The switch was flipped on the Movieline.com moments ago. The relaunch of the Hollywood magazine of the 90s, the once eminently readable forerunner of the bloggy listicle most notable in recent years for its spectacular decline into toothless aspirational lifestyle mag Hollywood Life, immediately caught blogosphere attention when three editors from the recently shuttered Defamer were hired to steer the reincarnation effort. It looks like the boys (Seth Abramovitch, Kyle Buchanan and S.T. VanAirsdale) have been busy seeding the site with content over recent weeks: there are already interviews with Emily Blunt and the guy who directed the HBO version of Grey Gardens, as well as reviews of State of Play, Adventureland, Observe & Report, etc. There’s also a TV section, which is probably a wise move in terms of sheer numbers — to make room on a movie site for a graphic juxtaposing Barack Obama and Jeremy Piven is to show signs of an editorial strategy with the interests of the people in mind.

The verdict as of Hour One? So far, they don’t *exactly* seem to be reinventing the movie website wheel but, you know … it’s not like I am. And I’m looking forward to promised comebacks of old Movieline features, as well as the magazine’s actual archives.

Something big happened this week, and Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo — an unassuming, nonthreatening, ultimately uplifting indie drama with no stars and, one would think, no immediate hook for press coverage other than its merits ––  was at the center of it. Solo, which opens today in New York and L.A., motivated A. O. Scott and Richard Brody, two grown-up film critics for venerable New York publications (the New York Times and the New Yorker, respectively), neither of whom are known for engaging in public battle with the online rabble, to get into a blog fight.

It started when Scott published a long story (5 pages online) in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on an emergent genre he called Neo-Neo Realism, which he says unites festival favorites such as Ballast, Wendy and Lucy and Treeless Mountain with the works of Bahrani, as films concerning “fictional characters most often played by nonactors from similar backgrounds… [who are] familiar on a basic human level even if their particular predicaments are not. And if the kind of movie they inhabit is not entirely new — the common ancestor that established their species identity is a well-known Italian bicycle thief — their unassuming arrival on a few screens nonetheless seems vital, urgent and timely.” In other words: a number of filmmakers are making art films about the daily lives of poor people, and also the economy is bad. Coincidence? Scott thinks not.

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So, we’re taking the rest of the week off. Enjoy your, uh, eating and shopping? That’s what people do, right? (I’m half-English, so I’m only half willing to admit that Thanksgiving even exists.) But first, for your holiday browsing pleasure, here are a bunch of stories from this week that I meant to comment on but ran out of time. Let me know if there’s anything in particular that you’d like me to revisit in depth next week.

• “Auteurism had Andrew Sarris. Abstract expressionism had Clement Greenberg. Punk rock had Lester Bangs. Where is the equivalent voice for today’s documentary scene?” So ponders Thom Powers, before offering a number of tips for those of us who might aim to fill the position.
• “Is there room in that diverse [film festival] community for people of faith? For people of more conservative political beliefs? Or are film festivals only for the support and promotion of those who agree with a specific, left-of-center political philosophy? And therefore, must major film festivals — and their primary staff — have a de facto bias toward that philosphy?” AJ Schnack examines the implications of the Prop 8/Rich Raddon situation.
• Eric Kohn visited the Futures of Entertainment conference, sponsored by the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT. “As the conversations progressed, so too did a flurry of typing from numerous laptops throughout the audience: Microblogging and online chatter created a series of miniature conversations that converged into a unified whole.”
• In the second of potentially three posts on Synechdoche, NY, Filmbrain runs Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut through the ringer of the Jungian concept of individuation. “The individuation process is about the uniting of opposites — good and evil, masculine and feminine, matter and spirit, body and psyche. There’s no question that Caden undertakes the journey, but he fails to become an individual, both literally and psychologically. Caden treats his life (both the conscious and unconscious elements) like a stage play, yet his attempt at directing from an omniscient position robs him of (in alchemical terms) the prima materia required for one to be a person.”

It finally happened: my obsession with MSNBC has dovetailed with legitimate movie news! Sort of!

Tonight the New York Times broke the news that over a year ago, Dan Mirvish (filmmaker and co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival) and Eitan Gorlin (whose directorial debut, The Holy Land, won the Grand Jury Prize at that festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award) made up a fake adviser to John McCain named Martin Eisenstadt. On Monday, MSNBC’s David Schuster reported on air that Martin Eisenstadt had taken credit for the “Palin thinks Africa is a country” leak. Eisenstadt had indeed published a post on his blog (tagline: “Because freedom isn’t free”) claiming to be the leaker, which no one at MSNBC bothered to look into deeply before Schuster’s report, otherwise they might have discovered that Eisenstadt a) is a made up person, and b) didn’t actually talk to Carl Cameron, the Fox news reporter who broke the “anonymous sources say Palin doesn’t know Africa is a continent” story.

