Because last year’s list of dress-up ideas for cinephiles was a hit, we’re doing it again. From movies released in the past 12 months, there are few obvious costume ideas. We’re sure to see a lot of guys dress up as the main trio from The Hangover, while girls inspired by Whip It will be sexy Girl Scouts (with or without roller skates).
This time around, though, we’re presenting ten costume ideas that shouldn’t be too popular. And that makes them somewhat appealing, because nobody wants to show up at a Halloween party where someone else is dressed in the same outfit (especially if the other person’s costume is better). Of course, keep in mind that some of the following unpopular ideas could in turn make you unpopular, too. …Read more
Director Justin Strawhand uses every known documentary trick in the book (as well as some tricks not in the book) to translate Edwin Black’s The War Against the Weak from 600-page doorstop of exhaustive, collaborative research into a smooth-moving filmed horror show that’s shocking, inventive, and seductive in the most disturbing sense imaginable.
Black’s basic thesis — and slogan on his book’s website — ominously portends that “it began on Long Island and ended at Auschwitz…and yet it never really stopped.” “It” is the scientific study of hereditary genetics, named “eugenics” by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, developed by American academic elitists to serve their inherently racist and discriminatory fear of the other, and eventually adopted by the Adolf Hitler, who, already obsessed with the notion of denerate peoples like Jews and Gypsies as a threat to Aryan supremacy, became obsessed with American eugenics literature whilst in prison in the 1920s, even writing “amateur anthropologist” Madison Grant a fan letter describing Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race as Hitler’s “bible.” Eugenics theory first resulted in questionable U.S. laws governing the civil rights of the blind, the epileptic, the feeble minded, and the generally lowborn, and ultimately the sterilization or euthanasia of the same. “Eventually,” Black writes, these same theories “led to the Holocaust, the destruction of the Gypsies, the rape of Poland and the decimation of all Europe.”
With Danny Boyle’s DGA win over the weekend, Slumdog Millionaire achieved a near-impossible feat; it became even more favored to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Once thought to be an underdog, Slumdog has been pretty much unstoppable throughout the awards season, even picking up the undeserved top honor at the SAG Awards, and has never fallen from its position of frontrunner since it took the lead months ago. Yet last week, the internet was populated by talk of a Slumdog backlash, and for the first time in weeks, other Best Picture candidates were seriously being discussed as slightly plausible victors. The two titles considered most likely to be a threat to Boyle’s film are The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Milk, with little concern for either Frost/Nixon or The Reader. However, while the former candidate is probably a sure thing to lose, the latter film should not yet be dismissed.
Before the Academy Award nominations were announced last month, The Reader wasn’t even thought to be a contender for any major category except Best Supporting Actress. Now, among its five nominations, it’s up for three higher-tiered Oscars, including Best Picture. So, we can’t rightly continue underestimating its potential. This isn’t to say that we are predicting The Reader to win Best Picture; Slumdog is still the safest bet for the top prize. But odds for The Reader do need to be adjusted, as its chances are a lot closer to, if not better than, secondary favorites Benjamin Button and Milk. Of course, as the it stands now, the film should be an appealing choice for any gamblers out there, because a surprise Best Picture win for The Reader would pay out big time. So, our immediate apologies to betters if the following seven factors have any influence on professional oddsmakers out there. …Read more
Only one acquisition to report this morning: IFC Films’ purchase of U.S. rights to the Swedish Norwegian zombie Nazi flick Dead Snow. It’s typical for many buyers to head home after Wednesday, so yesterday’s single deal may be the last major pickup we hear about for awhile.
But there are a number of films still receiving buzz and interest, so remember to keep checking SpoutBlog’s Sundance Deals chart for any updates that may come in.
Two halfsie holiday weeks in one Week in Review! From the final days of recession gluttony to the cold dawn of 2009, we learned about charismatic Nazis, twisted nativities,Revolutionary Road, The Spirit, Chernenko-sploitation, and the most misunderstood movies of the past twelve months. Happy Everything!!!
