indieWIRE has info on two major European festival announcements this morning: the films selected for Rotterdam’s Tiger competition for early-career filmmakers; and “the first 21 films” slotted in Berlin’s Panorama program. The Berlin lineup includes Julie Delpy’s latest directorial effort, The Countess, a period piece starring the director and William Hurt; Pedro, the docudrama about the Real World San Francisco cast member who died of AIDS which premiered at Toronto last year; and two Sundance entries, Tom DiCillio’s Doors doc When You’re Strange and White Lightnin’, the “dancing outlaw” film scripted by VICE guys Shane Smith and Eddy Moretti.

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, 14 films while vie for the award given to first and second time filmmakers. Among them: Michael Imperioli, best known as sometime-screenwriter, sometime-junkie Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos, whose The Hungry Ghosts will open the festival; and films from Chile, Indonesia, Iran, Taiwan and Turkey. The remainder of the festival’s lineup will be announced on January 15, six day before screenings get underway.

I’ve been tracking the odd pop cultural situation that awaits this month’s release of The Tracey Fragments for awhile now. The film, which I’ve written about before, stars Juno phenom Ellen Page; it premiered at Berlin in 2007 and played tons of festivals, but by year’s end had failed to secure U.S. theatrical distribution. Then, in February of this year, when Page was at the peak of her powers as a precocious Oscar nominee and face of one of the biggest “surprise” hits in recent memory, Tracey was picked up by ThinkFilm for domestic distribution.

This is a film which, despite positive reviews and an award from Berlin, went almost completely unnoticed when it screened at Toronto in September, largely because it didn’t have a distributor that could afford to hire track suited boys to pass out branded Tic Tacs on its behalf. And yet, as soon as ThinkFilm put out a new trailer for the film, it promptly attracted a bunch of negative blog attention, ranging from unfair to inaccurate.

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• At the IFC Blog, Alison Willmore unpacks the wildly divisive buzz surrounding Filth and Wisdom. “On one side is the urge to wield the long knife one’s probably been sharpening since the film’s presence at the festival was announced, and on the other is, perhaps, that wild contrarian compulsion to hold up the sure-to-be-maligned film as a misunderstood masterpiece.” Meanwhile, Jurgen Fauth defends his positive exit Twitter.
• Mike Jones has the winners of the Teddys, Berlinale’s juried queer film prizes. Matt Dentler got the news via a call from winner Olaf de Fleur, whose The Amazing Truth about Queen Raquela will be making its US premiere at SXSW next month. See a “making of” short above.
• At Salon, Stephanie Zacharek is less than impressed with Shine a Light and Standard Operating Procedure, but she found God in Fernando Eimbcke’s Lake Tahoe.

They’re calling it an exclusive, which we’re sure won’t be accurate for long, but for the time being the Times Online has the first full review of Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom. Again, this seems like a case of a filmmaker winning by vaulting over an extremely low-set bar, but as far as three-star reviews go, this one’s damn near hyperbolic. Unless we’re just talking about everyone in the same sentence as Robert Altman these days? Here’s the nut graph:

Yet despite its many shortcomings and an ending so mushy and neat it would embarrass Richard Curtis, Madonna has done herself proud. Her film has an artistic ambition that has simply bypassed her husband, the film director Guy Ritchie. She captures that wonderfully accidental nature of luck when people’s lives intersect for a whole swathe of unlikely but cherishable reasons. Altmanesque would be stretching the compliment too far, but Filth and Wisdom shows Madonna has real potential as a film director.

You can check out some of Madonna’s, um, potential, in the clip above. I have no idea what the announcer is saying (and yet us know if you do), but you can make out a bit of Filth and Wisdom behind it. Meanwhile, if you were Guy Ritchie––and had run your once-promising (I mean, some of you like Snatch, right?) career into the ground by first remaking a socialist/misogynist classic with your pop star wife in the lead, then by allowing said pop star wife to infuse your next generic gangster picture with Kabbalah bullshit––how many reviews like this would you stick around for?

UPDATE: You can watch a more complete, foreign voice-over-free clip at indieWIRE. And this one has strippers! Also, I added a question mark to the headline of this post, because after watching the new clip, I think Filth and Wisdom’s Altman cred is truly up for debate.

