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

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

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

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So, this year The New York Times‘ Carpetbagger Oscar season blog will be written not by David Carr, who created the brand and helmed it for four Oscar seasons, but by Melena Ryzik, a reporter, video blogger and sometime poet previously on the paper’s general culture beat. The Variety story on the matter suggests that Carr stepped down from the post in order to fully focus his attention on “the quickly changing world of publishing,” and also because last year’s Slumdog-centric race bored the shit out of him and he couldn’t fathom pretending to care about a non-competition again contributed to “simple burnout.” Which happens. Even if you’re only doing it part time, four years is a long time to stay chained to a blog.

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.

I’m not sure what it means that one weekend, I sit on a film festival panel about criticism and barely get a word in edgewise, and the next weekend become the center of a scandal on another film festival panel while actually physically attending yet another film festival on the opposite side of the globe. I guess I am more interesting in absentia. More remarkable is that, thanks to the magic of Twitter, I was able to comment on an argument about myself from 7,000 miles away, in virtual real time.

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.

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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.

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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.

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Silent Light finally becomes available in the US on DVD today. Here’s what I wrote about it when it screened at Film Forum in January.

“Tell me why I should go see a fucking movie that’s in Mennonite!” — Joshua Rothkopf.

Consider the gauntlet thrown down. The above quote comes from a “pubcast” posted last week by Aaron Hillis on his first day as editor of GreenCine Daily. In this conversation between Hillis, Rothkopf, David Fear and Matt Zoller-Seitz, about where film criticism currently is and where they’d like to see it go, the verdict seemed to be that everyone would like to see more clear-headed advocacy, free of snark and academic flourish. The film implicitly referenced is that pullquote Silent Light – which, though made by Carlos Reygadas in an Mexican Mennonite community and featuring a number of real-life Mennonites in lieu of professional actors, is not “in Mennonite,” but the obscure German dialect Plautdietsch.

That kind of quibble, of course, doesn’t really matter. What does matter, is a) that Silent Light is finally having its official for-profit US premiere tomorrow at Film Forum in New York City, and b) Rothkopf’s point is valid. The thing most expressed by most Stateside writers (including myself) to audiences about this near-masterpiece has nothing to do with what’s actually on screen. It’s that, since the film’s debut at Cannes in 2007, Silent Light been rather difficult to see.

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When Beavis and Butthead debuted on MTV’s Liquid Television in the very early 90s, it was not at all conceivable that its creator, animator and primary voice actor Mike Judge would, over the course of two decades, build a career that eventually conformed to the key points on the Troubled Maverick Timeline. First with those double entendre-happy half-brains to his long-running King of the Hill, Judge has done more to legitimize animation as a commercially viable vehicle for sly social critique than anyone in the post-Simpsons era save Matt Stone and Trey Parker. With Office Space, he cast Jennifer Aniston, then the biggest star on TV, in a sharp satire about 20 something stagnation far away from Central Perk, and audiences didn’t immediately get it. He followed that with Idiocracy, an apocalypse comedy that Fox dumped on the mere assumption that audiences wouldn’t immediately get it. Both films went on to find fervent cult audiences; Office Space looked a lot better on video and cable once its timeless comedy of little guy vengeance could be safely sifted away from the Aniston baggage; Idiocracy looked a lot better when it was actually available to be seen. After all this, it’s no wonder that Judge, who has written and directed each of his features, is treated like an auteur — quite the feat for a guy who makes visually indistinguished comedies mostly about working class guys and their frustrated ids. Who does he think he is — Kevin Smith?

Actually, Extract made me laugh more than any the last few Kevin Smith movies, but where Zach and Miri Make a Porno seemed to bring its maker’s career into sharper focus, Extract seems to derail Mike Judge’s previous progress as a filmmaker with Something to Say About The Way We Live In This United States. The story of Joel (Jason Bateman), a small business owner whose dreams of selling out to General Mills and finding a way to justify cheating on his wife are both thwarted when the insolence of one of his workers causes a chain reaction that results in another worker losing a testicle, Extract first takes too long to get going, and then seems to stumble into three or four conclusions. It’s riotously funny for about an hour in between (much of this thanks to the perfect cast, including Ben Affleck as Joel’s bartender buddy, Mila Kunis as the con bimbo who catches his eye, and Kristen Whig as his bored and boring wife), but those who have come to expect a Mike Judge movie to precisely skewer a contemporary social sphere may be disappointed. I didn’t previously give Office Space or Idiocracy much credit as anything other than very smart comedies, but Extract makes them both look like quasi-libertarian morality plays about the absolute necessity of personal responsibility. Those films were about men manning up to change the status quo; Extract is about a guy briefly taking his balls out of a drawer, juggling them for a bit and then putting them back after coming to the understanding that his status quo is actually great. Take away the ample discussion of testicles, and there’s something almost Capraesque going on here.

