“When you read a screenplay, it doesn’t come with a picture on the cover,” said Adam Siegel, president of Marc Platt Productions, a producer who is friends with all four women and has worked with all except Ms. Cody. “I know a few beautiful women, but none of them write like Dana, Liz, Lorene or Diablo.”

The above quote is the best part of a New York Times piece from the weekend that made me throw up a bit in my mouth despite how delicious it is (this happens a lot to me with Mexican food, but rarely Times articles, even those in the Sunday Styles section). I would have used it for the Bloggery earlier, but of course Nikki Finke was more important yesterday. Coincidentally, there’s something about this profile on Diablo Cody and her “Fempire” that relates to the Finke story, at least to how Jeff Wells responded to Kim Masters’ take, claiming that if Finke was a guy she never would have been attacked in such a way.

Similarly, Cody and Co. wouldn’t be written about if they were men. But more importantly, they probably wouldn’t have been written about if they weren’t such good-looking women. So, while there’s something empowering about this foursome of female screenwriters who each boldly wear an identical necklace with an inscription that reads “Fuck My Face,” it was quite necessary to include a lot of tantalizing quotes about them seeing each other naked and sometimes being “super porno” like. And of course that double-edged quote from Siegel above. And another condescending (to men and women) bit from the piece’s author, Deborah Schoeneman, describing Elizabeth Meriwether (scribe of the upcoming Friends With Benefits) as “a thinking man’s Scarlett Johansson.”

If you recall, some had believed Cody only won so many awards from critics and peers because of what she looks like (and the profession she used to have). So, perhaps Oscar nominations should have also gone to Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist and What Happens in Vegas? Related, would this article have been as interesting if the “Fempire” included Cody’s less-hot Oscar competitors Tamara Jenkins and Nancy Oliver?

More reactions to the piece from others from the last few days after the jump:

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Having seen the trailer for the Ken Kwapis’ cast-of-a-thousand stars self help book dramatization He’s Just Not That Into You many, many times (I watch a lot of SoapNET, Lifetime and, uh, MSNBC), I felt reasonably certain going in that I knew exactly what kind of film it was going to be: a wacky, light romantic comedy of mating manners, set in an alternate universe in which otherwise cosmopolitan adults can’t figure out how to use MySpace, and in which all normal and abnormal interpersonal neuroses and difficulties with intimacy are transposed into total paralysis over text messaging. I hope that someday soon, someone in Hollywood makes the film that He’s Not That Into You Was advertised as, because that’s sounds like the exact kind of science fiction that I really enjoy. But He’s Not That Into You is definitely not that film. The question is: what the hell is it?

That Into You fails to fit neatly into assumptions bred by its advertising and its genre makes it somewhat more interesting, if only because it forces us to contend with what our expectations actually are when we go to see a romantic comedy, and what it would actually mean to subvert them. Screenwriters Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein seem to be very aware of contemporary romantic comedy conventions, as well as a certain tradition of final inning moral clean-up that dates back to the very earliest examples of the genre produced under the Hayes Code. But they have no interest in depriving a mass audience of the crack hit of cinematic junk food that they were promised by the promos. The film’s ultimate willingness to pander to expectation may make it a disappointment on a critical level, but I’m not sure making the audience conscious of the way their guilty pleasure works before letting them have it is something for which the filmmakers should be reprimanded.

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Way back in May, I discovered (long after the rest of the world, I thought) that the 2005 German film Downfall had become unlikely fodder for a huge number of YouTube spoofs. This weekend, Virginia Heffernan looked into the meme for the New York Times. In my post, I commented on the irony that although millions of people have now been exposed to Downfall via the various YouTube spoofs, the videos don’t work as compelling advertisements for the movie itself. Now Heffernan notes that the ubiquity of Downfall as seen out of context not only fails to promote the film, but actually damages the experience of watching it:

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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.

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Trailers for novels aren’t the newest idea in the world, but I still think they’re a neat concept. Unfortunately, they can sometimes actually do harm to a book’s appeal, as in the case of Amanda Goldberg and Ruthanna Khalighi Hopper’s Hollywood-set novel Celebutantes, which arrives in stores tomorrow. The book has four dramatized “trailers”, or clips, pulled from its pages, the best of which is viewable above. Yes, I said the best of which. And if you think that one is bad, then check out the three other truly embarrassing clips at the book’s MySpace page.

So if they’re so bad, why am I sharing them (and possibly helping to promote the book)? Because I wanted to point out that these are the work of McG, who directed the two Charlie’s Angels movies and is currently working on the next Terminator sequel, titled Terminator Savlation: The Future Begins. The actors in these “trailers” are Katrina Begin (featured in the above spot), Cloverfield’s Mike Vogel, My So Called Life’s “Rickie”, Wilson Cruz, and TV actresses Autumn Reeser (The O.C.), April Bowlby (Two and a Half Men) and Michelle Borth (Tell Me You Love Me). None of these people are completely talentless (yes, even McG is better than this), so I’ll state the fault is with the writing of the two authors.

After four seasons of Entourage, could this novel be any less interesting to fans of film-industry-set fiction? Celebutantes seems even dumber and less relevant an Oscar-themed satire than Christopher Guest’s recent disappointment For Your Consideration. It’s no wonder that Entertainment Weekly called the book “silly” and gave it a “C+” grade (it was reviewed alongside another Hollywood-themed novel titled Oscar Season, which fared a little better with a “B”). The magazine also notes that the book’s authors are the offspring of producer Leonard Goldberg (Charlie’s Angels) and actor Dennis Hopper. You’d think they would have a little more insight.

Remember the other day when I insisted that a fat suit has never been funny?

I stand corrected.

Entourage’s recent slide in quality has been well documented, but after seeing the fake trailer for Vincent Chase’s passion project, Medellin, I’m starting to wonder if maybe this season has been *intentionally*, unbelievably over-the-top and divorced from even the show’s previous brand of no-unhappy-endings reality. Maybe HBO is trying to do camp?

I know, I know — Susan Sontag is rolling in her grave– but no one could possibly take this trailer seriously, right? At this point, it’s obvious that they’re mocking Vince, that he’s the brainless celebrity whose ego is so bloated that he walks right into career suicide, thinking he’s making a genius move…right? If so, then the trailer–and the fake website, fake interview (”Me in a fat suit just wasn’t gonna cut it”), and fake quote from a fake blurb-whore–is brilliant, a spot-on indictment of the contemporary star system. But post rim-job shark-jumping, can we really give anything Entourage that much credit?