Though I first buzzed about an Academy Award nomination for Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight more than a month before his death, I now want to take it all back. I feel all the talk of Ledger’s posthumous Oscar chances will cloud my mind when I finally do see it, and it will probably also cloud the Academy’s judgment, too. Six months from now, when the nominations are announced on January 22 (coincidentally the one-year anniversary of Ledger’s death), if Ledger is not recognized for his role as The Joker, there will surely be an uproar — actually, Hollywood might just up and self-implode.

I’m not the only one annoyed by all the Oscar buzz. Terry Gilliam, who directed Ledger in The Brothers Grimm and the upcoming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, is calling “bullshit” on the whole thing, particularly against Warner Bros., which Gilliam accuses of exploiting Ledger’s death and chance of a posthumous Oscar for publicity purposes. Considering most Oscar campaigns for live actors are really just part of movie marketing, he has a good point.

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Finishing Heaven begins in a bodega. A tall, thin, older woman with fire engine red dyed hair and a drawn face saunters to a table in the back of the deli section to greet a shifty-looking mustachioed character with whom she is clearly very well acquainted. They kiss hello, and almost immediately fall into an argument about matters that date back nearly four decades. it’s a bizarre scene, for a lot of reasons, but initially, I couldn’t get beyond the setting: why are these two in a bodega? They didn’t come for the food––she walked in with a half-empty venti Frappucino, and a wide shot reveals that the deli’s heat lamp trays are empty, thus signifying that it’s either very early or very late. If you were to meet an old lover to argue about old Warhol superstars and reminisce about Max’s Kansas City, would you really do it in front of the soft drink case at your circumspect corner grocery?

Director Mark Mann presents us this scene with judiciously inserted explanatory on-screen titles, through which we learn that the man’s name is Robert Feinberg, and the woman’s is Ruby Lynn Reyner, and the two were a couple in the 70s and are now reuniting for the first time in over 30 years to talk about finally making some progress on Heaven, a film which he directed and she starred in but he never finished editing. In spite of this exposition, overall it feels like we’re being thrown into a fire, and it’s exciting––sometimes you see things happening in Manhattan that you can’t quite explain and simply must accept, and you come to understand that it’s just one of the ways that the city humbles you into acknowledging that you do not control the universe. But then we cut to an exterior shot of the deli’s incongruously sunny exterior, and a title slowly fades up at the bottom of the screen: “Formerly Max’s Kansas City.”

It’s a laugh line, but it’s also an object lesson in how the director will proceed to tell this story. He asks us to jump straight in to one aspect of his subjects’ lives, and just as we think we have a handle on what’s going on, he pulls out and unpacks another box, unveiling a further facet of who these people are and what their relationship is all about. It’s a film that, on the top level, is about two extreme personalities trying to finish a film, but on a deeper level, it’s about the way lives slip out of control, dreams slip out of reach, and the incredible way that massive egos can take repeated beatings and continually bounce back, worse for wear but still resillient.

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Here’s a bit of candy to keep you entertained while I settle into the post-Cannes, post-holiday bloggy business as usual. Continuing the Muppets revisionist cinematic history trend (first came Sesame Streets by Martin Scorsese, then Elmo auditioned for a remake of Casino (he lost the role to Ernie, apparently), here comes The Muppets Take Manhattan. We always suspected that Kermit was the Woody Allen of Sesame Street, and now we have the visual proof.

Via Gawker.

• Jim Emerson has collated an incredibly comprehensive account of the events of the 1983 Telluride Film Festival, where Andrei Tarkovsky made some obtuse statements about cinema and art, and Richard Widmark offered an eloquent counterargument, which can essentially be reduced to its most powerful two words: “He stinks.”
• An intern in the Paramount Vantage publicity office Martin Scorsese has a MySpace profile.
• If you have $95, you can buy a My Blueberry Nights tee shirt.  Or, you can just go to indieWIRE’s Apple Store event tomorrow night and heckle Wong Kar Wai for indiscriminately distributing his branding rights for free.
• Dance Party USA and Quiet City scorer Keegan DeWitt is working on a new album. You can listen to a preview here.

When I was about eleven or twelve, my mother took me to see a Rolling Stones concert on the Omnimax screen at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. I remember the sheer power of the size of the screen itself – us laughing about seeing Mick Jagger’s lips, each fifty feet tall. Now, year’s later, when Scorsese himself decides to make a Rolling Stones concert film, the memory of that experience ingrained in my mind allows me to compare and contrast how far we’ve come in IMAX technology over the years. And, for all our advances, Shine a Light certainly pays off, providing the full concert film experience to viewer from the new millennium.

