Interesting. David Poland, who is not crazy about Iron Man (”I just wanted a character who actually dealt with the obvious demons that he overcomes… and not just another really, really cool suit of CG armor”) posits that the fact that other critics are crazy about the film (it’s currently at 86% on Rotten Tomatoes) might be a sign that it’s not going to connect with audiences:

This appears to be the Pass movie of the early summer for critics. Is it because of Downey or the middle-aged hero or talk about a huge opening or the use of the Middle East and the half-ass political arguments of the film that play out hypocritically but pay active lip service to liberals… I don’t know.

All I do know is that when film critics are the ones identifying with your superhero, you may be being successful with the wrong demo for mega-bucks… which is all the film producers wanted in the first place.

…Read more

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.”

And then there’s David Ansen.

…Read more

April 1 proves that there are essentially two types of people on the internet––nay, in the world!––those who think rickrolling is funny, and those who really, really don’t. I’m the latter, somebody at YouTube is the former, and the philosophical gulf keeping us apart is not easily reckoned with. Oh, internet…I love you, but you’re getting me down.

But because the last thing I want is for you to forget what day it is only be taken in by nefarious pranksters, here’s a round-up of fake movie stories I’ve come across on this agonizing day of digital torture. Hey let’s make this interactive––you can vote for where each one falls on the Painfully Unamusing Scale in the comments!

• Peter Jackson will follow up The Lovely Bones by directing both The Hobbit and The Hobbit 2. [If It's Movies]
• Benicio DelToro drops out of the remake of The Wolfman, to be replaced by “[Snarl] Busey, fathered by Gary Busey during an affair with a coyote six years ago during a trip to New Mexico.” [FilmDrunk]
• Harrison Ford will star in Han Solo. Written by Carrie Fisher, the belated Star Wars sequel “will tell of the Space Pirate’s post-Return of the Jedi life – his rocky relationship with Leia, their mischievous Jedi-training twins, and principally, Solo’s ongoing battle with The Hutt’s.” Sic. [Moviehole]
• Leonardo DiCaprio, whose character––spoiler alert!––ostensibly died at the end of Titanic, will nonetheless be back for Titanic 2: A New Voyage. Reports Fandango: “One version that has been slowly leaking onto the Internet finds DiCaprio’s character, Jack Dawson, last seen submerged and turning blue, being picked up by a Portuguese trawler and miraculously thawed out.”
• IGN has a trailer for a movie based on The Legend of Zelda. It’s really elaborate and totally humorless, so who knows––based on the game-to-movie track record, it would not be outside the realm of possibility if this were real.
• David Edelstein apologizes for suggesting that Harvey Weinstein might have limited the late Anthony Minghella’s potential. Oh, wait––this might be a real story. I don’t even know anymore!!! They shoot film bloggers, don’t they?
  

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two days––and or, don’t read many film blogs, which is the likelier of the two scenarios––you’ll know that Nathan Lee was laid off from his position as second film critic at the Village Voice this week, due to unspecified “economic reasons.” That makes Lee the fourth full-time New York based critic to get pink slipped in the past month, and it’s not hard to see his firing as a sign that, as Lee himself put it in an email to colleagues widely circulated on blogs, “staff film critic…jobs no longer appear to exist.”

For those of us old enough to have put a few years effort towards such a career but too young to have achieved any kind of institutional seniority, this is a pretty troubling state of affairs. Strippers are winning Oscars, but *I* have no future? There’s a great joke here, but because it’s on me it’s up to someone else to unpack.

In any case, I’ll point you to the comment sections on both The Reeler and The House Next Door, where bloggers/internet critics like Vadim Rizov and Andrew “Filmbrain” Grant are chewing over the issues with “old media” critics like Glenn Kenny and David Edelstein. Interestingly, a number of members of the extended Village Voice family weigh in, most notably Luke Y. Thompson, whose comment on Lee at The Reeler (which he now admits was “ill-considered”) touched off a firestorm of bashing.

