sex life, my family or the inner workings of Spout, I will probably decline to answer. Other than that…I’ll give it a shot.

Antichrist stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a married couple (they’re never named) who lose their only child in a freak accident, which they were present for but failed to stop; the operatic sex they were having at the time was something of a distraction. After she spends some time in a psychiatric ward dealing with her grief, Dafoe, a therapist, convinces Gainsbourg they should retreat to their house deep in secluded woods (they call it “Eden”) so that he can teach her how to face her fears. Totally coincidentally, this house is where the wife used to go to work on an academic thesis on Gynocide — which the film defines as archaic and semi-mythic violence against women, witch hunting and like practices through which, as Gainsbourg’s character puts it, “nature causes people to do evil things to women” — before her husband dismissed her subject and thereby discouraged her ambition. Overcome with the guilty feeling that her own sexuality caused her son to die, the woman essentially internalizes the texts she’s studied and becomes an embodiment of the “evil,” manifested mainly through total sexual hysteria, that she once dedicated her life to critiquing. And hilarity sort of ensues!

Antichrist’s first image is of Von Trier’s name, billed in giant letters in front of the film’s title — as if he’s the star or, better yet, as if “Antichrist” is his professional title. This should be the first clue that the auteur is mocking the fact that his reputation — as a contrarian force amongst modern cinema icons, as a sadist who puts actresses through hell — will precede whatever he actually puts on screen. If he didn’t get his point across by literally spelling it out, the next hint soon follows. In the black-and-white opening sequence, composed with the aesthetics (and subtlety) of a DeBeers commercial, Gainsbourg and Dafoe’s husband and wife make earth-shaking love whilst opera drowns out the soundtrack and snow streams in through the open window like silver confetti. While the couple are distracted on the road to orgasm, their toddler son crawls out of bed and tumbles out the window to his death — arms spread like wings, an angel before he hits the ground. It’s a gorgeous sequence, if ostentatiously so, and right in the middle (at least, in the version of the film shown at Cannes) there’s a single, rather lengthy cutaway to a giant erect penis penetrating a vagina. There is a “Catholic” version of the film, which Von Trier prepared for sale to some markets, and though I haven’t seen that cut, I imagine this shot is not in it. As far as I’m concerned Antichrist isn’t really Antichrist without the Plunging Cock Shot (henceforth referred to as the PCS), but if it has to be excised, Von Trier might as well replace it with a shot of himself, winking at the viewer. That would be the PCS’s G-rated equivalent.

In a way, that wink already exists in more literal form than the Plunging Cock Shot (heretofore referred to as the PCS). In a full color handout given to press and potential buyers at some Cannes screenings, opposite a few uniquely blank excerpts from a Danish Film Institute interview with the director there’s a photo of Von Trier that seems to directly reference, down to the three-quarter profile with the smug facial expression, the famous publicity shot of Alfred Hitchcock turned to face a live crow perched on his shoulder that was distributed to promote the film of his that most directly drew lines between female sexuality and the unpredictable horrors of nature, The Birds. Von Trier alters the image a little bit: in his shot, the crow lies at his feet, dead. In other words, this time, nature’s not going to get away with it.

Even without that publicity image, Hitchcock is a natural reference for Antichrist, insomuch as it’s a psychological thriller that looks like art but satisfies as a work of genre. It’s essentially a revenge of the witch/bitch movie, one that stacks together a few basic horror movie themes: ancient burial grounds, mythology come to life, sex as a precursor to death, and female sexuality in particular as potentially equivalent to a supernatural force of nature. After touching on all manner of hallmarks of classic supernatural cinema, Antichrist finally flips the script of the modern gore fest by putting a relatively chaste man at the mercy of a female whose sexuality is in crisis, thus turning Carol Clover’s “final girl” theory on its head.

This may be bait enough for those quick to cry misogyny, but what I think is more remarkable is how far Von Trier goes to justify the woman’s eventual physical torture of her husband. Dafoe’s character deliberatly defies the advice of his wife’s doctor, takes her off mood-stabilizing medication and insists on giving her thereapy himself. He’s condescending to her about her creative work, her mothering skills and her grief. Even after it is demonstrated that sex helps calm her anxiety, her rejects her, joking, “Don’t screw your therapist.” This is Von Trier’s biggest nod to the basic building blocks of horror: after all, desire repressed always comes back around as violence.

You can put me on the “pro” side on Antichrist, although I’m not without my reservations. I’m certainly not offended by it, nor do I think other members of my gender necessarily should be, and the many attempts to declare it as “dangerous” strike me as more offensive than anything Von Trier actually put on screen. My main misgiving is that its second “chapter,” the first after the couple enter the woods, is kind of plodding and boring, which is a problem for a film that rides a very thin line between legitimate horror and total ridiculousness. Still, I can’t imagine it would have stirred up even a fraction of the fervor if anything shown thus far in competition could match its artistry. Gorgeous to look at and made with a confidence that towers over anything else I saw at Cannes this year, Antichrist frustrates attempts to dismiss Von Trier for somehow not knowing what he’s doing.