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The End of America, a new documentary based on a book by Naomi Wolf and directed by Ricky Stern and Annie Sundberg (The Devil Came on Horseback), will premiere tomorrow night at the Hamptons Film Festival. And then, it’s going to be available … everywhere. It’s the first production of IndiePix Studios, and the company has developed a unique plan to get the movie out there via a ton of different means. After its festival premiere it’s going straight to streamability via Snag Films, and then, according to a press release, the doc will “flood venues around the country, from special screenings to theatrical exhibitions, from book stores and merchants that sell DVDs to internet sources for renting, streaming and downloading the film.”

As far as I know, it’s the first film to go to Snag directly from its festival premiere. Presumably, the goal is to enable the film, which “addresses issues of freedom, dictatorship, civil liberties and democracy - and warns that the United States’ claims on constitutional civil liberties are fast eroding,” to “go viral” in the days leading up to the election. It’ll be an interesting experiment; so far, most of the films on Snag have been titles that had been available in other forms for awhile, and this may be a test of whether or not, when given the oportunity to embed and discuss a brand-new political documentary, bloggers will pounce. I’m seeing the film tomorrow in the Hamptons and will have more thoughts after that.

This is the year that print film criticism went on life support, online film critics drafted sober eulogies and the rest of the world yawned distractedly while poised over the plug. Into the ill-attended open grave my colleague Lauren Wissot just tossed a meditation on film culture titled, “The Movie-Going Public.”

I dig it because it dares to take filmgoers as seriously as it does cinema itself. Further, it manages, mostly by way of example, to pee all over the very notion of a professional film critic. I use don’t use the term “pee” lightly but with great care, thinking of readers like Anonymous, who responded to Lauren’s post with, “You’re not an elitist. But you are crass, vulgar and unprofessional… Manny Farber is rolling in his grave.” I want Anonymous, if he or she is reading this, to imagine Mr. Farber howling in pain from the beyond at my using such a crude bathroom word as “pee” in reference to the profession he devoted his life to. But another dead 20th Century critic is probably grinning in his grave. James Agee: “I suspect I am, far more than not, in your own situation: deeply interested in moving pictures, considerably experienced from childhood on in watching them and thinking and talking about them, and totally, or almost totally without experience or even much second-hand knowledge of how they are made. It is my business to conduct one end of a conversation, as an amateur critic among amateur critics. And I will be of use and of interest only in so far as my amateur judgment is sound, stimulating,
or illuminating.” (Props to Ryland Walker Knight.)
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Screw it. I am herewith declaring Mad Men fair game for this movie blog, even though it is not technically a movie. It’s inspiring too much good bloggishness to ignore.

• Emily Nussbaum has gotten some grief for posting a spoilery clip in her Vulture post, but her short, salty take on maybe the biggest “They can’t do that!” scene of the series so far has been indelible. I’ll redact the spoiler: “But this scene, the one with Don Draper [redacted!] an odious she-manager into submission, sent a message. You think this is escapism, lifestyle fun, Entourage with better suits? Wrong-o.”
• Two different interpretations of the final scene. First, Andrew Johnson at The House Next Door: “[Betty is] unexpectedly happy. Like her husband, she’s just paid her freight by sucking up to the people who pay for her lifestyle–and, like Don, she just did so by managing expectations. The episode ends with something we rarely get from Mad Men–a scene in which Don and Betty feel like both a real couple and a real team.”
• And then, the one I’m more inclined to agree with, from Alan Sepinwall: “As Betty sits in that car at episode’s end, reflecting on another night of her husband using her as window dressing for a deal — or, in this case, worse: bait for the leering of a famous drunk — she can’t hide from it anymore. She plays to Don like she’s happy to be part of his life, but she’s crying because she realizes that, yes, she is profoundly sad, and has no idea how to go about improving this state of things.”
• Finally, a word from What Would Don Draper Do?: “The face in the mirror and the name I’ve claimed almost become one. But no matter how many times I answer or accept responsibiliy, just almost. I’d give anything to bridge almost - to fill myself out completely, leaving no empty spaces, not even the fingertips.”

In the wake of the massive success of Stuff White People Like––the sometimes funny (but usually in a really annoying, condescending, post-collegiate know-it-all jerk-off sort of way) blog-to-book sensation that’s taken, um, seven or eight other blogs by storm over the pas six months––there have been, of course, imitators. The most recent is Stuff Hollywood Assistants Like, the most recent in a short line of semi0nonymous blogs which purport to offer tales from inside the drudgery of minimum wag Hollywood employment (see also Hollywood Temp Diaries, and wasn’t this the original gimmick behind Defamer?)

I like SHAL more than some of its competitors, if for no other reason than it actually has a voice and an idiosyncratic sense of humor … you know, like a blog should? Some recent entries of note: Earthquakes, Las Vegas, and Swingers (the diner, not the movie).

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:

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Note: This review appeared in slightly different form during the Tribeca Film Festival.

I saw The Wackness last spring at a special screening held for the critics participating in the Moving Image Institute last week. Afterwards, Sony Classics president Michael Barker was asked about critical response to the film thus far. Barker disclaimed that “most major critics” hadn’t yet reviewed the film, but then said something surprisingly candid about the makeup of the film’s detractors. “What’s the demographic of the critics who don’t like it?” he began, starting a statement with a question in expert post-Robert Evans mogul style. “Female. Single. Mothers with teenage kids––they don’t like the movie.”

