Film Essent Re-Launches In MCN Blogspace

I want to formally welcome Kim Voynar’s Film Essent blog to our in-house blogroll.

Kim’s work on her blog will be wider ranging than most movie blogs, getting into the nitty gritty of indies that you might find hard to find, feminism, activism, politics, and whatever other conversations she wants to get into.
Today, she is all over wannabe McCarthyite Michelle Bachman, Shirley Chisholm, Femme Films of the Week, and askes, “What’s the Point of W?”
Take a look…

Great Night / Great Cause

I am a big fan of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, John Ortiz, and John Gould Rubin’s LAByrinth Theater Company, but I can’t be in NY on Monday night for a very cool annual fundraiser… but maybe you can. There are “rush tickets” available for a lower price than the pre-sale tickets for supporters… check it out…

DP/30 – Thandie Newton, Pt 1 of 2

Currently starring in W. as Condoleezza Rice and Rocknrolla as Stella, The Accountant.
She speaks in great detail about how she put together her version of Secretary of State Rice (about half way through this half of the interview)… but there is a lot of other conversaton about her other work…
“The one film my darling little girl has seen… has to be one of the worst films ever made.”
The interview

Images For A Sunday Evening

From The New Yorker, as referred to by Colin Powell

And some nut cases are not waiting on line for McCain/Palin… they are part of the fabric of the tent.

Sunday Estimates

As I expected, the dogs moved back up into the 2-spot, W. fell to fourth, though the number is about as good at Lionsgate could ever have expected, Fox had the 1 and 3 slots, and Body of Lies effectively half off… uh… Quarantine.
As you can see, this iPhone entry doesn’t allow for the chart, but it’s on the cover of MCN.

Saturday Night Reacharound

And so we near the end…
Sarah Palin on SNL was cute and funny and completely besides the point. When pols do SNL, it’s a way of making them more human… not Palin’s problem.
Truth is, the only good TV move for Palin would be to go in Face The Nation or This Week or Meet The Press or all three and to seem, for the first time, like a serious national politician who knows what she is talking about, regardless of where those positions are politically.
But the sad truth is, her people don’t trust her to do any of that. So, as we are seeing, serious-minded people – even those who have leaned right for decades – can’t bring themselves to endorse her or the man who selected her.
There is no question that this is still a race because of 3 factors: Republicans, Race, and Inexperience… in that order. The first is a hard core 35% of the populace. The second is likely 5 – 10% who won’t vote for a Black man. And there is probably another 5% that is truly serious about Obama’s short resume.
But consrvative thinkers, whether columnists, newspaper editors and publishers, and now, Colin Powell, have crossed the street and skipped right past Depression (after months of anger, denial, and bargaining) to acceptance.
And the most sane ones are hopng Obama can deliver… because it would be good for the country… And in 8 years, they can make the Big Comeback.

Just Too Funny (Or Die)

Images for A Saturday

Not Much Fun

I’ve been having an IM exchange this morning about the state of Traditional Media, kicking off with the Tribune Co’s threat to dump AP as a syndicate, even though it has become an alarmingly major part of the papers in the chain.
But there was also news of a