Of course, he knows exactly what he’s doing, and instigating that frustration is a big part of it. There was a great documentary playing in the Cannes market called Disco and Atomic War, which details the conflict between hard power, meaning the use of guns and bribes and such as a method of coersion, and soft power, which has more to do with the dissemination of images and ideas that have no real power on their own, but become extremely powerful by virtue of the fact that they make the people of a closed state want something outside of it, making heads of state fear the disruption of their ideological control. The doc uses the notion of soft power in talking about how the infiltration of Western pop and, particularly, the broadcasting of things like Emmanuelle and Dallas on Finnish TV, helped to erode the USSR, but it also offers one way to understand what has happened between Lars Von Trier and his detractors. With Antichrist, Von Trier is both mocking and interrogating the idea that images have the power to hurt the viewer. By stacking up so many concepts and actions almost guaranteed to offend prevailing highbrow taste, he’s essentially insuring that the offended will imbue his work with a power he himself knows it doesn’t intrinsically have. He may or may not be the best filmmaker in the world, but he’s the only one who really came out swinging this year, ready to fight a war.

Well, except for Uwe Boll, which brings us to Antichrist’s unexpected, but not inexplicable, embrace by the Fantastic Fest demographic. To the hardcore genre audience who have turned “Chaos Reigns!” into an all-purpose catchphrase, Von Trier’s winking presence plays as black comedy, as it should to any viewer unafraid to enjoy the goofiness of Von Trier’s spin on horror movie formula. Antichrist can only work as an affront to taste when it’s presented to an audience who thinks having their taste affronted is a bad thing. It’s a problem that so many critics fall into that camp.

This review is a re-write of a piece published during the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. Antichrist opens in New York tonight at 12:01 AM, and premieres today on VOD.

Werewolves do have some level of sex appeal, at least to those people who like hairy men (and/or women). And the fact that Twilight fans are divided over preference for bloodsucker Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) or lupine Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner) proves there’s a debate to be had about which creature is better. More importantly, though, is the presence of cinematic werewolves on the web this week, first with a much-derided clip from the Twilight installment New Moon, followed by a new trailer for Universal’s new version of The Wolfman (which features part of Marilyn Manson’s “If I Was Your Vampire,” interestingly enough) — Ryan Adams at Awards Daily posts them side by side for comparison.

I’d even like to somehow qualify the trailer for Serious Moonlight, which in addition to having a werewolf-friendly title features Meg Ryan displaying plastic surgery that looks like something applied by make-up artist Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London; Wolf; Cursed; The Wolfman) for the transition effects used in werewolf movies.

S.T. VanAirsdale at Movieline has already claimed this “Werewolf Week” as a result of all the lycanthropy. But here’s hoping the trend appropriately lasts at least a full lunar cycle. So come on MTV, you’ve got a month to get us at least some set photos ffrom your upcoming Teen Wolf TV series.

Check out what the other film blogs are saying about the werewolf invasion after the jump:

Responses to the New Moon clip:

• Gabe Delahaye at Videogum recognizes that werewolves are hotter than vampires now:
  

  OMG, u guyz. There should be some kind of SEXTING shorthand for the feeling you get when you realize that all of these years of being crazy in love with vampires have been a mistake when really it was werewolves that you should have been in love with all along. [...] OMGILWNIHVTSLOLGISUATMOSR. (Oh My God I Love Werewolves Now, I Hate Vampires, They Suck, Lots Of Love, Get It? See U At The Mall On Saturday, RIIIIIITE?) Something just short and easy like that.

• Anne Thompson at Thompson on Hollywood prefers the vampire in this franchise to the werewolf:
  

  The marketing folks at Summit are trying to turn Taylor Lautner into the next Rob Pattinson. He’s the new romantic interest for depressed Bella (Kristen Stewart) while her vampire lover has fled the scene (to save her life, natch). Well, while Lautner worked out like crazy to give himself some physical heft for his role as a werewolf, and has developed a following—he’s no Pattinson.

• S.T. VanAirsdale at Movieline compares this clip to the footage of the scene we saw in the trailer:
  

  Entitled “Jacob’s Transformation” and running a lean 53 seconds, only about half of its material is new; if you’ve seen Taylor Lautner’s midair wolfcake morph once, you’ve seen it a hundred times. Unless, that is, you watch it and his lupine nemesis in hi-def on iTunes, in which case you might start to see it as a comedy.

• Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk is suddenly interested in the Twilight Saga:
  

  To be honest, I’m actually thinking of seeing this movie now, it looks kind of awesome.  It has wolves the size of buffalo.  The only thing that could make it better?  You guessed it, bearsharktopus.

• Adam Rosenberg at MTV Movies Blog is left intrigued:
  

  I’m not blown away by the CG wolves, but the intensity of the showdown leaves me curious to see how it all turns out. I think Bella’s (Kristen Stewart) going to be okay. Just a hunch.

• Dan Hopper at Best Week Ever likens the trailer to a video game and another werewolf movie:
  

  Aaand it’s official, New Moon looks like a Nintendo game based on the movie Wolf.

• Michael Adams at Movieline came up with a list of “9 Werewolves Lamer Than New Moon’s Wimpwolf.” Here’s a comparative sample:
  

  8. Van Helsing (2004)
  The bare chest of The Sexiest Man Alive and a bear-sized, entirely weightless CGI were-beastie? New Moon’s sexy-manimal is probably directly related to the similarly lackluster lycanthrope of Stephen Sommers’ misbegotten monster mash.

Here’s that New Moon clip:

Responses to the Wolfman trailer:

• S.T. VanAirsdale at Movieline prefers this werewolf:
  

  The big, lugubrious period trappings of the original Wolfman trailer now take a back seat to the title character himself, whose man-to-beast transition was glimpsed previously but now works more aggressively as The Big Sell. [...] Whether this is a reaction to yesterday’s New Moon clip or simply the new Universal regime aggressively slamming its marketing cards on the table for the first time, all that matters is: We have a winner.

