This post was originally published in July 2008, in accordance with the New York and Self-Involvement blogathons. Ghostbusters was recently released on Blu-ray in honor of the 25th anniversary of the film’s premiere.

When I heard that the New York in the Movies Blogathon and the Self-Involvement Blogathon were happening around the same time, I got it into my head that there was one film I could write about that could legitimately fit on the nexus of both. Sure, there are “better” New York films––Manhattan, obvs, or even Metropolitan; there are films that would allow me to more deeply discuss my personal life, as the Culture Snob puts it, as it’s “filtered through movies.” But there’s no movie in any category or canon that allows me to talk about how my relationship to the city I live in has been filtered through movies since long before I lived here, quite like Ghostbusters. A close reading of the film, the way it depicts New York, and what that has to do with me, follows after the jump. The entire film is now available for streaming, but not embedding, on Hulu.

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The Tribeca Film Festival has often shown a predilection for a certain type of New York feature and filmmaker — see this year’s Woody Allen-directed opener, or last year’s opening night film Baby Mama, or the many virtually interchangeable Ed Burns pictures that have played the festival in previous years –– all reflecting a version of the city so plasticine that their use of actual locations seems to offer no more authenticity than a Hollywood soundstage.  But within 2009’s pared-down, recession-conscious lineup, a number of titles call back to a very different, dirtier aspect of the hometown’s filmmaking legacy, one which seems all the more ripe for a revisit in this climate of financial pain and industrial upheaval. Bette Gordon’s 1984 postfeminist noir Variety is the centerpiece of this unofficial strain, and it finds cousins in at least three program mates: Gordon’s latest feature Handsome Harry (starring Steve Buscemi), as well as the documentaries Blank City (in which both Gordon and Buscemi appear, discussing the downtown filmmaking scene of the late 70s-early 80s) and Burning Down the House: The Story of CBGB.

If Celine Danhier’s Blank City plays as an anthropological study of the interconnected community of downtown artists shooting transgressive provocations for no budget on low-gauge media, Variety is the prototype of a product of that community; co-written by Kathy Acker, featuring appearances from Nan Goldin, a young Luis Guzman and Spalding Gray, produced by Gray’s girlfriend Renee Shafransky, co-lensed by Tom DiCillio and scored by John Lurie. The two latter names would shortly move on the Stranger Than Paradise.

Sandy McLeod stars as Christine, a wannabe journalist who takes a job selling tickets at a Times Square porno house to pay the bills. She soon finds herself caught in an economic, moral and generational limbo, surrounded by women who are driven, by some combination of liberated curiosity and economic panic, to explore the sex industry, and yet find themselves in beyond-traditional, passive-aggressive relationships with their boyfriends. Increasingly fascinated with the tension between watching and being watched, Christine begins tailing a regular visitor to the theater, ultimately playing with the option of choosing her own sexual objectification. All of it unfolds in grainy 16mm against the backdrop of a pre-gentrified Manhattan where, as John Waters puts it in Blank City, “just walking home was like going to war.”

Speaking over the phone last week, Gordon described the means and tools of production that made Variety possible, considers why the film had an impact then and why its assessment of the choppy waters of female sexual empowerment is perhaps even more relevant now, and explains why she doesn’t want to be a “woman filmmaker.” A restored print of Variety screens on Wednesday at 5pm at SVA on 23rd Street; it’s also available on DVD.

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If you live in New York and you pay attention to the movies (or if you don’t live here but you read about film across the blogosphere, say), then it’s probably safe to assume you are aware of Film Forum’s Breadlines & Champagne series, running now through March 5th. All the films are shown in 35mm, plenty are not available on DVD and every day there’s a new 2-for-1 double bill of 1930s Depression-era cinema. This Saturday, the ever-dreaded (around here, at least) and always-plastic Valentine’s Day offers a delicious dream pairing sure to propel its audience back outside with all the right Hallmark-approved sentiment appropriate to gaudy reds and garish pinks and overpriced (and often terrible) chocolate: Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) followed by Mitchel Leisen’s Easy Living (1937). Indeed, Film Forum’s program has a David Thomson endorsement that says, “If you paired [Easy Living] with My Man Godfrey, you’d have a beautiful portrait of money in New York—and a happy audience.”