• Juno is honored as a work of “Cinema For Peace” on the same night a Czech party runs out of beer. Mike Jones enumerates those, and other signs of the apocalypse.
• Brit Withey isn’t feeling the doomsday vibe––he’s just bored. “So, halfway into the festival and so far, at least the competition screenings have been met with a general ho-hum-ness.”
• Unfortunately, it looks like Brit is not alone. With half the competition slate already screened, There Will Be Blood is apparently the clear front-runner for the Golden Bear, but no one wants to give an award that’s supposed to be about discovery to an Oscar-nominated Hollywood film.
• Variety offers a pre-screening feature on Errol Morris’ Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure. Says Michael Barker of the film’s distributor, Sony Classics: “One of the things that I love about the film is that you watch it and you are in the shoes of the common soldier who committed all these acts, and you tell yourself, ‘That could be me.’” We doubt such testimony will win over skeptics, but early word from the choir (ie: my super-liberal Facebook friend) is positive.

In a dispatch from Berlin, David D’Arcy reports on a screening of a restored print of some works by experimental filmmaker/performance artist Jack Smith. D’arcy concisely sums up the drama surrounding Smith’s estate, which has thrown a wrench into further restorations:

Smith left his apartment a mess when he died of AIDS in 1989, and the material that was saved was salvaged by friends who were working in spite of the indifference of Smith’s family, who had spurned him for his homosexuality decades before that. Performance artist Penny Arcade and Village Voice film critic J Hoberman, as what would later be called the Plaster Foundation, sifted through cat shit and years of newspapers to save the materials in the 6th floor walkup, and put enough order into the mess to create several books and a museum exhibition. Within the last five years, however, Smith’s sister reappeared, at the prodding of the filmmakers behind Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, a bio-doc that played in theaters in 2006, which served the interests of its filmmakers more than it served Smith’s memory. Courts in New York have declared that the sister who abandoned Jack Smith is now the owner of the materials in his apartment that she abandoned when she saw them and recoiled in disgust in 1989. Now Smith’s sister is asking for those materials back, and the filmmakers of Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis are demanding access to the archive, and suing the Plaster Foundation for that access, which they say was promised them for the making of the film. It’s an object lesson in the notion that no good deed goes unpunished

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Interestingly, the fight over Smith is also being played out on YouTube, although there it’s more about what Smith stood for than the future of his archive. Above: a video apparently produced under the auspices of the New York Underground Museum, in which Penny Arcade explains how Jack Smith suffered for “turn[ing] his back on being an art star.” More details, and an opposing argument, after the jump.

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A press release in this morning from Benten Films breaks news that the upstart DVD company has signed a deal to release The Free Will (Der Freie Will), the controversial Silver Bear winner from the 2006 Berlin Film Festival. Clocking in at 163 minutes, with a first act featuring a real-time rape scene, Mattias Glasner’s film was celebrated by juries and bloggers during its Festival run, but deemed by Variety to be all but unreleasable. It’s a bold move for the Benten team, a sign that their scope is much wider than the M-word associations of their first three releases (LOL, Dance Party USA/Quiet City, and the upcoming The Guatemalan Handshake). Check a clip from The Free Will above. The DVD will be available in late July June.

• The strike may not be legally over, but in an industry desperate to return to some sense of normalcy, this is apparently the sound of a fat lady singing: The WGA’s still needs their members to officially vote on the new AMPTP deal, but TV showrunners are nonetheless expected to return to work today, with regular writers back in the office on Wednesday. More in our frame of concern, the Oscars will go forth with writers and without picket lines.
• Meanwhile, writers seem to generally think the prolonged strike, which will net them each about $1500 per streamed television episode, was “worth it,” nevermind the losses incurred by those crew members who lost their jobs, or the hit taken to the Hollywood economy as a whole. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the strike is responsible for up to $2 billion in local losses.
• Fool’s Gold easily beat holdover Hannah Montana at the box office this weekend, with a respectable $22 million. Meanwhile, the Paris Hilton-starrer The Hottie and the Nottie, which garnered some of the best bad reviews I’ve read in a while (why did they even screen it for critics?), earned a disastrous $234 on each of its 111 screens.
• Berlin deals: Arthouse Films has acquired Christina Clausen’s doc The Universe of Keith Haring; the Jason Statham crime pic The Bank Job sold release rights to various distributors in 40 territories.

