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.

One of Karina Longworth’s favorite undistributed films of last year is available to watch for free on Reel 13. Sita Sings the Blues won the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award at the 2008 Gotham Awards. In Karina’s review from Tribeca 2008, she called it, “a strange and beautiful little film, a potentially wispy slice of autobiography smartly elevated through irresistible, orgiastic style.”

Watch the movie and read Brandon Harris’ interview with director Nina Paley from last November (republished) after the jump.

Originally published on 11/17/08 as SITA SINGS THE BLUES Director Nina Paley: The Media Diet by Brandon Harris

For fans of relatively offbeat animation, 2008 seems to have been a banner year. Pixar produced perhaps their most acclaimed effort yet with Wall-E, which is drawing considerable heat for a best picture nomination. Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir thrilled and horrified audiences in Competition in Cannes with subject matter and personal introspection not usually broached by animated films. Yet the most satisfying animated film that surfaced in 2008 may well have been Nina Paley’s delightful Sita Sings The Blues, which marries the tunes of obscure 30’s blues songstress Annette Hanshaw to a retelling, by three hip, Gen-Y Indians, of the Indian myth Ramayana and a mildly autobiographical story of a Seattle-based female cartoonist loosing her husband to his job in India. The film, a nominee for this year’s Gotham Award for the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You after an impressive festival run that began at this year’s Berlinale, screens at MoMA on Thursday and Saturday. Clearly a dedicated postmodernist, Paley discusses Sci-Fi channel’s Eureka, Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and the strange ambiguities of influence.

Whatever they had on the airplane. It was Virgin, and they charged $7.99 for movies, so I stuck with the free TV channels (I don’t have TV at home). The SciFi channel was showing a commercial-free marathon of Eureka which I had never even heard of before, but it was pretty good plane fare. Also some other station was playing Spiderman, but with tons of commercial breaks which made it kind of tedious to watch.

Eureka because I saw like 5 episodes, without commercials.

Not in any way I can identify consciously, but I’m sure it does somehow.

So many people have asked “what are your influences” over the years. I now conclude my answer is: EVERYTHING. Everything I see, even if it’s just out the corner of my eye, is an influence.

I’m one of those crazy free culture people who insist there are no original ideas; all creativity builds on what has come before. As an artist I pull stuff out of the hive mind, the culture that’s all around me. I’m so saturated in culture I can’t separate influences out, or keep track of each discreet one. Just as corals build complex structures from the calcium floating in the ocean around them, artists pull ideas and influences from the sea of culture, and organize them in ways that suit us.

I read a lot. I prefer reading to watching TV. I also read nonfiction.

Hmm. Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig would make a good movie, because people need to discuss this stuff and most can’t be persuaded to read a book.

It gives my mind an escape, something to do in “foreground” while my subconscious is solving problems in “background.” And it enriches me as a human being. My work is an expression of my whole being, so anything that touches me will in some way touch my art too.

I almost never sit down and consciously listen to music. But just walking around, I hear tons. Stores and restaurants pipe in music, people play it in subways and on the street, it’s on people’s cell phone ringtones, it blasts from the windows of passing cars, it’s in the background everywhere. I can’t close my ears. I may only hear snippets at a time but it sticks in my mind, somewhere, adding to all the other influences in
there.

I enjoy quiet. In silence I can play back all the junk my mind has collected, and really listen to it. I have a lifetime of music playing in my head constantly. The DJ is my id, or subconscious, or maybe God.

Since I typed all that, my host’s soundtrack has turned to the Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime.” I’ve never owned a Talking Heads record, and don’t have an MP3 collection, but I know that song, and countless others.

That would depend on the story, the idea behind the piece, and a lot of other factors. Right now I’m looking for a 30-second ditty on the theme of “copying isn’t theft.” Anyone have one or want to write one?

Live, from the Inside of Nina’s Head: God the DJ! That’s one long concert though.

In episode #108, we posed a simple question: Which movie should be turned into a graphic novel? Your responses to the question became the fodder for a great conversation. Turning the typical page-to-screen progression on its head, we dig into the strengths and weaknesses of each medium. We discuss the possibility of seeing Mystery Train, Walkabout, The Man Who Fell To Earth, Zardoz, Hero, Die Hard, and Gangs of New York crammed into little action-packed drawings.

We check in with Karina for a hindsight conversation about awards season. She poses the question: Who would win in a fight, Benjamin Button or Iron Man? The answer is as obvious as it seems, but not for the reason you think.

Want to win a copy of Watchmen: The Official Film Companion? Send us an e-mail telling us what film you think has the best production design in entire history of cinema. It’s that simple. E-mail filmcouch [at] spout [dot] com.

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

0:00 - Intro

3:22 - From film to comic.

26:40 - The Oscars. What happened?

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My favorite memory of the Oscars last year was Karina Longworth’s Twitters hitting my iPhone every few minutes. The way she can describe Diablo Cody’s dress in one sentence had me turning to my wife saying, “You’ve got to hear this…” By the end of the night we had the iPhone sitting between us, propped on a pillow where we could both see each twitter as it popped up.

Sunday, February 22nd, Karina and a gaggle of other SpoutBlog writers will live-twitter the Oscars again. Check back here at 8:00 EST. If you won’t have a laptop with you to see all the action, you can at least follow Karina on Twitter.

Saturday, February 21st, Karina will also be at The Spirit Awards, twittering from the scene.  IFC’s televised coverage begins at 5:00 EST, hosted by Steve Coogan.

Want to see Karina’s Twitter stream? It’s embedded after the jump.

Typically at SpoutBlog, we rarely state the obvious when it comes to a mediocre movie, trying to instead direct our gaze toward a gem that deserves some advocacy. Unless, of course, there’s a danger that said movie is going to overshadow the much earned good buzz around a great film. Such is the case with 500 Days of Summer starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. It’s a movie I walked out of at Sundance 2009, not because it sucked, but because it was lukewarm. I figured I’d never write, “It was so-so” for a review, so I left. But in the past week it has, surprisingly, garnered ovations that threaten to eclipse so many excellent films coming out of that festival.

