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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It is a crime in this day and age not to occasionally check in on Jeffrey Wells’ Hollywood Elsewhere, with topics ranging from billboard photos, blind item brunches and oddly angry political rants against apathetic teenagers.
Wells is a classic mix of online reactionary and keen insight, peppered with various “what the fuck” moments and the occasional non sequitur involving Paris Hilton and Al-Qaeda. To ring in the New Year, let’s take a quick look back at our favorite blogged remarks from the man who confused Mike D’Angelo with Ed Gonzalez, and whose random photos of restaurants and lawns oddly resemble–for lack of a better term–art. Also, any use of bold is for emphasis and my own editorial comments are in italics.
Happy New Year, Elephants
On New Year’s Eve, it sounds like Jeff was staying at a raucous party house in one of the Boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn? Who can tell these days.) Conditions were so bad that he was sadly driven to bar-hopping due to his neighbors:
I live below a family of animals — Hispanic party elephants — who stomp around and play music so loud that the building throbs and the plaster cracks. It’s a fairly safe bet they’re going to lose their minds tonight so I may as well just huddle down in the city and bounce around from bar to bar.
Follow-up in the comments from Wells:
People with a little class and breeding and a college degree don’t tend to be as noisy or boisterous or loutish as the commoners, cretins, galumphs, bad dressers, etc. The lower end of the gene pool. T’was ever thus.
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Odienator at Big Media Vandalism is publishing one essay per day this month, in honor of “Black History Mumf,” in an attempt, as he puts it, to “explore the movies Black folks love, regardless of how I personally feel about them.” I’m loving this series, even though the fact that I haven’t seen many of the movies being written about makes me feel like whitest White girl in White City. Here are some of my favorite pullquotes from the nine chapters published so far. You can check out all of these essays and future editions to the series here.
- On Sidney Poitier and No Way Out: “No Way Out is the cynical shocker in [Joe] Mankiewicz’s canon, a film about racial hatred that dropped my jaw. I can’t imagine the reaction people had when they saw this picture in 1950, but it couldn’t have been good…Finally, in a movie, passing for White helps the entire community!”
- On Joel Schumacher’s early career as scripter of Sparkle, Car Wash and The Wiz: “Perhaps the guys who assumed Joel Schumacher was the foremost authority on Black culture were the same ones who left the blackface aspect of The Jazz Singer in the 1980 remake…I don’t even think Car Wash has a screenplay. Yet, I must point out that his characterizations aren’t offensive; he tries and for that I must give some credit.”
- On the arranged marriage scene in Coming to America: “Now, a note to the bougie Negroes and liberal White folks who thought this section of the film was some kind of offensive representation of African culture: SIT YO’ ASS DOWN. Find me another movie where this much glitz and glamour, on such a grand scale, has been afforded people of color.”
We made the most recent entry to our Sundance deal chart late Sunday, and since then, there just hasn’t been anything firm to report. In fact, from Sunday to Tuesday, I think there have been more “why aren’t movies selling” think pieces in places like Variety and the New York Times than their have been actual deals throughout the course of the festival. Of course, nobody really knows what the problem is, but everyone’s willing to hazard a guess.
In her writeup for Variety proper, Anne Thompson said buyers are holding out for “that magic combo of an easy-to-market movie that will earn great reviews”; on her blog, she said buyers “are looking for love. And some may not have found it yet.” David M. Halbfinger’s NYT piece suggests that buyers are holding out in the hopes that prices wold drop. He also manages to find a way to blame bloggers for the sluggishness, with a quote from Sony’s Tom Bernard:
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Jeff Wells notes that Juno, which came in at the third spot at the box office over the weekend, is now besting both I Am Legend and the National Treasure sequel to sell more tickets than any other film during the week. At the rate it’s going, it looks certain to cross the $100 million mark by the end of awards season. To put it mildly, this strikes Wells as something of a surprise:
That’s a mindblower. I never would have called that in a million years. This is just a sweet and sharp little film. I wasn’t levitating after I first saw it in Toronto. I knew that I liked it because it was well-written and well-acted. I still know that. But for me, this makes two head-scratchers in a single night.