If yesterday’s clip of Muppets disco dancing wasn’t childish enough for you, check out today’s trippy video. I don’t quite understand the inspiration behind the concept, but someone decided to superimpose the heads of the cast from Valkyrieonto little bodies in elf costumes dancing to a disco version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” (courtesy of JibJab’s Elf Yourself program). Tom Cruise with an eyepatch was odd enough. Tom Cruise with an eyepatch flailing his arms about like a Nazi Tony Manero is just about the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.
Just what are these guys so excited about? The holidays? The death of Hitler (though not thanks to them)? Or could it be they’re celebrating the fact that the reviews of Valkyrie aren’t as dreadful as many expected? Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the actual movie doesn’t feature any scenes as great as this one.
David Hare has been writing for the theater since the 1970s, has served as Royal Dramatist to the Royal Court Theater in London, has been the Associate Director for the UK’s National Theater, is an accomplished director of both theater and film, and was knighted in 1998. That’s a pretty impressive resume on its own, but in the past few years he’s also become known for writing successful adaptations of novels.
In the past few years he’s adapted Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for film, and his latest is Bernard Schlink’s The Reader, which pairs him again with director Stephen Daldry. I spoke with Hare in Los Angeles, just after he’d (thankfully) recovered from losing his voice.
In the 16 months or so since it first became possible to distribute full-length feature films in single viewing windows embedded in a blog post, there’s been a lot of talk as to how a film presented in this matter might function. For Four Eyed Monsters, the first feature film made available legally in a single stream on YouTube, the embed functioned as a meme spreader for the FEM brand (and the page the embed code came from served as a revenue generator for Spout.com). At Telluride last month, Annette Insdorf talked about the embed’s value as reference point within online criticism, which is something we’ve done here on SpoutBlog, most recently with Steven’s post last week on DW Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln. Also last week, Anne Thompson suggested that Wayne Wang’s Princess of Nebraska, recently made available for streaming in full on YouTube, can serve as a marketing tool for the film Wang made concurrently, A Thousand Years of Good Prayer, which is currently in theaters. In pieces in the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, John Horn and John Jurgensen both suggested that free streaming solutions for features are performing a kind of public service; Horn commended SnagFilms, the portal for ad-supported embeddable documentaries, for their ability to bring “important movies to audiences that otherwise might never have known the films existed,” while Jurgensen focused on Hulu and YouTube’s potential to help relieve the “glut of movies jockeying for theater screens.”
This is all well and good, but in most cases, up until now an argument could have be made that the “better” place to see the film in question would be on a big screen, and/or with an audience, because the assumption has been that the natural home for cinema is in a cinema, that distribution via embed is an alternative option when theatrical distribution doesn’t work out. The same can not be said for The End of America, Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s non-fiction adaptation of Naomi Wolf’s book and ensuing lecture tour, which debuted on SnagFilms today. This is the first film I’ve seen that seems ideally suited to be seen as a blog embed, and not just because a good deal of the footage within was pulled from web video sources. Essentially a Top Ten list followed by a How To, it’s the first film I’ve seen that seems to have internalized the structure of the traffic-baiting blog post.
As real-life Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim–aka Dr. Death, who allegedly kept relics from his human experiments in his office!–is being “chased” through Chile (as much as you can chase a 94 year old), I’m sure Tom Cruise or Jerry Bruckheimer are watching CNN right now while furiously thumb-typing their lawyers on Blackberries to option the story.
But I couldn’t help reminisce about what could be argued as the genesis of torture porn, Marathon Man (1976). Dustin Hoffman plays marathon runner Babe who, like Cary Grant in North by Northwest, unknowingly has a connection that is too close for comfort with a Nazi war criminal known as–prepare to wince–The Dentist, played by Lawrence Olivier. Of course, Babe has some chronic dental problems that the Nazi dentist exploits in the anus-clenching torture scene. And Babe’s long endurance skills are important to him shedding his pacifist self in the movie’s climax. But this was action before action movies became formulaic, and it has a healthy dose of moral queasiness about the virtue of revenge. And, unfortunately, if there’s a Dr. Death released in 2010, I have a feeling we’ll be much better served by watching Marathon Man.