• Mali Elfman at ScreenCrave isn’t certain that everyone will prefer this werewolf:
  

  Oh Wolf Man, what will your fate be? At the moment it seems to be undetermined. People don’t know whether to love you or loath you. [...] They’ve definitely cut out the haunting, subtle feel that the first trailer had and went for a much more in your face action trailer. I’m guessing this one is aimed at all the teens out their they’re hoping to rope in.

• Rob Bricken at Topless Robot is disappointed with the singularity of this werewolf after seeing the New Moon clip:
  

  Although this trailer is better than the last one, I’m still not sure that I can maintain interest in a movie that only has one wolfman in it. I think I need more, or a vampire or a gill-man, or something, you know? I hate to knock would appears to be a good movie, but it’s 2009, man. We’re a multiple wolfman society now.

• The Playlist agrees this trailer is better than the last:
  

  Though it does look like one extended music video for AFI or [insert spooky metal band] here, the new Joe Johnston trailer for “The Wolfman,” starring Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving and the great Geraldine Chaplin is a significant improvement from the last, fairly corny trailer, is high on the dark gothic atmosphere, and actually gives off whiffs of hope that the picture could turn into decent escapist entertainment come February.

• Alex Billington at FirstShowing thinks the trailer is better but still has concern (and suggestion) for the final product:
  

  This trailer is considerably different from the first trailer from July, featuring less dialogue, one contemporary rock song running throughout, and a focus more on the monster and the intensity (and less on the story). I just really hope this is going to be rated R in the end, because after watching this trailer, I want as intense of a frickin’ Wolfman movie as I can get.

• Logan Hill at Vulture is relieved this werewolf looks better than Rick Baker’s last:
  

  Baker’s last werewolf — the unintentionally funny one in Cursed — was so lousy that the film was nearly shelved due to reported (and later, justified) concerns over the “look of the film’s lead lupine.” We’re not worried anymore. In this trailer (even if we’re uncertain about the way the Disneyfied Johnston seems to be aping Romanek’s aggressive, bass-heavy style), the slimmed-down, sleek, and mean Del Toro doesn’t just look like a man with a wolf head, but like some creature that is truly caught halfway between and is altogether unholy.

• Peter Hall at Horror Squad believes many people will still take issue with the effects:
  

  Sure, purists can complain, perhaps rightly so, that there is an over use of CGI and that Rick Baker should have been more involved in creating practical, on-set transformation effects. But I think there is little denying that this looks like a total, maniacal blast.

• Quint at Ain’t It Cool News, for instance, has such a complaint:
  

  But the CGI shots don’t seem to be much improved from what we’ve seen before. The bendy fingers thing looks cool, but knowing they replaced all of Rick Baker’s transformation effects with computer effects has me worried.

  CG is a great tool and could be used very effectively in this movie… there are some shots that look pretty great in the new trailer, like the hand transforming against the cobblestones, but there’s a bit of inconsistency with the effects. Some of the later CG shots in the trailer look VAN HELSING level bad.

• Kofi Outlaw at Screen Rant wonders if we’re seeing too much of the effects too soon:
  

  It’s a hard question to answer. On the one hand, I need to see some hair-raising Wolfman action if I’m going to plant my butt in that theater seat; on the other hand (as some have been mumbling around the Screen Rant offices), the amount of transformation sequences (the money shot of any werewolf film) featured in the two trailers might have “given away the farm” too early.

• Katey Rich at Cinema Blend would rather have more info about the werewolf than a better look at the effects:
  

  Of course, there are a lot more effects shots, particularly of Benicio del Toro transformed into the titular furry character, and maybe they’re just trying to approve that their effects are up to snuff after a long series of delays. But I’d rather learn more about who this guy is and where this whole werewolf thing comes from than see an endless series of unrelated shots. Am I crazy?

• Mark at I Watch Stuff notes the double-pleasure of werewolf movies:
  

  No more choosing between watching a movie about a man or a movie about a wolf. Thanks to modern technology machines, enjoy both fantastic genres with The Wolfman

• Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk wishes there were more werewolf movies:
  

  How come there aren’t more people-turning-into-wolves movies?  Personally, I could do with a lot more wolf-person movies and a lot fewer zombie movies.  Asked what would make his wolf man different from previous wolf men, Benicio Del Toro answered, “He flip you,” in a strange accent, then took a drag of his cigarette.

• Adam Rosenberg at MTV Movies Blog shares a gallery of Wolfman stills, which make him excited for the film:
  

  I’m pretty darn excited to see “The Wolfman.” The numerous delays don’t necessarily bode well, nor does the February release window, but reports from the few screenings have been mostly positive. Plus, is there anyone better for the role of the titular werewolf than Benicio del Toro? So yes… my hopes remain high.

• The folks at Screen Junkies are less impressed these days:
  

  Every new image or clip of The Wolfman gets me less and less excited for the film’s release… and now comes the second full trailer, which ends up playing out like some sort of Victorian version of The Fast & The Furious.

