This post is in response to a question asked in the Ask Karina thread by eugene: “You referenced this in your “Bagger” post, but what do you think is the future of film blogging? Where is all this going?”

I generally feel uncomfortable predicting the future, but I feel very comfortable diagnosing what’s wrong with the present!

…Read more

Robert Lloyd’s review of the new At the Movies, which debuted on TV this past weekend, hits on a good point that often gets lost in the, “Wow, The Two Bens were bad” pile-on. It’s not just that neither was very good, but that even in their badness, they were poorly matched:

Mankiewicz (grandson of “Citizen Kane” writer Herman and the great-nephew of “All About Eve” writer and director Joseph) was clearly better versed than Lyons (son of “Sneak Previews” host Jeffrey) in the literature of film, but that tended to make the show seem unbalanced. The original hosts could be spiky toward each other, but they always came off as equals; when they disagreed, Mankiewicz tended to make Lyons look wrong.

Lloyd is correct that the new version, starring A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, “restores the balance” between critics that made the old Siskel and Ebert battles so entertaining. But the show is not as humorless as those shiny table promo shots might have you believe. Witness my favorite moment of the first episode above, in which Scott approaches his review of Guillermo Arriaga’s The Burning Plain as a dry, conceptual joke.

The LA Times’ Culture Monster blog is reporting that, thanks to donations totaling $150,000 from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and Time Warner Cable/Ovation TV, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has reversed their decision to end their film program in October, and will now keep the program alive “at least through the end of the fiscal year in June 2010.” The Culture Monster post doesn’t indicate whether or not the LACMA’s Michael Govan and the film fan activist group Save Film at LACMA will go through with the much-hyped “popcorn summit”, scheduled to take place on September 1, to discuss LACMA’s film future, but apparently the Museum is newly committed to “thinking about the history and future of film as art as well as film’s increasing importance in the larger narrative of art history.”

Interesting side fact/road to conspiracy theory: David Segal’s recent NY Times profile of The Weinstein Company blamed Harvey’s acquisition of Ovation as one of TWC’s biggest missteps. Is Saving LACMA Film the Brothers’ way of backing up Inglourious Basterds’ big opening weekend with a big “we’re back” gesture? Maybe!

Lots to of changes to report at the Cinema Eye Honors. Held in the spring for the first two years of its existence, in 2010 the awards dedicated to nonfiction film will take place in January. The calendar move will change the identity of the event from a footnote to the long awards season to a potential pre-Oscar indicator. Also, filmmaker Esther B. Robinson and newly installed San Francisco Film Society programmer Rachel Rosen will join Cinema Eye Founder AJ Schnack as co-chairs of the event, and former co-chair Thom Powers will now chair the Nominations Committee. Finally, the nominees for January’s awards will be announced at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in England in November, thus somewhat internationalizing the affair.

Coverage of past Cinema Eyes.

Regarding the news that Michael Phillips and A.O. Scott have been hired to replace The Two Bens as hosts/dueling critics of At the Movies, at first there didn’t seem to be much to say other than what everyone else was saying — basically, “Yay! A rare victory for intelligence/maturity/old-fashioned film criticism values!” I like Anne Thompson’s headline on her post on her new indieWIRE blog: Disney/ABC Replaces Lyons and Mankiewicz with Adult Critics Scott and Phillips. That about sums it up, no?

And yet, it’s undeniably of note that, here in on the margins of pop culture where we have conversations about things like film criticism, a return to something like the old way of doing things is met with such relief. This morning I read several blog posts and whatnot about the changes going on at the New York Times. The paper’s culture editor, Sam Sifton, is replacing Frank Bruni as their lead restaurant critic. At one point Sharon Waxman was reporting that Trish Hall, an editor of a few NYT food and lifestyle sections, had been tapped to take Sifton’s old job, but Sharon is now backtracking on that. Still, the swap of Sifton for Bruni is enough to open up a dialog about the idea that arts reporting and food criticism exist on enough of a parallel that the same person could qualify for both jobs, and thus the issues plaguing one kind of criticism would be spoken of in the same breath as the issues of the other.

Reading food blogger Josh Ozersky’s take on the NYT swap, I was struck by how easily his language could apply to our sphere, at least up to a point. A lengthy excerpt:

…Read more

Hey look — there’s a trailer on Apple for Nations Pride, the Nazi propaganda film within Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Great idea, viral marketing geniuses at The Weinstein Company! The only problem is that the trailer, though ostensibly for a film made by Nazi ministry of culture in the early 1940s, has the look and cadences of a cut-rate war flick circa now. Come to think of it, that’s probably the exact kind of crime against cinema that Goebbels would be involved with were he alive today. Carry on!

The L Magazine passes along the news that Jarvis Cocker has written three songs to be performed by Russel Brand in Get Him to the Greek, a spinoff of Forgetting Sarah Marshall centeraed around Brand’s rock star Alduous Snow. to quote Mike Conklin: “Brand’s character was over-sexed, self-absorbed and had perfected a certain kind of sneering, condescending tone. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of a songwriter better suited for the job.”

Today’s Venice Film Festival announcement included mention of a film called Repo Chick, directed by Alex Cox. The film is not listed on IMDb, but it would seem reasonable to assume that it’s a sequel to Cox’s 1984 cult classic Repo Man, no? As Cox writes on his blog, “It isn’t really; it’s a story of different characters in a different world” — but that hadn’t stopped Universal, the studio that owns the 1984 film, from issuing a cease and desist, claiming that Cox has made “an illegal sequel” to their property.

