Last week, when news broke that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was shutting down its film program temporarily to “rethink” how to make it more profitable, some of the more interesting responses suggested that we should be skeptical that the program will come back in any significant form at all. “Don’t believe for a moment that this hiatus is designed to refresh and strengthen film at LACMA,” wrote Richard Schickel in an LA Times piece, in which he also came this close to accusing LACMA director Michael Govan of not having heard of the French New Wave. Also at the LAT, in a piece widely praised for its vitriol, critic Kenneth Turan railed against the “half-baked hiatus”: “You’ll excuse me, but the logic of needing to stop the program in order to rethink it sounds suspiciously like the apocryphal Vietnam War rationale that ‘we had to burn the village to save it.’ That the museum seems to lack the ability to consider the situation’s pros and cons while things are up and running doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in its ultimate decision.”
That decision seems to lie with Govan, and Schickel’s not the only one calling into question his credentials as an arbiter of film curation. In an interview with Govan and demoted film programmer Ian Birnie for LA Weekly, Tom Christie subtly implied that, with his suit and tie and talk of Jeff Koons, Govan’s agenda is hopelessly corporate art — not exactly the kind of worldview that befits a world class museum film program, according to Anne Thompson. “I loved the programming, but it was arcane and eclectic, as a museum’s should be, not designed to ‘build an audience.’”
What’s interesting is that, even in the wake of all this criticism, LACMA is actually encouraging further feedback. They’ve set up a forum where concerned parties can ask questions and/or rant about the rumored changes, and Govan will allegedly read and respond. So far, I couldn’t see any sign of him, although LACMA communications director Allison Agsten seems to be very active. So: is this an honest attempt at dialogue on LACMA’s part, or are they just paying lipservice to a community too small to have a real impact on the institution’s bottom line? That remains to be seen.
Thanks to a (front page?) article on Nikki Finke and Deadline Hollywood Dailyin today’s New York Times, the much-derided, much-feared entertainment journalist is getting quite a lot of exposure, just in time for her transition to her new home at Mail.com Media. Also courtesy of the profile, written by David “Carpetbagger” Carr, we now learn that Finke’s deal with Mail.com is closer to $5-10 million rather than the $14-15 million being reported last month.
As if that wasn’t enough excitement for female film journalists today, we also found out that Anne Thompson, formerly of Variety, will now park her Thompson on Hollywoodblog at indieWIRE (an official announcement is forthcoming). Meanwhile, though less film-related than the other two women, gossip magazine editor Bonnie Fuller is set to head Mail.com’s Hollywood Life. I don’t think we’ve seen this much girl power in one industry since the Spice Girls took the music world by storm.
Anyway, all I can say is that I wish them all luck and look forward to continuing to read their stuff (okay, this statement only includes Finke and Thompson) at their new homes. Now, let’s see what the rest of the film blogosphere has to say about the ladies after the jump: …Read more
In 10 out of 14 years, the winner of the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role has gone on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. If this year marks the 11th such congruence, Meryl Streep will take home the Oscar. Yet there is an odd circumstance with the Academy’s nominations that hurts Streep’s chances. Another one of the Academy’s Best Actress contenders also received a SAG Award Sunday night: Kate Winslet, who won the supporting actress trophy for The Reader. At the Oscars, this role has been recognized as a lead performance, one that is likely a favorite to win.
Yes, it is a strange situation, one that shocked and confused Oscar prognosticators (especially this writer) on Thursday morning. Winslet’s Reader performance was campaigned as a supporting role, and she was recognized as such by the Golden Globes, the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the Chicago Film Critics Association and of course the Screen Actors Guild. A few organizations did nominate her for a lead award for The Reader, though few people take the Satellites seriously, and the BAFTA Awards are different than most in that they permit Winslet to compete against herself in the same category (she is also nominated for Best Leading Actress for Revolutionary Road).
Some now believe the Academy’s deviation will in fact cost Winslet the Oscar she could have won in the supporting field. Either voters will be confused about what film she’s nominated for (unless I’m simply less observant than elderly Academy members, which may indeed be the case), or she will now split the majority vote with Streep and thus allow Anne Hathaway or Melissa Leo to slip ahead (Angelina Jolie is believed to have no shot). Another idea is that voters will dismiss Winslet due to doubts over which category the performance belongs in. But since enough members of the Academy made it a point to nominate her as lead actress in the first place, this is hardly a reasonable theory.