Here’s that trailer:

Finally, here’s a reaction to the Serious Moonlight trailer:

• Kyle Buchanan at Movieline addresses the problem with Meg Ryan:
  

  It’s just become too difficult — and disconcerting — to ignore Ryan’s plastic surgery anymore, and while Hollywood can be awfully rough on women over forty, I don’t think it’s going to help matters when those women don’t look like women after forty anymore. Meg Ryan’s chief asset has always been her relatability to women. How will they recognize themselves in her when they don’t even recognize her?

And that trailer:

When I saw the film last spring at Tribeca, I noted that Girl, which stars Zoe Kazan as Ivy, an epileptic college student navigating tricky interpersonal territory on a school break, “not ‘just’ a naturalistic character study; in fact The Exploding Girl is a work of rigorous formalism. Shooting in real locations on the streets and rooftops of New York, Gray keeps his camera far away from Ivy when she’s in public, allowing his star to pop and weave in and out of layers of cars and strangers, the crush of city life both overwhelming her and protecting her. The film’s sound design amplifies this layering effect; the core of this film is the frustrated sadness that surrounds a long-awaited phone call finally coming in, only to have the voice at the other end of the cell virtually swallowed by the noise around you, the conversational flow choked by distance and uncertainty.”

indieWIRE has more info.

Spout.com, the online community, continues as it has. As of now, we have no plans to publish new content on SpoutBlog after October 31. We hope the SpoutBlog book will console those of you who are used to making your daily visit to blog.spout.com.

Karina’s contract ends at the end of the month and we’ve amiably decided to part ways, the result of a difference in vision over the direction of SpoutBlog. She has been, and continues to be, an exceptional writer, critic and editor. It’s her devotion to her work that made SpoutBlog what it is today.

In hiring Karina Longworth a little over two years ago, I knew we had a talented writer. It was over the last two years that I realized–as many of you did–her opinion on film is the one I value most.

We wish Karina the best in what we know will be a bright future for her.

It is hard to imagine The Carpetbagger sans Carr’s red-carpet-outsider Bagger persona, but I wish Ryzik (seen above, posing with Karl Lagerfeld) luck and I’m excited to see what she brings to the beat. And not, unlike some of my chromosomal compatriots, just because of “girl power.” Because, really — the game of Oscar yelling is already overcrowded. Her being a broad (and, as Carr put it on his Twitter, a “fresh young” one at that) isn’t going to matter much if she doesn’t have something interesting to say, and maybe even more importantly, a way of saying it that cuts through the noise and demands attention.

In other words, I’m not concerned with gender quotas in Oscar blogging. I’m concerned that Oscar blogging has lost its urgency –– as has much of year-round film blogging, as so many of us either waste time bickering amongst ourselves, or piling on the same semi-stories in a desperate quest to chase the traffic that keeps us alive. I don’t know what the solution is, but I hope for Ryzik’s sake, she finds a way to shake up the cycle.

Ironically, though, I have no interest in the film adaptation of Rock of Ages, the 80s rock anthem-filled “jukebox musical” that Adam Shankman (Hairspray) has been tapped to direct. It looks cheesy and I don’t much like the idea of these types of musicals that revolve a plot around a greatest hits compilation. But Shankman thinks it will be like “Mamma Mia! for dudes,” meaning he actually believes heterosexual guys, the kind that don’t watch Glee and The Sound of Music if they can help it, will want to see it.

The whole idea got me wondering, though. What are the most guy-friendly musicals ever made? Probably those from Monty Python. Is Paint Your Wagon on the list? How about Tommy? Grease? Is Guys and Dolls cutting it close? Honestly, unless Rock of Ages has a lot of action and explosions, I don’t see it appealing to the average straight man.

Shankman is also in the news today with the announcement that he’ll co-produce the 2010 Academy Awards telecast with former Fox exec/producer Bill Mechanic (The New World). This makes me wonder if Shankman will try to jump off last year’s “musicals are back!” theme with a “guys can like musicals and the Oscars, too!” vibe. Preferably with his Pacifier star, Vin Diesel, hosting (and dancing and singing and maybe kicking some ass). In all seriousness, though, Shankman will probably try to bring Steve Martin back.

What do you think it would take for real manly dudes to both go see Rock of Ages and watch the Oscars? Comment below with your suggestions and check out the other film blogs’ responses to Shankman’s goal after the jump:

• Krystal Clark at ScreenCrave believes Shankman’s claim, though it may be dependent on who is in the film:
  

  That’s so true. I’m interested in seeing who they’ll cast in this film. Will they go for people who can actually sing, or will they dub the voices over? I hope that won’t be the case, because one of the musical’s signature tunes is Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” and you need range to belt that out.

• Paul Tassi at JoBlo.com has a casting suggestion that fits Shankman’s goal:
  

  Shankman is excited about the project, and has adopted a “go big or go home” mentality about it, due to the fact that he thinks he’s going to be able to reach a wider audience thanks to the tunes of the play. [...] Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Hugh Jackman as Jon Bon Jovi. Yup. Just so long as it’s not Mark Wahlberg.

• Adam K. Raymond at Vulture expects a more likely casting idea:
  

  “I’m thinking big, and absolutely am going to attempt to cast with movie stars,” Shankman said. Can’t wait to see Zac Efron as metal head.

• Elisabeth Rappe at Cinematical hopes Shankman does succeed with his claim:
  

  If this could succeed in converting ordinary men to musicals (something Hugh Jackman hasn’t even managed), I will love it on principle. Maybe it’ll even bring back big hair — and yes, I wish for that every day because I never got to rock that look.

