So: Sidetrack Films, the producers of Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard’s doc Beautiful Losers (see our SXSW coverage here), have signed a deal with Nike to sponsor the film’s release in five cities, starting with its New York premiere this Friday.

Like Mark Rabinowitz, who wrote a post on indieWIRE’s new Docsider blog pondering What This All Means in relation to the state of documentary film distribution, I have mixed feelings about this.

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Anne Thompson’s respecting the Beowulf review embargo for the time being, but she can’t resist poking a bit at the flick’s major bait: gold-painted naked Angelina Jolie:

…in one scene when Angelina Jolie rises up out of her cave pool to seduce the mighty Beowulf, who has just killed her only son, Grendel, she walks on water, revealing that she is not only painted in gold, a la Goldfinger, but sports a tail and stacked high heels. Please. Barbie Doll stilettos in 5th century Denmark?

Two of the men I asked about this, intelligent film critics both, said it didn’t bother them. I guess Jolie worked her magic.

David Lynch has partnered with shoe world god Christian Louboutin to promote a special, very limited edition of ladies’ footwear. Appropriately titled “Fetish”, the project started out as a photo essay by Lynch, documenting an extremely serious pair of Louboutin heels. After unveiling the images at Paris Fashion Week, Lynch and Louboutin developed five sets of shoes, as well as five sets of prints of Lynch’s photographs of otherwise-naked models wearing the shoes, to sell to collectors. Louboutin creepily described the collaboration thusly:

The models wore these unwearable shoes with natural grace. Their very white skin, very dark eyes and bright mouths melded with Lynch’s aesthetics…As is his habit, David Lynch made it into a décor populated with shadows.

More “Fetish” images here and here. Via Shake Well Before Use.