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

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

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Aasif Mandvi, Daily Show correspondent and host of tomorrow night’s Gotham Independent Film Awards in New York, was recently named one of FILMMAKER Magazines 25 New Faces of Independent Film. No, silly, not because of his role as a dentist alongside Ricky Gervais in Ghost Town––actually, Mandvi is finishing up production on 7 to the Palace, a feature film in which he stars and co-wrote, loosely based on his own one-man show. Submitting to our Media Diet questioning after the jump, Mandvi gives shout-outs to Slumdog Millionaire and Grey’s Anatomy, and names the only living filmmaker who could possibly capture the Michael Jackson concert experience on film.

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• If I wasn’t going to be in Denver until the following morning, there’s no way I’d miss the Museum of the Moving Image’s event on Saturday night at the Times Center in Manhattan, wherein Jerry Lewis will be interviewed on stage by his long-time friend, Peter Bogdanovich. The event will include clips from Lewis’ films, which Chris Fujiwara considered in a piece posted on the Museum’s Moving Image Source yesterday.
• On Thursday, MoMA will begin their screening series dedicated to the titles nominated for the Not Coming to a Theater Near You award at the 2008 Gothams. Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues kicks the series off; Wellness, Afterschool, The New Year Parade and Meadowlark will screen through Monday.
• Anthology Film Archives’ tribute to the films of Arthur Penn continues through Sunday. Tonight they’re screening Night Moves, which was recently the subject of one of Kevin B. Lee’s Shooting Down Pictures essays.

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

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Funny how, in the indie film world, falls from grace tend to begin before you’ve even hit the top. Yesterday, Lance Hammer’s Ballast was nominated for four Gotham Independent Film Awards — the most of any single film — including Breakthrough Director and Best Picture. Meanwhile, the critical darling is, for maybe the first time since its Sundance premiere, provoking sour responses. Armond White wrote a scathing review of the film attacking it as evidence that “African-American life is imprisoned by the art fallacies of Indie filmmaking, controlled by white liberal condescension” — but he’s Armond White, so that was somewhat expected. Somewhat less expected was this Hollywood Elsewhere post, where Jeff Wells pounces on White’s review like it’s the smoking yellow cake that makes the case that Ballast is overrated.

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IFP has announced the nominees for the 2008 Gotham Independent Film Awards (formerly known as just the Gotham Awards), and just by virtue of nod count, Ballast is the big winner with nominations in four categories:Best Feature, Breakthrough Director (Lance Hammer), Breakthrough Performance (Michael J. Smith) and Ensemble Performance.

Also very exciting: Barry Jenkins will compete against Hammer in the Director category for Medicine for Melancholy; Sita Sings the Blues, one of my Tribeca 2008 favorites, will compete against Tom Quinn’s The New Year Parade and SXSW winner Wellness for the Not Coming to a Theater Near You award; and The Wrestler, Rachel Getting Married and Synecdoche NY, some of my favorite American films of the year, all received attention. The full release is after the jump.

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Indiepix has sent word that they’ve set up a theatrical release for Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa, a Gotham-nominated doc about The Mesa, a kind of post-apocalyptic, semi-communal community of veterans, runaways and assorted dropouts, who head deep in the desert to live “without boundaries.” Indiepix says they will open the film nationwide (although there’s no indication as to how wide), before it premieres on the Sundance Channel as part of their environmental advocacy programming block, The Green.

I saw the film at the Denver Film Festival and liked it a lot, but I’m curious as to how much success indiePix/Sundance will have selling this as a “Green” film. The film may depict an extreme green lifestyle (there is no electricity, little water and no formal commerce in the area, and many members of the community grow their own crops and rely on generators and/or solar panels for power), but I don’t think it necessarily makes that lifestyle seem attractive. Plus, it’s at least as much about post traumatic stress disorder, poverty, and anti-utopia as it is about non-industrialized agriculture and solar energy.

Anyway, it’s good stuff. See the trailer above.

• Special guest SpoutBlogger Joe Swanberg already passed along the news that Ronnie Bronstein won the Gotham Award last night for Best Film Not Playing At a Theater Near You. Other Gotham winners: Into the Wild took Best Feature, Sicko took Best Doc, and Craig Zobel won the Breakthrough Director award for his wonderful Great World of Sound.
• From the Onion Headlines Come To Life file: a bunch of striking horror film scribes got together in LA yesterday and staged an exorcism in front of the Warner Brothers lot. Scott Kosar, who makes a living writing remakes of movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, used a bullhorn to ask God to “repel the greed that bewitches these studios.”
• Oh yeah — the strike’s still on, and no one but Nikki Finke has anything of substance to report.

When I head to NY in a few days to finish the remaining production on the first season of Butterknife, I will not find Ronald Bronstein.  He will be in Austin, TX, attending the already sold-out screening of his multiple-award winning film, Frownland, which hours ago claimed a victory at the Gotham Awards for “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You.”