• Katey Rich at Cinema Blend agrees the appeal is there but that Shankman may not necessarily be trying to “spread the joy of musicals with the world.”:
  

  “Guy” is the operative word here, and Shankman doesn’t mean the gay guys who know all the words to “Good Morning Baltimore” when they play it as part of Musical Mondays at Splash bar in Chelsea. Rock of Ages is the kind of musical that appeals to the hetero boys and men who made Transformers 2 a hit, and Shankman and company want some of that money for themselves.

• Ethan Anderton at FirstShowing is a guy who is interested in Rock of Ages:
  

  Despite my dig into the cliche nature of the musical romance, I certainly still have a soft spot for them in my heart. I absolutely adored Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, thoroughly enjoyed Rob Marshall’s Chicago (and can’t wait for Marshall’s Fellini-inspired musical Nine to hit theaters this years) and especially love musicals from the past like Grease, West Side Story, Newsies, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. But I’m especially excited because this musical combines all those predictable romantic elements with the popular 80’s rock that I love anyway into one package that I, personally, can’t wait to see.

• Oli Lyttelton at The Playlist is a guy who isn’t interested in Rock of Ages:
  

  Following his success with “Hairspray,” director/choreographer Adam Shankman will adapt another Broadway smash for the screen: the musical “Rock of Ages,” which follows two people who fall in love at a Sunset Strip club, and features 80s rock from the likes of Journey, Joan Jett, Bon Jovi and Pat Benatar. [...] There are literally no circumstances under which we would see this movie.

• Mark at I Watch Stuff doesn’t get the appeal of this musical for anyone, male or female:
  

  With fellow musical adaptation Mamma Mia! having raked in over $609 million worldwide, New Line Cinema expects similarly impressive numbers for this film–assuming that, between now and the release, no one realizes you can listen to the same songs, sung by the actual artists and without all the annoying story elements, by turning on a radio.

• Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk foresees the movie ruining at least one good tune:
  

  I’m constantly amazed that ‘Don’t Stop Believin’ can retain kitsch value even while being one of the most overexposed and f-cked out songs at karaoke night.  It’s a good song, but think about it, The Sopranos finale was more than two years ago.  All I can say is that if it can still be likable even after a cheesy dork like Adam Shankman makes a movie with it, and a Variety writer uses its “message” as the last line of his article, it should be recognized by Guinness as the most invincible song in history.  It’ll eventually be like Demolition Man where in the future, all the restaurants are Taco Bell, and the only song they play is “Don’t Stop Believin.”

• Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood broke the news about the Oscars. Here are her initial thoughts on the men chosen to produce the show:
  

  This is an unexpected combination, one that surely will have Hollywood scratching its collective head. But I consider it a good choice that bodes well for AMPAS new president Tom Sherak. Both Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic are experienced movie people, and Shankman has the added benefit of current TV experience.

• Seth Abramovitch at Movieline responds to Finke’s “toldjus” with focus on who Shankman and Mechanic should get to host the event:
  

  [Nikki Finke] suggests the popular choice to replace him is Tom Hanks, who could probably squeeze the gig into his busy schedule as Hollywood elder statesman and occasional papal crime solver. But can he carry a tune? Not that we’re aware of. And the guy smells of mothballs. Hey Shankman and Mechanic: You might want to take a look at this post, and the comments beneath it. Tina Fey, Ricky Gervais, Justin Timberlake. Let’s try and sex things up a bit this year, yeah?

• David Poland at The Hot Blog mentions an actor who could potentially end up hosting this show given the connections:
  

  Interestingly, the Adam Sandler connection is not only with Shankman, but with Sherak via Revolution Studios, which funded 4 Sandler movies including Punch Drunk Love and Sandler-produced The Animal, the company’s first greenlit production and second release. The connection also reaches to last year’s producer, Bill Condon, whose Richard Pryor film is being made at Sony via Sandler’s Happy Madison.

If there’s a single crippling irony to the explosion of web video over the last half decade, it’s this: no single piece of media created specifically for online distribution has so far engaged the masses as deeply as the bits of cultural detritus, from cat videos to classic films, that end up online unofficially, accidentally and/or illegally. Taking into account his own viewing habits and those of the post-internet generation, with Stingray Sam Cory McAbee set out to make a film that could be watched in discreet ten-minutes segments while still maintaining the narrative and image quality of the widescreen experience.

And so several months after premiering at Sundance, Stingray Sam became available for purchase in a variety of different formats from McAbee’s website, while the filmmaker continued to tour the world accompanying the film to festival screenings and other theatrical events. When the six-part musical space western screened last month at Fantastic Fest, McAbee and I met up at the new Alamo Drafthouse-adjacent clubhouse The Highball to talk about science fiction as political allegory, the peaks and valleys within the landscape of web video, and the further adventures of Stingray and the Quasar Kid.

At the screening last night, you said that Stingray Sam is political, whereas your earlier film, The American Astronaut, was personal. What are the politics, as you see them, in Stingray Sam?

Right after the US bombed Iraq, a woman from Copenhagen came and interviewed me for an art magazine. She was talking about American Astronaut, and she said, “Right now, Europeans are very angry at America because of what your government is doing, and they’re starting to feel like they don’t like Americans.” But, she said, Europeans always enjoyed loving American culture, and The American Astronaut had all the things they enjoyed loving about America.