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MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center have released the schedule for New Directors/New Films, and as in the past, it’s heavy on films that recently played Sundance, including award winners (Push, We Live in Public, The Cove and The Maid). I’m looking forward to catching Amreeka (the ND/NF opening night film), Stay the Same Never Change and Unmade Beds, all of which I missed in Park City, as well as Bob Byington’s Harmony and Me, a world premiere starring Justin Rice.

indieWIRE has the full lineup. ND/NF starts March 25.

Art Radio International renegotiated the terms of its lease of the Clocktower Gallery with MoMA recently, consequently serving subleasers The Film-Maker’s Co-op (FMC) with an eviction notice. Founded nearly 50 years ago, FMC is one of the longest-running distributors of experimental and independent film in the world, its offices operating in the same building since 2000. The organization houses thousands of 16mm prints, many of them unique and irreplaceable including those by Stan Brakhage, Paul Sharits, Carolee Schneeman, Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton, Jennifer Reeves, Jack Smith, Ken Jacobs, Peggy Ahwesh, Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow, Maya Deren, Marie Menken, Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Martha Colburn, Leslie Thornton, and literally hundreds of other artists, as well as an invaluable paper archive of letters, program notes and other materials. According to sources moving these fragile prints will take thousands of dollars the Co-op simply can’t afford.

Art Fag City passes along word that a significant archive devoted to art and experimental film is in danger of becoming homeless. The FMC is petitioning Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate D. Levin in the hopes she’ll help them either stay in the Clocktower or find a new space (and presumably the resources for the move). More details at the link.

As I hinted at a bit yesterday when I posted about some of the best undistributed films of the year, I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of movie ranking. The idea that any of us––critic, blogger, professional, amateur…to the extent that any of those words mean anything anymore––could be indisputably “correct” in our individual execution of such an activity is insane; and of course, any attempt to draw each of our subjective takes on The Year in Movies into a consensus waters down everything that makes an individual list idiosyncratic and thus interesting. But in the end, I do believe that what’s valuable about these activities is valuable enough to outweigh what’s annoying: if you read this blog regularly and have come to draw a bead on my tastes in relation to your own, maybe seeing a list of my favorite New York theatrical releases of 2008 will help jog your memory about films you meant to see (or avoid), and now that many of these are available on DVD, maybe you’ll make it happen (or not).

My full ballot is posted at indieWIRE now. I chose not to rank the titles from 1-10, but they did reel out of my brain in a particular order, and that has to mean something. Below the jump, my theatrical favorites, with links back to previous coverage, and notes on where/how each film can currently be seen.

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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.

The Two Boots Pioneer Theater in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which opened in February 2000, quickly developed a track record of supporting niche interests. It’s where the Donnie Darko cult was born, via midnight screenings that began four months after Richard Kelly’s film had opened in mainstream theaters and lasted for 28 consecutive months. It’s also where a number of recent indies we’ve supported at Spout had their first and/or only New York engagements, including Dance Party USA, LOL, Jones and Kamp Katrina. And now it’s gone, the victim of a rent increase and general economic fatigue.

The theater had its last screening on Halloween night (of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, natch) — but with no direct competition in the area (we love Anthology Film Archives, but while they are a reliable home for spelunked jems past and present, they don’t roll with the lowbrow very often), it won’t be easily forgotten. So if you’re in the neighborhood tonight or can easily be, come out to the Pioneer’s going away party. It starts at 6pm, and the theater’s website (which you should check out regardless of whether you’re looking to attend the party, to see testimonials/triubutes to  the theater from the likes of Bingham Ray and  In The Soup director Alexandre Rockwell) promises “free movies, popcorn and reminiscences.” I’m going to try to stop by a little later in the evening — hopefully right when the reminiscences are starting to get smutty and incriminating — so if you see me, come say hi.

Why did Kurt Anderson conduct a radio interview with Synecdoche, New York director/writer Charlie Kaufman in the middle of the dog run at Washington Square Park? Presumably, so we could have the pleasure of watching the above video, in which Kaufman tries to explain is desire “to give the world something that isn’t crap,” but is distracted when pounced on by adorable puppies. Cue Jon Brion’ “Little Person,” and watch grown men reach for the Kleenex. The full Studio 360 segment with Kaufman can be listened to here.

