Still one more day til Halloween (Silver Shamrock!), but as this will be the final Today in Film Bloggery post ever on SpoutBlog, it’s my only opportunity to do a roundup of what the blogs are posting this week related to the holiday of candy and costumes.

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:

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I apologize — I have run out of time to answer many of questions you’ve sent me via the Ask Karina thread. So, here is another batch of quick answers. Feel free to follow up in the comments on this post; you can also contact me directly through my personal website.

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?

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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.
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Okay, okay. It looks better. But that only makes me want to comment less on the latest Avatar trailer. Because there’s still no point in pre-critiquing the thing. If it does end up really good, I’ll believe Fox should have released this trailer from the start. However, seeing one weak trailer and one great one means it could really go either way. How about we just wait and see if it’s any good when it comes out?

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:

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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.

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With ten spots available this year for potential Best Picture nominees, it’s been easy to consider every other new movie a candidate for the top Oscar. But for every pundit who believes something like Up or The Hurt Locker or, now, This Is It, is a shoo-in for a nomination there is an opposing argument available for why each of these films might not get the Academy’s votes. Finally, there’s at least one title that can not possibly be denied: Clint Eastwood’s Mandela and rugby movie, Invictus.

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:

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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.

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Did you see Paranormal Activity? Did you like it? If you answered yes to the second question, you mostly have writer-director Oren Peli to thank. But if you didn’t like it, you can thank Paramount for at least getting you in the movie theater. And the studio’s shareholders have Paramount’s marketing department to thank for the humongous profits the movie has been making — from people buying tickets, not from people liking what they paid for.

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:
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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.

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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!

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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.

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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?

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Nothing hurts the credibility of the film blogosphere like bad rumors. Not even supercilious comments from Armond White or Peter Bart (before he gave in and started blogging himself) have cut so deep as the embarrassment of believing word about an E.T. sequel, Daniel Radcliffe being cast as Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit or Megan Fox signing on to play Wonder Woman.

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:

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As you may have heard, in a little over a week, I will no longer be writing this blog. I will continue to write about film elsewhere (I hope), but it won’t be the same. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that a blog takes on a life of its own. My voice bounces off this blog’s specific audience, and that makes it sound different than it would in a different space. Whatever else SpoutBlog might have been, at its base level it’s a conversation between me and you, and even if I find a new permanent writing home and you follow me there, what happens there won’t be the same. We may see each other again, but right now we are at a party that’s almost over. Maybe it’s just reflective of my shitty social skills, but that’s the only part of a party that I actually enjoy: the end of the night, when the crowd has thinned and the conversation shifts, so that suddenly we’re talking about what we really wanted to talk about all night long.

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.