Filmmaker and former Marine JD Johannes is selling a compilation DVD called Outside the Wire on his website. The DVD contains three short documentaries that Johannes shot himself whilst embedded with troops in Iraq (a trailer is embedded above). On a blog on the site, Johannes positions his “pro-victory, pro-troop” films in opposition to docs like Body of War and The Ground Truth. “Actually going to Iraq, living down in the dirt with the grunts and making documentaries about what is happening on the ground appears to be a rather novel concept, but I think the best way to understand Iraq is to see it from 5′10″ off the ground,” he writes.

Fair enough. But wait––there’s a gimmick! Johannes is trying to sell 2,900 copies of his DVD in six weeks, in order to match the domestic box office gross of Brian DePalma’s fall flop Redacted.

I haven’t seen Johannes’ movies, and I’m certainly not opposed to as many views of the war as possible getting out into the market place. In fact, I’ve argued previously that the reason why films like Lions For Lambs and Stop-Loss are so disappointing creatively and commercially is due to a homogeneity of perspective––the anti-war choir really doesn’t need to be pandered to anymore.

But what is a little illogical to me is that Johannes has chosen Redacted as the target to beat. …Read more

Video game blogs have a way of reminding me that I’m a big girl. The boys at Joystiq (some of whom are former colleagues and friendly acquaintances of mine) drop terms like “microtransactions” and “exergaming” and suddenly my brain turns off and I have an overwhelming urge to watch Tyra. Funnily enough, I picked up the former term (which still means nothing to me) from reading this story about a perspective game that would ostensibly be tailored to the girly market. Yes, apparently Juno, the little indie choo-choo train that could, the crossover underdog that scraped up $100 million thanks to a cleverly oppressive marketing campaign on pure pluck alone, is in the process of being turned into a video game.

We could speculate for hours as to what this game might actually look like (you get a jug of Sunny Delight every time you get Michael Cera to wear a blueberry condom!), but I thought it would be more fun to think about what it would be like if actual indie films were to have their brands extended into the gamer realm. Bearing in mind that my knowledge of video games pretty much begins and ends with Mario Kart, check out five ideas, for films including Gummo and Mutual Appreciation, after the jump.

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Here’s a look at the notable films opening this week that we’ve previously covered here on SpoutBlog:

• Redacted: Bill O’Reilly can finally get a look at the film he’s sight-unseen been threatening to boycott, while Magnolia finally gets to put that whole all-press-is-good-press maxim to the test. Here’s my review from Telluride; for a recap on the possibly-contrived battle between director Brian DePalma and producer/distributor Mark Cuban, see here, here and here.
• Beowulf: Is director Robert Zemeckis not doing press for this film because he knows it’s a bad idea to compete with the post-Comic-Con gushage over Angelina Jolie’s nakedness?
• Smiley Face: Kevin and Paul are big fans of Gregg Araki’s stoner comedy, which came off a successful festival run to be all but abandoned by its distributor. The film opens on one screen in L.A. today before going straight to DVD. Listen to Paul’s interview with Araki here.
• Margot at the Wedding: Noah Baumbach’s follow-up to The Squid and the Whale is disappointing, despite Nicole Kidman’s strong performance as a wicked sister. Read the review here.
• Southland Tales: What can I say? I thought it was funny.

• This week in Natalie NudeGate: Her nude scene is coming to the big screen! She maybe wishes she hadn’t done it!
• Great World of Sound tops the Gotham nominations.
• Manohla Dargis on the films of Andy Warhol.
• MySpace gets into the softcore Real World-ripoff game.
• John Kerry has bad taste in movies.
• Alfred Hitchcock is this year’s Truman Capote.
• Netflix used to say they wanted an indie revolution. Do they still?
• Redacted is being marketed much differently than its forebear, Medium Cool.
• Dumbledore may not be the only fictional character with a secret.
• It took two years, but Wristcutters: A Love Story is finally taking the indie box office by storm.
• An entry in the Close-Up Blogathon, on David Fincher’s music videos.
• Why the Golden Globes don’t care about world cinema — and why they shouldn’t.
• Mark Cuban’s latest reign as a reality star is over.
• There was a lot of adultery at NYFF.
• Shlock factory Troma is moving to Queens.
• A look at an incredibly candid shot doc about a single woman’s life in Baghdad.
• Do critics really have a problem with Tyler Perry? Or does Lionsgate have a problem with critics?
• Fox Searchlight is releasing Juno like an awards-bait indie. Meanwhile, Diablo Cody has sold yet another project.
• On FilmCouch, Kevin reviews Lynch and Karina talks to Richard Brown, whose series Movies 101 is coming to DVD.
• The Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles has been reborn as an impeccably programed rep house. They’re showing films from a batch of our favorite new American filmmakers in December.
• Sidney Lumet’s latest is now in theaters.
• An entry in the Totally Unrelated Blogathon, on Karina’s past life as a foodie.

