Facebook and Seesmic have banned a promotion for the international rollout of the Diane Lane film Untraceable. The movie basically bombed when it was dumped here in late January, but because people on the internet love nothing better than making fun of mainstream cultural stuff that pretends to understand the internet, it garnered a bit of snarky blog attention for its ridiculous premise alone. Lane stars as some kind of FBI cyberterrorism analyst who is charged with stopping the mastermind behind KillWithMe.com, who pledges to murder captive victims when the site reaches a quota of page views. Totally misguided attempt to plumb the new web culture as dressing for the same old thriller, and thus a sure sign that Web 2.0 is dead? Or a genius satire of the internet publishing industry? Nobody cared either way, I guess––the film has so far failed to make back its production budget domestically.

Which means its international box office is key. Which explains why Universal, desperate to make some noise, would hire a firm to essentially replicate KillWithMe.com on social networks.

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• “You know neither of us are really very creative people, Joe. I mean, I have filmmaker friends who walk around generating plot ideas all the time, but shit, when I walk down the street, all I do is brood about my friends and my loved ones and really zero in on all the attending barbs and snags and accrued resentments that seem to get in the way of closeness.” Ronnie Bronstein pulls back the curtain on himself and Joe Swanberg in the latest installment of our Butterknife interviews. See also: Butterknife stills.
• On this week’s podcast: An argument about No Country For Old Men, a love letter to Billy the Kid.
• Sundance goes trolling for submissions on YouTube. Slamdance, as far we know, doesn’t.
• Huey Lewis, Seth Rogen, and the return of the plot song.
• There Will Be Blood: more aptly titled than you might imagine.
• Why Billy the Kid is the anti-Juno.
• Karina is SUCH an Elliott Gould fangirl.
• Does Silent Light seem any less brilliant, now that we know it was inspired in part by freeware?
• Imagining a post-Gawker age of less-cynical criticism.
• The National Board of Review: Old, but generally inoffensive.
• Michel Gondry’s remake of Dancer in the Dark. Sort of.
• The Speed Racer trailer leads to an unexpected outpouring of love for The Postman.
• Chris looks into a couple of new techy things that feed on every cinephile’s desire to be alone with people.
• Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer: behold the bizarre.
• No one has C & Ded us on these Heath Ledger Joker pics. Yet.
• Knocking Knocked Up is SO boring.
• WIN AT YELLING!!!

Agnes Varnum has an interesting post at Re:Sources about blogs and bias. There’s this old chestnut about bloggers, that because our voices are distinct and our biases are supposedly transparent, our audiences can trust us more than a mainstream outlet. But Agnes notes that internet outlets are susceptible to some of the same bias issues as corporate media. Specifically, the editorial at larger sites is often beholden to the interests of their advertisers, and the all-attention-is-good-attention competitive business model can lead to a tabloid mindset, wherein “some days, they might have to just bend the truth to make it juicier.”

Implying that the impartiality of the Gawker blogs should be taken as less than a given, Agnes drops a reference to a review of Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs by Emily Gould (who, coincidentally, abruptly announced her resignation from Gawker last Friday).

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…that, and other revelations about what celebrities blog about, courtesy of this feature on Gawker. Surprising: 36% of all celebrity blogging is devoted to “shameless self-promotion”; I would have pegged it at 70 or 80 percent. Not so surprising: statistically, blogging celebrities devote exactly as much virtual ink to “indecipherable rants” as “Republicans.” Nice graph, but I have to say, I’m SHOCKED that the Gawk squad let Jeff Bridges’ use of the word “netiquette” slip by un snarked-upon.