How desperate does Hollywood have to be to vandalize its own movies?. According to the usually reliable projectionist crowd over at Film-Tech.com, Deluxe sent out film prints of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that had the audio tracks deliberately fucked up as part of some monumentally misguided plan to catch pirates down the line by tracing the audio glitches in their pirated recordings. (The audio tracks of bootlegged movies are often of much higher quality than the video, since pirates have figured out how to tap directly into theatrical sound systems.) The mob at boingboing reports what seems like a high occurrence of anecdotes about screenings of the film where the soundtrack fell back to analog — or dropped out entirely. If this is true, it’s a massive “fuck you” to moviegoers, much worse than those annoying orange dots that serve the same supposed anti-piracy function. My local theaters have a hard enough time maintaining the integrity of picture and sound without the distributors making their lives even more difficult. Just unbelievable. (Via Movie City News.)
If it’s playing at a festival near you, do consider catching Sita Sings the Blues. I know the synopsis suggests something deadly — animator, distraught at being dumped by her husband, makes a feature-length Flash cartoon comparing her plight to that of Sita, wife of Rama, drawing on the stories told in an ancient Hindi text, the Ramayana. Yes, it sounds like an exercise in utter preciousness and narcissism. But the results are really terrific — big, bold, colorful, and genuinely witty, with a combination of knockabout cuteness (many scenes are musical numbers set to songs by early jazz singer Annette Hanshaw), pure kinetic bliss (others feature cleverly looped animations set to hypnotic Bhangra-style beats) and just enough (not too much) poignancy. It’s a personal film in the best sense. I interviewed filmmaker Nina Paley for Film & Video. (Via Jessica Clegg, Christine Hardtman, Michael Sicinski and Chris Lanier.)
Did you ever wish ace DP Christopher Doyle would take a time-out from
all that artsy Asian romance and spend some time shooting naked,
well-built youngsters running around outdoors? Maybe with some cool
music by Sigur Ros in the background? Yeah, me too. NSFW! (Via No Fat Clips.)