Magnolia Pictures and Landmark Theaters Owner Mark Cuban was voted off ABC’s Dancing With the Stars last night. Above, watch his final performance; below the jump, in his ABC-mandated exit interview with Jimmy Kimmel, Cuban talks about wearing a onesie, buying the Cubs, and baring his “unshaved” hip replacement scar on national television. Throughout this whole DwtS thing, Cuban has downplayed his secondary career as an indie film mogul in order to play up his persona as a magnanimous billionaire of the people, so it’s not a surprise that recent Magnolia controversies did not come up on Kimmel.

More on the Dancing Mogul:

Mark Cuban’s Hobo Show
Mark Cuban on the Redacting of Redacted
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“I’ve been thinking about Medium Cool a lot lately,” writes Chuck Tryon at Newcritics. “In part because I’m teaching it, but also because the film’s treatment of history and documentary would seem to inform the debates about Brian DePalma’s Redacted and the decision to remove some documentary photographs from the film’s final montage.” Chuck hasn’t seen Redacted yet, but he makes some interesting connections in the full post, which you can read here. I havent’ seen Medium Cool since my first year of college (that’s about nine years, if you’re counting), and Chuck’s post inspired me to try to dig up some clips online. All I could find was the trailer above.

The thing that struck me when watching the trailer is that it looks very “real.” Obviously, I’m too young to have seen Medium Cool at the time of its release, so I don’t know if this is really a legitimate response–I don’t really know what “real” looked like in 1969. But even if it’s just a so-so approximation of 1969 reality, Medium Cool would seem to have something over Redacted, which wants to be a dispatch straight from contemporary popular media but, with its school play version of combat and video blogs kabuki, fails miserably.

Check out the Medium Cool trailer above, and the Redacted trailer below the jump. The almost image-free Redacted trailer is the ultimate teaser, a physical illustration of Brian DePalma’s insistence that the whole movie is comprised of material that an unnamed someone doesn’t want you to see. As Chuck notes, Medium Cool was, literally a movie that was considered too controversial and ground-breaking for release. In contrast, its trailer plays as a perfectly preserved slice of zeitgeist.

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• Kevin offered three tips for documentary filmmakers in search of the truth.
• A look at three fine examples of pre-code cleavage.
• It’s now easier for documentary filmmakers to qualify for an Oscar nomination.
• Did YouTube “borrow” branding from a successful internet film festival?
• Nikki Finke claimed Warner Brothers had instituted a corporate policy against casting women, then baited Gloria Allred into threatening a WB boycott. WB was like, “No you didn’t,” and then Nikki was like, “Yes, in fact, I did.”
• In more devastating Warner Brothers news, the studio continues to show a lack of support for Jesse James by making it nearly impossible for non-coastal critics to see it.
• Michel Gondry’s working on an autobiographical animated film with his teenage son.
• Harmony Korine explains how he solved his filmmaking block by joining a cult of fishermen in the Amazon.
• Juno is not a remake of another film about a pregnant teen with ‘Juno’ in the title.
• The Austin Film Festival memorializes Moonlighting.
• “Any network that can be used to share cat pictures can be used to bring down a government.” This and other pearls of wisdom from from academic/blogger Henry Jenkins.
• On FilmCouch, Paul and Kevin talk to Rob Parrish, the mastermind of Next to Heaven, a web series carved out of the public domain. Watch the most recent episode of Next to Heaven here.

New York Film Festival:

• Mark Cuban confirmed to us that he would not release Brian DePalma’s director’s cut of Redacted. DePalma took the case to the DGA, who ruled that Magnolia could release the “redacted” version. DePalma eventually gives up.
• Peter Bogdanovich explains why his Tom Petty movie is four hours long.
• The Silent Light trailer breaks Karina’s heart.

Chicago Film Festival:

• The Affleck Brothers on the red carpet.
• The Filmspotting gang shares their take on the fest.

It looks like the “battle” over Redacted is over. Brian DePalma was a guest this morning on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. Lehrer asked DePalma to comment on the lead story on the gossip page of this morning’s NY Daily News, which is essentially a transcription of the widely-circulated video documenting Monday’s DePalma press conference at the New York Film Festival. DePalma gave a restrained recap of the situation and then said, “I exhausted my legal options about 24 hours ago.”

He was most likely referencing the alleged DGA decision that ruled Magnolia can, against the director’s wishes, release the film with black bars placed over the faces in the images in question. I say “alleged” because this DGA decision has not been reported in the trades nor confirmed by press release––I’m getting my information from comments made on Movie City Indie by Magnolia’s Eamonn Bowles and someone who appears to be DGA General Counsel David Korduner.

