The long-promised SpoutBlog book is finally here!

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

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

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

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

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

First, a whole bunch from Mike Maguire:

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

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

3) Who is your favorite working female filmmaker?

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

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

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

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

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

WIll writes:

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

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

Karl Leschinsky asks:

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

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

Erin writes:

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

Related: daveed asks,

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

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

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

Chris writes:

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

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

Kamera88 asks:

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

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

Schuyler Bestkind writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So! What do you really want to talk about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

indieWIRE has more info.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it would be like their continuing adventures?

Well, not in space.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call it a study in failed tourism: in four expeditions into urban Abu Dhabi in search of specific destinations, I got lost and gave up before getting there three times. The problem — at least, its a problem for us New Yorkers; I’m sure it makes perfect sense to Abu Dhabi residents –– is that the buildings in the city have no street addresses. The email sign-offs of MEIFF employees state the address of their office as “Abu Dhabi Film Centre, next to Abu Dhabi TV, opposite Rosary School.” Locals find things by referring to landmarks: schools, malls, hotels or, in the absence of a structure that takes up a city block or more, usually a fast food place, apparently most commonly a KFC. My adventures getting repeatedly lost in this system sort of puts a new spin on my Das Racist analogy from earlier in the week: in a city that has erased most visible traces of its pre-1970s, Bedouin history to make way for global capitalism, the only commonly understood landmarks left are a product of that economic eagerness. And, of course, mosques.

Even after days of curious and ultimately confused wandering, including a trip to The Largest Mosque in the Arab World where I was harshly scolded by security guards every time my bangs fell out of my loose-fitting borrowed shayla, the place I felt most like a tourist in Abu Dhabi was in a movie theater. From the moment I got off the plane in Abu Dhabi, Blue had been billed to me as the hot ticket of the film festival. A Bollywood caper starring Indian superstars Sanjay Dutt and Akshay Kumar and former Miss Universe Lara Dutta, and featuring music by Slumdog Millionaire Oscar winner A. R. Rahman and Kylie Minogue, the film’s sole Gala screening drew a sample of Abu Dhabi’s large South Asian population apparently starved for a glimpse of famous faces. Judging from the lengthy line that snaked through the Emirates Palace before the screening, there was much more popular demand for Blue than for any of the Hollywood features or international indies given similar Gala treatment.

The pre-screening intro was total chaos. Calling Blue “one of the most eagerly anticipated films ever made” (it’s also reportedly the most expensive Bollywood production of all time), Peter Scarlett allowed director Anthony D’Souza to bring Rahman and the film’s actors out on stage one by one. Each star — including the composer — said a few words, all barely intelligible over the roar of the crowd, but most just stood there smiling blankly as the fans who rushed the stage with their digital cameras snapped and shouted. There was snapping in the seats, too — the guy sitting next to me picked a fight with the men sitting in the row in front of us. On their feet cheering each star’s arrival, they were blocking his view.

The spectacle of such moviegoer devotion is always appreciated, but without an emotional connection to its stars (I had no idea who any of the people on stage were aside from Rahman), Blue itself is easy to dismiss. Over-extended at less than two hours, the film plays something like a partially-underwater Fast and Furious, with musical numbers, and as it’s got all the narrative coherence that this mashup of genres would imply, it seems pointless to run down the plot. Let’s just say it’s about a badass young Indian bike racer (Zayed Khan) who gets into trouble in and flees to Bermuda, where he hooks up with his staid older brother (Dutt), the brother’s drop dead gorgeous wannabe marine biologist girlfriend (Dutta), and a multi-millionaire super-badass who devotes half his waking hours to trying to convince the brothers to go on a deep sea dive to find an infamous sunken treasure, and the other half bragging about having threesomes. One liners, explosions, suggestive underwater dance numbers about loyalty and action stagings directly lifted from Hollywood blockbusters follow. Is it any wonder the last dialogue exchange sets up a sequel?

In fact, Blue has got all the stylistic hallmarks of Bad Hollywood Action Film: incoherently cut action scenes that more often than not resolve in fire, entire scenes in which the camera seems to have been placed to ensure that all women will be cut off at the waist so that the viewer is free to contemplate their legs and asses without having to assign these features to a specific character, and virtual wall to wall verbal and visual double entendre — as if we might forget that this entire enterprise is really about virility. The musical numbers are essentially super-narrative stand-alone interludes, such as the introduction of Dutta via a sequence that resembles an Esther Williams romance number updated for the age of Sports Illustrated-as-softcore, with dolphins. And yet for all the trainspotting its referentiality inspires, there’s a playfulness to Blue’s imagery that is rare in North American tentpole films. It essentially pulls off a more realist version of what Speed Racer aimed to do, in that the true subject of each of the street racing scenes isn’t the race or even the machinery fetishism, but the visualization of speed through the distortion of space, light and color. The story has to be sparse, because spectacle comes first … and maybe second, third, and fourth.