Last week in Park City, we joked more than once about being thankful for both the recession and global warming, for making Sundance 2009 the most pleasant installment of the festival I’ve ever attended - diminished crowds at screenings and events, and 40 degree weather to enjoy whilst traveling between. One night at a dinner table, I worried aloud that this joking would look pretty bad to an outside observer — us, the elitists who still had jobs and/or travel budgets, laughingly toasting the apocalypse.
And now, just three days later, comes the news that Variety has slashed 30 jobs, including those of Mike Jones (who I tagged in that silly Sundance meme post before seeing the news, obviously), Jeff Sneider and, maybe most surprisingly, Anne Thompson. Thompson “ankled” the Hollywood Reporter less than two years ago for the Variety job. Her most recent post on her Variety-hosted Thompson on Hollywood blog says she’ll keep the blog going, and is also “actively involved in a web start-up which is in stealth mode; details will be available soon. And I will continue teaching film criticism at USC and hosting Sneak Previews at UCLA Extension.”
I’m sure Anne, Mike and all the smart and talented people let go today will land on their feet. But I still wish I could take back the jokes.
Stu at Defamertakes a look at this year’s Oscar nominees that debuted at last year’s Sundance and predicts that An Educationwill receive Academy Awards recognition one year from now.
And one of this year’s Oscar nominees almost wasn’t a Sundance selection: AJ Schnack samples froman IDA interview with Geoffrey Gilmore in which Man on Wire is said to have nearly been rejected.
The Envelope points out three Oscar nominees who are at Sundace this week: Josh Brolin, Melissa Leo and Michael Shannon, the latter of whom stars in The Missing Person.
Four directors/projects have been named winners of this year’s Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Awards.
Anne Thompson’s summary of this year’s fest notices it was a “time of transition for both Sundance and the industry,” while also quoting manager Michael Sugar, who believes it was a return to the past: “This year’s fest started to recapture the intended spirit. It seemed back to being about the filmmakers.” Also at Variety, Todd McCarthy’s summary notes that An Education and Sin Nombre were the two emblematic films of the fest, and both fit in with the start of the Obama age.
Manohla Dargis’ NY Times summary concentrates heavily on the presence of Sundance hero Steven Soderbergh, whose latest film she didn’t care for.
“If they had to do it all over again, would DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg and his partner Stacey Snider have left their lucrative deal at Paramount Pictures, where their slate of films had thrived, if they had foreseen the worsening financial environment?” According to Anne Thompson, DreamWorks is having a lot of trouble raising money during the credit crunch, and Spielberg and Snider may have to settle on a smaller business plan. On her blog, Thompson simplifies things: “But it’s Steven Spielberg! It doesn’t matter. The banks aren’t lending to anybody. It’s sheer bad luck.”
Ari Folman is following up his winning animated doc Waltz With Bashirwith an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi short story The Futurological Congress, which will begin as live-action then transition to animation. “Think of your favorite young actress. She’ll appear that way at the beginning, and then as the film goes on, she’ll be drawn like she’s 50,” Folman explains. So, like Kate Winslet in The Reader, but as a cartoon rather than with distracting aging makeup.
Barry Sonnenfeld will direct another sci-fi action comedy called The How-To Guide for Saving the World, which sounds like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy if Arthur and Ford had been able to use their book to twart the Vogon’s demolishon of Earth.
Billy Ray will direct his own adaptation of the supernatural novel Conjure Wife, which has been filmed three times previously. The premise sounds like Bewitched as a horror film.
Adam Shankman, who raised his comedy rep recently with Prop 8: The Musical (and may lower it again now with Bedtime Stories), has added another musical and another f/x extravanza to his pipeline. The former is the high-concept Bob the Musical; the latter is the long-in-works revival of Sinbad.
In her Variety column today, Anne Thompson contrasts Sam Mendes’ star-studded, Oscar-positioned, somewhat tonally revisionist adaptation of Revolutionary Road with the work and life of author Richard Yates. Thompson reminds what unlikely source material this is for a re-teaming of the beautiful young stars of the highest grossing film of all time, relating in detail the plight of “the long-suffering Yates,” who lived in “squalid” solitude, never sold more than 12,000 copies of a single novel, and hated the only produced film his writing ever had anything to do with.
In his day, Yates was asked by its editor to stop submitting fiction to the New Yorker, a publication which had no use for the writer’s “mean-spirited view of things.” In describing how Mendes and crew revised the material to make its protagonists “warmer and more sympathetic” (and chose to take their dreams seriously where Yates drily mocked and criticized), Thompson implies that Hollywood has no use for the acid element of Yates’ view, either.
