• “Thank God for the strike,” says Bob Rehak at Graphic Engine. “There is just too much new content out there, and with the scribes picketing, we now have a chance to recover — to catch up.” Meanwhile,
  Nikki Finke reports that Jason Bateman is just one star who is refusing to promote an upcoming film by crossing picket lines to tape interviews. We think Micheal Bluth would have accidentally driven the stair car through the picket line.
• At Re:Sources, Pamela Cohn conducts a “case study in indie distribution” with Ben Niles, director of the documentary Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, and Jim Browne of Argot Pictures. Browne says that if you really want to book your self-produced film in theaters, you’ll have better luck if it’s a documentary: “Theaters aren’t willing to take a chance on narrative features that have no name actors in them. I see little indies all the time that are really strong, well-made movies, but they don’t have the cash to take out the kind of advertising you would need to drive audiences to the theater, or they don’t have any kind of recognizable talent.”
• Spout Maven Demndiary has posted reviews of Frownland, The Tracey Fragments, Grace is Gone and tons more from the Denver Film Festival.
• At Libertas, Dirty Harry says liberal polemics like Lions For Lambs are failing because blogs like his have pulled back the curtain and engendered mass distrust of the Hollywood system. Of course, they also spread negative buzz sight unseen from the moment the logline appears in Variety, but that’s just part of the process…
• On Day 10 of AFI Fest, Craig Kennedy calls In Search of a Midnight Kiss “the nicest surprise of the festival.”
• In the name of making a “dent on [his] December bills with money that I earned by expressing myself on this website,” Michael Tully is taking a Radioheadian approach to blogging.

Your faithful blogger will likely be out for the afternoon working on a podcast. So here’s a batch of links to get you through the rest of the day:

• “I do know that at this particular juncture in film history and film criticism, we who write about and care about films allow ourselves to be borne back ceaselessly into the past do so at our own peril.” Glenn Kenny questions his colleagues’ near-universal worship of Pauline Kael. Come for Kenny’s eye-rolling, stay for the unexpected Sonic Youth reference.
• The Reeler has compiled the entries thus far in the Totally Unrelated Blogathon. My favorite so far: John Lichman’s story of working for Chris Matthews, for whom he once made “a delicious, chocolate cake with vanilla icing.”
• Join Peter Knegt in saying Happy 36th Birthday to “the accidental beard of [his] boyhood,” Winona Ryder.
• Girish has convinced me to buy and read Michel Marie’s The French New Wave: An Artistic School with his post on the “bloggable” ideas contained within.

Last week, I wrote about Rescue Dawn: The Truth, a website where friends and family of Gene DeBruin, the character played by Jeremy Davies in Werner Herzog’s film, make the case that the director distorted the real life events at the Laotian prison camp in order to puff up the heroism of Dieter Dengler. Conservative bloggers and critics, who had initially praised the film for upholding American patriotic values, immediately turned on Herzog. They were particularly fired up by the claim that Herzog had been contacted by people close to DeBruin but had ignored their pleas to make changes to the film. In response to charges that DeBruin’s defenders were “blown off” by Herzog, Debbie Schlussel wrote, “Since Mr. Herzog would not tell the truth, I will.”

But over the weekend, I was listening to the August 3rd episode of Filmspotting, which features an interview with Herzog. This interview must have been recorded at least two weeks before Schlussel started the blog firestorm with her post, and in it Herzog voluntarily acknowledges the DeBruin camp’s unhappiness with his version of the story. Herzog concedes the discrepancy between his version and the family’s version, but says the Gene seen in Rescue is basically an exaggeration of certain character flaws related by Dengler to Herzog before Dengler’s death. Herzog’s basic attitude is, “I understand that they love Gene and want to think the best of him, but sometimes when men are put in extraordinary situations, they behave in ways that even the people closest to them wouldn’t expect.” You can listen to the podcast here.

This would seem to absolve Herzog of the charges of libel that were recklessly flying around the blogosphere last week. It’s not that he willfully mischaracterized DeBruin; the Herzog and the DeBruin camps simply have two different takes on the truth.

