And The World Goes 'Round

Why don’t you get honest coverage of the film industry very often?
Patrick Goldstein writes: “Fox Co-Chairman Tom Rothman graciously agreed to have lunch with me today at the Fox commissary”
So… as so often is the case… a blogger attacks and attacks and attacks for no journalistic reason and the result… he gets what he wants. In this case, another free lunch.
Why? Because Tom Rothman wants to head off attacks on his most expensive production of the year at the pass.
But Patrick is hardly the only one who plays this game and Fox is hardly the only studio that plays along.
This is the same issue, at its core, as the embargo discussion.
I talk to studios all the time about how treacherous the publicity landscape is these days. And if you want to know why, it

BYOB – Humpty Hump

Left Out Detail…

I am a big fan of August: Osage County, Tracy Letts’ brilliant play of modern southern (Southern Oklahoma, in this case) family strife and scab-shredding healing.
It is hard to imagine the money role of the mother getting past Jane Fonda. I’ll take Maggie Gyllenhaal, Maris Tomei, and Gwyneth Paltrow to block. If he

That Would Be The Butt, Ben

So…. as everyone is clamoring about Brad Pitt being chased into his Benjamin Button SAG NomCom screening last night, a tiny bit more insight. When asked what making this movie was like, David Fincher responded, in his Fincheresque glory, “It was like getting my first rim job.”
Meanwhile, Paramount will wait 10 days between this first event screening and their first press screening after claiming for months that they LOVE this movie, which was said by some attendees of last night’s screening to be more Gone With The Wind than Forrest Gump. If either holds true, Paramount wins. (I’ll be seeing the film on Thanksgiving Day… first window after that first screening, apparently.)
Rollout for the last few Oscar hopefuls is hot and heavy in the next next week (and change):
Saturday the 15th – Revolutionary Road
Wednesday the 19th – Australia
Thursday the 20th – The Curious Case of Bennjamin Button
Monday the 24th – The Reader
The last two awards craving, but so-far unscheduled launches are for Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino and Will Smith’s Seven Pounds.

Franchises Change

I was just writing a comment in the Bond entry and I thought… this is really a full entry.
In BondLand, it’s Connery vs Moore… late Moore… the middle guys… Brosnan, where they also got more Late Moore-ish… and now this reboot, where I think they got too into going arty with this one after hitting just the right note with the last one. They kinda need Frankenheimer… and he’s not available.
In Batman, it was the TV show to The Killing Joke to Burton to Schumacher’s gay fantasia (that even gays hated) to the beloved Nolan.
It’s almost indistiguishable in Harry Potter.
Will Sony commit franchise suicide with a middle aged Spider-Man instead of going out and finding a new director and star?
How lucky were Back to The Future and Lord of The Rings to have closed-ended trilogies?
Would another director have been better with Indy IV?
And is it time to go back to the Alien well?

Review – Bland, James Bland

I don

Voynaristic – Female Nudity

Okay, you pervs (and others)… here is a topic to titalate… from Kim Voynar, MCN’s newest star…
Although I recognize that there will be any number of men who will go to see The Wrestler because exploitative websites like Mr. Skin tell them down to the minute just when they’ll get to seeTomei’s bare breasts on the screen (and that’s a subject for another column), I would argue that in the case of The Wrestler, Tomei’s nudity is absolutely relevant to the story. The whole point of Cassidy’s character revolves around both the way in which she exposes and exploits herself for the sake of a buck, and the way in which the men to whom she’s exposing herself view her as “too old” to fulfill their sexual fantasies (also disturbing in and of itself for what it says about both the male sexual obsession with young girls and the way in which men, as they age, become “dignified” while women become “over the hill”).
For us to really feel the impact of Pam’s awareness of her own exploitation in her stripper persona, and in particular the way in which she evokes that despairwrenchingly onstage in the film’s final act, we need to have earlier felt the way in which she accepted (or rather, told herself she accepted) that exploitation as a means to an end. The audience needs to cringe as Tomei writhes on stage for the kind of men who slip dollar bills into stripper’s thongs, needs to feel tension as she’s taunted by a pack of young men for being too old for them to pay her for a private lap dance, needs to feel the pain of that moment when, after years of taking her clothes off for a living, she suddenly feels utterly vulnerable, naked, and exposed.
The rest…

Cool Image

This image floated in from AFI Fest today. I had a great time with Tilda, but what really struck me about this image was how very Jarman it looked to me… more so if there were feathers and dancing and fighting… but AFI isn’t releasing those images.

Why The Daily Beast Will Soon Be Sued

It’s always amusing watching the past rear its ugly little head again and again.
This struck me when I notice Anne Thompson running a video embed from The Daily Beast that was nothing more than a direct steal by The Daily Beast of The Onion’s online video content.
BZZT!
The Daily Beast seems to have missed the period in which people were trying to embed other people’s content on their sites with frames that not only had the logo of the site grabbing someone else’s content on a wholesale bases, but often, advertising, creating revenue off of someone else’s work… a.k.a. stealing.
This was shut down by many cease and desist notices, which if they have not already started hitting The Daily Beast, will soon start arriving… as soon as someone notices.
It’s one of the fascinating pieces of etiquette developed on the web. How much content is a hat tip… and how much is theft?
Our policy at MCN has not only been to link outright to anyone with content, using minimal pulls on our site (when we use any), but also to look for the originating source of anything we post. This comes us, for instance, when we find a LA Times story that we don

Hot Button – Doubt: Review Part I – Spoiler Free

Reviewing Doubt really requires two different bits of discussion. First, there is the movie and its overall structure, skill level, etc. Then there is the question of what the movie is actually telling the audience

Hot Button – Doubt: Review Part II – Spoilers

Part 2 of this review is really a discussion of what I feel actually happened in the story of the movie Doubt.
ALL SPOILERS, ALL THE TIME
I would really not suggest reading any of this entry until after having seen the teh film or the stage play. But when people do, I suspect we will have a lively conversation about what we all think really did happen… and what did not.
Here is the SPOILER discussion of Doubt…

BYOB Monday

It’s a new week… whatcha got?

DP/30 – Slumdog Millionaire's Danny Boyle, Dev Patel & Freida Pinto

What Would Harvey Do?

There is a kinda crazy idea out there about boycotting the Sundance Film Festival and even more so, Utah skiing, in response to Mormon funding of Prop 8 here in California.
Let me be even more direct. The idea of pressuring Sundance or Redford to abandon this year

AFI Jury Awards

JURY AWARDS
INTERNATIONAL FEATURE COMPETITION
GRAND JURY PRIZE: ACNE
SPECIAL MENTION: NIRVANA
INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY COMPETITION
GRAND JURY PRIZE: KASSIM THE DREAM
SPECIAL MENTION: THE LAST DAYS OF SHISHMAREF
INTERNATIONAL SHORTS COMPETITION
GRAND JURY PRIZE: THE LEGLESS BOY CANNOT DANCE (EL NINO SIN PIERNAS NO PUEDE BAILAR)
SPECIAL MENTION: THE APOLOGY LINE
AUDIENCE AWARDS
FEATURE: A NECESSARY DEATH
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: KASSIM THE DREAM
DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: THE WORLD WE WANT
SHORT: BUSCO PERSONAS: THE FACES OF COLUMBIA