At the Filmmaker Blog, Scott Macaulay points to Pitchfork’s effusive (for them) review of the soundtrack for Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. In every way, it seems to be the audio mirror of the film: it’s a two-disc set of Bob Dylan covers by (by my count) 30 artists, each with a different style of interpretation. And like the film, the soundtrack is a massive undertaking that’s by turns interesting, boring, a failure and a success. You can listen to three tracks, by Sufjan Stevens, Cat Power and Calexico, here.
I agree with Stephen M. Deusner of Pitchfork that Stephen Malkmus’ songs are pretty good, and certainly better than most of what he’s done in the eight years or so since the dissolution of Pavement. But I’ve been having kind of a reniassance of late with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and I still can’t reccommend Karen O’s god-awful verson of “Highway 61 Revisited”, which you can sample here. I understand that the idea was to commission a number of artists to record covers specifically for the movie, but man … they would have been much better off recycling PJ Harvey’s version, from her 1993 record, Rid of Me, and calling it a day. See her performing it live above. And if you must, use the comments to vilify me for accusing Todd Haynes of being a 60s narcissist, while I’m clearly just as bad when it comes to the 90s.

The hands-down quote of the day comes from David Cronenberg. The filmmaker was recently asked how he felt about Paul Haggis naming his “race relations are hard” Oscar winner Crash less than a decade after Cronenberg released his own film, about car crash fetishists, with the same title. According to IMDB, there were at least five films called Crash before Cronenbeg’s, but his, based on a J.G. Ballard book of the same name, was certainly the most well-known. And according to the New York Post, Cronenberg thinks Haggis plagiarized on purpose:

I’ve told [him] that he was a [bleep]hole basically for doing that. And so have many other people. It’s very disrespectful, not only to me, but to J.G. Ballard, who wrote the book . . . I made my movie . . . in a very respectful way. Haggis just co- opted the title, and he knew what he was doing.

Did he, though? Could Haggis have really thought that the titular confusion would *help* his movie? I guess there could have been a cunning plot afoot, but I don’t want to give Haggis too much credit.

Musical theater legend Robert Goulet died yesterday at the age of 73, while awaiting a lung transplant. Goulet first made his mark starring in Camelot on Broadway in 1960; he was a staple of variety shows made-for-TV musical adaptations until both went out of fashion; he appeared in Beetlejuice and Atlantic City; he voiced the penguin in Toy Story 2. But most people of a certain age probably know Goulet best through Will Ferrell’s impersonations on SNL. So, in tribute to Goulet, I’ve embedded my favorite of Ferrell’s Goulet clips above. You get the idea.

As I understand it, the Supreme Court is *not* arguing, as Nikki Finke puts it, to make it a “crime to see American Beauty or Lolita.” The Reuters report is, admittedly, poorly written, so I’m not entirely sure what’s going on. But I *think* the law would not make it illegal to make or see a film depicting an underage person being naked or having sex; I *think* it would ban anyone from promoting such a film as containing teen sex or nudity. So the image from American Beauty to the right would be a-okay within the context of the film, but could not be distributed as an advertisement for the film. Even though Mena Suvari was 20 when the film was released, because the character she plays is underage. Right? Am I wrong? Tell me what’s really going on so I can pick a side.

Last night, a number of music blogs reported that portions of Jonny Greenwood’s score for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood were streaming on a Paramount Vantage promotional site. So this morning, we clicked the link, followed the “Score” tab…and found nothing. The streams are nowhere to be found, the page in question blank but for the teaser that something unspecified will be “coming soon.”  Did traffic from Pitchfork overwhelm the Paramount Vantage servers? What else could have happened in the intervening 14 hours to make the stream disappear? Oh, wait — it is Halloween. Spooky!

Anyway, all is not lost. The Playlist has been on this soundtrack like John Edwards on Hillary Clinton’s inconsistencies. They’ve got the track listing for the Blood soundtrack, which reveals that two of the “songs” used in the film are excerpts recycled from Greenwood’s 18-minute orchestral composition, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, which was commissioned by the BBC in 2006. They have a link to a Real Audio download of that on the BBC’s website.

Meanwhile, The Bathysphere apparently had a chance to listen to the stream before it vanished from the Vantage site. They point to this episode of Henry Rollins’ IFC show, in which the director says he listened to “a lot of crazy Polish pirate music” like Krzysztof Penderecki while writing the film (Rollins does a wide-eyed double-take at this tidbit that’s pretty priceless). The Bathysphere points to this MP3 of Penderecki’s Threnody To The Victims Of Hiroshima, which was also used in Children of Men, and which sounds *a lot* like the music that backed the twenty-minute reel of Blood shown at Telluride.

