From June 2007 to October 2009, Karina Longworth was the editor of SpoutBlog. A film and new media blogger/critic based in Brooklyn, she was also the co-founder/editor of Cinematical. Karina is a regular contributor to the national morning radio show The Takeaway, and has freelanced for TimeOut New York, indieWIRE, Slate, Vulture, The Daily Beast, Filmmaker, Las Vegas Weekly and other print and online publications. She has a BFA in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MA in Cinema Studies from New York University.
The long-promised SpoutBlog book is finally here!
An anthology of the posts that various SpoutBlog readers, trusted advisors and I consider to be my “greatest hits” as editor of this blog, The Portable SpoutBlog contains 41 previously published pieces, a new introductory essay (intended as a recap and a look forward; you can consider this a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Antichrist stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a married couple (they’re never named) who lose their only child in a freak accident, which they were present for but failed to stop; the operatic sex they were having at the time was something of a distraction. After she spends some time in a psychiatric ward [...]
Hey, good news! The Exploding Girl, directed by Bradley Rust Gray and produced by So Yong Kim, will be distributed in North America by Adam Yauch’s Oscilloscope Films. O-scope previously released Treeless Mountain, directed by Kim and produced by Gray, who are also husband and wife (Kevin Lee interviewed Kim for us earlier this year).
When [...]
So, this year The New York Times‘ Carpetbagger Oscar season blog will be written not by David Carr, who created the brand and helmed it for four Oscar seasons, but by Melena Ryzik, a reporter, video blogger and sometime poet previously on the paper’s general culture beat. The Variety story on the matter suggests that [...]
If there’s a single crippling irony to the explosion of web video over the last half decade, it’s this: no single piece of media created specifically for online distribution has so far engaged the masses as deeply as the bits of cultural detritus, from cat videos to classic films, that end up online unofficially, accidentally [...]
The nominees for IFP’s 2009 Gotham Awards were announced just a few minutes ago, via a live webstream starring A.O. Scott, critic of film for the New York Times and At the Movies, who recently coined the term “festivalism” as a pejorative to describe the audience-limiting nature of contemporary art house film and the institutions [...]
Hebba (Mona Zaki) is sort of a sex pot Tim Russert. With bright red lips and tight Eurotrash-girl-reporter get-ups, she intimidates the powerful guests of her politically controversial late-night talk show by all but crawling across the desk to interrogate them. Newly married (for the second time, as is repeatedly pointed out, lest we forget [...]
Kevin Buist
FLAME + CITRON Review
Christopher Campbell
Happy Halloween Links. Today in Film...
Brandon Harris
5 80s Literary Adaptations Worse Than...
Kevin Kelly
John Krasinski, Brief Interviews With...
Karina Longworth
SpoutBlog, Now Available in Book Form
Paul Moore
October 31, Karina’s Last Day
Lauren Wissot
Sasha Grey Interview
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