So, I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but I started looking at how we are viewed, our culture, and how the things we create are reinterpreted everywhere else. So I wanted to address that, for years, because I felt bruised by the Bush administration. In the end, I decided to intentionally write a piece that would embrace American culture, and at the same time criticize it. In embracing American culture, I used all America born genres –– the western, the musical, science fiction serials — and put them in a landscape of privatized prison systems that capitalize on their prisoners, pharmaceutical companies being irresponsible, tobacco advertisers, depletion of natural resources. I put them all together to create this one science fiction landscape. And it’s not meant to be propaganda, it’s meant to be enjoyed.

Well, propaganda would imply that you were being sort of rah-rah–

–or, anti-rah-rah. Yeah, that I was taking a side and trying to inject it into everyone else. But I was trying to do what is also a classic American thing, which is take the political landscape and make science fiction out of it. Like with The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits using the Cold War, or The Invasion of the Body Snatchers drawing from the modern political environment of its day.
What came first: writing the songs, or the conception of the Stingray Sam as a narrative?

It went both directions. Some of the songs were written first. “Mars,” in episode one, was written before the episodes were written, but it was written with the same idea in mind, and it was a perfect match. The lullaby song I wrote specifically for the scene. The song that the Quasar Kid sings was a song Crugie [guitarist for McAbee's band, The Billy Nayer Show] wrote, and I wanted him to sing something that was very natural to him, so I picked one of his songs and worked that into the screenplay. Others were written specifically for it. So it went in all different directions. A lot of the incidental music, not all of it, but some were actually songs we had recorded, and we just remixed them without vocals. When we released the soundtrack, we put them in as songs in their entirety.

At what point in the process did you come up with the release plan?

I was asked to make a film for mobile phones once, for the Sundance Film Festival, a couple of years ago. After that I was asked to go speak about making films for small devices, at functions that dealt with communication and eletronics and technology. So I learned a lot about what people were trying to move towards in those fields.

But I also watched how young people consume entertainment these days; it’s very different than it’s been before. I wanted to do something that was organic to the way people get their films. So I started writing writing Stingray Sam with the idea that it would be a multi-platform release, that it would be released on 35mm in movie theaters at the same time on different sized digital dowloads, on DVD — [Cory points to my iPhone, which is recording the conversation] you can watch it on here, if you want to. The idea was to write it, too, so that you could enjoy it on small devices. Most people watch things in transit, so I wanted it to be dense in information, for each one to be a complete piece that you could watch in ten minutes So each one has a complete beginning, middle and end; its own history, its own science, its own featured music track.

Regarding your interest in how young people are consuming media, how are you consuming media? Do you watch web series and films created for digital devices?

No, most of the things that are being created for small devices I don’t think are really…they’re like one-two-punch jokes. Not really my cup of tea. But I do watch classic films in segments on YouTube. Feature films are being sectioned up and being seen on small screens — that’s the way most people watch things. I just watched an old silent film, The Wind. I’d never seen it before, and I watched it in its entirety in ten minute segments on YouTube.

So I’m not watching things that that are created for it, but I’m watching things that end up there. And so I wanted to make a feature film that is told in complete pieces, rather than an entire thing cut into small pieces. Each piece, each segment would hold up on its own as a complete story, to create an entire story.

Stingray Sam seems to be a product of your relationship to Sundance in a couple of ways — there’s the commission to make work for small devices; John Cooper connecting you to your narrator, David Hyde Pierce; and ultimately the rush to have production completed in time for a Sundance 2009 premiere. There has been some lately discussion about how, in a climate in which indie film distribution has dried up significantly, the film festival circuit can function as an alternate distribution channel. But in a case like yours, in which a festival has so much influence over the conditions of production, can a festival also function as a sort of alternate studio?

Well, you know, you make a lot of friends. Nothing I’ve made has been created through a festival, but I’ve made a lot of friends at festivals who have been very helpful. So I wouldn’t call it a studio, but as far as it being an alternative form of distribution, it’s a way to get things seen. One of the fears people have these days, everyone’s talking about piracy, and I think that more often than not has an effect on bad films, because no one wants to buy a film they’ve seen that sucks. People are showing my films on YouTube, they’re showing them in pubs and things like that, and that only increases the popularity of the film, and increases the DVD sales. So, screening in festivals increases your own audience.

So do you see festivals and other screenings as promotion for DVD and soundtrack sales?

Enh…it depends how you run your life. To me, the main thing is — well, one of the main things, the non-financial thing. I don’t think only in terms of money. If I did, I’d live a very different life, I’m sure. But one of the things that’s most important to me about making a film is that people who might like it will have a chance to see it. That’s step number one. Making your money back is step number two, and making a profit, I guess, would be further down the line. Hopefully not too far down the line — hopefully it’ll all work fairly quickly! But the main thing is to have an audience.

What’s next for you? What about Werewolf Hunters of the Midwest?

Everyone asks about that film, because I’ve been trying to make for seven, eight years. I’m rewriting it now, and I think it’s going to be a much better film than it would have been if I had made it when I had first wrote it.

I’ve got two [other] things that I’m kind of playing with. One is another episodic piece for multi-platform release, and the other is a more regular structured feature, with Stingray Sam and the Quasar Kid.

So it would be like their continuing adventures?

Well, not in space.