Regardless, this appears to be as far as DePalma is willing to fight. At the end of the segment, Lehrer asked DePalma if the battle will delay Redacted’s release date, and the director said no. “I’m afraid that controversy is over,” he sighed, clearly resigned. There’s no indication he has any plans to take Mark Cuban up on his offer to let DePalma take the film off Magnolia’s hands.

Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures and key player in yesterday’s Redacted press conference dust-up, responds to the chatter that the incident was a publicity stunt on Movie City Indie. As I noted earlier, DePalma has been milking the issue at a number of festivals, and it appears that Bowles finally reached a breaking point:

there was absolutely no calculation involved at the press conference yesterday. depalma has been on a toot about how we’ve compromised his film, and then he stated publicly at the official nyff press conference that in no uncertain terms mark cuban, for aesthetic reasons, wanted the photos out of the film. i had just arrived and this was one of the first things i heard. in an almost tourette’s like moment, i just blurted out out that it wasn’t true. [...] the fact of the matter is, none of the companies that have released depalma’s work in the last 30 years would ever touch this film. and because our company, which has had it’s fair share of controversial, uncompromising films, actually was the one stupid/brave/committed enough to do so, we end up being the evil force trying to shut down a director’s vision.

Bowles also notes that the Director’s Guild has sided against DePalma on the matter. You can read Bowles’ full comments here. Jurgen Fauth also has video of the press conference, which I’ve embedded above; you can here his take on the fracas here.

UPDATED 10/10: Last night, a commenter at Movie City Indie calling himself “A. Nonymous” disputed Bowles’ note that the DGA voted against DePalma, and stating that “an arbitrator ruled the company could use redacted photos in the film, rather than the unredacted photos Mr. De Palma wanted to include”–so it’s not so much that the DGA voted *against* DePalma, but that they sided *with* Magnolia/Mark Cuban.

And in the comments to this post, Matt V writes: “Check out the TypeKey profile name of the anonymous commenter on the mcindie site. DKorduner - Who, since he has a “DGA email address” is probably David Korduner, who is the General Counsel for the DGA. Why is he making (or at least trying to make) anonymous comments on a blog site?” A fair question, although perhaps the bigger issue, is what kind of lawyer tries to make anonymous blog comments using his work email address?

Several film blogs have posted Jamie Stuart’s thoughts on yesterday’s NYFF press conference for Brian DePalma’s Redacted. In a nutshell: DePalma mentioned that the film’s final montage (which consists of real photographs of real victims of real terror and war-associated violence, and which is thought by many to be the most powerful portion of the film) is in danger of being “redacted” by the film’s distributor, Magnolia Pictures, at the request of the Magnolia/HD Net founder Mark Cuban. According to Stuart, DePalma’s comments were discredited yesterday by Magnolia’s president:

As [DePalma] began discussing the film’s use of actual war photographs and their graphic nature, Eamonn Bowles from Magnolia began shouting from the rear of the Walter Reade Theater to refute De Palma’s claims that Mark Cuban was trying to, well, redact them from the picture’s release. Then, just as the press conference was coming to a close, producer Jason Kliot rushed the stage and grabbed moderator Jim Hoberman’s mic to offer the crowd his version of this distribution controversy. I was left wondering how spontaneous this all was or whether they knew it would be immediately blogged upon to stoke media attention.

I was less inclined to see this as a pure stunt. I knew DePalma had been pushing this button at press conferences as far back as Telluride, where his statements were vague enough to be misinterpreted but loud enough to be difficult to miss. If this fighting between filmmaker and distributer started as a ploy for attention, then it doesn’t make sense that Magnolia would wait this long to publicly respond. Still, unsure how to interpret this latest event, I sent an email this morning to Mark Cuban to get the official word. Cuban confirmed to me that Magnolia has, indeed, asked DePalma to remove the images from the film, and will not release Redacted unless the final montage is cut. More details after the jump.

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Almost two weeks ago, I posted the news that Brian DePalma canceled a press conference previously scheduled to coincide with a screening of Redacted at the New York Film Festival. NYFF’s press office has just sent out a press release announcing that, “by popular demand”, DePalma has agreed to the meet the press after all.

The press conference, rescheduled for Monday afternoon, should be particularly interesting in light of the fact that Redacted has been widely reviled by most of the New York press (myself included). In fact, the only local defender of the film that I can name off the top of my head is New York Magazine’s David Edelstein, who just this morning blogged about not being able to get a word in edgewise at Tuesday’s Todd Haynes event. I wonder: will the Redacted haters cancel their Columbus Day plans en masse in order to get all up in DePalma’s face, or will Edelstein have a much easier time getting his questions answered?