A few years ago, Caveh Zahedi called this award a backhanded compliment, after receiving it for I Am a Sex Addict, and I’m not sure I disagree.  But in Ronnie’s case, it’s just the beginning of a wave of attention he will be receiving over the next year for his film.  He worked on Frownland for several years before presenting it at SXSW in March, and the 9 months it has taken everyone to catch up will have been worth the wait, as he should never have to suffer another rejection letter from a cowardly Festival programmer who needs external validation to justify presenting this excellent film to an out-of-shape audience.

Some of these links still date back to before the weekend. What can I say? It took a couple of days to make it all the way through my feeds. Only freshies tomorrow, I promise.

• John Brownlee offers a sneak peak at Ghostbusters 3, the videogame-only continuation of the saga, featuring a script by Dan Ackroyd and the voices of Ackroyd, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. “Will Ghostbusters 3 be a worthy successor to the franchise? It’s still too early to say, but early game footage of Ghostbusters 3 has leaked out, and it looks incredible.” That footage is embedded above. The footage has been removed from YouTube. Boooo.
• We’re sure Ronnie Bronstein is very excited about his Spirit Award nomination, but Frownland is also up for an award at the Gothams, the New York-centric film awards put on by Find Independent’s former parent company, IFP, which takes place tonight. And as if the stakes weren’t high enough already, Michael Tully has declared, “if Frownland doesn’t win the Gotham tonight I will eat my iPod.” Of course, we’d rather see Ronnie win, but should the iPod eating actually go down, I’ll try to get photo evidence.
• What’s this? High praise for Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth, which was almost universally dismissed at the Rome Film Festival? Hmmm. Jurgen Fauth says: “I know, I know — there’s nothing duller than listening to other people’s dreams. And yet… the shared fantasy Coppola created from Mircea Eliade’s novella weaves a strange magic, mysterious, playful, philosophical, and loopy with romance. I’d like to hold on to that gossamer enchantment for just a little while longer, privately, before it’s time to take out the stainless steel critical apparatus and cut this one open.”
• Speaking of Coppola, The Playlist weighs in on FFC’s One From the Heart: “This neon, highly stylized break-up film might be a failed experiment, but man, is it one of the most pretty failures to look at ever.”
• Ray Pride passes along exciting news: David Cronenberg is writing a novel. Says Nicole Winstanley, the Penguin Editor who nabbed the rights, “I wrote David Cronenberg several months ago to inquire about whether or not he’d consider writing a novel. His films demonstrate a deep understanding of the human condition that could translate into fiction brilliantly.”
• “Noah Baumbach is one relentlessly bleak filmmaker, and that’s not a compliment,” writes Daniel Carlson at Pajiba. “It’s not that his films are necessarily evil, or even completely off-target; rather, one of the things that makes Baumbach so slippery is his habit of stumbling onto moments of slight emotional truth in the middle of a film completely devoid of it.”

IFP has just announced the nominations for their Gotham Awards, which will be handed out in Brooklyn next month. I’m so happy to see that Craig Zobel’s fantastic Great World of Sound has been nominated in three categories–Best Feature, Breakthrough Director and Breakthrough Actor–the most nominations of any single film this year. Zobel’s feature, which Magnolia released with little fanfare last month, shares the Best Feature category with four, relatively “big” indie-arm titles: The Namesake, I’m Not There, Margot at the Wedding, and Into the Wild.

I’ve privately bitched about the lack of publicity surrounding Sound (even the release date seemed misguided, as it fell right in the middle of the Toronto Film Festival and thus necessarily turned coverage of the movie by bloggers and other indie journalists of limited resources into an afterthought), so I’m hoping these nominations will give Magnolia the impetus to give the film a stronger push. According to the distributor’s website, they’re still planning a slow roll-out to smaller markets through December.

Other Spout favorites to make the cut: Julia Loktev’s Day Night Day Night earned two nominations, for Breakthrough Director and Breakthrough Actor; and Ronnie Bronstein’s Frownland will compete in the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You race.

As of this writing, IFP hasn’t posted the list of nominees on their website, but you can check out an alphabetical list on nominees, ripped from the press release, after the jump.

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• David Benioff will adapt Charles Cross’ Kurt Cobain bio Heavier Than Heaven for a pic for Universal. Courtney Love and her lawyer, Howard Weitzman, will executive produce. Nikki Finke quickly railed against Love’s involvement, saying that Universal cannot “expect truthfulness” from a biopic with the backing of Cobain’s controversial widow. “This movie is gonna get crucified by critics, audiences and Nirvana fans just by involving Courtney,” Finke predicts, implying that only a Courtney-bashing Cobain biopic could give the fans the “truthfulness” they apparently require.
• Michael Bay’s production company has been working on a remake of The Birds for at least two and a half years; Naomi Watts has been attached for at least a year. So I guess the kernel of news in this story is the fact that Martin Campbell will direct, and Universal has no plans to rush the film into production before the various labor strikes commence.
• Roger Ebert will be present to accept a tribute at the Gotham Awards in Brooklyn next month. It will mark his second public appearance since falling ill in mid-2006, after his own Overlooked Film Festival earlier this year (although I did see him in screening-hopping in Toronto).