After all the Tweeting and bloggery I noticed centered on the film last night and today, I’m pretty underwhelmed. I appreciate the stop-motion animation at the end, but otherwise I guess I just can’t really stand Kanye’s persona here  — fictionalized or not — and would have stopped it short had I not heard there would be some trippy shit eventually. Also, I’ve now learned that I need to stop watching TV shows and short films online while I eat my lunch. Between this and The Office wedding episode, I hope to never see someone vomiting (even if its rose petals) while I’m chewing food again. Besides, I’m far more interested in another upcoming Kanye collaboration, with animator Bill Plympton.

Check out other film bloggers’ reactions to the short after the jump:

• Rodrigo Perez at The Playlist gets the credit for bringing the film to the attention of the film blog masses. He discusses how it was supposed to be released to iTunes last month, prior to the infamous VMA incident but now has probably been officially postponed due to his shame:
  

  Would another date be scheduled once the Kanye controversy died down? Or was it just poor form, post-Swift incident and the filmmakers just let it naturally make it’s way onto the web? Who knows [...] Also note, if you’ve seen “Where The Wild Things Are” you know that little demon rat at the end does seem very much to be a part of the same aesthetic.

• Gil Kaufman at MTV.com addresses the post-VMA significance of this film:
  

  The sight of West woozily walking through the club and indulging in his trademark blustery talk was filmed nearly a year before his bum rush of Taylor Swift at the VMAs, a night when he was photographed swigging from a bottle of cognac. Seeing it now, along with the heavily symbolic birth/ death scene at the end is a bit disorienting, but also par for the course for the envelope-pushing Jonze, who always shies away from the obvious image. In lampooning West’s self-indulgent public persona, Jonze makes Kanye a more sympathetic character, on film at least, helping the rapper to rid himself of whatever demon is inside him in a cathartic, moving and powerful scene.

• Seth Abramovitch at Movieline agrees with a YouTube commenter’s theory about the film:
  

  One commenter suggests that this short film — made 8 months before he’d become a pop culture pariah for storming Taylor Swift’s moment — as proof that the VMA event was a planned part of a greater, ongoing spectacle: Kanye’s lifelong performance opera. “HOW I KILLED MY EGO - THE STORY,” he writes. “WE HATE him, AND THEN feel bad for him, leading our emotions like a good story teller does. andy kaufman style…. smart.”

  You know what? It might be giving West too much credit, and detracting from Jonze’s genius gifts of perception. But I like that theory. I like it a lot.

• Drew McWeeny at HitFix also addresses the relationships between this and both the VMA incident and the weekend’s box office:
  

  The weird part, though, is that this was all shot well before the Taylor Swift incident that turned Kanye into a target for all sorts of outrage, and yet if you’d told me that this short film was a direct reaction to that incident, I would believe you.  It feels that directly connected.

  So now here we are… it’s the Monday morning after Spike’s film finally opened, capping off a five year journey to get this thing onscreen.  And Kanye’s still trying to recover some sort of public standing after making himself look like a drunken ass who picked on a little girl on the best night of her life.

• Screen Junkies would like to see this further developed into a feature:
  

  Yeah, like we said, pretty weird. I’d like to see Spike Jonze revisit themes in Adaptation and do a film in which Kanye starts to interrupt himself, and then find out that his entire life was actually the daydream of an autistic child staring at a snow globe. That autistic child’s name? Kanye West.

• Vadim Rizov at IFC’s The Independent Eye thinks the weird stuff is kinda stupid, but he does see worth in the film overall:
  

  It does make for a neat companion piece to “Where The Wild Things Are,” a parallel tale of an infantile man-boy who acts out, despairs, purges himself of those negative feelings and learns to control them. It’s about as “adult” as Jonze’s work gets — the sex, the clubbing — yet that regressive aesthetic is in full force.

  Better, “We Were Once A Fairytale” really clarifies who Jonze is, besides a talented technician with an imagination. He’s a kid who relates to other kids who never learned to process their emotions in a sophisticated way, no matter what age they are. That’s something that holds as true for “Jackass” (which Jonze co-created) as it does for the hyper-articulate, despairing protagonists of “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation.”

• Mr. Atoz at Agent Bedhead is disappointed with the ending:
  

  A capsule review: Kanye turns out to have a real gift for playing a drunken, overbearing lout, and we can expect to see him exploring this persona in future public appearances. Moreover, any movie that shows Kanye hacking himself open with a bowie knife gets an automatic four stars in my book. Unfortunately (SPOILER ALERT!), the movie ends on a thoroughly downbeat note: Kanye survives the experience.

• Jessica Barnes at Cinematical is primarily impressed with Jonze’s work here:
  

  Hopefully the success of Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are this weekend means we will be seeing more from the director this year, because this short reminds us that there’s nobody that makes movies like Jonze — not to mention that he does the impossible with this short: he makes Kanye West seem almost human.

• Adam K. Raymond at Vulture is also disappointed with parts but likes it overall:
  

  It drags in the middle and the metaphor is a little obvious, but all in all this video was probably worth the wait. (It helps that no one was actually waiting.) Plus, the special effects are awesome.

• Vince Mancini at FilmDrunk compares it to another “real” short:
  

  The whole thing has Spike Jonze’s funk all over it and that alone makes it a compelling watch.  Then at about the nine-minute mark, I don’t want to be a party-pooper mcsurprise ruiner, but suffice to say, Sh-t. Gets. Real.  It kind of reminds me of another awesome short film I posted a while ago, Rabbit.  Bottom line, prepare for face melting.