Case in point, it’s number one in Coming Soon’s Best of the Fest:

Clearly the biggest crowd-pleaser at this year’s festival was this romantic comedy from first-time director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael Webber, which covers a year and a half in the relationship between Tom Hanson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Bishl (Zooey Deschanel), the latter a flighty woman who breaks the former’s heart. While some of the ground covered is stuff we’ve seen before, the film is told in an innovative and clever narrative style, jumping around in time from the height of their developing love affair to the months that follow their break-up. Gordon-Levitt creates an infinitely likeable character that both guys and women can relate to, much like John Cusack in his heyday…. What could easily be seen as a “…Say Anything” for the younger generation, the film’s Sundance premiere received a standing ovation from the audience, and one can expect that when it opens in July, it will be another Searchlight hit in the vein of Garden State and Once.

Of course, I can’t write a “review” of a movie I didn’t fully watch. I can, however, write a review of my decision to walk out a half hour into it. In fact, I’ll use the above blurb to record what was going through my mind in the half hour before I left.

“Clearly the biggest crowd-pleaser at this year’s festival…” Must be taken with a grain of salt. A festival like Sundance combines star-spotting mania with meditative art films, wrist-slashing character studies and unsellable passion projects. So, seeing a couple stars (who happen to be seated in the audience) perform in a mildly funny comedy often brings the house down when, in a regular multiplex, the house would shrug and head to the bathroom when the credits roll.

“… from first-time director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael Webber, which covers a year and a half in the relationship between Tom Hanson (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer Bishl (Zooey Deschanel), the latter a flighty woman who breaks the former’s heart.” Deschanel’s greatness in other roles is that she can be flighty without being shallow. She has an introspective, girl next door quality that gives her romantic leads the feeling that she’s not the girl you get, she’s the girl you marry. It appears that Neustadter and Webber probably had Deschanel in mind for the part when they wrote it, but in their mind she’s Kate Hudson.

“… the film is told in an innovative and clever narrative style, jumping around in time from the height of their developing love affair to the months that follow their break-up.” Non-linear story-telling can make an already compelling story that much more compelling (Pulp Fiction, Memento). But if you take an old episode of Two Guys and A Girl and recut it with a non-linear plot, it’s still an ABC sitcom that’s easy to watch, but doesn’t compel you to laugh out loud.

“Gordon-Levitt creates an infinitely likeable character…” It’s not that he’s unlikable as much as tedious. If the male lead is a bore for at least a half hour of the movie, can you really say “infinitely likable?”

“…the film’s Sundance premiere received a standing ovation from the audience, and one can expect that when it opens in July, it will be another Searchlight hit in the vein of Garden State…” If there is one thing that Summer does have in common with Garden State, it’s that it tries to be a cinematic mix tape. But there was a certain chemistry between Zack Braff and Natalie Portman in that movie. However corny, the scene where Braff falls for Portman when she plays The Shins for him doesn’t have the screeching-brakes feeling to it that Levitt’s swoon does when Deschanel says, “Are you listening to The Smiths? I love The Smiths!”

In a lot of ways, 500 Days of Summer feels derivative of Garden State and a lot of other better romantic tweener comedies. It’s kind of like if Garden State had been turned into a TV series, recast, cancelled, then bought by USA network and restarted. Which is maybe why I felt watching half an hour was enough.

Push took top prizes at Sundance 2009 (Grand Jury for Drama, Audience Award and special acting prize for Mo’Nique), but–like a lot of prize winners in the past–it may prove to be too much for regular audiences. During the Q&A after the screening I attended, a girl stood up and said, “I’m from Harlem and I know people like that, but I’ve never seen it on a screen before.” She then thanked director Lee Daniels through her tears and sat down. It was the kind of moment Sundance programmers live for.

This small, risk-taking film does show something that hasn’t been on a screen before, and it eclipses the feel-good-and-give-me-your-money bigger pictures. Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire is a simple story about an uneducated, pregnant girl in Harlem circa 1987. It leaves you a sweaty wad of mixed emotions and defies you to figure you what you’re feeling and why you feel it.

Precious (Gabourey Sidibe) is a sixteen year old girl who lives in hell. She’s morbidly obese and hated wherever she goes, except in her fantasies. (Kind of like Pan’s Labyrinth, but the war torn country Precious escapes is the Harlem ghetto and her fantasy world comes from TV.) It’s a little absurd and supposed to be funny. She has an indomitable wit despite the fact that she carries her father’s second child and her mother (Mo’Nique) is one of the most tragic and despicable villains, maybe, in all of cinema. Precious’ entire life is just a vessel to absorb all the victimization possible from being poor and black and female. Through her hallucinogenic fantasies, her protective sarcasm, and a couple of women who refuse to let her disappear, she inches — and I mean inches — towards prevailing.

If you’re starting to think Stand and Deliver with incest, think again. Precious’ journey is like watching somebody held under water learning to breath through a straw. If Push did not completely absorb you into the world of Precious, it may appear that her victories (like reciting the alphabet from start to finish) are minute, maybe even pathetic, but their monumentality in Precious’ world is visceral. It also helps that every once in a while there’s a fall-down funny joke.

Daniels’ freestyle comedy is what prevents the audience from walking away with PTSD. Shortly after what’s probably the most difficult scene in the movie, Precious is staying with her teacher and her teacher’s lesbian partner and remarks to herself, “They talk like TV channels I don’t watch.” At the screening I attended, the theater fell into fits of laughter, the way a death row inmate might when granted a pardon. When Daniels introduced Push, he encouraged the audience to look at how Precious laughs at what’s thrown at her, and laugh with her. My immediate thought was that his last screening must have been completely morbid and he wanted to lighten this one up. But now I think he may have been prepping us for the real brilliance of the movie. In some way, Precious’ humor creates an even deeper connection for us to her suffering because it makes her suffering more authentic. Isn’t it human nature to find some weird whiff of humor in the darkest hour? Finding a way to make a joke, albeit a dark one, can be the only reason at the end of the day to think tomorrow could be any better.