Bollywood has a long tradition of remaking Hollywood films (the one small local cinema I encountered in Abu Dhabi was showing two Bollywood films, one an apparent remake of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), but Blue doesn’t feel like a simple wrapping of one culture’s commercial entertainment in the tropes of another’s, so much as a conscious effort to hybridize and eventually equalize the two. This is a film in which characters slip seamlessly from speaking Hindi to speaking English, but only when they want to emphasize the gravity of a given situation, and/or their own dominance within it. The Kylie cameo (the bulk of which is embedded above) is an interesting example of how Blue spells out its intention to show us East meeting West, painlessly but not without ground lost by the latter. There she is, a blinding light in silver-white mini-dress, performing a nightclub act flanked by men in gold lame Hammer pants and Don Draper hats, only interrupted when Kumar comes crashing in on a giant chandelier. The scene soon evolves from staged performance shot like a music video, into something much looser and open, a lot of it shot verite style from within, The Western icon is not knocked off her pedastal, but is forced to share it, ceding to the East’s ever-increasing ease at playing on the Western stage. It’s no wonder two of the men do a fist bump to celebrate a mission accomplished: there couldn’t be a more fitting cultural appropriation than this gestural embodiment of America’s own social/racial/generational upheaval in progress.

Since first premiering at Berlinale in February, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s The Shock Doctrine has itself absorbed a couple of major shocks. In the intervening months, the film has been recut (or, as Whitecross put it when introducing Shock in Abu Dhabi this week, “finished”) for fine tuning and to add material about the global financial crisis. Shortly before this altered version of the film premiered on UK television in September, the author of the book that inspired the film, Naomi Klein, made headlines by disassociating herself from the project. Because there was not “complete agreement between the directors and myself about the content, tone and structure of the film,” she told The Independent, she chose not to narrate the film or accept credit as its writer. The paper spun this as a falling out between the writer and the filmmakers; Klein then published a statement on her website softening the impression of conflict, saying that the she and Winterbottom “came up with a compromise: that someone other than me would narrate and that it would be clear in all materials that this was not my film but rather Michael and Mat’s adaptation of my book.” Whatever the production circumstances might have been, the adaptation lacks Klein’s gift for untangling relatively complicated webs of social, political and economic history with graceful persuasion.

Klein’s theory begin with the economic philosophy of University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman, which postulated that governments could take advantage of disasters to increase their power and decrease the freedoms of the governed, because “only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.” The film meticulously (if too briskly) outlines how notions of Friedman and his disciples (called the Chicago School) were exported — with full knowledge and help of the US government, and the implicit support of the Nobel foundation –– to places like Chile, Russia and, um, England, resulting in disastrous dissolutions of governments, near-total hijacking of democratic freedoms, and economies fueled by fear. Moving quickly from one Chicago School application to the next, Shock really only slows down for long sequences of incredible archival footage of the urban warfare in which this socio-economic “shock therapy” inevitably results.

After the MEIFF screening on Sunday, Whitecross elaborated on the split between the directors and the author. Acknowledging that Klein had wanted to produce a work of investigative journalism, covering new ground and shooting loads of fresh material while Whitecross and Winterbottom were more interested in “translating” her analysis of recent world history by plumbing media archives, he insisted that Klein was “involved all the way to the end,” up to and including the portion of the film about the financial crisis produced after Shock’s premiere at Berlinale. The film doesn’t feel disingenuous to Klein’s ideas, but it does seem like it could make better use of her. She appears on screen in two modes: b-roll shows her scribbling notes “on the ground” at disaster zones from Baghdad to New Orleans, while documentation of Klein’s various panel appearances and lectures serve as the most concrete, precise delivery systems for her actual talking points. The entire argument really only comes into crystal clear focus fairly late in the film, via a lecture clip in which Klein appeals to the audience’s “feelings” about 9/11 and the ensuing expansion of government — something we can all understand, that swiftly and simply allies the viewer on an emotional level to the Chileans and Russians previously screwed over by the work of the Chicago School. This single moment renders most of Kieran O’Brien’s barking narration superfluous.

Throwing out the show-don’t-tell rule, Whitecross and Winterbottom show, tell, show again and then yell. While images of Thatcher supporting her “friend” Pinochet as he’s arrested for murder in Britain go miles further in suggesting her guilt than the long section of the film equating her crimes (union breaking, the sale of public-owned industries) with his (mass murder, torture, kidnapping, censorship…) The Shock Doctrine suffers from the same problem that weighed down Whitecross and Winterbottom’s The Road to Guantanamo (which remains the more elegant, focused, fascinating film): their material is so powerful that the filmmakers could essentially just thread it together and their polemical argument would state itself, but they weaken their case by beating us over the head with “evidence” that their chosen villains — particularly Friedman, Thatcher and every American Republican politician of the past 40 years, but there is also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bashing of the Clinton administration for supporting Yeltsin — are not just politically questionable, but unquestionably evil. If much of the footage here could beautifully speak for itself, a few frames of Donald Rumsfeld apparently smirking in front of the still-burning 9/11 Pentagon crash site just pushes the argument into the realm of cartoon.

As a work of anti-fascist propaganda, The Shock Doctrine might have felt refreshing several years ago, when audiences starved for angry media were forced to make do with Michael Moore. But at this point, how many more airless, humorless indictments of British and American political wrongdoings do we need to see from members of the villains’ own voting republics? The question that The Shock Doctrine and all similar films seem to revolve around is, “How could this happen in our democracy?” The weak answer usually offered is “Because the idiots who don’t watch films like this voted for the wrong people.” The Shock Doctrine, almost accidentally, reveals this as the false solution that it is. There’s a clip towards the end of the film of Obama’s election night acceptance speech, which he began by looking directly into the camera and saying, “Hello, Chicago.” By showing this as Barack Obama’s first public words as the President elect, the implication is that this is the guy who will finally break from the pattern set up by the Chicago School, this is the guy who finally look at real bad guys dead in the face and destroy their dominance. If only he had shown such strength in real life!

