GREEN CINE HAND ME DOWNS

The great film blog Green Cine, which is something of a daily imperative for any literate cinephile, has so many interesting links up today that I might as well give them props for all of the below:

An interview with video director Johan Renck on the eve of his first feature, Downloading Nancy, a story about a woman who arranges for herself to be killed by a guy she meets on the interet but changes her mind when she falls for him. Stars Holly Hunter, and the interview is linked to downloadable videos from Madonna and New Order, among others.

For those of you who need to learn about independent films from someplace other than the cover of Vanity Fair, here’s the very arresting trailer for An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore-global warming doc.

Director Adam Curtis interviews Errol Morris in The Believer.

And finally, this great piece by James Wolcott about Fassbinder and impulse buys:

aturday I was standing in the checkout line at the Barnes & Noble across from Lincoln Center, which was lined with DVDs for last-minute, late-decision purchase. But the DVDs weren’t the usual Blockbuster hits. One whole rack was alloted to German Language DVDs, and among them was a cluster of Fassbinder movies.

I have to admit I did a mild double take. Even if I had been able to foresee DVDs and digital downloads back in the Seventies when Fassbinder was pumping out films as fast as Joyce Carol Oates novels, I never would have reckoned that someday they would be handy checkout items–collectibles. Even then Fassbinder movies were relative rarities on the art circuit until the breakthrough hit The Marriage of Maria Braun, and these B&N items weren’t even the best-known Fassbinders–we’re talking Satan’s Brew and Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven. Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven as an impulse buy! What it italicized for me is how much of what’s considered underground/fringe/outre/rarified migrates–matriculates–into the mainstream until it’s part of the cultural ecology….