It’s pretty upsetting when you see more documentaries than most Americans, and yet you haven’t seen any of the 15 docs deemed best of the year by the Academy. This is my case this year, and I guess I was slacking. Or maybe the real problem is that Oscar has shortlisted too many films that haven’t been released commercially. In his IN DEPTH look at the shortlisted docs, Kurt Cobain About a Son filmmaker AJ Schnack points out that only 6 of the films have pursued a true theatrical release and 2/3 have not been available for review by critics nor have they reported their box office. For commentary on Schnack’s earlier analysis of both this year and last year’s eligible docs, check out Karina’s post from last week.

So, there’s my excuse. Anyway, I still have many months to see the docs that are most likely to receive the five nominations. My guesses of what I need to see before Oscar night: Sicko, No End in Sight, Lake of Fire, Body of War and War/Dance (or Taxi to the Dark Side, if the Academy allows so many Iraq War docs). Of course, if I want to be a true doc fan, I should make sure to see all 15, as well as a lot of other films left outside the shortlist.

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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).

New York Film Festival coverage:

• Brian DePalma schedules a last-minute press conference to talk about Redacted.
• Todd Haynes talks about casting women and children in the Bob Dylan-inspired I’m Not There.
• Silent Light: The Best Film at NYFF
• I’m Not There? I’m not a fan.

Chicago International Film Festival coverage:

• Press preview
• Tribute to Roger Ebert

The best of the rest:

• The Lumiere Manifesto Seeks To Dogme-ize YouTube
• There Will Be Blood: The First Real Trailer
• Looking Forward To Desert Bayou
• David Lynch Pays the Mortgage
• YouTube Assumes Online Videomakers Secretly Long to Go To Sundance
• About a Son: The United 93 of Kurt Cobain movies
• Vincent Gallo: Still Anal
• The Movies That Inspired The Simpsons
• SAW Blood Drives: More Porn Than Torture?
• The International Documentary Association’s Top 25 Documentaries EVER.
• John Landis gossips about Alfred Hitchchock, Don Ameche and the “shitty” Universal Studios cafeteria
• On our weekly podcast FilmCouch, Kevin and Paul covered A.J. Schnack’s Kurt Cobain: About a Son, and Karina ranted about one of the few documentary selections at NYFF, The Axe in the Attic.

Forget about Manohla’s pan (seriously: has she just been watching too much Behind the Music?): go read this story on AJ Schnack’s Kurt Cobain: About a Son in the Village Voice, and then, if you have the means, go see the film tonight in New York or this weekend in L.A. To quote the inimitable Camille Dodero:

If Cobain’s death is the 9/11 of the modern-rock canon—an epochal tragedy that recklessly opportunistic minds have flattened into a sad, one-dimensional cartoon—then Gus van Sant’s tedious and arrogant Last Days is the World Trade Center of the posthumous Kurt industry: a fictionalized piece of shit by a big-name director. (And Nick Broomfield’s Kurt & Courtney is the Fahrenheit 9/11.) [...] Here Kurt Cobain, the supernatural songwriting god who discovered that the only true fountain of youth is death, is transmogrified into a mere mortal. This is About a Son’s singular objective, and real accomplishment.

We’ll have more on About a Son on Friday’s episode of FilmCouch. Suffice it to say, we’re fans.

A few weeks back, I commented that the soundtrack for AJ Schnack’s documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son “looks amazing.” Instead of focusing on Nirvana’s greatest hits, Schnack built the soundtrack and the film around songs that Cobain loved and listened to through various stages of his life. A few weeks back, a reporter asked Schnack to name the soundtrack to his own life, and now the filmmaker has challenged a number of bloggers (including yours truly) to do the same.

AJ set out the following rules for the endeavor:

1.) It must reflect music from each part of your life, including childhood, awkward pre-teen years, all the way up to your current existence
2.) It should be music that is not just your favorite songs, but also things that make sense thematically
3.) It cannot be your own music
4.) Challenge at least 2 other bloggers to do the same.

I noticed that Tom Hall wrote blurbs for each of his choices, while AJ did not. With my list, I elaborated on a few choices and left others cryptic. As Schnack’s film is broken down into sections based on the cities in which Cobain lived, my list is broken down by own geographic location when these songs had an impact on my life.