Friday Estimates by Klady

Good for W.. Glad Lionsgate was able to find a bigger than expected audience. Honestly, I was pretty sure that Letterman hit it on the nose when he said something last night to the effect of, “W… yeah… we want some more of that.”
That said, I would expect Beverly Hills Chihuahua to move up into the #2 slot by the end of the weekend.
Nice starts for The Secret Life of Bees, which should be leggy with a little word of mouth. It’s not for everyone, but adult women should be pleased by the rarely-theatrically-movied kind of tale with strong performances and a good heart.
Max Payne is clearly a yawn on the quality scale, but it’s a pretty decent number on the Screen Gems level, which is where is belongs. The question is what the budget was. At Screen Gems, that movie costs under $20m.
Let’s start the suicide watch for Patrick Goldstein as it lands at #1… but don’t worry too much… he’ll just pretend the moment of success didn’t happen and count the failures before and after. Perhaps Tom Rothman can arrange to finally have lunch with Punitive Pat, but secretly invite Drew McWeeny and Dr. Phil so the dyspeptic duo can work through their anger at the rough hewn studio chief.
Sex Drive is typical of Summit openings so far. The distributor-in-infancy is set up to have a true Newmarket/IFC moment with Twilight. According to Box Office Mojo charts, My Big Fat Greek Wedding is the only IFC release to ever be on more than 300 screens and was their only grosser over $14m ever… and while Newmarket ended up having four $20m+ movies, only TPOTC ever did more than $35 million.
I suspect that Twilight will be their first $100 million-plus film. The questions are whether there will be a second and whether they will be able to collect on all the ticket sales without an equally muscular film coming in behind the vampires

"Palin" Appears On Letterman

The clip…
Also: How Palin “balances” the Alaskan budget and avoids discovery all at once…

1000 Words… A Halloween Treat

Simply irresistible.

So Basic…

It’s just the election, but it is certainly a constant in this election…
It makes me CRAZY when someone puts something into the middle of a conversation and then refuses to take responsibility. I mean, above and beyond dumb ideas, I consider the lie of that dance to be one of the truly great offenses.
This comes to mind today because I just read some McCain camper complaining that Joe The Plummer has become a story while little attention is being paid to Joe The Plumber as the example that McCain wanted to make him.
That, my friends, is McCain’s campaign to a fine point. Constantly talk about Ayers… claim he doesn’t really care about Ayers. Have Obama speak for month after month in detail about the full extent of the relationship with Ayers, then continue to play out the “he’s not telling you the full truth” overt lie, using one part of one sentence from nearly a year ago – “He was a guy from the neighborhood” – out of context and in a willfully misleading way.
Meanwhile, McCain’s campaign is paying for robocalls that simply say that Obama has worked closely with a domestic terrorist. Oy.
All this stuff about the Palin crowds and the “there were things said at your rallies” lie… no one has been reported to scream anything like “traitor” or “kill him” at an Obama rally, but more importantly, those sout outs were not random loons… these people were quite specifically incited to those shouts by McCain, Palin, and the people introducing them. But McCain takes ZERO responsibility and talks about other sympathy generating groups at his rallies.
Of course, there is also the blood-pressure-racing lie about Obama’s tax plans, which McCain is reasonably against on a political level, but instead of running against the actual plan, he and his continue to lie and to campaign against his mythological idea of the tax plan… well, a whole different reason for anger… lies… just lies…

Paramount Pushes 2 Oscar Movies Around

A few sentences to start… and then more later…
Bard Grey or John Lesher leaked news of he move of The Soloist (to March) and Defiance (to early 2009, with a qualifying run in late December) to their favorite mouthpiece, Nikki Finke, before his team at Paramount had the chance to clean up the various messes to come… standard operating procedure for Grey & Lesher.
The first big mess was that the two movies happen to be opening and closing Los Angeles’ AFI International Film Festival, which kicks off on November 30.
The good news is that the films will remain in their festival slots as early premieres. So for Downey fans, it is a chance to see The Soloist five months before anyone else. And for Daniel Craig fans, it’s a chance to get a look at your favorite Bond doing some of the excellent dramatic work he was doing before he became an icon.
Why all the movement? Stay tuned…
ADD – 11p
Five movies in two months can be a lot for a studio marketing department, especially one in transition. So, Paramount dumping down to three, with one film getting only a qualifying release at the very end of the year, actually makes some sense.
Like the battle over The Reader, this is, simply put, all about money. The idea that it is about making sure

20 Weeks – Waiting…

The films will start landing in earnest in about two weeks, and between October 28 and November 21, most of the answers of what the season will really be will be answered.
But until then, the dance of Oscar is complicated by two major elements. First, the election is definitely making people nervous. They don