About a month ago, I emailed Adam Ross and asked him if he’d let me do one of his Friday Screen Test interviews at his blog, DVD Panache. He graciously agreed to allow me to promote myself via personal movie history confession. The interview is up now; I’ve pasted an excerpt after the jump, as companion to the above video. You can read the full thing here. Also: I’d like to note that I just laughed out loud reading the quote that makes up the entirety of the “About Me” section of Adam’s blog: “I think it would be fun to run a [blog].” –C.F. Kane.
If you’ve happened across the Spout homepage over the past couple of weeks, you’ve seen my sexy, under-lit iSight self-portrait, but if you know nothing else about me, here’s a primer:
1. I grew up in Los Angeles and now live in Queens.
2. My favorite movie trilogy of all time is Back to the Future
3. I co-founded and used to edit the film blog Cinematical. I’ve also written for The Huffington Post, TV Squad, NewTeeVee and FILMMAKER Magazine.
4. I have a bad habit of using “punk rock” as an adjective.
5. Most of the time, I look less like that iSight shot, and more like this.
If you have questions, concerns, news tips, suggestions, complaints or just really need someone to listen to you rant about Sonic Youth producing a record for Starbucks, I’m here for you. You can email me at karina AT spout DOT com, or hit me up on AIM at karinalongworth.
Karina Longworth, (former editor of Cinematical) is joining spout.com. We met shortly after SXSW, where she had noticed us covering the festival. We talked a bit about what we’d like SpoutBlog to be, about how we binge on interviews and blog posts at festivals, then go back to the office where the day to day running of spout.com takes us away from the blog. She shared how her position at AOL was moving away from writing about film (most troubling since we’re all fans of Karina’s writing at Spout). Then, the lights went on. We want to see more great writing about film on SpoutBlog, Karina–one of our favorite film bloggers–wants to write more about film. Badda bing. We hired her.
Starting June 18, Karina will be posting here on SpoutBlog and popping up here and there at spout.com. We’re excited. Also, in the next couple days Spout will be doing something new with Susan Buice and Arin Crumley of Four Eyed Monsters. If you’re a fan of FEM, talk with Karina about it in the foureyedmonsters group on spout.com.
Stay tuned. We’ll announce what we’re up to in this Friday’s FilmCouch podcast.
Karina Longworth is contributing posts from Tribecca in New York (check them out–we’re so excited to have her here on SpoutBlog). I’m here in the cornfield-embedded college town of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Sigh.
But I was feeling compelled this morning, nonetheless, to write a post about the ability, even in a small Midwestern town, to see great movies on a big screen. Besides the fact that we have a much-loved art film theater and all kinds of mini film festivals through the University of Illinois, we have our own annual festival, taking place this week–the 9th annual Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival. Ebert grew up here, going to movies (including Gone with the Wind) at the 86-year-old Virginia Theatre, where the festival is held.
Much is often overlooked where I live–the Midewest in general, this town, Ebert’s festival. But the most important things being overlooked (by all kinds of people everywhere) are great films. This is what Ebert is hoping to change through his festival. The first year I went, in April of 2002, I was skeptical. I thought the films would be good in a slightly-left-of-mainstream way. But I was genuinely impressed by what I saw and the way Ebert talked about each of them, before the movie started, and after it ended, often in conversation with the director or other guest. He is really passionate about these overlooked films. He’s far more complex than a black or white, thumbs-up or -down man. (That first year I heard the Alloy Orchestra accompany the silent classic Metropolis, and I saw David Gordon Greene’s George Washington, followed by a conversation between Ebert and Greene. I still carry those and other Overlooked Film Festival movie experiences with me.)
At this year’s festival, for the first time, Ebert won’t be talking before and after the films. Last year he underwent significant jaw surgery in his battle with cancer, and he isn’t able to talk. (See this piece by him and this CNN story about him.) But he is here, with his wife Chaz and other friends as his voice, which is pretty darn impressive. And even though there’s not much in the movie realm that could seem more mainstream than Roger Ebert, I’m glad that he’s doing so much to promote great films that a somewhat mainstream audience might not otherwise see–especially in a small town like this.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