We’ll start with a teaser. You’ll find the full list after the jump. Oh, and I tag these two: Filmbrain and The Cinetrix

LOS ANGELES

Malcolm McLaren, “Madame Butterfly” (see video above)
Malcolm McLaren’s Fans came out in 1984, and at the time, I had no idea who Malcolm McLaren was, nor did I have any concept of how ridiculous it was that the puppetmaster behind the Sex Pistols was releasing an album of synth-pop opera covers just seven years after Never Mind the Bollocks. My mom bought it–I actually have a vague memory of her hunting it down at the Tower Records in Sherman Oaks before finally finding it at the Music Plus in Studio City. I was a four year-old budding ballerina, and when she’d put the record on, I’d practice my pas de bourrée. At some point I choreographed an entire ballet to the full record, with yours truly playing all the parts (thankfully, this was before the advent of affordable consumer camcorders). It’s the first music I remember requesting to listen to.

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On Friday, I wrote a bit of a gusher over the upcoming About a Son, in which I speculated that the film and its associated soundtrack were Nirvana-free because securing rights to Kurt Cobain’s recorded output is rumored to be difficult and costly. Over the weekend, About a Son director AJ Schnack wrote a comment on that post with some further information:

Thanks for the blog love. Want to clarify one point. As crazy as it may sound, the decision to not use Nirvana music was not a financial choice, nor was it obstruction from another party. I tried to put a Nirvana song at the end, but it struck all the wrong notes in a film that is not so much about him as a musician as it is him as a man. Ultimately, I thought that Steve Fisk and Ben Gibbard’s score music worked better for the end of the film. It’s not the most commercial choice in the world, but I think it fits the movie I made. However, on your larger point that anyone can (and should) go home and listen to Nirvana (preferably In Utero as it was the album he was writing and recording at the time of the interviews) after seeing the film - I am in total agreement.

I’ve seen the film, and I would agree that it makes more sense to fill the soundtrack with music Cobain would have listened to, rather than music he made. In any case, the current soundtrack has a mixtape quality that I like a lot, and that I imagine will go over fairly well with the Pitchfork set.

AJ Schnack dropped a hint on his blog yesterday about the soundtrack for his new film, Kurt Cobain: About a Son, and I followed the link to Barsuk Records to take a look at it. It looks amazing–21 tracks, songs by David Bowie, Butthole Surfers and Iggy Pop, plus scraps of the Michael Azzerad interviews with Cobain that are used in the film. There are no Nirvana songs, but that’s to be expected (rights-wise, they are alleged to be prohibitively expensive), and really — if you’re interested in the film, you probably already own every Nirvana recording that’s been released.

As David Lowery points out, About a Son begins a one-week Oscar qualifying run today in Los Angeles, as part of DocuWeek. It’ll hit additional cities in the fall.

Filmmaker A.J. Schnack, who usually blogs here, has launched a new blog devoted to his upcoming Kurt Cobain documentary, Kurt Cobain: About a Son. I found the above clip from the film on the new blog, but it’s apparently been on YouTube for a while — behold the 78 comments it’s earned, which include such insights as “Courtney love is bitch. I hope she burns in hell.” and “Kurt Cobain is alive, Gods never dies..”

It’s frustrating to see that there’s still so much anger and speculation surrounding interest Cobain’s manner of death, because Schnack’s film (which, in tone and content, is well represented by this clip) really has no interest in any of the conspiracy theories. Based on audio interviews conducted by journalist Michael Azerad for a circa 1993 book about Nirvana, it’s a poetic and introspective portrait that does a lot to puncture the “Cobain was a God brought down by a harpie devil” myth that I’m sure most reasonable people grew tired of about ten years ago.

From my very cold and very snowy perspective here in Grand Rapids, Austin is starting to sound really good. But it always does, right? It’s a great film town, SXSW is a great festival, and March is a great time to head South.

The festival lineup of films was unveiled earlier this week, so it’s officially time to start anticipating. Here’s the info from the official festival site. indieWIRE has a nice overview of what’s scheduled, too, and here are some notes from GreenCine Daily.

One of the movies in the lineup is Kurt Cobain About a Son, which some of us saw at Denver. It’s a great film, and director A.J. Schnack is a great guy. We were lucky to catch him and Michael Azerrad for a chat about his film and also did a roundtable from Ted’s Montana Grill in Denver where we talk about the film. If you’re heading to SXSW, make sure to catch it.

We’ll dive into the lineup and say more about it here as we get closer to the festival. In the meantime, we’re busy preparing to do the festival’s Spout-sponsored email/webcenter, and dozens of podcast interviews. Rick will also be on a panel “New Dogs, New Tricks: New Media Goes to the Movies,” which is just a great example of what a good fit this festival is for us–the perfect mix of movies and interactive media. Stay tuned for more in the coming weeks.