I know Push has everything going against it. Incest, a cast of “real” characters (even Mariah Carey looks like she’s served time in prison) and a location people don’t want to visit unless they have to, but it has an undeniable authenticity. It definitely pushes what an audience is willing to take. Some will say the waves of tragedy hitting Precious’ life smack of melodrama. Does Push go over the top? I really haven’t decided yet, but there’s that girl in the audience who said it was a spot on depiction of people she knows. I think there are lives which are more broken and sad than anything we’ve seen in movies before. Wrestling with whether or not I’ll allow Preicous’ life be authentic to me is, I think, is exactly what Daniels wants because days after I attended the screening, I still haven’t forgotten her.

On the surface, Art & Copy is a tribute to legendary creative minds in advertising, and the process through which they made their most iconic ads. From taglines that became pop touchstones like “Just Do It” and “Got Milk?” to how Mac, Budweiser and Volkswagon went beyond their product and became “lifestyle brands,” the charismatic advertisers share how it happened from their point of view, which smacks of self-mythologizing. Not only does the director, Doug Pray, appear to completely buy the mythology presented, but when the film raises moral and ethical questions about advertising, I’m not sure he realizes the questions are even there.

The documentary follows a simple structure. An advertising legend (Hal Riney, George Lois, Dan Wieden, David Kennedy, Mary Wells, Rich Silverstein, Jeff Goodby, Lee Clow among others) tells a story or expounds on creativity. Between each story is a meditative sequence that harkens back to Koyaanisqatsi: billboard scaffolding, a city highway, a satellite being constructed –the real concrete and steel lattice work advertising travels to get to us. Usually, over these images a disturbing statistic pops up like, “We receive 5,000 advertising messages a day.” Often, the images include workaday drones putting up billboards or sitting at banks of computers monitoring satellites. Then there’s a statistic revealing how absurd post-modern life has gotten like,  “Children receive a zillion advertisements before they’re potty trained.” Paradoxically, these statistics are always followed by another ad executive sitting in an architectural masterpiece of a workspace talking about the power of creativity and how they harnessed it to the betterment of the world.

After a while, it becomes apparent that Pray’s desolate shots of satellites, billboards, highways and cables with the creepy statistics superimposed continually beg a question that won’t be answered: And do you, rebel/artist/advertising billionaire, feel complicit in creating this consumer madness? This massive spider web where we’re sold stuff from the time we open our eyes to the time we close them?

Although the question is not so subtly raised, it is obviously averted. In defense of the film, there is an insinuation that bad advertising has polluted the world and degraded consumers, but good advertising–the kind we’re talking about here–is basically art. Case in point: Nike’s Just Do It.

Nike wanted to sell sporting equipment that assists in a healthy lifestyle. Altruism, capitalism and creative genius align to make Just Do It. All of the sudden, people aren’t just buying Nike, they’re leaving abusive relationships, going back to school, changing jobs because they decided to “Just Do It.” Now, would these people have gone on to just do it–whatever it is–without Nike’s ad? Probably. Did Nike make billions by becoming an aspiration for a lifestyle rather than a pair of shoes that wasn’t significantly better than their competition? Definitely. Is the world a better place because Nike was able make shoes represent the life you want instead of the life you have? Well, that’s a question this documentary continually steps up to ask, then avoids.

Unlike Art & Copy, Beautiful Losers is a doc I reviewed last year wherein the artists actually ask themselves whether using their creativity to sell stuff is moral. In fact, wrestling with the question is part of their process of going from juvenile artist/rebels to grown ups. It’s troubling that in Art & Copy the altar of the artist/rebel has become so sacred that when questions about the ethics of one’s work become unavoidable, the worshippers simply won’t acknowledge them. These advertisers don’t ask hard questions about what they’ve created. It’s an elephant in the room which has been ignored for so long, that even though it seemed to be standing in the very editing room for this documentary, nobody acknowledged it.

Burma is under a repressive military regime. To a Western mind, it’s hard to imagine plain clothes agents of the government arresting anybody holding a camera (who’s not another agent), or soldiers shooting protesters in the streets then airing TV messages like “RFA, AFP, BBC [free press] saboteurs, watch your step!” Almost all images from inside Burma come from a few brave Burmese “reporters” with Sony Handicams. They leave them rolling in their bags, then briefly unveil the lens to capture a piece of an event without being discovered, which is the extent of their reporting. They upload the footage over the Internet or smuggle it to Thailand. From there it goes to Oslo, Norway where it’s broadcast back into Burma. Burma VJ is Anders Ostergaard’s documentary about the anonymous cameramen known as The Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB). Without them, the world does not see what happens in Burma.

Having the emotional effect of a thriller because each action anticipates a truly brutal response by the government, to actually use the word “thriller” cheapens the power of the footage and the sacrifices made to get it out. “Joshua” is the narrator of the story (”Joshua” is his handle). He was compromised during a very small protest in 2007 and went into exile in Thailand. The footage he and his VJs caught of that small protest was played over and over on national media. Something changed. Since 3,000 Burmese were killed during massive protests in 1988, the country had been oppressed in an airtight silence. For 19 years, Joshua says “our stories were silent,” meaning they filmed silent people, restrained from any political expression. VJs themselves questioned whether anybody that wound up in front of their hidden lens was an agent who was onto them. Then the small sidewalk protest that sent Joshua to Thailand inspired thousands of monks to step out of monasteries in peaceful protest. At that point, bravery spread like a virus. For a week in September 2007, the brief clips captured and smuggled out by the BVD to Joshua in Thailand and on to Oslo changed world politics.