The film starts out small. Populating only the center section of the giant screen, Scorsese begins with a mini documentary about his collaboration with the band and the process of organizing the filming of these shows. Boasting some great 16mm camerawork by Albert Maysles, this short film unto itself is a highly entertaining piece that could work on it’s own. So, to come out of that, you can imagine he has to step it up a notch. Suddenly, and without warning, the film captures the explosive intro to the concert with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” From there, it’s full speed ahead, fluctuating between quick close-ups and long takes, based on the rhythm of the music of the feeling of the performance.

One of my favorite things about Scorsese’s piece is the sound work. Not only does it come blaring at you in full force through the powerful IMAX system, but also the instruments are mixed and isolated so that you can really get the full concert experience. If one guitar breaks and let’s the other guitar fill the space, you can hear through the sound mix. During duets with the likes of Christina Aguleria and Jack White, Jagger is heard harmonizing from one side of the theater while the other respective singer is working it on the other side. The medium is utilized to full power that it should be. This is not a concert experience. In a concert experience, you would view it from a distance. When you comprise the film with so many tight close-ups, it’s more like being on stage and the sound reinforces that.

There’s a few cute pieces of archival footage cut-in as transitions between songs and I will be the first to admit: it is a little long. The 125-minute running time doesn’t bode well for those who find this kind of film repetitive. But, bloated as it may be, Shine a Light is still a powerful reminder of the strong performances the Stones are capable of and the absurd climax is also a reminder of how playful they can be too. Captured all by Scorsese with extreme gusto using a complex multi-camera set-up and a lighting design that overheats even the season Jagger himself, the film is a must-see for biggest to the smallest Rolling Stones fans.

Star Wars may have the most famous opening title sequence in film history, but in terms of influence it’s got nothing on the work of Saul Bass. He’s the brilliant graphic designer who gave us the animated credits for Hitchcock’s Vertigo, North by Northwest and Psycho and Scorsese’s Casino, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence and Goodfellas and most of Otto Preminger’s work, including Exodus, Anatomy of a Murder and The Man With the Golden Arm. You’ve also seen his work at the beginning of West Side Story and Alien and Big and The Seven Year Itch and Spartacus.

But what if he had designed the opening credits to Star Wars? Well, it might have looked something like this video, which was created for a school project. Interesting, yes. Creative, yes. Entertaining, yes. Memorable, no. It just goes to show how significant some credit sequences can be, because this is hardly appropriate for George Lucas’ film. And I don’t just mean because the music is all wrong. If this student wanted to go with a jazz score for the titles, he should have gone with a jazz cover of the Star Wars theme. And if he wanted something more upbeat, he could have used a jazz cover of the Cantina Band song (both covers can be heard on this album).

If I was this guy’s professor, I’d give him a B+, mostly for effort and the fact that I love the lazer blasts and the zoom in on the Death Star at the end. For the A, though, he’d need to resubmit with something more suitable than a Buddy Rich soundtrack.

[via Fraktastic]

The news [via Vulture] that Larry David has been cast in the lead of Woody Allen’s upcoming return to New York project makes me really happy for some reason. I mean, obviously, he’s been cast in the traditional role of Woody stand-in; and, obviously, there is going to be either a romance or some kind of hokey mentor relationship between he and the sure to be precocious-yet-neurotic sexpot played by Evan Rachel Wood. But still! If Woody *has* to make films about old men and the young girls who are inexplicably drawn to them, at least he’s found a pair where the girl has experience kissing up to a much creepier older man.

For a taste of what David can do when working alongside a canonical New York auteur, check out the clip from Curb Your Enthusiasm above.

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.
  

• Oh man … I totally forgot about the Val Lewton blogathon, and now I’m way too busy with Sundance prep to write something up. In any case, it starts today, to coincide with the TCM premiere of Val Lewton: The Man In the Shadows. I saw Kent Jones’ doc (narrated by Martin Scorsese) at Telluride, and it’s definitely a must-see for fans of films like Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie who want a taste of Lewton’s lesser-known works.
• Anyone could have guessed that last night’s Un-Golden Globes would be “weird”, but who could have guessed that it would have moved so many journalists to lapse into poetics? First Variety likened the experience to a dream; then, the NY Times topped their coverage with this photo of an unusually long-faced E! anchor, with a caption pointing up his supposed existential dilemma. Now, David Poland’s getting into the act, with this revelation: “I don’t really like ghosts as much as I enjoy the living.”
• A week or so ago, Jurgen Fauth mentioned that he’d bought an URL that he didn’t know what to do with. He’s since figured it out: IDrinkYourMilkshake.com has now become a web portal dedicated to aggregating discussions––and inevitable video mashups, as above––concerning There Will Be Blood. Act now, and you can even get an @idrinkyourmilkshake.com email address!
• Bob Westal ponders Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. “Could this film be the next Duck Soup combining the silliest comedy and the sharpest satire?”