Clowns to the left, jokers to the right. Flattening popularly elected leaders into smarmy supervillians while essentially picking a hero at random, The Shock Doctrine offers evidence that liberal polemics have devolved into a cycle of caricature that’s indistinguishable in form from the media produced by the opposite side.

To recap for the Twitilliterate: there was a panel on film criticism at the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend. I was not there; I was, and still am, in Abu Dhabi at the Middle East International Film Festival (see my coverage here). According to Michael Tully, on that panel Karen Durbin (film critic for Elle, with whom I shared space on another panel the week before at Woodstock) mentioned my writing on this blog as an example of high quality “in-depth criticism” happening on the web. When the conversation shifted to the “internet’s democratization of authoritative/professional voices,” Durbin again brought up my name as an example of something worthwhile online. Then things got weird.

According to Tully’s report at /Hammer to Nail, NY Press critic Armond White then “dismissively reminded Durbin that he was proud to be a member of a professional organization. When she asked him if he’d read Longworth’s writing at Spout, he replied that he had and stressed that she/they were not a member of their own organization [the New York Film Critics Circle] for a reason, adding, ‘The reason is they don’t rate.’” After that, there was apparently some heated cross talk, and “it felt like all hell was about to break loose, but instead of turning into a full-blown war, everyone regrouped and took the discussion in another direction.”

It’s hard for me to know how to respond to the criticisms leveled against me without having been there to hear them for myself, but I can try to speak to the concept of professionalism in general as I think it applies to me. This entire panel has been reduced to “Armond White Disses Karina Longworth,” but I find it hard to believe that this is all really about Armond White thinking that I am a bad writer. If there are several ways to interpret this incident, I chose to believe, as Tully put it, that White “didn’t actually know who Durbin was referring to but he knew that she was talking about internet writing and that was enough to warrant a curt dismissal (hence, his use of the word ‘they’ instead of ‘she’).” I think this is about death.

For better or for worse (when it comes to my personal life, probably mainly for worse), I am the biggest careerist I know. Which, granted, is not the same as being a professional, but in a profession that seems to be disappearing, my compulsive need to work and to be recognized for my work seems to be keeping doors open (fingers crossed, knock on wood, etc). At my two big blog jobs, first at Cinematical and then at Spout, I have not had the benefit of working with an editor, and though I’ve slowed down a lot over the past six months, cranking out a high volume of content quickly is still endemic to the job. I can’t honestly say that I’m proud of every single piece I’ve ever published on a blog, but I can say that my approach to creating content is the opposite of a hobbyist’s.

According to Tully, “White’s tone of dismissal had that particularly rank air of institutional condescension. It was as if anything written specifically for the internet was amateur, sloppy, irrelevant, and, perhaps most incorrectly, unpaid…White seemed to imply that Longworth was an unpaid blogger—again, that question of ‘they’ muddles the dilemma at hand—to which a few of us wanted to point out that Ms. Longworth’s position at Spout did, indeed, earn her a salary that was probably equivalent to what many of those panelists were making.”

I don’t know from numbers; I will say that while Spout has paid me generously for the past two-plus years, the fact is that I’m not technically a salaried employee, but a full-time freelancer. It is very, very difficult to find an organization that will put a blogger on the employee payroll and offer them the same benefits to which a magazine staff writer would be entitled — I’ve never found one — and if you know a magazine that’s hiring staff film writers, you know more than me. I don’t think the fact that I get my health insurance from the Freelancers Union (not to mention that I pay exorbitant taxes for the privilege of being self-employed in New York) has any impact on the quality of my writing, but I can sort of understand how the lack of job stability accorded to even paid bloggers could contribute to the perception of a lack of legitimacy. That said, I don’t have much of a choice.

I’d like to think that my professional status would not go away if my monthly stipend from Spout were to go away — I’d like to think that one of the things that makes me a professional is that I’ve approached film blogging with a sense of professional seriousness since long before I was making a living wage at it. I don’t work for an institution. I wish there was an institution I could work for. Writing about film is the only thing, in any sphere of life, that I’ve ever been even a little bit good at — other than promoting my own writings about film, that is — and I can’t stop doing it just because there are no jobs to be had at magazines. I have to write online, or perish. And apparently, that means I have to keep dealing with the same blanket dismissals from the same generation of critics, who essentially seem to be saying that they’d rather see film criticism die on the vine than join every other genre of journalism in a media evolution. Which is fine for them, but I can’t stay mired in this tired debate. I have to keep moving forward, or I will die.

“I’m at the film festival. I’m at the mall multiplex. I’m at the combination film festival venue/mall multiplex.”

So I tweeted from the Toronto Film Festival this year, in a quick-wink rewrite of Das Racist’s avant-retarde one-liner critique of contemporary global capitalism and cultural homogenization, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” Twitter is rarely a venue for deep thoughts, and with that update, I was definitely being cute/glib. But the more time I spend watching allegedly non-commercial films in capitalist cathedrals round the world, the more it seems like there’s something there to this Das Racist analogy.