After reading Anne Thompson’s post on the dismal reception given to the youth-baiting rethink of At The Movies starring Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz, I decided I had better watch The Two Bens’ first episode online to see what all the griping is about. It actually starts off rather well: Mankiewicz is totally qualified for this job, although it’s a bit of a wonder he was even hired, what with his TCM-honed, “I am going to explain this very slowly because my viewers may be aged” manner of speaking. But then he tosses it to Lyons, who says something completely incoherent about Burn After Reading being “almost like an exercise in drama,” and then they cut back Mankiewicz, who struggles to croak out, “Yeah, that’s an interesting point,” whilst swallowing his own testicles. At that point, I stopped.
Interestingly, another thing that I wasn’t able to force myself to watch all the way through this week also had to do with the sorry contemporary incarnation of the former gold standard for televised movie reviews.
“There is, of course, cause for concern, and even alarm.”
These were some of the first words out of moderator Annette Insdorf’s mouth, at the start of a panel called Snip Snip: Are Cutbacks in Film Distribution and Criticism Affecting Quality Filmmaking? in Telluride on Sunday. She ticked off all the alarming factors––studio-funded arthouse distributors like Paramount Vantage and Picturehouse are shutting down; marketing costs for the average film have risen to the $20 million range, which means that true indie distributors can’t compete; there’s a glut of films in both festivals and in theaters; print outlets dedicated to film have all but disappeared, and general interest publications have come to see critics as a luxury. She closed this listlessness-inducing laundry list with the question, “Will we simply have to read blogs to be informed about non-Hollywood cinema?” The distributors and journalists on the panel (including Michael Barker of Sony Pictures Classics, Anne Thompson of Variety and Scott Foundas of Village Voice Media) ended up taking this querie and running it into a lively, contentious debate. But first, Paul Schrader declared that he’s already heard the death rattle of cinema as we know it.
Remember that interview that Variety EIC Peter Bart gave MTV in June, responding to the “boycott” of his publication by a handful of fanboy sites who insisted that the trade had repeatedly failed to properly credit their “scoops”? Variety’s Anne Thompson resurrected the debate and the Bart quote this morning in a blog post pegged to Comic-Con, where a gang of outlets of various sizes––including us––will be fighting to post the same material at the same time. If my post about The Watchman goes up 20 seconds after Cinematical’s, will I get in trouble for not giving them “credit” for “breaking” the story? What’s the netiquette??!!???
She’s mostly looking at the divide between a “legit” outlet like Variety and the independently run sites like Film School Rejects, but I think Anne makes some good points about this stuff not being the black-and-white matter of thievery that some of the sites would like to believe. As far as I’m concerned, this is the key part of her piece:
Wow, I’m tired of talking about Sex and the City. How about you? I’m happy that millions of women found something on a movie screen that appealed to them, even if it’s not something that appeals to me, and I feel like that should be the end of the story. It won’t be, but personally I just want to put the period on this sentence and move on to the next manufactured hysteria. But first, two final thoughts:
I don’t have much to say about the latest film criticism obit, this time from Anne Thompson at Variety. Well, okay…I have a couple of things to say.
Number one: Although I love Pajiba, I don’t see them fulfilling the role of champion for under-the-radar new releases. A champion for forgotten/overlooked/misunderstood catalog titles, yes, and deflater of misbegotten studio marketing-fueled wannabe blockbusters, for sure. But scroll down their front page right now, and the “smallest” film you’ll see reviewed is Flawless, a Magnolia release starring Demi Moore which Dustin Rowles compared to the experience of a former smoker lighting up for the first time in five years: “the first few puffs are exhilarating, but then the headache sets in, and then you wish you’d quit puffing away before the tobacco left a taste of ass in your mouth that you still taste the next morning.”
Pajiba reliably gives each release they cover the treatment it deserves, but they don’t have a mandate to cover everything. They’re an indie site with limited resources, and they’ve chosen not to devote those resources to panning for untapped art house new release gold. Which is understandable––seeking out and heralding worthy festival films and smaller releases can be an arduous process and in terms of traffic, it’s often totally thankless––but when I think of sites that could realistically fill the void created by an absence of adventurous print critics, dedicated to, as Thompson puts it, “influenc[ing] readers to seek out small releases,” I think of Reverse Shot or The House Next Door long before I think of the site that devotes 800+ words to why David Zucker “should crawl up into the fetal position and abort himself for allowing Superhero Movie to see the light of day.”
Anne Thompson’s respecting the Beowulf review embargo for the time being, but she can’t resist poking a bit at the flick’s major bait: gold-painted naked Angelina Jolie:
…in one scene when Angelina Jolie rises up out of her cave pool to seduce the mighty Beowulf, who has just killed her only son, Grendel, she walks on water, revealing that she is not only painted in gold, a la Goldfinger, but sports a tail and stacked high heels. Please. Barbie Doll stilettos in 5th century Denmark?