This is not a traditional fiml and it defies a traditional review. Director Anders Ostergaard does a compelling job re-stiching the events in chronological order. Reenactments of Joshua in his office in Thailand, gives the the film a personal point of view as the story unfolds before him, like it does us, in the footage coming in from the reporters he handles. But the story of the events from the start of the protests to their inevitable demise was a matter of simply telling what happened, rather than the sporadic bursts of information broadcast news provided at the time. The bulk of the footage is authentic, real people doing something truly brave. Real bravery, not being retold by people or reenacted with actors, is inexplicably beautiful.

As tens of thousands of people who’ve lived for 19 years stifled by fear begin to clap, shout and march down the street knowing they may not see nightfall, watching the movie feels like a privilege to see an authentic record of our capacity for courage. It’s a pure decision, to set aside fear and say “I want to be free,” even if it means death. Witnessed with wonder and then with despair as the inevitable response from the government comes, there’s a palpable feeling that watching Burma VJ is an amazing cinematic experience that somehow becomes an act of solidarity.

UPDATE: This documentary was billed at Sundance 2009 as Thriller in Manila, but is now set to release under the more jazzy sounding title, Thrilla in Manila.

Take an epic sporting event, cut together the highlights and interviews with the athlete (or athletes) and coach (or coaches), and you have an instant crowd-pleaser, because the crowd already been pleased once and knows it will be again. I expected Thriller in Manila to be that documentary until the build up of “the greatest fight of all time” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier unexpectedly wheezes, as a 63 year old, nearly incoherent Frazier walks into his decrepit Badlands of Philadelphia gym. With one shot of the little, cluttered room he lives in upstairs, the tone shifts to the unapologetic telling of Joe Frazier’s side of the story. Director John Dower has an easy target (Ali can’t speak for himself anymore), but to his credit he lets the camera remain on the mixed emotions of people closest to the fight and thereby raises issues–and the film–above its genre.

Through talking heads with the gray hairs who were there, archival footage and the relentless narration of Paterson Joseph, we go back to the late sixties when Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali are friendly competitors. Joe Frazier personally lobbies President Nixon to get Ali back in the ring after Ali’s famous refusal to go to Vietnam for his religious convictions (a member of the all-black Nation of Islam). Back in the ring, Ali and Frazier go on to have three fights in a vicious rivalry that’s the stuff of sports legend and Greek tragedy. It all culminates in 1975 when Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos hosts the “Thrilla in Manila,” the third and final bout between Frazier and Ali.

Much of the film dwells on Ali earning his Great American Hero status more for his publicity skills than his fighting skills. Joe Frazier was an uneducated sharecropper’s son who grew up in Beauford County, SC, where he still couldn’t cash a check even after he became the World Heavyweight Champion of Boxing. He’s presented as the real black working class champion, even though Ali’s radical political views and charismatic spirit made him an icon of 60’s political activism. Ironically, Frazier’s fans were usually white conservatives who admired his quiet, dogmatic work ethic.

With Joe Frazier’s vicious left hook, it appears Thriller is going to pound Ali’s mythic image into the floor. The tipping point of the title fight and the film, happens when Frazier introduces his newly developed right jab, causing Ali to have to rethink how he’d protect his left side in mid-match. This turns the bout from a shoo in for Ali into a bloodied, epic war between the two men. At this point, Dower upends his own Ali exposé when Frazier’s drive to “take apart” the man who’d derided him for years as an Uncle Tom, sends Thriller flailing at religious fundamentalism, the group think of The Media, black on black racism and even the corruption between professional boxing and dictator regimes (Imelda Marcos, although married to a ruthless dictator, could not take sitting ringside anymore during the fight because it was too violent). All factors are complicit in what made “the greatest fight” the one neither man really walked away from.

The exhaustion Thriller creates in the audience by its conclusion has less to do with the typical drama of boxing that movies like Rocky revel in. As they pound and pound each other, each man exhibits an almost supernatural willpower to go on, but unlike Rocky, that heroic willpower may be the very thing that has crippled their twilight years. “Each one is Ahab and the other is the Black Whale,” Ali’s biographer says. Although Thriller in Manilla is heavy-handed at times, taking a sports history documentary and infusing it with Moby Dick horror is definitely something to behold. Unless you’re queasy like Imelda Marcos.

Eric Fensler created one of the first viral video sensations when he overdubbed the GI Joe PSAs. He’s a rare artist who, like Andy Kaufman, is hard to describe in a sentence or two. One thing is certain, he’d rather not be called, “The GI Joe PSA guy.”

Listeners respond with what their families watched on Thanksgiving, while Karina Longworth was transfixed by Australia and Indecent Proposal over the holiday weekend.

(See two of Eric Fensler videos after the jump.)

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

0:00 - Intro, listener feedback

5:32 - Eric Fensler

29:41 - Karina on Indecent Proposal, Australia

42:21 - Listener voice mail: why movies are better than video games

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Eric Fensler’s TRS-80 music video, featuring himself on keyboards

Eric Fensler’s GI Joe PSA, “Body Massage”

You start searching for the DVD and, probably, wind up at Amazon.com. There you’ll find a few secondary vendors selling VHS copies of the movie for over $100. Your heart sinks. A little more digging reveals there’s no copy at the local library. For the more Internet immersed, you may try Archive.org hoping the copyright expired and it’s now in the public domain. No luck. MGM still holds the rights. But there’s a guerrilla spirit of VHS movie collectors out there who won’t let baby be put in the corner.

YouTube is the current battleground in getting hard-to-find movies released, and John Damer has decided to start blogging about film essentials that are likely only available to you there. It was a short debate he and I had: Keep them a secret so they don’t get taken down? Or start letting people know as a bottom-up protest to release these movies in some legal way?

