Conservative film blogger Dirty Harry is often best ignored when he’s aggressively railing against the liberal Hollywood elite, but when he offers a faux-populist view of filmgoing that’s so obstinately limited in scope that it’s actually potentially dangerous, I have to say something.

The gist: the cursed Hollywood elite is once again pushing movies with purely elite appeal for awards, and audiences are not responding to these films because after years of reading reviews written by partisan elitists who are out of touch with What The People Want, they no longer trust film critics. Also, elitism! An excerpt:

From early predictors, it looks as though the ever-widening disconnect between Hollywood and their audience will reach into 2008. The Visitor, The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Rachel Getting Married… Any of these on your radar? Any of these captured your imagination?…what a sad statement that the films the industry are most proud of are met with almost complete indifference at the box office.

Dirty Harry’s commenters take it from there; the basic consensus is that if any of the above named films get the Best Picture nomination that should rightfully go to The Dark Knight, why they’ll … become really indignant about the tyranny of the liberal media? Not watch the Oscars? Boycott movie theaters? So, pretty much status quo, right?

Anyway. First things first: that Variety story he bases the post on is three weeks old, which is a lifetime in the prognostication game. And let’s leave aside the fact that neither Slumdog nor the Wrestler have opened anywhere yet, and that only a very small percentage of the population would admit to having their “imagination captured” by a Woody Allen film, even though Vicky is still on almost 100 screens almost three months after its release and is currently about a million dollars away from being Allen’s highest-grossing film in 22 years.

Regardless: Dirty Harry chooses to extrapolate two films named in that story as evidence that “the films the industry are most proud of are met with almost complete indifference at the box office”: Rachel Getting Married and The Visitor. I’m far more of a fan of one of these films than the other, but Harry’s assessment of audience “indifference” is misleading for both. As is common for him, he willfully refuses to acknowledge that expectations and accounting are different for films that open on 3 screens and then expand, than they are for films that roll right out into 3,000.

So, some numbers: …Read more

As far as Hollywood is concerned, the best way to lose one’s virginity is on the road. Whether driving cross-country for a sure thing or making a weekend trip to the state university in an attempt to get laid, teens are always taking sex-seeking trips in the movies. Already this year, there was College, which featured some high school kids having sex on a campus far from home, and now this week sees the release of Sex Drive, a movie about a guy traveling 500 miles in order to hook up a girl he met online, just so he doesn’t begin college a virgin.

Though it may be wrong to celebrate movies that could possibly be encouragement for online predators and purveyors of sex tourism, we present some of our favorite cinematic virgins who lost it on a road trip:

(Warning: potential spoilers ahead.)

…Read more

For those who may have been out of town last week, it’s time to catch up on the first episode of Italian Spiderman, a wacky new series that spoofs Italian action films from the ’60s and ’70s (while pretending to be a forty-year-old print salvaged from the Atlantic Ocean). It premiered online last Thursday, but it’s more interesting today, since the Internet was all abuzz yesterday with the rumor (started by Latino Review) that Sony’s looking at both Patrick Fugit or Michael Angaro to replace Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 4 and 5.

But I say, why go for either of the kids from Almost Famous (Fugit and Angaro both portray the young Cameron Crowe character at different ages), when there’s Italian Spiderman? In fact, why bother making more Hollywood Spider-Man movies, when there’s Italian Spiderman?

After watching the above episode, be sure to check out the trailer for the series and head over to the film’s MySpace page to hear the theme song and other groovy songs from the Italian Spiderman soundtrack.