Cox had decided to ignore the filing and continue work on the movie — there is apparently significant effects work to finish up in the month left before its Venice premiere — until receiving news that Universal had their own Repo action up their sleeves. They’ve apparently taken a Jude Law film called The Repossession Mambo off their shelf, finished two years ago and left mysteriously in their vault ever since, and have announced plans to rush it into release under the title Repo Men (according to this story, it’s actually Repo Men!, jaunty exclamation point required). Cox is convinced this is an attempt to confuse audiences, distracting them from his non-sequel to Repo Man with a non-sequel of their own. He writes:

I still have a contract with these guys and - if they ever want to make a film based on my original work - they have to ask me to direct it. What fun that would be! … I’m sure [The Repossession Mambo] is an excellent film, which Universal accidentally forgot to distribute, and now are passing off, in their innocence, as the new Repo Man. Only a cynical person might see any attempt to catch the upward draft of Repo Chick, and give loft to a turkey.

What do we think: dasterdly intellectual property violation or unfortunate coincidence?

I was on vacation/self-imposed internet exile when David Hudson’s IFC blog, The Daily, ceased publishing at the end of last month, so I didn’t realise it had happened until nearly two weeks later. By that point, indieWIRE had stepped in to fill the void with cinemadaily, a five-day-a-week column that usually focuses on one blogospheric meme per day. It was something, but it wasn’t enough: I missed the quick-glance view of the entire day’s worth of news and chatter that Hudson used to offer, and I especially missed his summaries of the Arts sections of international weekend papers.

Today, Hudson is back with a new vehicle for his mad collation/curation skills. The Auteurs Daily will live on the cineaste site’s blog, the Notebook, with a twist: items that would have gone in the section that Hudson used to call Shorts will now be broadcast directly to Twitter. “I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been a dedicated Twitter disparager in the past,” Hudson writes, but he now belives the microblogging platform will be the perfect way to streamline his service whilst broadcasting it in a hyper-timely fashion. You can follow those tweets here. Welcome back, David!

In Coppola’s house on Broadway. Outside the wind is howling, whipping the laurel bushes. The sailboats in the bay are lying almost flat, the waves sharp-contoured and restless. The Alcatraz Light is flashing signals, in broad daylight. None of my friends is here. It is hard to buckle down to work, to shoulder this heavy burden of dreams. Only books provide some measure of comfort.

The NYTimes.com has published an excerpt of Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, his diary of the making of Fitzcarraldo.

After a long, highly-publicized battle, Farrah Fawcett has succumbed to cancer at the age of 62. Though unquestionably better known for her tabloid-fodder love life and five-decade-spanning career in TV, Fawcett’s filmography includes a remarkable number of camp and cult classics. See clips of her work in Logan’s Run, Myra Breckinridge and Stanley Donen’s Saturn 3 after the jump.

…Read more

All in all, it made me really question what I am doing in this country. It has become impossible to work as a journalist without the risk of physical violence from the government.

Filmmaker James Longley (Iraq in Fragments) was in Iran working on his new film when the fallout from that country’s contested election began this weekend. In a series of postings on the documentary forum DWord, which AJ Schnack has excerpted at All these wonderful things, Longley recounts the situation on the ground, climaxing with his account of being detained by riot police while his translator was severely beaten and then sworn to silence. Read the full thing at the link.

Word is starting to spread through the Twittersphere that actor David Carradine of Bound for Glory, Kung Fu, Kill Bill and most recently Crank 2 fame has been found dead in a Bangkok hotel room. The apparent cause of death is hanging, and it looks like a suicide. So far this report in Thailand’s English-language newspaper The Nation is the only news story I can find on the matter; if it turns out there’s more to report I’ll add to this post. In the meantime, watch some memorable Carradine moments after the jump.

UPDATE: Fox News is reporting that Carradine’s death may have been an accident, and that his body was found with a rope “tied around his penis and another rope around his neck.”

…Read more

NBC has canceled Reel Talk, the Saturday morning movie chat show starring Jeffrey Lyons and Alison Bailes (formerly of IFC’s “At the Angelica”). Never exactly a stoker of the flames of the zeitgeist, Reel Talk is probably most familiar to New Yorkers, who have for the past year or so been exposed to a repurposed form of the show screening as part of the loop of noise blaring out of flat screens in the back of taxis. Because this show was useful as a repository for fluffy pull quotes for indistinguishable studio films with the consistency of oatmeal, but was otherwise considered by most people who actually care about movies to be generally unwatchable, the sort of indignation (righteous or otherwise) that accompanies the firing of most name film critics will probably not surround this story. Though Bailes and Lyons have at least temporarily lost their livelihoods as well as a platform from which to influence moviegoers, it seems unlikely that anyone will bemoan the cancellation of Reel Talk as yet another blow to the already crippled culture of film criticism, because Reel Talk’s contribution to film criticism mostly sucked.

But still … what are the chances that the network would replace the bad move critics show with a good movie critics show, or any critics show at all? To say that they’re slim would seem to be overly optimistic. This leaves Lyons’ son Ben as the default prince of TV film criticism, by virtue of the fact that he and his partner Smart Ben are the only TV film critics who still have a show. How long do we give At the Movies before it too falls in the face of total consumer disinterest, thus rendering the post-Ebert era of advert slush branded as criticism mercifully dead? Or will the zombie corpse of At the Movies continue on indefinitely, feasting on brains already softened like ripe bananas, each needlessly hyperbolic, context-oblivious pullquote hammering another nail into the coffin of public film debate?

Happy weekend!