• It’s t-minus 16 hours until the all-but inevitable WGA strike, but the studios aren’t sweating as much as you might think. According to this story in Variety, the majors and indie arms have been preparing for this all year, and everybody has at least 5 solid scripts that they could put into production without the consultation or aid of a WGA member. Quoth an unnamed “veteran industry player”: “For now, it’s a television strike, not a movie strike.”
• Meanwhile, while New York indie players are generally optimistic that the strike will have little immediate negative impact on their productions, there is a fear that if the strike continues through January, it could make for a manic buying season at Sundance. “Because,” says Tom Quinn of Magnolia,  “If you can’t fill your slate with enough production titles, you’ve got to go out and get finished films.”
• Speaking of buying, the weakened dollar is making it a lot easier for foreign buyers to attend the American Film Market, which gets underway tomorrow in Los Angeles.  But the exchange rate is unlikely to spark irrational spending; as one foreign sales guy tells the Hollywood Reporter, “a lot of what’s at the AFM is very bad U.S. product — a lot of bad horror films and such.” That comment was presumably in regards to the finished films in the market; as Gregg Goldstein reports, this year’s market for as-yet-un-produced properties is full of star studded projects.
• David Wain is directing Elizabeth Banks, Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott in an untitled comedy about “party-hearty energy-drink salesmen forced into the roles of big brothers to fulfill a community-service obligation who end up bonding with their assigned kids.” Rudd and Wain wrote the script with Wain’s longtime collaborator, Ken Marino.

Kevin and I are currently working on a podcast about spirituality in film. A movie I recently saw I really wanted to talk about, which won’t make it into the podcast is Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964), an art house classic recently available through Criterion. A search on Rotten Tomatoes brings up a lot of discussion around this movie, but none I’m satisfied with.

Woman in the Dunes opens with an entomologist vacationing in the desert, collecting insects and he misses his bus. A couple villagers invite him to stay the night. They take him to a house in the bottom of a large sand pit where a woman lives. The man climbs down a rope ladder into the pit and the next morning the ladder is gone. The purpose of his kidnapping: To help the woman shovel sand each night which is hauled up and sold by the villagers above. Some vague reference is made that she must shovel or the sand will overtake her house, then the next and so on, but the science of why she’s stuck there is clearly irrelevant. She chooses to be there. The man does not and his attempts to climb the walls of sand sifting into their hole are futile. …Read more

Brandon Harris sent me a note about his stylish short film, Happiness is No Fun, which purports to be “a short blaxploitation tinged remake of Godard’s seminal Breathless.” It’s not as jokey or spoofy as that logline might lead you to believe–which might lead to some initial disappointments. On the whole, I thought it’s refusal to go to the genre+genre=joke route was refreshing, if at times it gets a little didactic and speechy in its insertion of racial politics. Watch it above, and check out Brandon’s blog here.

I’ve recently been enjoying Wholphin DVD magazine issue four. It’s a great collection of short films that would otherwise be pretty hard to see. My favorite so far is Olivo Barbieri’s site specific_LAS VEGAS 05. The film features a montage of partially blurry aerial footage of Las Vegas, with only the center of the image in sharp focus. The result is a mesmerizing image that oscillates between reality and an infinitely detailed scale model, as if shot through a macro focus lens.

If you haven’t gotten your hands on the DVD yet, you can check out Barbieri’s next installment in the Site Specific project, Waterfalls, showing at Yancey Richardson Gallery in New York, opening November 1 and running through December 22.

As Karina mentioned here, Wholphin will be doing their first screening in LA next month, November 27, at the newly reopened Silent Movie Theatre. The description of the event is loaded with delightful McSweeny’s weirdness:

The screening will likely involve short films about- and live entertainment from- drunk bees, bioluminescent squirt guns, a crying competition, Satanic nine-year-olds, super-slo-motion tongues, and if we’re lucky, a never-before-seen short film by Paul Thomas Anderson starring Elliot Smith as a Rastafarian basketball player with a cameo by Bette Midler.

If you still haven’t gotten enough of Wholphin, check out the online screening room featuring web-only content, and stay tuned to FilmCouch, where Paul and I will be chatting about the DVD magazine sometime soon.

Now that Juno has won a big festival prize and Fox Searchlight has revamped its release plan to make the teen sex melocomedy look more like a prestige picture, various bloggers are have begun to seriously consider the film’s Oscar chances. I still think Searchlight would be better off selling this movie to teenagers than to the Academy dinosaurs, but if everyone else is doing it, I’ll play along.

