Frenzy on the Wall
Changes That Would Actually Make The Oscars Better
by Noah Forrest

The Academy doing silly things shouldn't be a surprise for anyone since this group has had a long history of doing remarkably silly things. The idea of giving awards to the "best" film or the "best" actor is a rather inane act in itself, but it seems as if the Academy is intent on stripping away any kind of legitimacy or value from the proceedings. 

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Digination
Jeffrey Levy-Hinte Finds Some Soul Power
by Gary Dretzka

How many people today can recall anything about the "black Woodstock" music festival that was staged in Kinshasa to coincide with the “Rumble in the Jungle”? Not many. The three-night event, Zaire ’74, attempted nothing less than to bring the most popular soul and R&B acts in the United States together with the most important groups in Zaire and black Africa.

I thought this was pretty slight—thought the acting isn’t bad, in an improv-eyy way. But the rationalizations, soul-searching and evasions of the two, under the writer-directorial hand of Lynn Shelton (who appears briefly as one of the lesbian partiers), while believable, didn’t strike me as that funny.  Humpday also boasts one of the worst  pickup basketball games I‘ve seen. Are these guys basketball virgins as well?

AND - DP/30s with Il Divo writer/director Paolo Sorrentino
and Soul Power director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte
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35 Weeks to Oscar
The Next Oscars Will Be Rated X
by David Poland

It also strikes me, when laying out the season to come, is that the expansion that we all knee-jerked into being such a very big deal seems to be falling into some pretty traditional patterns. Paramount and Warner Bros. have the most pictures in play. Sony Classics has a number of titles, all of which have more muscle in categories other than Best Picture. And everyone else tends towards one-offs.

But as you'll see... even with the contenders being bunched, the resulting nominations could be quite unexpected.

Voynaristic
The Slippery Slope of Truth in Non-Fiction Films
by Kim Voynar

What's the point of documentary storytelling? Is it merely to frame and tell the story the filmmaker wants to tell, with no claim whatsoever to objectivity? It seems we're seeing a lot of this type of social justice, agitprop documentary of late—films that we're not supposed to criticize and stories we're not supposed to question because their cause is so "worthy"—and I find this troublesome not only from the viewpoint of analyzing and critiquing the films, but for the mixed messages they're sending to their audience.

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MCN DVD Wrap
Push

Set in China, the movie looks pretty cool, and some of the special effects are quite well done. A couple of them are worth the price of admission, alone. (For instance, there’s a gun fight in which the weapons levitate, move and shoot on the orders of good and evil “pushers.”) As if to justify the two-hour length of the movie, the extras include a featurette on ways various government agencies have attempted to exploit the powers of psychics, while also dismissing ESP as a bunch of hooey.

Also ... Knowing, Night Train, Le Jupon Rouge, Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes, and more!

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Wilmington on DVDs
Knowing, Quo Vadis?, Lonely Are The Brave
by Michael Wilmington

I might be making all this sound a little silly, but I couldn’t possibly make it sound as silly as it really is. For example, at one point, the teacher in charge of the time capsule makes her kids race through their drawings/predictions in the last minute, ripping Lucinda’s numbers out of her hands. Koestler keeps running from disaster to disaster -- the numbers sheet includes latitude and longitude of the locations -- with the cops never listening to his warnings, even after he develops a superb catastrophe track record.

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The Ultimate DVD Geek
Waltz with Bashir
by Doug Pratt

In 2008, however, there was finally a film produced that demonstrates what incredible power and flexibility the genre can have, and it was so unusual that the establishment didn't even acknowledge what it was, nominating it not for a Best Animation or Best Documentary Oscars, but for Best Foreign Film, Waltz with Bashir, now available from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

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Frenzy on the Wall
The Hurt Locker: A War Story for Our Time
by Noah Forrest

In Three Kings, it was about whether or not one should risk potential wealth when faced with a situation where lives could be saved—but perhaps not for very long; in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, it’s a question of how a person could put himself directly in harm’s war to defuse bombs. Take the “war” aspect out of the films and Three Kings is about how painful and rewarding selflessness can be, and The Hurt Locker is about how damaged one must be in order to be willing to be a hero.

"When it comes to creative content, if trans-media projects take hold, journalists will have to be literate in discussing not only cinema but gameplay and other forms of the user experience. Being able to analyze the past will only get you so far."
Scott Macaulay Goes Long On The Rush Of Film Journo Blog Posts About Not Making A Living

Beyond Thirst: Dawson On The Korean New Wave

Morgan Spurlock Turns Yellow For Simpsons Doc

Soldiers On Hurt Locker: Two Green Wires Up
And - Vatican Gives Harry Potter Two Brooms Up

NJ Pair Cuffed For Violating Brüno's Autorschaftrechte

Fujiwara On The "Pure Escapes" Of Jerzy Skolimowski's First Six Pics

Banderas Sez There's "Not A Penny" For Indie Films

Culver City Studios Set To Rent GWTW Mansion

World's Oldest Working Director Sets His Next Pic For His 101st Birthday

Chipotle Serves Up Free Food, Inc. Screenings

Moguls In Sun Valley: Skeptical
And - "I Am Stunningly Uninterested In Diller And Malone’s Opinion Of Twitter"

"A Finnish journalist stood up and said, 'Crash is an abomination; you’ve completely destroyed a great novel.' And Ballard, sitting right next to me, said, ‘I actually think the movie is better than the book.’ It was my own Alvy Singer moment."
With A NYC Retro, Cronenberg Exhumes His Corpus

Business Week, $4.95 On Newsstands, May Be Sold For A Buck

Chris Hedges On Michael Jackson's "Variety Show With A Coffin" And How We Kill What We Worship

Distrib Mark Lipsky On Why Academy's Rule 12 Is Bad For Indie Docs

UK Gets A Kiddie Version Of Brüno, Too

Rian Johnson Adapts Page 439 Of "Finnegan's Wake" With Joseph Gordon-Levitt (video)

A User's Guide To Zooey Deschanel's Man-Child Love Interests

Chairman Of Co. That Owns IndieWire Blogs From Sun Valley

Recollectin' Rosefelt On A Young Kathryn Bigelow In 1970s NYC

Rumor: Amazon Wants Netflix

28 Minutes With Spike Lee 20 Years After Do The Right Thing

"Brüno is a product of Sacha Baron Cohen's bourgeois sexual neuroses. The film doesn't challenge social prejudices–it is simply smutty public-school trash."
The Observer Dons Its Lede-Hosen
And - "Like any star, Baron Cohen resolves contradictions—he's an open-minded bigot, an amoral moralist, an honest conman, a clever fool, and a performer whose crudeness is filled with grace. Even more than Borat, Brüno attests to the actor's skill at verbal and physical comedy."
Hoberman Weighs In

Sunday Brünch Mit Brüno
"We are not expecting people to show up with signs. We are telling people to be careful and not go see it."
Christian Ministry Movieguide Wants Brüno Shuffled Off To Gomorrah
With - Their Cry To Ban "Mindlessly Pornographic, Politically Correct Paganism"
And - "For a major studio film with a massive cultural footprint to pile even more stereotypes and discomfort onto an already hostile climate doesn't make the work of changing and overcoming it any easier."
Poland In The Hot Tub With Brüno
And - GLAAD Saad Over Stereotypes