One of TIFF’s two mall multiplexes, the Varsity, completely reverts to festival screenings during the festival; I’m fairly sure the other, the AMC, gives many screens over to press and public screenings but holds on to a few for regular screenings of the usual Hollywood fare. As the mall multiplex becomes an increasingly ubiquitous film festival venue (how many festivals of size can you name that don’t make use of one at all?), it’s the latter tactic that’s more common. The dissemination of ostensible fine art film is only possible on any kind of grand scale thanks to these venues, virtually identical in every city that they appear in around the world, and thanks to their main business trafficking motion picture products that are as divorced from “cinema” as the fare sold at a combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell is divorced from their ostensible Italian and Mexican sources respectively. In a city like Abu Dhabi, that juxtaposition really throws into relief “festivalism,” as it has recently been derogatorily termed by A.O. Scott, as the embodiment of deviance. (See also an amusing alternate definition of Festivalism, involving the “metamorphosis of capitalism into something less predatory, that I found via an accident of Google)

I had one primary, two-part question coming into the MEIFF experience: What does a festival in the UAE spearheaded by star Western film festival talent look like, and who is its audience? In other words, how does the intersection of U.A.E. Resources and American curatorial talent reflect, in a broader sense, the intersection of the Muslim world and global pop and capitalist culture? What I hadn’t quite banked on is the Mall Multiplex factor: despite the obvious cultural differences, MEIFF resembles most regional North American festivals (and, more significantly, major international festival/market hybrids like Toronto and Berlin) in that the bulk of its programming unspools in shopping centers, on screens adjacent to theaters welcoming everyday patrons to everyday cinema fare. Here, as in the States, that everyday fare is apparently overwhelmingly dominated by large Hollywood films.

The lobby of the Cinestar at the Marina Mall in Abu Dhabi seems to always be packed, but the bulk of the local emirate natives (identifiable by “national costume,” which usually means white floor-length dishdashas and red-and-white headdresses for men, and floor-length abayas and headscarfs or burkas, all often black, for the women) seem to be headed down the right corridor, where multiplex business continues as usual, while those in Western dress mostly turn right, towards the four screens that MEIFF has commandeered. I had been told by a festival organizer that one of their challenges in fostering a film culture here is that when natives of Abu Dhabi go to a movie theater, they behave “like it’s their living room” — meaning that they might arrive late and/or leave early, and carry on audible conversations with each other during the film. Hearing it described, I assumed the problem (if you can even safely apply that term to what amounts to a difference in cultural conditioning) was just a degree removed from the situation at an average “urban” multiplex at midnight shows on Friday nights.

And then I sat next to two men in national dress during Saturday’s screening of Son of Babylon, a soft drama co-produced by 8 countries and shot on location in Baghdad and Kurdistan, about the post-Shock and Awe shock and desperation of Iraqis confronting the recent past in the immediate weeks following the fall of Saddam Hussein. For the first twenty or so minutes of the movie, the men next to me kept up a running conversation in Arabic, at a volume perhaps lower than street level but definitely above a whisper. At times they seemed to be arguing about what was happening on screen; sometimes, one would just repeat a line from the film and the other would audibly sigh. And then a character on screen began singing a song about Saddam’s genocidal Anfal Campaign in Kurdistan. The man immediately to my right pointed at the screen, turned to his friend and said, “Kurdistan!” And then both men got up and walked out, leaving their jumbo-size soft drink cups in their cupholders, never coming back to retrieve them.

I don’t pretend to know enough about local attitudes towards the Kurds and the wider situation in Iraq to understand what about this scene would send these men running for the exits; maybe they just had to run down the hall to catch a screening of Surrogates. I can tell you that what they missed made me contemplate running for the exits more than once, though in keeping with *my* cultural conditioning, I dutifully stuck it out. Resembling what might happen if Abbas Kiarostami was given a commission to transpose Germany Year Zero to post-Saddam Iraq with the caveat that if the film failed to win the Best Foreign Film Oscar the director would be billed for its production, Son of Babylon also bears traces of its eight-nation collaboration, in that the various political provocations naturally inherent to the material are pounded into middlebrow mash.

The film follows preteen Ahmed and his grandmother (played by Shazada Hussein, a Kurd whose entire family went missing during Anfal, and who was the sole woman to testify against Saddam at his trial), as they trek across Iraq in search of Ahmed’s father, a soldier who was imprisoned at Nasariyah during the war in 1991 and hasn’t been heard from since. As the duo take a convoluted route from the north to Baghdad to Nasariyah to Babylon (made more convoluted by the fact that every car breaks down, and every stranger encountered seems scary but ultimately has a heart of gold), the chaos and confusion, interpersonal conflict and communal despair of “liberated” Iraq are effectively transmitted through the eyes of our preternaturally mature child guide.

This is the kind of film that Oscar foreign language voters love, because it flatters their general liberal guilt without demanding any real prerequisite knowledge of historical fact or the nuance of intra-Iraqi relations — everything is explained, leaving no room for feeling. It also affirms the widely held assumption amongst the U.S. left that while Saddam was bad for Iraqis, the U.S. intervention definitely wasn’t good. Son of Babylon unsurprisingly offers a conception of America where “Michael Jackson is the mayor” and all Americans are “pigs” — that is, barking rednecks who point big guns at old women and kids.

Oddly paced, hyper-shrieky yet emotionally flat, Babylon’s one interesting spin on the contemplation of the many crises of contemporary Iraq is that for the bulk of the film, Ahmed seems to be the sole future-focused soul around. The kid naturally, guilelessly buys into the Bush administration’s propagandist fiction that in a world reduced to ground zero, old disputes can easily be zeroed out, that without Saddam all Iraqis should theoretically be free to move forward, that the U.S. Invasion could give each and every Iraqi a clean slate. Ahmed’s grandma knows better, and in time, Ahmed is forced to put away childish fantasies and learn his lesson — morbidly, mawkishly, amidst mass graves. A braver film would offer this punctured naivete as an allegorical indictment; Son of Babylon settles for the punishment of its heroes.

