How can the Web be used to connect unseen films with audiences hungry for something new? Is online culture more vulgar than the pre-Web cultural conversation? Is YouTube a viable platform for narrative film? Is Second Life a bold new way of promoting film, or just another niche attempt loaded with hype? This edition of The Rocchi Review features Karina Longworth, daily blogger and contributor to the Webby-nominated FilmCouch podcast for Spout.com, a social networking website for the world of film. You can download the entire podcast right here -- and we hope you enjoy.

Next week, Cinematical contributor Nick Schager will be bringing you a review of Waitress, a romantic comedy starring Keri Russell that's arriving in theaters on May 2 with a lot of unfortunate baggage. Waitress is of course the final film of indie actress and filmmaker Adrienne Shelly, who was murdered in her office apartment last November, reportedly before hearing that Sundance had accepted Waitress into its 2007 schedule. You may have seen her most recently as a player in Matt Dillon's much-liked barfly film Factotum, or you may remember her as the star of those Hal Hartley movies from way back at the dawn of indie wave, The Unbelievable Truth and Trust. If you want to read more about Shelly and her final film, you can pick up a copy of the spring issue of Filmmaker Magazine, which is featuring an article on that very subject.

The piece, which was penned by media blogfly and former Cinematical editor-in-chief Karina Longworth, is encapsulated thusly on the magazine's cover: "Premiering at Sundance following the sudden death of its writer-director, Adrienne Shelly's Waitress is a bittersweet success." I haven't read the article yet, since that would involve all kinds of complicated actions like leaving the house and catching a bus to the city, but if you're fortunate enough to live closer to a well-stocked newsstand than me, and you're looking for something interesting to read, you might want to go out and pick up a copy. Sarah Polley is the dressed-down cover girl, and the issue also contains articles on, among other things, Hostel: Part II and the Sundance films Once and Zoo.

It is pretty amazing how well-received Borat is with the critics. At Rotten Tomatoes, it has a rating of 95-percent in its favor, with the "cream of the crop" critics unanimous at 100-percent. One of the few people to offer a negative review (in part, anyway) is Netscape's Karina Longworth. In her latest "Netscape @ the Movies" video, she says,"as comedy and social commentary Borat fails more than it succeeds," and claims that, "if you live in the world, you've seen 75-percent of this movie." But she also states that the remaining 25-percent is, "totally worth the price of admission," and, "the winning stuff really is worth seeing."

Examining the purpose of such a film, the source of its humor, the validity of its satire, the questions regarding scripted scenes and the defense of its marks, Karina offers an insightful review of the highly-anticipated comedy. Of course, her problems with it havn't altered my immense excitement about seeing the film this weekend. How about yours?

Check out the video here, or download it over at Netscape.

More on Borat:

James' Review of Borat

Film Clips: Too Much Borat -- Who's the Man Behind the Mustache? ...

Is Borat Unethical?

Another election, another politician wanted out of office ... and yet another documentary. This chain of events is so common now that the presence of partisan docs is as easy to ignore as all the real campaign ads on television. Even one such film, about Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger, would have passed under the radar if not for gaining a bit of controversy over the weekend. The film, Running with Arnold, is against the re-election of "The Governator" and has reportedly gone over the line as far as taste goes in order to attack the actor's qualifications for office.

One person who isn't happy with the finished product is its narrator, Alec Baldwin. He could sue the film makers after having gotten no cooperation from them regarding his request to be removed from the project or a cease and desist letter that he issued to them. On The Huffington Post, he wrote about his disapproval of the film, particularly the unfair association of Schwarzenegger with Nazis. He also says that the film makers can not accommodate his wishes because of a distribution deadline (I can't seem to find a release date for the film to back up this deadline, but seeing as how election day is in one week, I'm guessing it will play somewhere starting this Friday).

Netscape's Karina Longworth sat down with Death of a President director Gabriel Range, and has intertwined the interview with her own thoughts and criticisms of the faux documentary and the controversial buzz surrounding it. The most important point addressed in the video is probably the fact that the film is actually the opposite of anti-Bush. Karina even goes so far as to say it is, "definitely sympathetic," in its treatment of the president and, "it manages to truly humanize him," turning him into a "misunderstood hero."

You can watch the video right here, or go to Netscape and download it.

More on DOAP:

Cinematical Buzz Reviews: Death of a President

Death of a President: There's No Publicity Like No Publicity

Canadians Want You to See Death of a President

I love SXSW. It's by far the most favorite film festival to attend, in no small part because it's seemingly the last major film festival that cares about whether or not its audience is having fun. So when the people behind the acronym called and asked me to sit on the jury of their offshoot, SXSWclick, I jumped at the chance. SXSWclick, to quote the official website, "is a year-round initiative created to showcase short-form storytelling via mobile devices and the web." In other words, it's a festival specifically for shorts designed for digital, if not device-specific, distribution. There are five categories to submit work in, ranging from music videos to documentary, to "What the F*$!?" - or, the "Not sure we 'get it' -- but it's pretty cool" category. All work has to be under ten minutes, and it needs to arrive at the SXSW offices via VHS or DVD by June 12. Winners receive a passel of prizes, as well as a chance to screen their film for the ever-expanding crowds at the 2007 SXSW Film Festival, and all entrants will be seen by a panel of filmmakers and industry professionals, including Jason Reitman, Bob Sabiston, Kirby Dick, and, well, me. Wanna enter? Here's the link.