My vote fell on the latter side because doing nothing usually results in nothing. Watch them while you can! Gabriel Over the White House (1933), The Decline of Western Civilization (1981), Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

Postscript: Kevin Buist and I have an in depth discussion this week about Gabriel Over the White House on FilmCouch. That podcast will be up Friday morning.

In the Austrian countryside, Robert and Susanne (Andreas Lust and Ursula Strauss) have built a cozy house and are trying to start a family. He’s as a rural cop, she works at the local grocery and on Sundays she takes her elderly, widowed neighbor to church. In the red light district of Vienna, Alex (Johannes Krisch) is the errand boy for a pimp and has started an amorous–and very secret–relationship with one of his prostitutes, Tamara (Irina Potapenko). When the desperation of escaping Vienna kicks in for Alex and Tamara, it looks as if Revanche is heading into familiar genre territory: Alex plans a bank job out in the country (”What can go wrong?”), it goes wrong and Tamara is killed in the getaway by a cop, Robert. But it’s when Alex goes to hide out on his grandfather’s farm and realizes the cop who killed his girlfriend lives next door, the movie screeches like a getaway car into unexpected territory.

With an excuse that his mother told him to chop all the wood for winter, Alex arrives at his grandfather’s farm. The wood pile is enormous, creating a sisyphean task. What follows are long takes of Alex in a self-imposed labor camp, cutting log after log to regulate the overwhelming grief and violence wanting to come out of him. The quiet little countryside becomes a cauldron, lit by the death of a Russian prostitute, where all four characters will be melted down to reveal what they’re made of.

Johannes Krisch’s physicality alone is brooding and boyish, volatile and seductive, giving us the space to fear and like him. In an interesting sidenote, Spielmann mentioned in the Q&A afterward that people don’t feel at home in their skin when concentrating on what their saying. So, he and the actors rehearsed until what they said was no longer important, then their bodies began to do the acting. Spielmann also doesn’t use music, but the sound of the buzz saw and animal cries in the woods are more ominous than any music. He doesn’t give any easy answers away and we’re left wondering about the choices his characters make long after the movie ends. A typical revenge plot is fueled by the hero’s obsession, but Revanche has a different kind of energy, fueled by the collison of four obsessions. It’s a fascinating watch and by veering from the beats of a typical revenge plot with Revanche, Spielmann elevates the genre to a new level.

Juliette (Kristen Scott Thomas) sits in an airport in France smoking. Her face is a map of heartache. In fact, it looks more dead than alive, which is probably the most impressive moment of the movie. (Why do directors insist that great actors talk so much?) Her sister, Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) arrives late. The ride to her sister’s country home is icy. They haven’t seen each other in a long time and they want to discuss anything but why. That’s how I’ve Loved You So Long begins.

Quickly, we learn Juliette has been in prison fifteen years for murder. But obviously she’s not considered dangerous because her sister brought her home to live with her husband, two adopted daughters and mute father-in-law. Juliette and Léa reluctantly embark on trying to be sisters again. Meanwhile, Juliette looks for a job, smokes, visits her parole officer (Frédéric Pierrot, the most compelling character with the least screen time) and slowly defrosts around her sister’s family and friends. When somebody tries to talk to her, she snaps at them, but when she chooses to talk to somebody, there’s a huge backlog of stories about herself she needs to share. Its kind of a rhythm: Smoking, snapping, talking. Smoking, snapping, talking.

It doesn’t take too much time for the audience to discern the nature of the murder she served time for, but for some reason the director orchestrates a big reveal at the climax of the movie, which is anything but. Juliette’s a classic tragedian whose slowly stepping toward a grand catharsis, a moment that begs us to be stunned by what we’ve known all along.

At Berlin, I’ve Loved You So Long won the Ecumenical Prize for best picture promoting unity or something. I guess it won because we feel compassion for a prisoner walking the streets after serving time for a crime of compassion. But isn’t that kind of a non-criminal? It’d be like making a movie about learning to forgive Harriet Tubman for all the lies she told. I think if the award validates anything, it’s that people love to have great actors repeat their beliefs back to them.

Now Revanche on the other hand. Phew-ee. That movie had a slimeball ex-con who was so magnetic I wanted to hire him as a nanny. Figure out how the director promoted that kind of unity because I can’t.

Firaaq (translated: Separation) takes place in the immediate aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots, where as many as 2,000 people–mostly Muslim–were killed. The riots were a hindu backlash to the Godhra train burning where Muslims were accused of burning up a car with 58 Hindu pilgrims inside. Made with an ensemble cast and intersecting storylines, it’s a day in the life of would be neighbors right after the riots are over, the anger and fear still dense in the air.

There’s a rickshaw driver whose house was burned down, his wife who suspects her Hindu friend did it, a gravedigger wanting revenge, a Muslim priest whose remained oblivious to the conflict outside, a secular shopkeeper married to a Hindu wife and another Hindu woman married to a man who was a perpetrator in the riots. Their lives loosely intersect to reveal they could be a community but for an age old hatred made fresh by the killing, raping and burning of the last month.

A frequent pitfall of movies made this way is that the stories are only skimmed lightly and characters are forced to say exactly what they’re thinking (Crash) because they have to get out of the way for another storyline. Firaaq, at times, is didactic, but where it wins is in delivering on concept.

A little discussed fact of massive violence is that it’s not over when the fighting stops. It’s just smoldering like a volcano returning to dormancy after an eruption. There’s a haze of fear and loathing still thick in the community. It happened with Jews who survived the camps trying to return home after WWII only to find they weren’t anymore wanted then they were during the war. The enduring displacement was maybe the biggest reason for establishing Israel, which shifted the war to a smoldering tension, and occasional eruption, with Palestine. It’s the same five years after the Gujarat riots between hindu and muslim Indians.

