Sita Sings the Blues

This looks like a fucking rad movie! The Ebert's scoop on the film & its creator basically being unable to release it due to using songs from the 1920s.
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2008/12/having_wonderful_time_wish_you.html#more

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/5sitav.jpg

The trailer

yeah that looks cool. the ramayana is ripe for cartoon treatment.

The comments on the thread have a lot of people complaining about this kind of adaptation of a religious text. I had never heard of the Ramayana and I am sure this is true of 90+% of the US population, so it'd be a learning experience.

I used to have indian ramayana comic books when I was a kid

I saw some of those online! They all looked Marvel-beefed and mulleted out but with blue skin.

the Ramayana's rough equivalent (very rough) is the Odyssey; the Mahabharat's is the Iliad (somewhat more of an apt comparison) - yet they are longer in both cases i beieve than their Greek counterparts, and filled with more extensive digressions and possibly characters? (human and especially animals! and all things in between, like spirits) .

the purists have NON legit reason to complain, since this non-Indian creator-woman - who got dumped by her conservative Indian husband unceremoniously , telling her he's going to stay in Bangalore instead of coming back to see her!- this woman has a lot of chutzpah and courage to do this, and a desire for her own healing. For as you can remember, Rama wound up eventually ::SPOILERS:: banishing Sita in the end by himself, even after making her suffer the LITERAL trial-by-fire post siege-of-Lanka. It's a very rich text to "explore shades of feminism" within- and i can't believe i typed such a lame sentence

The purists are going to be the ones getting embarrassed in the end since in the meantime Nina Paley is only increasing visibility of the Ramayana (and by extension the Mahabharata) - surely what a lot of these "bloggers" pushing outrage have to end their own desire for change

My girl helped spearhead getting the full-length piece on Channel Thirteen's website to stream.

http://www.thirteen.org/sites/reel13/blog/watch-sita-sings-the-blues-online/347/

I saw an early cut of this at a fundraiser that Nina held on her roof and was completely enchanted; really pissed about the copyright issues that are making this impossible for her to release commercially but very happy that she's taking a 'fuck the system' tact. Donated a hundred bucks; if you love this as much as I do, I'd recommend dropping her twenty or so here:
http://blog.ninapaley.com/category/money/

Yeah, I saw a mention of this elsewhere the other day, neat to see it getting further attention. (Now of course I should actually watch it!)

I've watched it about four times; it's completely great. The only beef I'd have is that the opening can be a bit indulgent.

Found it on demonoid

It's really, really awesome. After four times, maybe I'll see something to complain about, but not yet.

oh, cool!

> The only beef I'd have is that the opening can be a bit indulgent.

Okay, after my second viewing I kind of agree with this, and also think the intermission and rotoscoped dance number don't add much to the movie besides eyecandy. It's pretty great eyecandy, though, and doesn't take away from the rest of the movie, so I'm still okay with it.

From what I understand; that stuff is intended to be there so that someone who donates a ton of money can change it however they want. It's open incentive for producers.

I read that about the intermission. I didn't know that about the techno numbers, though.

I loved this movie.

Really loved it.

And watched it at thirteen.org, so thanks to the above poster's girlfriend!

P.S. It's also downloadable now at http://sitasingstheblues.com/

Really!

Netflix has this!

awesome news!

Hey, this is my favorite movie in 2009, if it counts as 2009.

Streaming here.

really enjoyed it too, although from watching the dvd extras i don't think i would want to hang out with the creator for really long.