The September Issue is an irresistible pop culture mashup: imagine the Teen Vogue segments of The Hills (though her royal highness Anna Wintour is swapped in for cut-rate LA imitation Lisa Love, the MTV reality show’s masterful manner of spinning diegetic commentary out of eye rolls taken out of context is left intact), genetically blended into an alternate universe version of The Office. Except in this office, the workers actually work, and in fact are terrified not to because their boss is Michael Scott’s polar opposite: impatient, undemonstrative, and absolutely incapable of taking no for an answer.

As a portrait of Wintour the person, RJ Cutler’s documentary does little to dig under the surface of Wintour’s iconic, impassive under bangs image. But as a meditation on art vs commerce, emotion vs rationality, and the role of fantasy merchants in the recently-burst economic bubble, The September Issue is both cerebral and accessible. If it’s not as provocative as it could be, it’s definitely entertaining.

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This interview was originally published during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. World’s Greatest Dad debuts in New York this week, and it’s already available on VOD.

In the director’s statement slipped into the press notes for his Robin Williams-starring Sundance entry World’s Greatest Dad, Bobcat Goldthwait says it took him 25 years in show business to figure out that what he really wants to do is direct movies, and doing so makes him feel like he’s “getting away with murder.” That’s a fair description of what he pulls off in Dad, in which a frustrated novelist/high school teacher (Williams) exploits the death of a loved one to plump up his own popularity. Though far more polished than Goldthwait’s 2006 Sundance competition film Sleeping Dogs Lie (also known as Stay), Dad rides the same line between obscene satire and almost mushy sincerity. I talked to Goldthwait about self-Googling, why he has no desire for his stand-up fans to see his movies, and why he’s not going on Celebrity Fit Club any time soon.

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“Another depressing movie for the depression,” Abel Ferrara cracked, after a screening of his 1992 film Bad Lieutenant at Anthology Film Archives on Saturday night. The screening was held to raise money for Cinema Nolita, an indie video store on the verge of having to shut down for lack of funds (they’re having another benefit tonight, a concert featuring The Virgins and a DJ set by Animal Collective). Ferrara, who lives in the neighborhood and is a regular patron of the store, turned the the post-movie Q & A into an angry but resigned meditation on the ways in which New York, indie film and the world have changed in nearly two decades, to get us from the point where someone like Ferrara could make a film on the streets of New York, to the point where someone like Ferarra may soon be unable to rent a film on the streets of New York.

“Watching this film, it’s kind of sad,” Ferrara said. “At that time, there was some kind of indie film scene going on, and we could make a film and get it distributed. Why that indie film industry isn’t there [now] is caught up in the changing times.”

Several times during the evening Ferrara grumbled over the compromises involved in getting his upcoming 50 Cent-starring Jekyl & Hyde adaptation off the ground. “We’re just trying to get the movie made, and now every movie’s being made in Grand Rapids, Michigan, even if it’s set in Liberia. I’ve never been to Grand Rapids, but they’re bending over to give movies cash [via tax incentives].”

“I don’t know if we could have made [Bad Lieutenant] in Grand Rapids,” Ferrara said, pausing to laugh to himself. “But in this day and age, if you get money to do a movie, you’re gonna go to Mars.”

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Voy a Explotar (I’m Gonna Explode) is the contemporary Mexican teenage Pierrot le Fou. It knows this, and it wants you to know it, and it doesn’t care if this makes you hate it on principle. The third feature by Gerardo Naranjo (director of Drama/Mex, co-writer and star of Azazel Jacobs‘ The GoodTimeskid), it’s the rare love letter to influence that’s infused with enough personal style and sentiment to transform the stolen into something thrilling and moving.