If Salman Rushdie is any indication, I think the movie will be well received. There’s a reality that many of us will be oblivious to human suffering happening around the world unless it’s in a movie. Which is why filmmakers continually turn to movies to connect political action with human emotion and why, on some level, it continually works.

(Complete interview with Paul Schrader available here.)

Adam Resurrected is the new movie by Paul Schrader (Affliction, Auto-Focus) premiering here at Telluride 2008. I was at the first screening which was also the first time Schrader ever watched the movie with an audience. “I realized watching it how exhausting it is, ” he told me right after the screening, “And it’s full of extremes. Literally, that old saying ‘you don’t know whether to laugh or cry’ is true here, and some scenes I think either emotion is fine with me.”

It’s in the navigation of extremes that my crush on Jeff Goldblum, who plays the title character, was born. I’m not one to get into Oscar buzz, but I will with Jeff and even add easily excerpted blurbs: Jeff Goldblum is magnificent. Jeff Godlblum’s peformance is a tour de force. I want to make out with Jeff Goldblum in the back of his Toyota Prius. Like how Daniel Day-Lewis’ character, Daniel Plainview (There Will be Blood), would have seemed flat or absurd in another actor’s hands, Jeff Goldblum’s wry delivery and velvet wit take the absurdity of Adam Stein and make him believable.

Based on the wildly imaginative novel by Yoram Kaniuk, Adam Resurrected begins in 1961 in Tel Aviv where an aging, witty and debonair Adam Stein has gotten a little too rough with his landlord/girlfriend and she has him committed again to the Seizling Institute out in the Negev desert. Founded by an American philanthropist, the institute is an asylum for concentration camp survivors living in Israel. It’s purpose is to somehow restore a reason to care about humanity and god when they carry the weight of being survivors to unspeakable horrors perpetrated on everyone they loved. Each patient is a walking abstraction of a type of survivor: A speechless woman carrying a babydoll, a young man who was a Nazi servant, a man who couldn’t protect his daughter.

Adam Stein is a susperstar in the asylum. The head nurse (Ayelet Zurer) is his mistress, Dr. Gross (Derek Jacobi) his biggest fan. A famous performer in Berlin, Adam was a one man circus who could throw knives, read minds, play violin, do magic, impersonate animals and, strangely, cause himself to bleed on command. Through flashbacks, we see his rise from a Cabaret performer in 1924 to a celebrity in 1936. One night as he works the audience, he reads the mind of an unstable audience member–played by Willem Dafoe–and makes him the butt of a joke. In 1945 when Adam and his family enter a concentration camp, Willem Dafoe has become Commandant Klein, head of the camp. He belittles Adam by getting him to impersonate a dog and charm his German Shepherd. From that night on, Adam literally becomes the Commandant’s pet: A dog whose a man.

At the asylum, he finds what he thinks to be a dog. As if lifted from some horrific parallel dimension, the dog is a boy brought to the asylum. If Adam can turn this dog into a boy again, then maybe he can put away his past as a dog, as the commandant’s pet who survived the camp where his wife and daughters were brutalized.

When I asked Paul Schrader what sparked his interest i the book he said, “Just the strength of the metaphor: The man who once was a dog who meets a dog who once was a boy. I’m not jewish, I’m not as invested as some others in issues of survival guilt and Jewish identity, but that aside, these are really universal themes.” It is universal. Dense with emotion and humor, Adam Resurrected is about the complicated path back from being treated as a dog, a non-human, to becoming a full person again. It’s a powerful metaphor that could have crushed another actor, but it’s the part Jeff Goldblum has been building up to his entire career.

It’s Bucharest in 1911. Live theater reigns supreme and movies are just shy of an opiate appealing to base instincts and keeping lower class citizens out of live theater houses. Drama schools only enroll those who can best impersonate the nation’s “heroes of history.” Grig (Marius Florea Vizante) is a 25 year old movie director whose theater actor father is ashamed of him. The big french studio, Gaumonde, has set up a shop in Romania and catches wind of Grig’s “film libretto” about Romania’s war of independence. The famed actor Belcea was Grig’s only advocate and shot at making the movie, but he’s dead and Gaumonde wants to steal the story. Grig runs to get the help of Leon Negrescu (Ovidiu Niculescu), an eccentric tycoon who believes God mandated him to bring arts and sciences to Romania (he wears a toga and conducts art classes). But first Grig has to convince Leon that film is worthy of his patronage.

It’s the first of several hysterical hurdles Grig faces to get his movie made. He wears the hats of both swindler–when he needs money–and moralist–when he needs control. Along the way, an aspiring actress, Emilia (Mirela Zeta) captures his heart, but her ruthless ambitions threaten to break him. By casting Marius Florea Vizante as Grig (think a young, Romanian Paul Giamatti) Caranfil finds the perfect fresh-faced optimist whose naive enough to know when he’s right. But as much as Silence is a story of Grigg sprinting the gauntlet to get his film made, it’s about how movies rose from humble beginnings to greatness and the sacrifices–or casualties–made along the way.

It’s somehow pitch perfect that in this story where film is the underdog, Nae Caranfil wrote and directed it in classic Hollywood style. It has the rapid-fire charm and wit of movies like His Girl Friday, the visual eye-candy of the turn of the century sets from The Godfather II and a tightly wound script where each element must lead to the next.

In fact, watching The Rest is Silence is kind of a bitter sweet pill. It’s just so enjoyable and such a respectful homage to Romania’s first major filmmaker, that it’s a little mournful the U.S. can’t tout such a film as the most expensive made in our history. And to add insult to injury, Silence’s budget was 2.6 million euros (somewhere around four million dollars). No wonder Romania is experiencing a renaissance when they’re smarter with four million dollars than Hollywood is with 100 million.