Via Nikki Finke comes word of The Projectionist, a new blog at NYMag.com by the print edition’s resident film critic, David Edelstein. Edelstein’s only been blogging for a couple of days, and already he’s dropped a bit of self-promotion, with this post inviting fans to join him for a special screening of Sideways tonight at a wine bar in Brooklyn. Edelstein will be introducing the film, and will apparently use the opportunity to air a grievance that has been collecting dust for nearly 3 years:

I especially want to talk about the movie because a certain powerful critic (I won’t name him, but two of his initials are “A” and “O”) wrote a cheap, sleazy, opportunistic, and altogether scurrilous column to the effect that the film was acclaimed as intensely as it was because critics tend to be, like Sideways’ protagonist, pudgy, elitist, misanthropic alcoholics with no lives and not the faintest hope of snaring a dishy blonde like Virginia Madsen. To which I say, “Yes, but …”

I’m no detective, but I’m fairly sure Edelstein is referring to this column, in which a NY Times writer fitting the coy description above cited Alexander Payne’s Oscar almost-was as “the most overrated film of [2004].” I, unfortunately, won’t be able to make it down to Brooklyn tonight to see if said mystery writer shows up to defend his three-year stale hyperbole, but if you make it down there, I’ll expect a full report. In any case: welcome to the blogosphere, David!

When word got out that Angelina Jolie would be playing the French/Afro-Cuban Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart, a small but very vocal segment of the population jumped to decry the casting as racist. Labeling Jolie’s work in the film sight unseen a”blackface performance”, the blog Racialicious declared that Jolie (who is, you know, trying to save the world by adopting a bunch of kids of different races) should have known better than to accept the part. “Given that Jolie has two children of color, I would have thought that she might have been more sensitive to issues of race and the place of women of color instead of following in the footsteps of Al Jolson.” Even actress Thandie Newton (who was last seen in a paragon of cultural responsibility called Norbit) jumped into the debate, telling a UK tabloid that she was “shocked” Jolie had “been blacked up to play a black woman.”

Anyone who really knows the history of Hollywood blackface understands that it’s ridiculous to compare Jolie (who appears in Heart wearing a wig and a healthy dose of bronzer) to Jolson, who smeared shoe polish on his face in caricature of Black performers (a caricature that, it must be noted, was not generally considered racist at the time). Still, it’s been interesting to see how mainstream critics deal with the issue in their Mighty Heart write-ups. Newsweek devoted an entire paragraph to the issue:

The studio releasing Heart, Paramount Vantage, insists that Jolie’s makeup was not darkened for the role, and that any complexion variation is caused by the film’s lighting. If they are lying–which is probable–it’s only by a little. In costume and under natural light, Jolie looks, at most, a shade or two duskier than her natural complexion. Regardless, both Jolie and Pearl say they were blindsided by the charges. “I know that people are frustrated at the lack of great roles [for people of color], but I think they’ve picked the wrong example here,” Jolie says. Pearl is more pointed: “This is not about skin color. I wanted her to play me because I trust her.” She sighs. “Aren’t we past this?”

I haven’t found a review yet that professes Jolie’s makeup to be a problem. On the contrary: most high-profile film critics are male, and for them, a new Angelina Jolie movie is, like, the event of the year. Jolie dressed up as Mariane Pearl is not so much an opportunity to contemplate racial and cultural dynamics as it is an opportunity to fantasy role play. Anthony Lane, whose New Yorker review is devoted primarily to the “problem” of Jolie’s schizophrenic sexpot/saint split, contemplates Jolie’s “corkscrewed hair [and] tinted skin,” but is far more interested in her lips, which he dubs “the world\’s most recognizable mouth.” (He also makes the laughable suggestion that Jolie would have been somehow better suited to the career of blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield.) Certainly, no one seems to be getting more pleasure out of this than New York’s David Edelstein, who comes close to crossing the line of common decency by suggesting that Jolie has been “dipped in caramel.”

On the whole, A Mighty Heart is very much a film about reflection, perception, and projection. As a star, Jolie often functions as a blank screen for the projection of the audience’s desires. As usual, despite Jolie’s efforts to generate interest in the issues that she deems important, it seems to be much more interesting to talk about what’s it’s like to look at her.

We’ll have more Mighty Heart chatter on Friday’s edition of FilmCouch.