The thing is, middling though it may be, I think I could stand to see a dozen more films like Son of Babylon, that at least show very recent history in which the U.S. has a stake from the other end of the gun. Whereas, I think I may have seen my fill of documentaries cartoonishly vilifying the last thirty years of U.S. foreign policy from the perspective of self-hating Americans and Brits. But more on The Shock Doctrine tomorrow…

The Middle East International Film Festival is entering into its third edition. For its first two years, the fest was produced by Pyramedia, the production company of Oprah-esque media multi-hyphenate Nashwa al-Ruwaini, which is also responsible for Prince of Poets, a Eurostar-esque competition dedicated to original poetry that draws huge TV audiences in the region. From what I’ve gathered in my short time on the ground here, the consensus seems to be that while al-Ruwaini and crew put on a good show, their iteration of MEIFF had little interest in making a mark on the international film festival landscape, or participating in the wider conversation about film culture.

This is one thing that the new creative minds behind the festival, led by former Tribeca artistic director Peter Scarlet, seek to change. At a press briefing here today, consultant Lucius Barre, who has been tasked by the festival with hiring and training a permanent, year-round communications team, aligned the mission of the new MEIFF with what he described as the original charter behind the Cannes Film Festival: “To gather films from as many parts of the world as possible, show them under the best technical circumstances possible, and thereby foster goodwill” to the peoples of the world. “My aim,” he went on, “is to show the world the welcoming face of Abu Dhabi” to the international film community. Whereas other artistic initiatives in Abu Dhabi (including the upcoming branches of the Louvre and Guggenheim museums set to open in the emirate within the next three years) are sponsored by the Abu Dhabi tourism agencies and thus are primarily  a one-way gesture of pulling people and money in, it seems that MEIFF is interested in forming lasting two-way connections between this region and the wider world.

If that’s the lofty theoretical agenda, the practical agenda seems to be two-fold: to make MEIFF more like a blue chip international film festival (and thus more welcoming to international press, industry and filmmakers who are used to a certain kind of social atmosphere and/or hospitality), and to begin to develop a year-round film culture locally. The first part of that agenda came at least partially to fruition this year with the establishment of The Tent, a hospitality space on the terrace of the massive Emirates Palace hotel complex, where the festival can hold informal panels during the day and transform into a low-key social lounge at night. As Thursday night’s massive opening night celebration in the balmy gardens outside the Palace began to run out of steam, festival staff and guests migrated over to the air conditioned tent, where Scarlet was holding court. The idea for the space, he said, came to him when he visited the festival last year and was told that if he wanted something to eat and drink at 10pm, he’d have to go back to his hotel room. “This is what we always wanted,” he said, gesturing at the filmmakers and assorted friends of the festival, gathering at small tables over champagne and cigarettes. The space is welcoming, and yet unexpectedly exclusive: there’s no need to be on a list or to show any sort of credentials to get in, but once you’re there, those glasses of champagne cost roughly forty US dollars a pop.

As for the second point of the program — the part about establishing a film culture in a place where there’s very little knowledge of cinema beyond Hollywood, Bollywood and Egyptian blockbusters — on Thursday night Scarlet and MEIFF programmer Kellen Quinn (also recently employed by Tribeca) both spoke passionately about the opportunities afforded by an event geared towards a local audience with no cause for cynicism about cinema. They’re particularly excited about bringing selections that might elicit yawns in New York to fresh eyes (case in point: Scarlet says MEIFF’s program of silent comedy shorts with live piano accompaniment next Friday will be for most of the audience their first ever exposure to silent film).

And if this film missionary project doesn’t catch on right away, that’s fine—Scarlet says he’s in it for the long haul. I asked him if he plans to stay in Abu Dhabi year round, and he responded, “Moved here in June. Found a house in April. Probably never going to leave.” Maybe it was the champagne, but I believed him.

Above: a standup pointing the way to the Empire Palace’s exhibit of plans for Saadiyat Island, a plot of land that’s being developed to become “Abu Dhabi’s cultural center” by the end of the 2010s. Saadiyat is scheduled to host a number of attractions in partnership with Western institutions, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (billed as the largest Guggenheim in the world), and New York University Abu Dhabi Campus.

The flight from JFK to Abu Dhabi was twelve hours, non-stop. Once I figured out how to recline my sleeping pod seat, I slept for eight of them. I spent the rest of the flight exploring the on-board entertainment system. I watched an episode of Mad Men, an E! Special on sexy celeb style or some such that bent over backwards justifying Audrey Hepburn to the youngsters, and part of Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom, which was coincidentally the opening night film at the Middle East International Film Festival — my hosts in Abu Dhabi — last year. Every selection on the on demand video server on Etihad Air (“the national airline of the UAE”) was preceded by an ad for TDIC, the Tourism Development Investment Corporation of Abu Dhabi. After seeing this promo several times, I partially memorized the accented-English voiceover: “The foundations for Abu Dhabi’s future development have been with us for generations,” the voice boomed. Attracting Western tourism and business, it promised, would reveal “the next treasures in Abu Dhabi’s bright future.”

As the plane descended into Abu Dhabi, the entertainment system locked, and each seat back screened a short promotional film that made the boosterism of the TDIC trailer seem mild. As soothing music played, the film offered a series of titled tableaus depicting what would ostensibly await us on the ground. Title: “True Arabic hospitality.” Image: four-top filled with what look to be Europeans, lunching at an outdoor cafe. Title: “Desert adventures.” Image: A camel crosses the screen from right to left, revealing an American-looking couple lounging in a sand dune, laughing, champagne glasses aloft. Title: “Understated luxury.” Image: The camera pans up to the interior of a domed ceiling, adorned with tilework that would’ve made Gaudi blush.