The movie opens with Odd Horten (Bard Owe), a 40 year veteran train engineer, waking up to his morning routine, which is just as mechanical as the train station he reports to each day. Helming the engine, he drives his train in and out of dark mountain passages opening to the stark landscape of Norway in winter.

The night before his final voyage, the locomotive engineers association has a small banquet honoring his years of service where he’s given a dwarfed trophy called The Silver Locomotive. Already, Horten feels set apart from his colleagues who still have the enthusiasm of being full-tilt into their careers. Through a complex series of circumstances, Horten accidentally falls asleep in a stranger’s apartment and misses his final voyage. It’s the premature arrival of this next chapter in life, a symptom of which is chronically falling asleep, usually at the wrong times.

The ceremony of his final voyage blundered, Horten trips into a retirement he’s not prepared for. His friends aren’t where they’re supposed to be because they’re also retired or passed away. He eats less, but sits longer in his regular pub. He’s an operator no longer operating. With no wife or children, he visits his mom whos is only a quiet shadow of her younger self. Finally, into the drudgery of establishing his new life while looking back at the old one, Horten meets a man laying in the sidewalk calling himself Dr. Sissener (Espen Skjønberg). Whether Dr. Sissener slipped on the ice, passed out or laid down for a nap is of no consequence. At a certain age, falling down or falling asleep comes to be an expected intrusion. Horten and Sissener spend a much needed evening together and give each other the nudge they’re looking for to make the next transition.

Although the end of O’Horten is pretty dense with metaphor, it’s the hour and a half preceding it that’s hypnotic. Usually, when an old person is cast in a movie, they fit a young person’s view of them. They’re curmudgeonly and funny, often full of wisdom when it’s needed. The proverbial firecracker, which is really a young person with old skin on. Horten is cast not as young people see him, but how he sees himself: Confused, dissatisfied and burdened by how helpless this next chapter of life promises to be. The charm of the movie isn’t in the funny parts–and there are several–but in the quiet, alone moments with Horten. These are moments we rarely see, particularly with old charcters in movies. But they are the real connecting point between for an audience that spans generations. Generations preoccupied with a mythical sweet-spot in life that doesn’t come soon enough and passes too quickly.

Asa is a young man living with his sister’s family after a stint in the navy. They’re nomadic sheep herders and Asa works for his older brother in law, Ondas. He’s anxious to start his adult life and for him it will begin with marrying Tulpan, the title character. But neither Tulpan nor her parents are interested in the arrangement. Asa’s not established himself as a herdsman. He begs his brother-in-law for a herd, but he can’t get a herd until he’s married. Therein lies Asa’s dilemma he must face to go from boy to man. But it’s Dvortsevoy’s meticulous direction that creates a cinematic experience.

It’s not just the performances that are enamoring, it’s the sheer starkness of the environment. You see, Tulpan is not just the only girl for Asa. She’s literally the only girl, which sounds ridiculous until you see the Hunger Steppe of Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is the largest landlocked country on the planet, and the steppe is a vast, flat sea of dust. From the family’s yurt–a tent that looks like a giant wicker basket turned upside down and covered in wool blankets–there’s 360 degrees of flat horizon and nothing to break it. Not even a telephone pole. A constant wind buffets the earth and its droll is only broken by the sharp cries of one of Ondas’ children, his sheep or the engine of a tractor-turned-truck driven by a porn loving courier, Asa’s only outside friend.

The isolation is unnerving, but it also clarifies the inherent drama of this family. There’s no need for Dvortsevoy to impress us with symbolism. The reality is the metaphor. For Ondas, when he can save a lamb, he insures his children’s survival. Dvortsevoy’s long, uninterrupted takes pull up the quiet angst of their life. We don’t have to hear Ondas say, “Life as a herdsman is really hard,” because it’s a fact we become intimate with. So, in Tulpan when it’s time for a sheep to give birth, we’re right there, hanging on every moment. And that sense of The Other that Sasha Baron Coen used to make his Kazakh character Borat so funny, is nowhere to be found.

(Sergei Dvortsevoy’s documentaries are also playing at Telluride’s Backlot: Paradise, Highway, Bread Day and In the Dark.)

Eureka! One of the great documentaries to slip through the cracks in 2004 was released this week through new DVD label, Carnivalesque FIlms. Mardi Gras: Made in China deftly examines globalization by stringing together life in a Chinese bead factory with the drunken, breast-baring party life of New Orleans during Mardi Gras.

Plus, a listener emails us two movies about female vigilantes. Can you guess what they are?

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

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The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Bonus: Can you name a post-apocalyptic movie where the human race is condemned to death? We can and do.

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

FilmCouch 80

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0:00 - Intro, how do other vigilante movies measure up to The Dark Knight?

4:35 - The Dark Knight gush review.

19:24 - Karina prepares for a trip to Branson, Missouri by watching basic cable.

27:50 - The Dark Knight redux, with spoilers.

(Subscribe to FilmCouch–Spout’s weekly movie podcast–in the iTunes store or to our RSS feed and an episode will download each Friday)

We’ve been running into a really exciting company at festivals called SnagFilms (snagfilms.com). Today, they launched their beta site with a slate of over 270 free documentaries, many of them full-length. The next few weeks the library should increase to 400. They’ve also acquired the perennial news source for independent film, indieWIRE, which will be SnagFilms editorial voice for these unsung gems that would probably otherwise languish on the festival circuit.

Many of the docs available were featured at the SXSW Film Festival, like award winning audience favorite of SXSW 2006, Darkon. Watch it. It’s free. (It feels so good to write that.)

UPDATE: I just found Heavy Metal in Bagdad on SnagFilms! Probably the movie Karina was championing most last year. Oh boy. I know what I’ll be doing tonight.

Scott Kirsner (Cinematech, Variety) is ever-present at the point where film and technology meet. Now he’s involved in co-hosting a “two-day conversation… about the future of cinema, video, games, and telling stories with new media.”