For a recap of our NYFF coverage thus far, click here. Everything else you might have missed from the week gone by is linked below:

• Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales may not be a debacle any longer.
• Jesse James’ family slam Warner Brothers, lurve Brad Pitt.
• Brian DePalma declines to meet the NYFF press.
• Fosse!
• Harvey Weinstein moves a rook in his Oscars 2008 game, which right-wing bloggers drastically misinterpret.
• Sidney Lumet’s latest, dressed up like Saul Bass.
• When Michel Gondry has bills to pay, he sells recycled versions of his movies to cell phone companies. I’d *love* to get in on that racket.
• Billionaire indie film mogul Mark Cuban went on a reality show dressed as a hobo.
• Making fun of Mickey Rooney in Asian-face never gets old.
• Cover your windows in twee, courtesy of Miranda July.
• Sofia Coppola tries to sell her canned champagne via YouTube.
• The Showtime series that brought you voting zombies is moving to NBC.
• The stoner comedy of the year is going straight to DVD. How is that a bad thing for stoners?
• The extremely slim Natalie Portman unrobed for Wes Anderson’s short film, causing the entire internet to transform into twelve-year old rib cage fetishists.
• Paul Thomas Anderson’s hotly anticipated There Will Be Blood premiered this week in Austin to rave reviews.
• On FilmCouch, Paul and Kevin take a look at movie greed, by way of Wall Street and The Price of Sugar.
• The computer containing the script for Francis Ford Coppola’s next project has been stolen.
• Rueing the day you sunk your chunk of change into the ApplePaperweight? Jaman is here to help.

The New York Film Festival opens to the public tonight with two screenings of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. Since today also marks the midpoint of the press screening schedule, here’s a recap of the films we’ve covered so far, with info on when they’re screening for the public at NYFF and when/where you’ll be able to catch them if you’re not in New York.

*The Darjeeling Limited
Screens 9/28 at 7:45 and 9pm; opens in New York tomorrow and expands next week.
“It’s this kind of style-as-substance that has earned [Wes] Anderson a lot of flack over the years, but I’ve come to the point where I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to fault the guy for pursuing his balls-out personal vision. And though the quirk factor of that vision can be grating, Darjeeling’s DNA is more in line with the sentimental glamour of Margot Tenenbaum’s furs, and less with the antiseptic affectation of Steve Zissou’s nautical suit. Watching the feature, for me, often felt like being welcomed back into the embrace of an old friend.”

*The Romance of Astreé and Céladon
Screens 9/29 at 10am and 9/30 at 9:15pm; no U.S. distribution
“For a film in which a hot-to-trot nymph princess imprisons a cross-dressing himbo, it offers a surprisingly touching celebration of the spiritual over the physical, and as a tale of a crisis of romantic faith, it could play comfortably alongside any of the 1930s marriage comedies.”

*4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
Screens 9/29 at 12:30 PM and 10/1 at 9:15 PM; opens in select theaters and on VOD later this year.
“It all adds up to a portrait of a political situation that transforms even the most mundane personal activities into a negotiation process, ranging from frustrating to humiliating, to downright horrifying.”

*The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Screens 10/29 at 6pm and 10/30 at 10am; opens in limited release on 12/19
“Julian Schnabel’s third feature is an almost excessively beautiful aestheticization of misery.”

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Apologies for the poor quality video, but above you’ll find evidence of sometime-movie mogul Mark Cuban’s debut on Dancing With the Stars. The Magnolia Pictures chief/simultaneous distribution evangelist/financier and distributor of Brian DePalma’s Redacted performed last night; his fate as a reality TV star will be decided by “America” tonight.

What you don’t see above is the prologue, which you can allegedly watch on ABC.com (I’m still waiting for the video to load). In a segment designed to introduce the audience to Cuban and his partner, Kym, Cuban revealed that he had hip replacement surgery just seven weeks before rehearsals began for Dancing With the Stars. “Most people are still on crutches,” Cuban says, lifting up his practice shorts to reveal a massive scar. Kym’s voiceover commends Cuban for working through the pain while we watch footage of him practicing with a tortured expression on his face. Cut to Cuban, interview style: “I’m not going through all this pain and agony just because. I’m there to win.”

It strikes me that, whether it’s his doing or that of Dancing’s producers, Cuban has managed to hit on a magic combination of about 100 winning reality TV cliches: rich fish out of water, an American Idol’s beginner’s enthusiasm for competitive performance, Extreme Makeover-branded physical struggle, non-household name reifying his stardom by going on a show mostly staffed by declining B-listers united in the deception that they’re so famous they don’t need to be there. On a show like this, it seems like a brilliant strategy: the audience, it seems, unfailingly rewards not those who perform well, but those who perform *surprisingly* well.

More on the dance itself after the jump.

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