So much of any in flight experience is about distracting the passenger from thoughts of the worst case scenario. This landing film, shown to a captive audience of passengers who clearly have reason enough (business leisure, or … other?) to travel halfway across the planet to the UAE, seemed to be about allaying any residual fears of the culture shock/conflict awaiting them in this foreign land. This film seemed to say, “Put your nightmare stereotypes about Arab hostility against your way of life aside — we love capitalism!”

Above: the view from my room at the Intercontinental. Yes, that’s smog — thanks to its desert clime and the absurdly high standard of living of its elites, Abu Dhabi reportedly has the biggest carbon footprint of any city in the world. That’s why they’re aiming to build Masdar City, an experimental “carbon neutral ecotopia” within the city by 2018.

I have to run to get my press pass now. More on my first day in Abu Dhabi, and the opening night festivities, when I return.

Lone Scherfig’s An Education is an extremely classy film –– classy as in modish, classy as in overtly concerned with class, and both ultimately at the expense of digging as deep as it could into the gut ugliness of first heartbreak. It’s about Jenny (Carey Mulligan), an Oxford-bound beauty in 1960s suburban London, the pet of an old maid-ish English teacher (Olivia Williams) and a worthy sparring opponent for her protective dad (a sharply funny Albert Molina), who takes a vacation from smart-girl responsibility in order to lose herself in the charms of the much older David (Peter Sarsgaard). David picks her up one rainy day and proceeds to insinuate himself into the schoolgirl’s boring, middle-class life, charming her unsophisticated parents into allowing him to take their daughter on weekend trips, tempting her with the lifestyle of the full-time consort, and eventually endangering her virtue, her standing at her uptight all-girls prep school, and her future.

Oh, young love! When An Education works, it’s because it’s capable of recreating the insane fog of love, particularly first love, which always feels like last love. To the outside eye, Jenny is a foolish girl making choices with her heart and libido at the expense of her head, but in the film’s most interesting angle, Scherfig and Hornby approach Jenny’s escape to romance as a political decision. In a post-WWII world, an antebellum age between The Blitz and The Beatles, where the specter of mass destruction is very real just outside Jenny’s bedroom community and her Jewish boyfriend is still an outsider, she feels she’s making an informed decision to live life to the fullest while that option is still available to her. The proto-feminist option — to go as far as possible academically at the expense of expanding her horizons emotionally, with little potential reward in sight –– is, compared to the life David promises of sports cars and cocktails and other shadily acquired luxuries, a death sentence. Watching An Education, you could only wonder why such a smart, rational, good girl would so easily abandon middle class morality and lose her head so many points along the way, if you’ve either never fallen so deeply under the spell of another, or you have and have opted to forget that momentary loss of control.

Ultimately An Education seems to take the latter option. After revealing the truth about David and Jenny’s relationship, Education opts for a kind of willful forgetting about the ways in which youthful romantic obsession leaves its mark on relationships moving forward. The film resolves itself so easily that the last couple of scenes play as if there were a serious scene missing before the camera-drifting-off-into-the-clouds sign-off. Never, up to this point, in charge of telling her own story, Jenny suddenly reveals her inner monologue via voice-over in the film’s tacked-on coda. Her “and life goes on” reflections are very sensible, very classy, and very weirdly cheery, as if this girl has casually pushed aside the “education” she received at the hands of her older boyfriend, as if it had never happened. An Education works as a fever dream of first love, but the wake-up is unsatisfying and incomplete.

If you know nothing else about Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, which screened at the New York Festival on Thursday night just four months after the VHS cameras started to roll, you’ve probably heard it described, either positively or negatively, as “not really a movie.” As Korine himself put it before the screening, “I don’t know what it is. It was made to be more like something that was unearthed, or buried — something that was in a ditch, maybe. Like a VHS tape that was in a ditch. Or an attic. Or a drawer.”

It’s fitting that as Korine rambled, the words that came out of his mouth to define what he made became increasingly intimate in their connotation. In the span of a handful of sentence fragments, Trash Humpers went from something dumped like corpse, to something stored in a home, first hidden away in an attic, and then kept close at hand in a drawer. And this is exactly what Trash Humpers does in practice: in a series of vignettes, videotaped from an insider’s perspective, Korine introduces us to a world of inexplicable horror, and then slowly domesticates it. There may not be an traditional narrative intended, but if you make any effort at all to tie together the threads that Korine has laid out, it would be impossible to not see a beginning, middle and end to this 78 minute artbomb, a progression from dangerous grotesquerie to something more personal and almost — almost — sweet and nice.

The “Humpers,” as Korine refers to them, are four unnamed characters (the closest thing to a lead is played by Korine’s wife Rachel, and Korine plays another himself) masked under exaggerated old-person makeup, who literally have sex with curb-side trash cans. Sometimes they lift the lid to see what’s in the can before they begin to hump, other times they settle for fellating tree branches or humping trunks. They also smash TVs, eat pancakes with dishwashing liquid instead of syrup, hang out with overweight singing hookers, teach a child with an uncanny resemblance to Drew Carey how to insert a razor blade into an apple, and — whether accidentally or on purpose, indisputably gleefully — kill their friends. Much of this plays out to a soundtrack of the Humpers’ theme song, an a cappella rap of sorts that goes, “Make it make it make it don’t fake it, make it make it make it don’t take it.” With this refrain, and the countless acts of dumbass violence punctuated with the Humpers spontaneously busting out into victory dance, Trash Humpers takes on the quality of a cracked musical.