There's nothing tackier than a Memorial Day sunburn. Come point and laugh at mine, tonight in New York City. Our friend The Reeler is hosting a screening of Lodge Kerrigan's Keane tonight at the Pioneer Theater on the Lower East Side, and after the movie I'll be sitting in on a discussion with Kerrigan, Lawrence Levi, and The Reeler himself, S.T. VanAirsdale.

You probably blinked and missed Keane when it was released late last summer, but the film (which was nominated for Independent Spirit and Gotham Awards alongside films like Brokeback Mountain and Capote) produced some of my favorite pullquotes of 2005. Manohla Dargis' review opened like this: "Lodge Kerrigan keeps such a tight watch on the title character in Keane that at times you think the camera is going to crawl in the man's ear to take a look inside." In The Wall Street Journal, Joe Morgenstern wrote, "This isn't entertainment in any conventional sense, but it's a mesmerizing film all the same." And, in positing Keane as the indie flipside to the Jodie Foster hit Flightplan, Roger Ebert took an opportunity to philosophize on the nature of filmgoing: "The complete filmgoer is open to the movie on the screen, and asks it to work in its own ways for its own purposes."

Tonight's event starts at 6:30. If none of the above seems like reason enough to head downtown, know that there will be free beer and pizza after the discussion, courtesy of Two Boots and Magic Hat -- for ticketholders only. You can buy tickets here; for more info, click here.

Dear Faithful Laws and Sausages readers (both of you),

Laws and Sausages will be on a brief hiatus for the next few weeks, while your intrepid reporter (uh, that's me) focuses her energies (both of them) on developing Fill-In-The-Blank (or whatever it's called, as of next week) and covering Tribeca. I'll be back on the first Thursday of May, with a recap of Tribeca and a look at the state of the American film festival in general. Unless something really, amazingly worth emergency columning about happens between then - in which case, your vacation from me will be cut short. Sorry about that. Hopefully it won't happen.

love and kisses,
Karina
ps: check out the new Laws and Sausages logo - whaddya think?

 

Last column (and, uh, yeah -- it's been a while), I teased you with the promise of a column about V for Vendetta, the opening weekend sucess of which seemed unlikely for a host of reasons. The film, after all, has faced a host of obstacles on its 20 year journey from B & W British comic strip to Warner Brothers' most prominent Spring widget: the Wachowski-brother-speared adaptation was abandoned by comic co-creator Alan Moore (who, to be fair, has a general policy of distancing himself from filmatizations of his work); after the London bombings last summer, WB was forced to abandon both its original release date (November 5, the 400th anniversary of Guy Fawlkes' aborted bombing of the British Houses of Parliament) and its original marketing campaign ("Remember, remember, the 5th of November..."). But most interesting of all was the outsized fervor the film instigated, months and months before its release, amongst conservative film critics.

Add it all up, and and Vendetta's $26 million opening seemed sufficient for study. But two things happened the following week: 1) I finally got around to seeing the film, and 2) Vendetta's numbers dropped a precipitous 52% in its second weekend, with the holdover title easily falling victim to Inside Man's $30 million opening onslaught despite an advantage of 500 screens. The weekend-to-weekend drop isn't exactly a mark of failure -- at virtually exactly this time last year, another comic adaptation, Sin City, opened just under $30 million, dropped 50% a week for about six weeks, and was eventualy considered one of the year's biggest hits -- unless we're playing this as a zero-sum game, On those terms, V for Vendetta could safely be considered a massive failure: the most pretensiously political film to come from a studio in some time, it's managed to fail to either rally the Left or vidicate the Right. On the ideological spectrum, there's no winner here -- which means everybody loses. But just the very fact of Vendetta's failure to inspire much more than a shrug from most parties points to the possibility that the culture wars might be far less potent than certain pundits – not to mention publicists – would have you believe.

Hey, here's something new - last night, James Rocchi and I bridged the 3,000 miles between San Francisco and Brooklyn via Gizmo Project and recorded a podcast. We started talking about Tyler Perry, whose latest film, Madea's Family Reunion, made $30 million this weeekend – proving that the studios' recent tactic of witholding their trash from critics is really working. We then make the logical leap to talking about the Oscars – specifically, this year's acting nominees. Admittedly, we're still working out some tech stuff, but give us a shot – we've got some exciting stuff planned for the weeks ahead. The show's about 17 minutes long, and you can check it out here.