MGM’s decision to release Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn on July 4 was more than just a clever Transformers counter-programming gambit: it was an implicit attempt to mark the German director’s POW drama, a dramatic remake of his own documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly, as a red state-targeted tribute to American patriotism. And to some extent, it worked: conservative film blog LIBERTAS called Rescue “a good old-fashioned patriotic war film”, but reserved their highest praise for the film’s director. “Herzog is a genius and a true iconoclast. He’s a rebel and a free-thinker. The lemmings desperate to be loved and fit in make the other kind of war film, the true counter-culture makes this kind.” And in blog post dated July 27, conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel named Rescue Dawn “the best movie of the year.”

Less than a month later, Schlussel has changed her tune considerably. In a post on her website dated August 16, Schlussel points to site called Rescue Dawn: The Truth, which claims that Herzog altered facts in Rescue Dawn in order to make Dieter Dengler appear to be more of a hero than he actually was. The site bears the signature of Pisidhi Indradat, who says he was imprisoned alongside Dengler but was omitted from Rescue Dawn; and Jerry DeBruin, brother of Gene DeBruin, who was played in the film by Jeremy Davies.

DeBruin and Indradat are primarily upset that Herzog gave the Dengler character the bulk of the credit for planning and executing the escape from Laos. They insist that, in real life, these plans were already in the hopper before Dengler ever got to the camp. In fact, they say they waited a few weeks to tell him about the escape because they didn’t know if they could trust a guy with a German accent. DeBruin is also angry at Herzog’s depiction of his brother as an antagonist to Dengler, played by Davies as a “deranged and derelict Charles Manson type entity.” Schlussel adds fuel to *that* fire by pointing out that Davies played Manson in a 2004 TV movie. It’s clearly a conspiracy!

…Read more

Man, Nathan Lee is ON FIRE. My new critical hero, who previously wowed with his gaga reviews of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Black Snake Moan (sample quote: “[Christina Ricci's] the white-hot focal point of Brewer’s loud, brash, encompassing vision of the soul’s dark night survived, peering into the dawn. That’s right, haters, I said ‘vision.’) hit another home run this weekend, with this New York Times op-ed on spoilers. It’s so good that it’s hard to pick just one section to blockquote, so here’s an attempt to condense some of the best stuff:

I wouldn’t dare unmask the secrets in the movie A History of Violence out of respect for the artistry of David Cronenberg and the integrity of his booby-trapped plot, but there isn’t a single frame of The Number 23 I wouldn’t mock in great, guiltless detail for the simple reason that I find it extremely silly. A spoiler requires something to spoil and someone to take offense at the spoiling, and I’m confident that my readership does not include humorless scholars of the Joel Schumacher oeuvre.

Our obsession with spoilers has a diminishing effect, reducing popular criticism to a kind of glorified consumer reporting and the audience to babies. People outraged by spoilers should avoid all reviews before going to the movies or reading the book they’ve waited so long for, because the fact is all criticism spoils, no matter how scrupulous.

My stance on spoilers is similar to Lee’s, but that’s been documented sufficiently. So let’s do something else. Everyone’s talking about Lee’s op-ed, up to and including Brian Lehrer, my local NPR morning talk host, who invited Slate’s Dana Stevens on the show this morning to chew over Lee’s piece (Lee, apparently, didn’t return Lehrer’s calls). At one point on this morning’s segment, Lehrer asked Stevens if critics in ye olden days had taken care not to spoil major plot twists, such as those within Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Stevens said she didn’t know. I then spent 45 minutes on the internet attempting to answer that question.

I could only find three reviews of the original Psycho on the internet, but I think they represent a decent cross-section of methods, opinions and outlets. Of note: two out of the three reviews note that critics have been asked not to reveal the film’s ending. One of these the reveals the kinds of plot details that could get a contemporary critic scalped. The third review, by Bosley Crowthers of the New York Times, is at once the most respectful of the film’s secrets (he reveals the identity of the killer as Norman’s mother, but refrains from revealing the identity of the mother, and the least impressed (”his denouement falls quite flat for us,” sniffs the master of the royal first-person plural.)

Variety and the San Francisco Chronicle were less careful. A review attributed to Paine Knickerbocker spends several paragraphs detailing plot points (Marion meets with her lover, Marion steals the money, Marion buys a used car) before exercising restraint: “No more of the action may be disclosed here. But violence follows, and then a skillfully paced interrogation by Martin Balsam as an affable but determined private eye.” Is it less of a crime to tick off each menial plot pint than to reveal the really good stuff?