I’m sure Searchlight will push for nominations for screenwriter Diablo Cody and lead actress Ellen Page. I think both pieces of work are sufficiently spectacular (in multiple senses of the word) to secure a nod, but despite the Academy’s love of ingenues, I think when it comes down to vote time the general consensus will that both will do better work once their talents mature a bit. This must be what everyone else is thinking, too, because out of nowhere, people are starting to talk (see the comments on this post) about Jennifer Garner’s work as the title character’s would-be adoptive baby mama as worthy of a Best Supporting Actress nomination. It’s not–which doesn’t mean it won’t get nominated, but I think that would be serious over-praise. It’s not bad work by any means, but there are at least three finer performances in that movie.

Searchlight probably doesn’t have the guts to push Jason Bateman for Best Supporting Actor, but man, I’d like to see them try. He’s absolutely the catalyst for everything Garner does, as well as much of Page’s performance in the film’s middle section. He transforms from the heroine’s confidant to, essentially, the film’s villain in the space of a single scene. And we’ve never seen subtlety like this from Bateman before. Even fans of his straight-man work in Arrested Development should be impressed. The big story of 2007 will be the emergence of the comedy with unexpected depth (it’s actually a throwback to the 30s, but that’s a discussion for another time). The performances of Bateman, Page and Michael Cera in Juno embody that theme, and deserve to be recognized as such.

A side note: Searchlight’s sudden post-fall festival focus on Juno must suck for the team behind Waitress. Certainly, no one could be mad that a film made for about a million dollars has grossed $20 million, but back in June, Keri Russell looked like a lock for a Best Actress nomination. Now … she doesn’t.

Chris Thilk points to a new trailer for Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Chris writes: “I love the music that plays, since it creates a sort of tone-poem feel to the trailer. Unfortunately that will likely be lost in the final film.” Actually, “tone poem” is a pretty dead-on description of large sections of the final film–if anything, this trailer is maybe more straightforward in terms of narrative than the full feature. Check it out above.

• With the WGA strike looking almost certain to begin by the end of the week, new complications seem to arise every minute.  Now two studios, Universal and New Line, have forbidden contracted scribes from complying with the WGA’s “script validation program.” It’s a rule insisting that, in the event of a strike, writers must submit evidence of all projects-in-progress to the guild. New Line sent a letter to their writers, which flat-out stated that adhering to the WGA rule wil be considered “a breach of your writing agreement.” The AMPTP has already ruled that the WGA rule is illegal; WGA, natch, disagrees. More here.
• Heath Ledger and Sean Penn are in talks to star in Terrence Malick’s next film, Tree of Life. The project has been in development for years, but of course, nobody knows anything about it. Except, at one point, it was going to star Colin Farrell and be shot partially in India, and neither of those things are happening anymore.
• Rebecca Miller (wife of Daniel Day-Lewis, and his director in The Ballad of Jack and Rose) will direct Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder and Robin Wright-Penn in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, based on Miller’s novel. The plot concerns a dutiful wife” (presumably Wright-Penn?) “whose husband falls for a younger woman” (Ryder?), “freeing her to explore her buried sensuality and leading to a ‘a very quiet nervous breakdown.’”

Your faithful blogger will likely be out for the afternoon working on a podcast. So here’s a batch of links to get you through the rest of the day:

• “I do know that at this particular juncture in film history and film criticism, we who write about and care about films allow ourselves to be borne back ceaselessly into the past do so at our own peril.” Glenn Kenny questions his colleagues’ near-universal worship of Pauline Kael. Come for Kenny’s eye-rolling, stay for the unexpected Sonic Youth reference.
• The Reeler has compiled the entries thus far in the Totally Unrelated Blogathon. My favorite so far: John Lichman’s story of working for Chris Matthews, for whom he once made “a delicious, chocolate cake with vanilla icing.”
• Join Peter Knegt in saying Happy 36th Birthday to “the accidental beard of [his] boyhood,” Winona Ryder.
• Girish has convinced me to buy and read Michel Marie’s The French New Wave: An Artistic School with his post on the “bloggable” ideas contained within.

AJ Schnack has written a great post on the so-called “doc depression”. And no, we’re not talking about the emotional trauma that follows a screening of Lake Of Fire--though “depressing” documentaries likely have something to do with it, this depression is purely financial.

Only three nonfiction films are on track to gross a million dollars or more this year, making it the slowest year for documentary box office since 2001. There are are lot of potential factors–the always handy Iraq/political fatigue; the fact that studios and their indie arms are mainly distributing docs with name-brand directors (which, if you take Man From Plains‘ opening weekend as evidence, are less than safe bets); the unfortunate reality that docs that are winning awards at festivals are not getting picked up by powerful distributors, and thus, if they’re entering the marketplace at all, they’re relying on grassroots promotions to slowly build a successful run–but I think AJ’s really on to something when he cites the logjam that has become the fall release schedule:

…Read more