viz.

If you haven’t yet heard about Sita Sings the Blues, then I’ll let Roger Ebert introduce you to it:

It hardly ever happens this way. I get a DVD in the mail. I'm told it's an animated film directed by "a girl from Urbana." That's my home town. It is titled "Sita Sings the Blues." I know nothing about it, and the plot description on IMDb is not exactly a barn-burner: An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Uh, huh. I carefully file it with other movies I will watch when they introduce the 8-day week.

After Ebert decides to watch it he writes:

I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord. You might think my attention would flag while watching An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Quite the opposite. It quickens. I obtain Nina Paley's e-mail address and invite the film to my film festival in April 2009 at the University of Illinois, which by perfect synchronicity is in our home town.

To get any film made is a miracle. To conceive of a film like this is a greater miracle. How did Paley's mind work? She begins with the story of Ramayana, which is known to every school child in India but not to me. It tells the story of a brave, noble woman who was made to suffer because of the perfidy of a spineless husband and his mother. This is a story known to every school child in America. They learn it at their mother's knee. Paley depicts the story with exuberant drawings in bright colors. It is about a prince named Rama who treated Sita shamefully, although she loved him and was faithful to him.

Despite rave reviews like this one,--and winning a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival--Paley’s film has remained unavailable to most people because she was unable to clear the rights to the songs she used in the film, and the cost securing those rights scared off most distributors. Fortunately, some of these issues have been resolved, and the film is now being released to a wider audience.

If you live in New York, WNET/NY will be airing Sita on Saturday, March 7 at 10:45 (thereby atoning for this). In the meantime, you can watch the entire film online via WNET’s streaming player or download the film to watch at your leisure.

Update: here's the trailer from YouTube:

Charles Burnett’s little known and nearly plotless masterpiece, Killer of Sheep, offers a tender yet realistic vision of life in 1970s Watts, the racially segregated suburb of Los Angeles where poverty, racism, and riots doomed the area to generations of social and economic oblivion. Inspired by Italian neo-realism, Burnett’s camera lingers on characters—many played by non-actors—to reveal situations of familial intimacy and communal identification.

Made in 1960, Inherit the Wind is a closely rendered version of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" of 1925, with most of the courtroom arguments being taken straight from the trial transcripts.

Today I was introduced to Jack Nicholson's video endorsement of Clinton. It is currently making the rounds on YouTube:

Gerry Canavan has posted a collection of images of the Statue of Liberty taken from science fiction stories and films.