Really, Jeff? A teen sex comedy hipped up enough to attract 20-somethings, feminized just enough to attract tween girls, but not so girly that it turns off the Apatow crowd. Advertised EVERYWHERE. Plus, it’s probably the most crowd-pleasing movie to have played a festival in 2007. And you’re surprised that it’s making a lot of money? Seriously?
You would have had to have been stupid to have seen Juno with an audience at Telluride or Toronto and NOT imagined it performing at least as well as Superbad. Jeff Wells is not stupid. Is actively selling the fiction that this is a “surprise”/”crossover” hit a condition of accepting Juno skyscrapers on your site?
I swear to god, I want to stop talking about this, but they keep pulling me back in …
“At the age of 15 or 16, same as some kids discover pot, I discovered Martin Scorsese and David Lynch.” Jamie Stuart sent an email pointing to FilmInFocus, an advertorial portal newly launched by Focus Features, in partnership with Faber and Faber and FILMMAKER Magazine. Stuart has produced three new short films for the site. My favorite of the three is called “Jamie Stuart analyzes Atonement,” but that seems like a slight misnomer–it’s really an analysis of the inspirations and influences of Atonement’s director, Joe Wright, who’s literally on the couch and under the microscope.
Another FilmInFocus feature that may be of interest: Behind the Blog, an (apparently) running series of interviews with film bloggers, including Friends of Spout David Hudson and Andrew Grant.
At the Guardian’s film blog, Sean Dodson erroneously paints WB’s release of the their six-minute Dark Knight prequel on IMAX prints of I Am Legend as an “accident”:
Holy bungled distribution Batman! The wrong trailer has been sent out! Or was it? Audiences in America who turned up to see an Imax preview of I am Legend this week have been treated to an apparent accidental taster of the forthcoming Batman movie, The Dark Knight, which is not due to arrive until July next year. Six minutes of the film were “accidentally” screened in Imax cinemas and the bootleg quickly leaked on to the internet.
Dodson doesn’t site any sources, so it’s hard to say why he reads this as “an accident”––beyond the fact that I guess he didn’t read this story, or this story, or this one, all of which indicate that Warner Brothers had made their intention to run the six minutes public as far back as October. But then, in a stunning feat of blog cliche, he cynically spins this non-accident as a devious conspiracy devised by evil marketing geniuses:
But although Warner pulled the bootleg preview from YouTube earlier today, you can’t help but wonder if this was accident or design…All those who saw it reported that the six minutes of raw action didn’t half leave them panting for more. The Joker couldn’t have planned it better.
So, to recap: Warner Brothers said they were going to show a six minute Joker short before I Am Legend. Then they showed a six minute Joker short before I Am Legend. When a camcorder bootleg of this footage ended up on YouTube, Warner Brothers had it removed, in an attempt to protect their copyright and further bolster ticket sales for I Am Legend. Then a blogger accused Warner Brothers of intentionally leaking the short but deviously making it look like an accident.
I get it now. This is why they hate us.
News of a number of can’t-miss events has flown into my inbox over the past 24 hours. In chronological order:
- This Saturday, The Pioneer Theater in New York is presenting a six-film, 584 minute werewolf movie marathon. $25 buys tickets to the whole affair, or if you really just want to show up at 4 AM to catch Teen Wolf (and who could resist, after seeing the poster to the right?), individual shows are $5 each. For more information, visit The Pioneer’s website.
- The Denver Film Festival runs November 8-18. There are many reasons to be excited about this festival (and Mark Rabinowitz has and will continue to list many of them on his blog), but here’s a new one: I’m going to be speaking on a panel about film blogging, alongside Mark, James Israel from indieWIRE, and director AJ Schnack. For more info and tickets, go here.
- Alas, because I’ll be in Denver that weekend, I won’t be able to head up to Cambridge for the Futures of Entertainment conference, which is happening November 16-17 at MIT. Organized by the Convergence Culture Consortium of the school’s Comparative Media Studies program, the conference will bring together academics and industry experts to discuss a variety of new frontiers of form and content, from mobile distribution to fan labor and the “architecture of participation.” There are only 200 seats available, so if this sounds good to you, register now.
This weekend, Peter Bart and Peter Guber devoted a segment of their AMC chat show Sunday 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.”
“As a student and fan of special effects and new media,” writes Bob Rehak at 