Amidst all this braindead destruction and debauchery (much of which is hilariously, for lack of a better term, fucked-up), there are brief flashes of clarity: a Humper associate, dressed in a French Maid costume, recites a rousing poetic battle cry about how the culture of consumption and waste has made them what they are. Korine, in character, drives through the Nashville neighborhood where the film is set (and where, in real life, the filmmaker lives), talking to the camera about “smelling the pain”of his normal neighbors, trapped in their everyday lives. The trash humpers, he says, “choose to live like free people.” That said, they’re free people in a kind of war. “It’s just one long game. And I expect we’ll win it. I expect that all these people will be dead and buried long before I catch my second wind.” The Korine character’s survivalist bravado is given truly poignant counterpoint a bit later, when the old woman played by Rachel Korine, whiskey bottle in hand, asks God for guidance. The film ends (suddenly, it seems — as unpleasant as some of Korine’s material is, he is not forcing his audience through an endless endurance exercise) on an oddly tender, maternal note, which is itself undercut by all we’ve seen before.

Never has the bizarre beauty of degraded low-grade video been exploited to this extent in anything like a traditional feature film. The artifacts left by the breakdown of the medium on which Trash Humpers was shot don’t feel like mistakes, but like a kind of ghostly graffiti. The images themselves, with their odd texture and indefinable color spectrum — is that grey? Green? Pink? A combination of the three that seems like an invention, since no one’s ever celebrated video this shitty to this exalted extent? –– take on a quality similar to the blurred photorealism of Gerhard Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings. There’s a sequence in Trash Humpers in which Korine flms the other Humpers asleep on a kitchen floor, and the way the VHS reacts to the low light, their faces seem to melt like decomposed corpses. There eventually are enough actual corpses in the film that this doesn’t seem accidental.

And that kind of thing is the niggling problem withTrash Humpers. It’s transcendantly funny, haunting, and sickly beautiful, but if we are to take Korine’s stated intentions at face value, then it’s a failure. Trash Humpers is never convincing as a found object; the hand of the artist is just too visible. It’s just too good to be trash.

This review was originally published during the Toronto Film Festival. The Invention of Lying opens today.

The Invention of Lying begins with a voiceover by the film’s co-writer/director and star Ricky Gervais, referring in the third person to his image on screen as that of a “chubby little loser.” Various variations of this epithet will be thrown at the Gervais character, a failing screenwriter named Mark, throughout the film; even his love interest, the lovely but shallow Anna (Jennifer Garner), tells him they can’t be together because she doesn’t want to spawn “little fat kids with snub noses.” Anna is brutally honest because everyone in Lying is — the film is set in an alternate universe version of a small American city in which not only does no one know how to tell a lie, but they’re moved to speak each truth that pops into their heads. So on Anna and Mark’s first date, Anna tells him over and over again that she’s there not because she finds him attractive, but because she’s afraid of dying alone. Their waiter greets them not with a welcome, but with the admission that he’s “very embarrassed to be working here.”

Turns out a world without bullshit is a glum one indeed. Unable to spice up his movie about the Black Plague with creative embellishment, Mark loses his job, and unable to make excuses about the rent, he faces eviction. He goes to his bank to withdraw the paltry remains of his account, when a crazy idea hits him: in a world of absolute truth, there is no disbelief, so if he tells the teller his account balance is higher than it is, she’ll probably give him what he asks for. She does, and this sets off a chain reaction of lies for the greater good. The trouble starts when Mark soothes the fears of his dying mother by telling her that she’ll live better in death than she did in life. When these lies about the afterlife spread, Mark accidentally invents an international cult that looks a lot like Christianity –– to the point where the buildings erected for quiet contemplation of his “man in the sky” bear icons of Mark with his arms outstretched, not on a cross but presenting the pizza boxes on which he’s scrawled his prophecies. And still, Anna won’t date him. “Does being rich and famous change your genetic material?” she asks, without guile. He has to admit that it doesn’t.

Gervais and co-director/writer Matthew Robinson don’t exactly have infinite track to run with this premise, but they make the most of it, teasing both well-earned pathos and gut-busting laughs (the many indie A-list cameos help) out of the notion that humans naturally resist happiness. The mid-narrative segue into religious allegory is a bit rocky, perhaps because the rules of the game are so ill-defined; was there no religion whatsoever pre-Pizza Hut tablets, or no just no Christianity? Was there ever a human named Jesus Christ, and if his birth wasn’t an epochal, calendar-structuring event, then what bloody year is it? It’s more successful as a meditation on the paradox of success. Winning at one or two aspects of life may solve three or four problems, but it rarely if ever cures our biggest insecurities, and if the person you love prizes “genetic material” over all other attributes and yours doesn’t suit their fancy, there’s little your money can do to help you out with that.  By playing a chubby little man whose sense of himself as a loser can’t be changed by wealth and fame, Gervais rips open potentially autobiographical wounds, and also exorcises them. But it’s hard to write this off as mawkish public therapy — The Invention of Lying is just too damn fun.