Finally, Variety. A review attributed only to “Variety Staff” pledges not to expose spoilers, and then totally does anyway:

Hitchcock uses the old plea that nobody give out the ending — “It’s the only one we have.” This will be abided by here, but it must be said that the central force throughout the feature is a mother who is a homicidal maniac. This is unusual because she happens to be physically defunct, has been for some years. But she lives on in the person of her son.

I’ve always hated spoiler alerts with a passion. But jesus christ — to say you’re *not* going to reveal a plot secret, and then immediately reveal the plot secret? That’s just dirty play.

Despite having the best Wednesday ever, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix earned a relatively small sum of money for a five day release. Here’s how a handful of scribblers spun the numbers:

To Box Office Mojo, the big-Wednesday, small-weekend phenomenon is a sign of “burning off demand”–that is, the huge fans showed up at midnight on Wednesday, and there’s little to no potential for the sequel to build on word-of-mouth.

But don’t tell that to Paul Dergarabedian, the industry blurb whore recently targeted by New York Magazine who hints that the release of the final Harry Potter book next Saturday could
actually reinvigorate ticket sales. “They’ll be walking book in hand into the movie theater,” he promises. Gag.

So many blockbusters in the marketplace leave little room in the writeups for attention to indies, but there’s always space to gloat over the failure of torture porn. The New York Times devoted two paragraphs to Captivity’s sub-top-ten debut; Nikki Finke’s sole sentence on the matter can be reduced to two words: “how nice.” Meanwhile, HecklerSpray asks the rhetorical question that’s surely on everyone’s mind: “[License to Wed] is still in the weekend box office top five and a film where Elisha Cuthbert has to drink a milkshake made out of mashed-up eyeballs isn’t?”

I’ve been tagged by FilmSnob to participate in the Eight Things meme that’s been going around. All the cool kids are doing it, and it’s Friday, so why the hell not? But in the interest of keeping things around here *somewhat* on topic, I will try to keep this semi-film related. First, the rules:

Rules:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.

2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

3. People who are tagged write their own blog post about their eight things and include these rules.

4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don\’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they\’re tagged and that they should read your blog.

Now, the things:

1) I have never seen the following films: Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, The Goonies or Gremlins.

2)When I first moved to New York, I was broke, working full time and going to school at night. I came up with a crack-pot scheme to track down Peter Bogdanovich and convince him to let me be his personal secretary. I was totally ready to put it into action, until a roommate talked me out of it.

3) I’ve walked out of far too many films in tears–films that could not in any way be construed as tearjerkers–films like Dodgeball, and Independence Day. I think there’s actually something wrong with my eyes; they tend to tear up when I stare at any kind of screen for a long stretch of time. This is just one of many reasons why, like FilmSnob…

4) I prefer to see films alone. Another reason: I get extremely claustrophobic in movie theaters unless there is at least one empty seat next to me.

5) I have dressed up as the following fictional characters for Halloween: Holly Golightly, Sally Bowles, Marla Singer.

6) Speaking of Sally Bowles: I’m such an unrepentant Judy Garland fanatic that I give a pass to pretty much everything Liza Minnelli does. With the possible exception of Arthur 2: On the Rocks.

7) I have a ton of VHS tapes that I rescued from bargain bins with the intention of burning them to DVD, but that, due to my own stunning laziness, are just sitting on my shelves collecting dust. Some of these include: Where the Green Ants Dream, Two For the Road and Zabriskie Point. I hate myself for being this lazy, but the self-loathing just breeds more laziness.
When I was in ninth grade, I went to see Pulp Fiction with a guy named Gil, who went on to direct Monster House.

Now that that’s over, I beg for attention from tag the following bloggers to participate in the meme: Aaron Dobbs, Michael Tully, Ariel Waldman, Tom Hall, Wiley Wiggins, Gabe Rivera, Randall Bennett , Jason Calacanis, and Virginia Heffernan.

Last week, I introduced a new feature called The Micro Five, with the basic concept being that every Tuesday, I would come up with a five-item list based on a micro-specific topic, and then toss the baton to five other film bloggers, who would then rebut my list with a list of their own. I had fun putting together my list of Five Improbable Werner Herzog Anecdotes, but that whole baton tossing part didn’t work out so great–the feedback I got indicated that the topic was *too* obscure, and that the rules were too vague.