Two of the men I asked about this, intelligent film critics both, said it didn’t bother them. I guess Jolie worked her magic.
What makes me crazy is that the studio had a well-reviewed, smart-house, classy movie that played well for the Academy and cost only $22 million. That’s peanuts to a studio like Warners and there was no earthly reason to go wide! They could have let those per-screen averages play out slowly over time, kept the movie simmering in a successful mode, and widened gradually, keeping the Oscar race in mind. This is the kind of movie that builds and finds an audience. As long as it’s successful, all well and good. But taint it with a 4th-place weekend and you’ve got the perception of damaged goods.
I haven’t seen Clayton yet, but from what I can tell, she’s totally right: this is the kind of movie that needs to play small for a few weeks, adding cities and screens bit by bit, so that coastal, early-adopting grown-ups have a chance to see and spread the word to their peers.
It’s so strange that Warner Brothers keeps bungling like this. Just take a look at the Warner Brothers tag on this blog, and it’s just one stupid scandal and/or mistake right after another. They either failed to sufficiently support Jesse James out of apathy, or they deliberately sabotaged its release. They let Nikki Finke’s “Robinov hates women” meme spread unchallenged for days before issuing a denial. And now they’re letting what should have been an easy (if slow-burning) prestige hit fall to their impatience. This is where I break into the Jerry Seinfeld voice in order to say, “What is the deal, with Warner Brothers?” And with sure-to-be gems like Man Wich in the pipeline, can it really get better before it gets worse?
This weekend, Peter Bart and Peter Guber devoted a segment of their AMC chat showSunday Morning Shootout to the subject of bloggery. I didn’t catch it myself, but judging by the write-ups I’ve read, it was…exactly what you’d expect.
As usual, celebrity gossip blogs such as Perez Hilton and TMZ were spoken of in the same breath as industry blogs such as Defamer, and blogs aimed at producing serious, non-snarky commentary were pushed to the far margins of the conversation. Bart, of course, held down the hard-line anti-blog end of the argument (at this point, this guy’s qualified to write a “You Might Be A Blogger If…” joke book); his Variety colleague Anne Thompson intelligently defended her right to produce journalism in the format of an online journal frequently updated in reverse chronological order. Guber played interference, which apparently involved repeatedly using the word “perpetrate” when he probably meant “perpetuate.” But who knows.
Because I didn’t see it, and because I’m getting really tired of asserting my right to make a living in my chosen field, I definitely do not want to comment at length. Awards Daily has a partial transcription of the show, and some fierce commentary to boot. David Poland has solid analysis at The Hot Blog; by my count, he only strays from strong logic to dig at Nikki Finke once (weeeelllll, maybe twice). See also Aaron Dobbs at Out of Focus, who offers a simple suggestion: “I don’t have a problem with Bart criticizing online journalists and bloggers, pulling to some degree the same argument lots of “professional” media likes to claim to maintain a feeling or air of superiority, but Peter, if you’re going to do that, please stop having your own publication send out “Breaking News” alerts that are simply notices that you’ve posted a new column with nothing but your same old opinions? Thanks.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
Thanks to a (front page?) article on Nikki Finke and Deadline Hollywood Daily in today’s New York Times, the much-derided, much-feared entertainment journalist is getting quite a lot of exposure, just in time for her transition to her new home at Mail.com Media. Also courtesy of the profile, written by David “Carpetbagger” Carr, we now learn that Finke’s deal with Mail.com is closer to $5-10 million rather than the $14-15 million being reported last month.
Last week in Park City, we joked more than once about being thankful for both the recession and global warming, for making Sundance 2009 the most pleasant installment of the festival I’ve ever attended - diminished crowds at screenings and events, and 40 degree weather to enjoy whilst traveling between. One night at a dinner table, I worried aloud that this joking would look pretty bad to an outside observer — us, the elitists who still had jobs and/or travel budgets, laughingly toasting the apocalypse.
Stu at Defamer 
In her Variety column today, 
Remember that interview that Variety EIC Peter Bart 
Wow, I’m tired of talking about Sex and the City. How about you? I’m happy that millions of women found something on a movie screen that appealed to them, even if it’s not something that appeals to me, and I feel like that should be the end of the story. It won’t be, but personally I just want to put the period on this sentence and move on to the next manufactured hysteria. But first, two final thoughts:
I don’t have much to say about the latest film criticism obit, this time from 
Anne Thompson has written an impassioned post
This weekend, Peter Bart and Peter Guber devoted a segment of their 