• Devin Faraci at CHUD.com sees this as more related to music videos than to “real” short films:
  

  Called We Were Once A Fairytale, the ten minute short (with some mildly NSFW moments) seems to begin like one of those arty 90s music videos - you know, where the music takes a back seat to the dialogue and story - and then really becomes one of those arty 90s music videos - you know, the ones you can only see on The Director’s Series DVDs, and that played on MTV one time, as part of the ‘Making Of’ special about the video that MTV would never play.

• Gabe at Videogum points to why it seems like one of those “artsy music videos” after comparing the film to a recent feature film:
  

  It’s basically his The Wrestler. His entire life has led up to this one perfect role.

  Supposedly, the shoot began as a music video shoot, but then I guess they got too much great footage of Kanye seeming really drunk and belligerent so they decided to turn it into a short film. Cue puppet magic! (That would also explain why the audio is kind of terrible on this thing.)

Now, watch the film:

Anyway, I quite like several of the movies nominated, including The Hurt Locker (Best Feature, Best Ensemble Performance, Jeremy Renner for Breakthrough Actor), The Maid (Best Feature, Catalina Saavedra for Breakthrough Actor), October Country and You Won’t Miss Me (both nominated for Best Feature Not Coming to a Theater Near You). indieWIRE has the full list of nominees.

Hebba (Mona Zaki) is sort of a sex pot Tim Russert. With bright red lips and tight Eurotrash-girl-reporter get-ups, she intimidates the powerful guests of her politically controversial late-night talk show by all but crawling across the desk to interrogate them. Newly married (for the second time, as is repeatedly pointed out, lest we forget that this is the apparently 30-something’s Last Chance At Love) to an ambitious flunky at a State-run newspaper, Hebba submits to her husband’s aggressive request that she tone down her implicit criticism of contemporary Egyptian government by devoting her show to “stuff you can’t blame the government for” –– at least until he secures a key promotion. After an encounter with a shopgirl who cuts a glamorous Western-esque swath by day only to don a hijab to walk through streets littered with burning trash at night, Hebba figures she can give her husband the superficial human interest stories he wants and still slip in a bit of hard truth. The sob stories of Egypt’s everyday women turn out to be so politically incendiary that their fallout hits Hebba where she lives. Literally.

The existence of Yousry Nasrallah’s Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story within the contemporary Egyptian film industry mirrors the uneasiness of storytelling in a less-than-open state that’s at its story’s core. Both visually and politically provocative, the film has managed to triumph over controversy and censorship to become a huge critical and commercial hit in its home country. A triptych-within-a-story revealing women as the invisible victims of the Muslim world’s pains of growing into modernity, the epic drama sometimes wears its muckraking intentions a little too plainly on its sleeve, but its fusion of campy/soapy pleasures into serious social satire is unforgettable.

Scheherazade sets up Hebba’s tenuous home and work balance, and then temporarily leaves the host’s personal dramas behind, shifting attention to dramatizations of the stories three women present on Hebba’s show. In a mental clinic, Hebba finds a middle-aged beauty who, in rejecting a powerful man who wanted to take away her car and give her a veil, let her own Last Chance At Love pass her by. In the home of a sickly female prison guard, she finds a homely ex-con whose torrid love quadrangle between her two sisters and their young worker resolved in murder. It’s the story of a lady dentist who takes to the streets to protest the cabinet appointment of a man who betrayed her that really gets Hebba in trouble.

When we first see Hebba, she’s running towards herself. She’s fled her marriage bed in the middle of the night to watch tape of her own show from her living room treadmill, combining contemplation of the self in a moment of self-improvement. Her resistance to her husband’s wishes subsequently seems less a question of journalistic integrity and more to do with Hebba’s inability to contemplate a world that doesn’t revolve around herself. If the thesis of the film is that the personal is never more political than in a society that tries to legislate against desire, Scheherazade gets there by forcing its protagonist to understand that her narcissism can actually change the world — as long as she’s willing to reveal an image of herself that’s as naked as the “truth” she so ferociously drags out of other women.

As the film shifts format to accommodate its embedded stories, it becomes evident that on the set of Hebba’s show, the guest sits in front of a giant video projection of the host, and vice versa. We realize along with Hebba that she and the “the oppressed women” she profiles are the same, but she’s got to keep quiet about that until a crisis makes it impossible to ignore. In Scheherazade’s amazing final scene, Hebba reveals the scars of her own struggle for modernity, live on air, and concludes, “I guess no one’s better than anyone else.” When the show cuts to commercial, her producer asks Hebba how she feels. With black eye and puffy lips, she smiles. “Great!” This is what she wanted all along: to be the only one who can truly embody the hypocrisy of her world.  It’s a megalomaniac victory, and an enjoyably sick one.

Scheherazade’s Arabian Nights-inspired structure almost necessarily bloats in the middle, and director Nasrallah sometimes goes further than he needs to in his fuck-you to Egyptian standards of acceptable good taste (oppressed woman rock bottom is embodied in the second graphic abortion scene I’ve seen in an international art film this year; point me to a third and I’ll namecheck you in my trend piece.) For all its flaws, Scheherazade spectacularly calls to mind Pedro Almodovar’s early-to-mid career balls-out modern woman’s films, and as both entertainment and statement, easily trumps anything the Spanish director has made in a decade. If nothing else, Scheherazade inspires a kind of “I can’t believe this is happening, but I think I love it” awe, revealing how desperately self-serving Pedro and Penelope’s collaborations have become.