Although, I hope they cast Dustin Hoffman as Dr. Death to give the finger to those Nazis.
I was really into that video that was going around last week, of the scene from Downfall transformed via subtitles into the story of Hillary Clinton’s last stand––not just because I dislike Hillary Clinton, but because there’s a goofiness to it that makes it seem more clever than your typical “this politician is just like Hitler!” joke. A lot of my favorite parts are too obscene to excerpt, although I do like it when s/he slams “those fainting sissies over at MoveOn.org” for “choking on their tofu because I voted for the Iraq war!” But I think I was most impressed by what I thought was the novel choice of material––a 3-year old German film detourned into YouTube propaganda? How imaginative!
Um, turns out, it’s not as novel as I thought. A twitter from Chuck Tryon alerted me to the news that Downfall has been the basis of YouTube parodies long before the Hillary clip came to light. Many of these parodies reconfigure Hitler as a frustratedXbox user; Hitler also has problems using Vista, is unhappy to hear that his favorite soccer team has lost the Champions League Final, and is absolutely irate at an underling’s suggestion that he buy a new Mustang. There are so many Downfall spoofs on YouTube that I’m almost positive I was the last one to know that spoofing Downfall was, like, a thing that people did.
Almost all of these clips have view counts on YouTube in the six or seven figures. Downfall was the second-highest grossing foreign language film of 2005, but it still only made about $5.5 million. Almost certainly, more people in this country have now seen a clip from the film wrangled into a new context than would have ever seen the film in its original state. Downfall thus becomes part of the cultural conversation, but at the same time, it seems unlikely that any of these clips could effectively function as commercials for the film. Maybe it’s sad or maybe it’s totally appropriate, but it seems clear that the general YouTube user would be able to summon way more excitement for the concept of Hitler on the phone with Microsoft tech support, than they would for the concept of Hitler…doing Hitler stuff.
Of course, like many others I would wish for them to have never existed, because millions of lives are more important than any number of classic movies. But the Nazis did happen, and they continue to populate cinema for better or worse. We all know about the latest product of Hollywood’s Nazi fetish, Valkyrie, and we’ve seen a ridiculous trailer for a new Russian Hitler farce titled Hitler Kaput!, which shouldn’t be confused with Germany’s recently announced Hitler comedy Mein Kampf, based on a play by George Tabori (I Confess). And now, because we still need Nazi sci-fi, there’s Iron Sky, for which a teaser trailer (see above) has just been released.
Stefan Ruzowitzky won the Best Foreign Film Oscar for his movie The Counterfeiters, a WWII narrative based on true events around an enormous Nazi counterfeiting scheme. It’s been quite common to see movies based on the holocaust taking home Oscars (Nazis are a modern archetype making for great good versus evil showdowns). But what you don’t often see is an Austrian filmmaker making a movie for an apparently large audience that still refuses to believe Nazis were the BAD GUYS.
I revived an interview I did in Telluride with Ruzowitzky an hour before he premiered The Counterfeiters. He talks about why he made the movie and his desire to beat up old people after the jump…
Rudolf Arnheim, the author of seminal film theory text Film As Art, died in June at the age of 102. Like Chris Campbell, I’m just finding this out now, but as Arnheim was one of the few theorists whose work I really connected to in grad school, I thought a late mention was better than none at all. A few essential Arnheim links follow after the jump.
I interviewed Stefan Ruzowitzky about his new film The Counterfeiters. It’s a movie about the massive Nazi counterfeiting operation during WWII. He made because some people “need a punch in the face.”
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.
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Only one acquisition to report this morning: IFC Films’ purchase of U.S. rights to the 
If yesterday’s 
As real-life Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim–aka 