So, we’re trying this again. This time I’ve picked what I think is a more accessible topic, and instead of tagging specific bloggers, I’ll leave it open to anyone who wants to respond with a list of their own. If you put together a list, please paste a link in the comments to this post. If you’d like to put together a list but don’t have a blog of your own, may I suggest starting one for free at Spout? Next week, I’ll do a round-up post linking to all responses.

This week’s topic was inspired by this blog post, which is just the latest in the “I think Knocked Up is plum unrealistic!” meme that’s been going around all summer. Katha Pollitt’s angle is an interesting one–basically, that Knocked Up isn’t so much about an unwanted pregnancy as it is about Seth Rogen’s character wanting to be saved from himself–but it’s still a bit hung up on the idea that the plot wouldn’t fly if abortions were more commonplace in movies. I personally disagree–I think everything Judd Apatow tells us about Katherine Heigl’s character indicates that she’s exactly the kind of woman who would keep an unplanned baby as part of a quest for unconditional love–but this seems like as good a time as any to compare and contrast unwanted movie pregnancies. So, in no particular order:

1. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve) loves Guy, but he’s a mechanic, and her mother would prefer her to be with this older businessman dude with a creepy moustache. Guy gets drafted and has to go to war in Algeria; shortly after he leaves, Genevieve discovers she’s pregnant. After a few months of mooning for the absent Guy, Genevieve acknowledges that her mom’s got a point: a rich baby daddy that she doesn’t love but who is willing to financially support another man’s child is better than a genetic baby daddy that Genevieve “would die for”, but who is penniless nonetheless. Demy’s treatment of Genevieve’s situation is frank and nonchalant for its day, particularly considering that the film itself was an homage to Hollywood’s fantasy-driven Technicolor musicals. The final scene (embedded above), in which (spoiler alert!) Guy is reunited with his child, gets me every time.

2. Wish You Were Here

A near-forgotten gem of 80’s British cinema, Wish You Were Here follows Lynda, an ostentatiously promiscuous 50s-era teen tart (director David Leland based his script on the memoirs of famed madam Cynthia Payne) through a series of seriocomic coming-of-age encounters in her seaside hometown. Lynda’s mother’s dead, and her father can’t be bothered; her sluttishness is clearly coded as “looking for love by any means necessary.” When a friend of the family gets her pregnant and then abandons her, Lynda’s aunt provides the cash required to “take care of it.” Lynda takes the money, skips town, keeps the baby and starts a new life. The unexpected cloying ending (blah blah blah, the baby gives her the love she was looking for all along) works thanks to the mult-layered breakout performance of Emily Lloyd, who was nominated for a BAFTA ad generally became something of an international It girl for a brief time after the film was released.

3. Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Not only the only movie I’m aware of that deals with an unwanted pregnancy with a total lack of hysteria, but the only film dealing with the A-word that I could find that was actually directed by a women (Amy Heckerling). All of the drama surrounding Jennifer Jason Leigh’s unwanted pregnancy in this movie has to do with how she’s gonna get to and from the clinic. The douchbag who knocked her can’t even pay for his half, let alone give her a ride. She ends up lying to her brother, telling him that she needs a ride to the mall, and then sneaking off to clinic when she thinks he’s driven off. He ends up following her, and drives her home after the procedure. Today, Heckerling is praised today for refusing to moralize the abortion subplot, but it’s probably worth noting that at the time of its release, Fast Times was widely panned. “How could they do this to Jennifer Jason Leigh?” Roger Ebert wrote. “How could they put such a fresh and cheerful person into such a scuz-pit of a movie?”

4. Stephanie Daley

Hillary Brougher’s harrowing second film is a study of two very different pregnancies. Amber Tamblyn plays the title character, a religious high school student who loses her virginity to a stranger and gives birth in a public restroom several months later, claiming she never knew she was pregnant; Tilda Swinton plays the pregnant psychologist hired by the court to pass judgment on Stephanie’s sanity. The film revolves around Stephanie’s fractured testimony–is she crazy? Lying? A little of both?–all of which Tamblyn manages to pull together in an incredibly nuanced performance. The film came and went in limited release earlier this year (I saw it at Sundance in 2006), but it’s worth seeking out. The birth scene, shot something like a Lars Von Trier remake of Carrie, is absolutely terrifying.