Who ever is doing research over at Sony deserves a raise. I fit just two of those descriptors, and I don’t like it, either.

Maybe it’s true that even professional critics struggle to get beyond their own natural demographic biases. A certain (very young, very male) segment of the film blogosphere lashed out at Sony for buying The Wackness towards the close of Sundance––not because they didn’t like the film, but because they loved the film so much that they were moved to protect it from what they saw as the risk of a mis-managed mainstream release. I thought this campaign was absolutely inane at the time—in the virtually non-existent narrative buying climate of Sundance 2008, the boys should have been happy that their pet project was picked up at all––but having finally seen the thing, I’m at no loss to explain why those writers have embraced this film. With its full-on, fully uncritical glorification of adolescent male self-indulgence and permanent immaturity, The Wackness is a kind of cinematic embodiment of certain tendencies that make the sub-AICN movie web go round.

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We all freaked out when famously blog-hostile reporters Peter Bart and Patrick Goldstein recently got on their knees and started their own blogs, but really, the weird part was that these guys were so insistently anti-blog to begin with. They’re both big on railing against critics, and their alleged impotence when it comes to influencing the audience (to reject industry product); they both act like for a professional critic to offer an assessment on a Hollywood film is to somehow throw handcuffs on the potential ticket buyer’s ability to exercise free will (to consume industry product). Well, what are blogs, if not a space where the audience shrugs off those and other types of handcuffs in order to trade notes on their consumptive desires and experiences? You’d think they’d be an industry booster’s dream.

All of that’s a long lead up to the fact that I don’t know exactly how to parse this blog post by Goldstein, in which he once again beats the “who needs critics?” drum, and uses his blog to annoint Hollywood producer Avi Lerner as the “out of touch” review slinger’s populist replacement:

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• Oh good, fake controversy! Everyone’s pointing to Jeffrey Ressner’s Politico piece on Boogie Man, the Lee Atwater doc screening here at LAFF. “Atwater doc makes conservatives groan,” cries the headline. But, as AJ Schnack points out, those groaning conservatives were actually Ressner’s invited guests, conservative plants who would likely be hostile towards the subject matter regardless of its actual treatment.
• On to controversy-baiting classics: “The 7-minute film has a hero called Eveready Harton (sometimes spelled “Hardon”), a fellow with a very large penis who, throughout the course of the film, lets his manhood lead him into contact (mostly sexual) with a naked woman, an unfortunate man, a farmer, a donkey, a cactus and ultimately a cow.” A brief history of dirty animation from Nick Dawson at Film in Focus; behold the adventures of Mr. Harton above.
• Finally, WTF? Sequel Controversy: Corey Feldman strenuously attempted to defend the existence of a sequel to The Lost Boys last night at LAFF, but even the sequel’s director seemed unconvinced: “I still think no matter what, it’s not like Citizen Fucking Lost Boys Kane.” More from Stu at Defamer.

When I read that Patrick Goldstein, author of the L.A. Times column The Big Picture, was launching a new blog under the auspices of the paper, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I think the exact thought that popped into my head was something along the lines of, “Oh hey! He likes to package pseudo-populist opinion as though it’s unimpeachable fact––he’ll fit right in!”

But the rest of the internet is, like, freaking out. Shoutcasting the story as “BREAKING” news, FishbowlLA went on to relate that the Times plans to put “Goldstein’s knowledge and sources to work in a blog that brings responsible journalism to the faster-than-pulp pace of 24/7 online entertainment reporting.” Finally, a “responsible” corrective for our chaos!

But all meta-commentary on this issue of international importance pales in comparison to the hundreds of words put forth by Jeffrey Wells. …Read more

Peter Bart now has a blog, but that’s no reason for him to play nice with the blogosphere. In a post from earlier this week, he did his best to discredit any opinion about this impending Hulk movie that is not his own:

The dweebs may not like the effects. The star, Edward Norton, may not like the cut. And the blogosphere is steeped in bad buzz. So here’s what Universal decided to do about it Sunday night: Throw a party, invite 5,000 folks to a screening and celebrate The Incredible Hulk as an instant hit…The audience roundly applauded the set-pieces of CGI mayhem, as if to tell Comic-Con-ish doubters, “Get a life.”

Because of course, it’s better to manufacture the illusion of “an instant hit” than to actually make an attempt to appeal to the “Comic-con-ish” built-in fans of the brand. I could go on and on about how to claim that the reaction of an invited audience (probably predominantly made up of people on the Marvel, Paramount or associated payrolls) is more valid that the worries of a film’s core ticket buyers is unforgivably solipsistic and probably not in line with Variety’s ostensible mission to couch all value judgments in assessments of commercial viability. But instead, I’ll just quote at length from one of Bart’s more articulate commenters, Shawn Bowers, after the jump.

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