Via Rach.

Ever since word broke at Toronto that IFC had picked up Steven Soderbergh’s Che for US distribution, there have been conflicting rumors as to how the company, known for its day-and-date theatrical and VOD releases, would handle a film of this length, scope, and potential Oscar cachet. At yesterday’s NYFF press conference, Soderbergh talked a bit about the “roadshow” concept, through which the entire two-part film will first hit theaters.

He confirmed that in each market the film enters, it’ll screen for just one week, on one screen, with ticket buyers paying a premium (probably $25 each, including full-color printed program) for the experience. “I think that’s the ideal way to see it,” the director said, although he acknowledged that “it’s a lot to ask of an audience, to throw away an entire day.”

A source told me last night that IFC is banking that a lot of people are going to want to throw away their days on Che.

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Paul Krik’s low-budget indie thriller Able Danger is nicely shot in tinted b&w hi-def video, slickly mixed, scored and edited almost to the point of being indistinguishable from this or that Bruckheimer TV show. And Krik is a keen film student: Many of the film’s images recall Welles, Lang, Fuller, Mann, Kubrick, Frankenheimer– you name it. Hipster-geek lead Adam Nee, as a conspiracy theory blogger convinced that 9/11 was an inside job, shows subtle, offbeat charm. Young film majors curious about how to pull off a polished look on a shoestring may want to check it out. Krik gets a lot of mileage out of color correction software, real Brooklyn locations and one beat-up mountain bike.

Most memorably Krik also shows an eye for cute European and American hipster chicks in dark femme fatale dresses, retro skirts and, most memorably, panties. …Read more

From its animated notebook-scrawl opening credits to a final scene in which two people finally, effortlessly unburden themselves of a MacGuffin and just decide to be together, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (based on the young adult novel by Rachel Cohn and David Leviathan) seems to have been packaged in the hopes that the lightning that made Juno an unignorable commodity a cultural phenomena will strike twice. Nick and Norah isn’t quite the assault to the teen romance genre that Juno was, and that’s both good and bad. Michael Cera’s Nick, Kat Denning’s Norah, and their assorted pals drift fluidly between irony-as-defense and taking both themselves, and the idea of love, very seriously. The result is a film that’s much more of a traditional teen romance, but also a more honest one.

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When I heard that the New York in the Movies Blogathon and the Self-Involvement Blogathon were happening around the same time, I got it into my head that there was one film I could write about that could legitimately fit on the nexus of both. Sure, there are “better” New York films––Manhattan, obvs, or even Metropolitan; there are films that would allow me to more deeply discuss my personal life, as the Culture Snob puts it, as it’s “filtered through movies.” But there’s no movie in any category or canon that allows me to talk about how my relationship to the city I live in has been filtered through movies since long before I lived here, quite like Ghostbusters. A close reading of the film, the way it depicts New York, and what that has to do with me, follows after the jump. The entire film is now available for streaming, but not embedding, on Hulu.

…Read more

• At Portfolio, Fred Schruers profiles Austin Chick’s dot com crash period piece August, which the filmmaker and his stars will cheekily promote by ringing the bell at the NY Stock Exchange on Friday. “The film will need all the promotion it can get. In this summer of tent-pole behemoths…even an art-house film that won plaudits at the Sundance Film Festival faces a challenge.” Yup. So imagine how hard it’s going to be for virtually plaudit-less August!
• Focus Features sent Variety a ComicCon Survival Kit, complete with a copy of Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics. Mike Jones recommends leaving it at home. “If the geeks see you reading this there, you’ll get the worst eye-roll ever. Their equivalent of a beat-down.”
• There’s a New York in the Movies blogathon happening at 12 Grand in Checking (blog named after a throwaway line on 30 Rock? Very good sign.) and a Self Involvement Blogathon at Culture Snob. I’m going to try to work up something tonight that fits both.
• In the meantime, watch a video that has no application to either: above, The Mind of Danny Tanner, a wrangling of sound and image from Full House into the poetic style of Bergman and the soundtrack of Donnie Darko. Via Mark Lisanti.