5. Trust

Many Knocked Up skeptics mention the film in the same breath as Waitress, another 2007 comedy centered on an unplanned (an inexplicably un-terminated) pregnancy. That film’s director/co-star, the late Adrienne Shelly, was best known to many indie film fans for her starring role as a pregnant teenager in Hal Hartley’s Trust. Shelly plays Maria, a gum-snapping suburban high school dropout whose pregnancy prompts her football-star boyfriend to leave her, and her father to drop dead of a heart attack. Matthew, a TV-repairman played by Martin Donovan, is probably twice her age, but he’s struggling to break out from the shackles of his own dysfunctional family. The two form a tentative bond based on their mutual alienation. Matthew offers to marry Maria; Maria, believing Matthew has fooled around with her sister, eventually gets an abortion. Just as Maria and Matthew’s relationship hinges, as he puts it, on mutual “trust, admiration and respect,” Hartley asks us in good faith to invest in a relationship devoid of the usual romantic fireworks, and then suddenly removes the one traditional bit of plot glue holding the two characters together. Due to Hartley’s magic formula of deadpan melodrama, it works.

I try not to get involved in inter-blog fighting, but there’s a rumble happening right now that’s just a little too weird to ignore. I’m trying to follow all of this based on Kate Coe and Mayrav Saar’s coverage at FishbowlLA. I’m still a little fuzzy as to how Fishbowl got involved, but they’ve been publishing an email back-and-forth between film bloggers Nikki Finke, David Poland and Jeffrey Wells that’s shaping up to be the cattiest thing I’ve ever seen.

It looks like it all started when Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere sent an email to Nikki Finke, to “congratulate” her for winning an LA Press Club award. The email started out like this:

Congrats — good for you, good work, hats off. That said, I have to say I’m detecting a culture of clubbiness among the winners. I get the feeling they’ve all hung and schmoozed with each other (or with LAPC board members) all year at various drinky LAPC gatherings.

Finke responded (all lower and uppercase hers):

your email wound up in my spam folder. i’ve never socialized with one member of the LA Press Club. i’ve never even met a single member. no one i know belongs to the LA Press Club. my understanding from my own newspaper is that the club itself does NOT judge the entries. i was told they send out the entries to another major press club who judges it.

Then David Poland got involved, sending an email (to Finke? to Saar?) seconding Wells’ “congratulations”. It read in part:

Considering the lame field of people who were entered in the contest, Nikki had to win. [...] Congrats! One-eyed woman, kingdom of the blind, etc; you are truly the queen of the local newspaper movie gossips!!!

Poland and Wells are clearly just getting catty because they, Finke’s fellow L.A.-based entertainment journalists, were both ignored by the Press Club. At some point, Finke apparently sent an email to the LA Press Club, complaining that other local bloggers were trying to slander their awards. FishbowlLA then published two missives from members of the club, both strenuously denying any kind of voting irregularities, and emphasizing that Finke couldn’t have gotten “drinky” with the voters, because each press club’s awards are decided by press club members in other towns. Cue David Poland:

If I was a judge in some other city and got a dozen (if that) submissions on film, I would certainly think Nikki the most entertaining by a landslide… so long as you don’t know the film business, which judges from other cities do not…Enjoy your award, Nikki. You’re the most popular car wreck in town not directed by Michael Bay. Now, go back to beating up Terry Semel on your gossip blog because some idiot friend of yours is jealous of him and doesn’t realize that Yahoo! was near death when he took over and that he is the only reason the company is at all competitive with Google.

This, apparently, was too much for Wells, who mentioned on his own site earlier this week that Poland gives him a “I’m looking at you but I don’t see you because you don’t exist” look” whenever they meet.

I realized some years ago that the only action I could take that would truly satisfy you as far as my HE jottings were concerned would be to drink hemlock or do a swan dive in front of a moving bus. All I know is, you could have been a little nicer about this.

Where’s this torrid little skerfuffle gonna go next? I know two things to be true: 1) when Saar sums it all up by saying, “This is the equivalent of watching other people’s parents fight,” she’s* totally right; and 2) The HE commenter who says he’d cast Russell Crowe and James Gandolfini as Wells and Poland in the movie of this is on to something. How about Gena Rowlands as Nikki Finke?

*added an “s” in order to connote the appropriate gender.