• The first trailer––really, the first bit of “official” marketing of any kind, because that sploogey Vanity Fair cover apparently doesn’t count––for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will premiere on Valentine’s Day, in front of prints of The Spiderwick Chronicles. Variety says it’s part of a trend of studios waiting until a quarter in advance to show glimpses of their summer tentpoles; it could also have something to do with the fact that Indy 4 just wrapped, like, last week.
• You know it’s an unremarkable weekend when both Variety and The Hollywood Reporter bury their Friday morning box offic predix (yay, slanguage!) stories under a handful of other headlines. Variety says it’s a draw between Fool’s Gold, and the “far harder to predict” Hannah Montana concert film. THR says the abysmally reviewed Kate Hudson comedy will “probably cop the weekend’s bragging rights.”
• Berlin deals: Lionsgate has purchased Bangkok Dangerous,  starring Nic Cage as “as an anonymous assassin who travels to Bangkok to handle four kills for an underworld crime boss, but whose conscience becomes his enemy when he meets a local Thai girl.”
• Blah blah blah strike story, blah blah blah “what does it all mean?!?!”

Spout is, sadly, not at the Berlin Film Festival, where screenings began this morning. But we’ll be trolling the blogs for scraps throughout the course of the fest.

• Immediately after Martin Scorsese’s opening night film Shine a Light screened for the press, I started seeing insta-reviews on Twitter and Facebook. “Shine a Light: weak sauce,” wrote About.com/IDrinkYourMilkshake.com’s Jurgen Fauth. David Hudson was slightly kinder: “Shine a Light is, well, okay for what it is - a concert movie.” I imagine we’ll see full reviews tonight or early tomorrow. Mike Jones has a report from the Light press conference, where Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts grumbled about the experience of watching the film, “I hate it.” UPDATE: Filmbrain yawns along.
• The other big news this morning seems to be that two members of the Berlinale Jury, director Suzanne Bier and actress Sandrine Bonnaire, have simultaneously dropped out of their commitment to the festival. The dropouts don’t seem to be related––Bier says she has an urgent work matter to attend to, while Bonnaire has a family thing––but it does seem like a very weird coincidence. The jury will carry on with just six members, including actress Diane Kruger and editing god Walter Murch.
• Morgan Spurlock, Eugene Jarecki and Ross Kauffman are amongst the filmmakers on the board of Cinelan, a new adventure launched in Berlin today that aims to provide an online distribution platform for short (under 3 minute) non-fiction films.
• Variety has published an interview with Eugene Hutz, Gogol Bordello frontman and star of Madonna’s directorial debut, Filth and Wisdom, which will be unveiled in Berlin. Brilliantly subverting the trade’s form-letter questionnaire, when asked to name his “dream project” Hutz responds, “Anarcho-syndicalism worldwide.” Swoon.
  

• Erik Skillman, the Criterion designer who recently regaled us with tales of his process putting together the box image for Berlin Alexanderplatz, has applied some of the same techniques to a portrait of Barack Obama. “I’m not sure I quite captured him (there’s a little hint of Reinhold in there that’s kind of strange), but for a 20-minute sketch it’s not half bad…” [via Cinetrix]
• Mike Jones has already started blogging Berlin. We’ll be keeping an eye on Filmbrain, Twitch and of course Berlin-based David Hudson for updates over the next week or so.
• Jette Kernion on the magic trick of Quiet City: “You can’t watch a man and woman who become fast friends like this without wondering whether they’ll hook up, which provides a small amount of suspense. But you get so caught up watching these people and their friends that the romantic potential hardly seems to matter most of the time.”
• Kevin Kelly balks at Christina Ricci’s suggestion that there’s a “sad guy” thing in Speed Racer that will make the boys cry: “What’s a sad guy thing that’s not a sad girl thing? Does Speed lose his penis during one of the races and get told that he can’t have any Speed Juniors?”

Based on Paul’s recommendation, on our last day in Telluride I went to the encore presentation of People on Sunday. Though I wholeheartedly agree with Paul’s endorsement of Sunday’s fully-modern depiction of courtship, I was equally taken with its utopian treatment of working class leisure. People on Sunday is as much a love letter to the proletariat as the films of the Bolshevik giants, but politics are ultimately pushed aside for a celebration of a pursuit of happiness that’s in some way about transcending social class. As a snapshot of the last wave of youthful abandonment before the Hitler era, it’s a heartbreaker.

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