I haven’t weighed in on the Roman Polanski clusterfuck, because I feel strongly that I shouldn’t add to the noise on any given scandale du jour unless I actually have something original, relevant and new to say. So far, I haven’t. But in trying to find an angle from which I could approach the story, I went back and read my review of Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which I saw and wrote about at Sundance in 2008. Much of what I could say now about the complexities of the case (and particularly the apparent divide between Polanski’s film industry supporters egotistically “demanding” his release and the — for lack of a better term — normal Americans who hadn’t given thought one to Polanski in decades but are now all over cable news accusing Woody Allen et all of condoning child rape), I already said in that review. So I’m publishing a slightly rewritten version of that review below the jump.

For the record: I had serious problems with the thread of Polanski apologia running through Zenovich’s film, and I personally support his extradition and some sort of jail time, but would hope that there would be a new hearing considering the tangible evidence of judicial misconduct before he’s re-sentenced. That said, I don’t operate under the delusion that my personal opinion actually matters, and the coverage of the case has made me wish that others felt the same.

People here in Park City are going crazy for Marina Zenovich’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. According to Variety, the film was courted by four buyers after its first screening last night (the Weinsteins nabbed international rights, but US distribution is still on the table), and not only was there substantial applause at this morning’s packed press and industry screening, but I don’t think I saw a single person leave the theater. For an 8:30 AM Sundance press show, that’s rare.

So the hype train is rolling full steam ahead, but what do we actually have here? For me, Wanted and Desired convinces that this seemingly trivial footnote in cinema history is actually a story about the media’s role in turning the very idea of justice into a farce. Zenovich goes some way towards crafting a valuable historical document, but the film’s credibility on that front is weakened by its clearly imbalanced sympathies.

It’s a methodical but irreverent look at the legal quagmire and media scandal and that erupted in 1977, after a 13 year old girl accused Polanski of drugging and raping her in Jack Nicholson’s hottub whilst ostensibly taking topless photos of her for Men’s Vogue. Polanski admitted to having intercourse with the girl, but said it was consensual; the film tracks how Polanski’s plea on a lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor was mutated by media-hungry Judge Rittenband, ultimately causing Polanski to flee to France in fear of being sentenced to half a century in prison.

Zenovich sets up Rittenband and Polanski as polar opposites in the realm of media-mediated justice. Polanski, a public figure due to his profession but a media star due to a combination of charisma, bad luck, and his admitted personal “recklessness,” is forced to face the reality that even in the anything-goes swirl of Hollywood in the 70s, absolute free will is an impossibility of public life. Meanwhile, hungry for his own taste of media attention, Rittenband drifted towards celebrity court cases (he previously chose to officiate Elvis’ divorce), and allowed his obsession with controlling his own media image to dictate his rulings. Ironically, Rittenband’s push for glory directly led to Polanski fleeing to France, where he was able to escape not just jail time, but the gaze of an unsympathetic media.

As Rittenband is dead and Polanski is still in exile, the film relies on old media clips and testimony from countless talking head witnesses, including Polanski’s defense attorney and his alleged victim and Mia Farrow, who offer their perceptions of the two absent personalities at the center of the proceedings. Zenovich fills in the gaps between testimonies by literally spelling out the facts of the case on screen in titles. Most of these titles are eventually made redundant by Zenovich’s talking heads, so I can only assume that the decision to keep them has something to do with Zenovich’s desire to insert her own perception of the events.

To be fair, the onscreen titles aren’t the only place where the director makes her voice heard. Zenovich demonstrates a real knack for filtering commentary through her visual choices, as when clips from Polanski’s films are shown out of context as cheeky counterpoint to the oral testimony, and she’s masterful at spinning seemingly innocuous still photos into punchlines. Still, whether she’s using found materials to make a point or speaking directly to us via words on the screen, there’s a lack of criticality towards Polanski that borders on hagiography.

In Wanted and Desired, there is a deep nostalgia for the late 60s, the hippie-styled but unquestionably moneyed Southern California idyll that Polanski and wife Sharon Tate were in thick of, a full-time party irrevocably fouled by Manson murder. There is an implied sympathy for Polanski’s own coping mechanisms –– chiefly and most creepily, the idea that A Great Artist who has lived through tragedy is entitled to ameliorate his pain via the fucking of young girls. Maybe most irksome, there is a shrugging off of Polanski’s personal proclivities as endemic to the pre-AIDS sexual libertinism of the 1970s debauched jetset. Even as Zenovich is building a credible case that Polanski rights were perverted by the ulterior motives of Rittenband, she’s undermining that evidence with a parade of excuses designed to diminish our perception of Polanski’s actual guilt. It’s very normal for Europeans to have sex with 13 year old girls! Also, Polanski survived the Holocaust and the Manson family, so cut him some slack. And ultimately, what 13 year old wannabe model in 1977 went to Jack Nicholson’s house with Roman Polanski *not* expecting to get slipped a luude and sodomized? Oh, BTW — that judge sucked. For a film seemingly so critical of the media’s complicity in abetting the myths of huge egos, Wanted and Desired uncritically indulges in its fair share of media-driven myths.

The title Wanted and Desired comes from a quote late in the film, in which a friend of Polanski’s quips that whereas in America, the director is a wanted man, in Europe, he’s desired — ie: people want him around, they’re attracted to his talent and to this idea that he’s a hero who has faced down the greatest horrors of the 20th century: Hitler, Manson, American prudishness. Zenovich puts this idea of Polanski being an “attractive” person so much at the center of her film, that there’s ultimately a sense that the doc is laughing at some cipher version of America for thinking that Polanski is a criminal, or even creepy, or even anything but desirable. When you look at it that way, the whole enterprise stops just short of saying, “If she wasn’t actually asking for it, she should have been.” This is all sort of fascinating to talk about, but I’m not sure it’s good filmmaking.