The Conversation will take place October 17 & 18 at the Pacific Film Archive theater in Berkley, CA. The guest list is exciting and includes Reed Hastings (founder Netflix), Peter Broderick (Paradigm Consulting, early advocate of digital moviemaking), Sharad Devarajan (CEO, Virgin Comics/Virgin Animation), John Batter (DreamWorks Animation SKG), and our friend Sara Pollack of YouTube among many others. You are eagerly invited to suggest topics and guests for the event, so it remains firmly informal, open and non-PowerPointy.

Please, allow me to clear my head of my immediate reactions: The Dark Knight is the shit! It is so awesome I can not stare into the light of its awesomeness without seeing spots. Better than I hoped–and I was hoping for a lot–there were even points where I sat looking at the screen thinking, “Can Christopher Nolan (writer/director) possibly sustain my amazement any further?” The answer: Yeppers, and with a choke-on-its-way-down ending. I’ll shut off the blathering even though I want to keep going.

Christopher Nolan does what I wanted Jon Favreau to do with Iron Man. Kick ass and kick more ass while always staying a step ahead of me (Heath Ledger as The Joker is as mystifying and sensual as Hannibal Lecter). Then–so I don’t feel he just took my money for a couple great chase scenes–he knocks me in the head. When I walked out of the theater I couldn’t balance out the world. I laid awake in bed rethinking the Iraq war based on something a guy in a bat costume said, and that’s when I knew I’d gotten my money’s worth.

Tonally, The Dark Knight picks up right where Batman Begins left off. The soft, sour notes in the concluding refrain of Batman Begins have grown in volume. The closing of the first movie suggests that donning a cape and mask to inspire fear in the ruthless and hope in the innocent has, in fact, unlocked the frenzied fantasies of Gotham’s sociopaths, which crescendos in the opening bank heist of Dark Knight. Heath Ledger’s Joker is so exceptionally twisted and brilliant, I can imagine casting agents boycotting future assignments to cast comic book villains. He’s a sociopath, a terrorist and he’s totally magnetic. If The Joker weren’t killing people, he’d make the perfect role model: Resolute, determined, brimming with self-confidence and unshaken by the material things of this world. He’d be a monk on his way to sainthood, if only he didn’t live to see the world suffer.

There is no effort to explain where The Joker comes from, except for his own self-made mythology which changes whenever he tells it. Nolan won’t offer false comfort in “understanding” where The Joker comes from, but just the reality that some evil cannot be explained and must be faced. Gary Oldman returns as James Gordon (minus the befuddled old man in the Batmobile antics, thank god). And Maggie Gyllenhaal has replaced Katie Holmes as district attorney Rachel Dawes (again, god, thanks). Aaron Eckhart takes a prominent role as “The White Knight,” D.A. Harvey Dent, a surprisingly worthy double for Batman/Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale). Harvey Dent and The Joker orbit Batman like protons and electrons vying to change the very molecular makeup of our hero, and they do.

Take all the brilliant action of the first movie and give it the psychological sparring up there with Anton Chigurh and Sheriff Bell in No Country for Old Men. It’s an art film with comic book heroes to geek out on. Ah, how refreshing for the hero to be challenged so far beyond his nemesis having a bigger, better contraption! The Joker is a spirit, a moral contaminant awakening uncomfortable admiration and shame over our silly values. He’s the most compelling defense for water boarding. Like a walking Sophie’s Choice, his sole purpose is to strip away any pretense of nobility and reveal what humans are truly capable of when only given the choice to kill or be killed. He’s Batman’s true nemesis because he preys not on Batman’s body, but the very hope he has in his city and the people in it. For us, he’s the enemy we won’t let ourselves believe in.

I’m still thinking about it.

It goes like this: A young actor, in his/her first or second movie, shows so much promise they’re touted as The Next [insert famous actor name]. “Despite being only 19 years old, Brendan Fraser has exploded on the scene in School Ties blah, blah…” Then, in spite of of a string of movies like Blast From the Past, every single summer these actors show up in another overly hyped movie.

Below are five top call actors that inexplicably keep starring in big movies. In making this list I noticed a couple hallmarks to spot actors who fit the criteria. One, if they weren’t reading lines when we see them onscreen, you get the sense they’d sound dumb. Also, think about roles they’re famous for, then switch out–say–Ben Affleck as oil-driller-turned-astronaut in Armageddon with Brendan Fraser. Would the movie have really changed? At all?

Ben Affleck - I think there’s a lot of suspicion around how much he actually contributed to the Oscar winning screenplay of Good Will Hunting. Nonetheless, he’s got the Oscar and we’ll be seeing him play the All-American guy who can cry beer again in the star riddled, He’s Just Not That Into You.

Josh Hartnett - Here’s a common occurrence: A good looking guy is cast in a movie like The Virgin Suicides to play an insensitive, slightly dopey high school heart throb. Then, when said actor delivers so well in that role, people apparently think he’s acting.

Julia Stiles - I just don’t even understand how this one happened. In high school, she’d be the new girl everyone wants to hang out with until you actually hang out with her. With Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet and later O, there was a sort of “I can do Shakespeare” card trick that apparently still pays off. She’ll soon play Esther Greenwood in the adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (the equivalent of Josh Hartnett playing Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye).

Ryan Phillipe - He got two shots to redeem himself with Gosford Park and Crash (along with runner up for this list, Matt Dillon), Ryan is best cast as “their father” to Reese Witherspoon’s kids.

Jon Voight - In case you’re thinking Brendan Fraser is the father of the inexplicably famous actor list, I present Jon Voight. For all the film-o-philes yelling, “Not Joe Buck! He was nominated for Midnight Cowboy!” I refer you back to the explanation in the first paragraph of this post, and also remind you that Marisa Tomei has an Oscar. I also offer the above clip that’s been on this blog before for your viewing pleasure.