15 year-old Maru (Maria Deschamps) is a prep school bad girl with a mangy mane of hair and, apparently, a drinking problem. When spoiled little rich boy son of a right-wing politician Roman (Juan Pablo de Santiago) gets kicked out of his school and transfers to Maru’s, he introduces himself via faking his own hanging at a talent show. The girl is instantly besotted. “He exists, but I also made him up,” she writes in a letter to a friend which doubles as internal monologue. “The best part is that he’s angry.” Roman is equally smitten, and soon the pair are scheming to run away together.

Or so they want their parents to think; really, they’re camped out in a tent on the roof of Roman’s father’s mansion. Maru’s hysterical mother and sister come over to the house to become part of the rescue effort––which, under the oversight of Roman’s distant dad, consists mainly of drinking tequila and waiting for clues to come to him. With a stolen cell phone, Roman calls daddy’s security detail with false leads to get the grown ups out of the house so that he and Maru can crawl downstairs and collect provisions. It’s only when the pair decide to finally leave home for real that their saga starts to hew to the traditional tropes of love-on-the-run.

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Long before I had actually seen Azazel Jacobs’ second feature, The GoodTimesKid, I had heard tell of its final scene, in which the Gang of Four song “Damaged Goods” is played in its entirety. It takes a certain kind of confidence to use a Gang of Four song in a cinematic context. Deceptively simple post-punk loaded with weighty narrative, it’s virtually impossible to match this music with imagery without the filmmaker’s voice getting lost in the noise, without the soundtrack seemingly functioning as a mission statement above and beyond what the rest of the film has to say. Certainly, the thesis of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette seems most articulate in its opening scene, set to a lengthy excerpt of Gang of Four’s “Natural’s Not in It” — the song serves as a key to unlocking that film’s visual indulgence, placing its evocation of angsty teen consumption and self-absorption within the irony of “problems of leisure” and the political context of the “body [as] good business.”

Jacobs makes the viewer wait about 70 minutes for the first use of “Damaged Goods,” but the song’s ethos still felt throughout the film. If there’s anything missed from Benten Films’ long-awaited release of The GoodTimesKid, it’s the full text of the letter, peeking out of the corner of the DVD box, that Jacobs wrote to the band asking for use of the song.

In Gang of Four songs, sex and commerce, personal relationships and socio-economic identity, are always inextricably linked, to the point where an apparent reference to one can be safely assumed to double for the other. It’s articulated best in another song, “Contract”: “Social dreams put in practice in the bedroom.” “Damaged Goods” swings back and forth: it’s a break-up song (“The change’ll do you good, I always knew it would/sometimes I’m thinking that I love you, but I know it’s only lust”) that dips into the language of transaction (“Damaged goods, send them back … open the till, give me the change you said would do me good/ refund the cost.”) It’s a fitting theme song for a film about three people desperate for change, bouncing back and forth between embracing the sentimentality of personal relationships and rejecting it. Never mind that it was shot on damaged short ends stolen from the set of Troy.

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Alejandro Adams‘ Canary screens in Brooklyn at Rooftop Films tonight. Since I interviewed him on this blog way back in February, right before his film premiered at Cinequest, Adams has become something of an uningorable mascot (and sometimes, thorn in the side) of online film culture — or, at least, the microcosm of film culture represented on Twitter. There he is, picking fights about the Dardennes brothers! There he is, challenging this reporter on her choice of avatar! There he is, always, at the center of the conflict, however virtual and/or minor that conflict may be. And now, Canary, a film that virtually no one has seen outside of three specialty festivals and the cineaste Twittersphere, gets a rave in the Village Voice, bumped up in the print edition right next to an assessment of Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania pegged to the umpteenth revival of Jonas Mekas’ signature diary film. The placement in the paper says it all: from zero to avant-garde canon in under six months. But don’t blame Twitter — Adams’ online antics have a tendency to plant expectations that the films themselves subvert. You want to dismiss him as an attention whore, but the films frustrate that impulse. As one filmmaker wrote to me after watching Canary long after knowing of its maker via his Twitter agitations, “Goddammit.”

Seeing the Canary review next to the Mekas write-up on a physical page yesterday reminded me of something Adams had written in the long email exchange we had that led up to that February interview, which hadn’t made it into the published post. I went back into those emails and pulled out that quote, and a few other memorable outtakes, for your persual. The text below the jump may make more sense after a reading (or re-reading) of the initital published interview, but keep in mind that when Adams refers to “you,” he’s generally referring to me. If you’re in New York, you can (and should) buy tickets to tonight’s screening here.

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