We’ve never been big fans of Slumdog Millionaire here at the SpoutBlog. Kevin Buist was first underwhelmed with Danny Boyle’s hyperactive Mumbai game show movie at Telluride, where he called it “hectic and sloppy, especially considering the rigid and somewhat boring structure upon which the film is built,” and noting that the love story in particular was “sorely lacking.”

When we re-posted this review around the time of the film’s general release, commenters started attacking Kevin right away. “i think you have no knowledge of being a movie reviewer,” ‘prady‘ wrote. “Just watch the movie and its great.You might have some problem,contact your doctor soon.” And ‘clearly’ had a number of questions: “um, Kevin, really? Why are you qualified to write reviews.. perhaps another line of work for ya? Rigid and boring structure? are you blind, ignorant or just stupid?” The onslaught became so much that Kevin responded and defended his position on an episode of FilmCouch.

But after the film’s Golden Globes sweep (see the full list of its wins at the newly re-designed indieWIRE) last night, that review began to attract some very different comments.

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We all like to make fun of the Golden Globes, even when the telecast *doesn’t* involve the bequeathing of an unusual amount of power to Billy Bush. So prepare to have your mind blown: there were eight moments on tonight’s telecast that actually transcended my knee-jerk cynicism over awards in general, and the Hollywood Foreign Press Awards specifically. Some were funny, some were borderline surreal, and all struck me as — gasp! — genuinely unscripted. Join me in counting the moments down to the best — and, in all probability, booziest! If you’re on the West Coast and the show’s going on and you want to avoid spoilers … well, then I don’t know why you’re reading a movie blog, but don’t click through the jump.

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When the Golden Globe nominations were announced last week, there was one glaring omission from the Best Supporting Actor category: a nod for Milk. Actually, there were four glaring omissions, because Milk still does not have a definite forerunner among its quartet of campaigned-for supporting actors, which includes Josh Brolin, James Franco, Emile Hirsch and Diego Luna. Did the Hollywood Foreign Press Association truly snub the film, as has been suggested, or could the organization simply not decide which actor to nominate? Perhaps the two favorites, Brolin and Franco, cancelled each other out. If so, the Academy needs to ensure that such a thing doesn’t happen with its Oscar nominations. And the best way to do this is to get behind Diego Luna for Best Supporting Actor.

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The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has announced the nominees for the annual Golden Globes, and the LA Times has all the info. First-read surprises? The Visitor gets a nod for Best Motion Picture Drama while Milk doesn’t; both Robert Downey Jr AND Tom Cruise were nominated for Best Supporting Actor (a category which the Globes don’t break down by genre) for their work in Tropic Thunder; and Happy-Go-Lucky, which has been racking up the critics nods with several Best Actresses for Sally Hawkins, was completely shut out. Take a look at the full list here, and let us know what you’re particularyl happy or sad about.

• Oh man … I totally forgot about the Val Lewton blogathon, and now I’m way too busy with Sundance prep to write something up. In any case, it starts today, to coincide with the TCM premiere of Val Lewton: The Man In the Shadows. I saw Kent Jones’ doc (narrated by Martin Scorsese) at Telluride, and it’s definitely a must-see for fans of films like Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie who want a taste of Lewton’s lesser-known works.
• Anyone could have guessed that last night’s Un-Golden Globes would be “weird”, but who could have guessed that it would have moved so many journalists to lapse into poetics? First Variety likened the experience to a dream; then, the NY Times topped their coverage with this photo of an unusually long-faced E! anchor, with a caption pointing up his supposed existential dilemma. Now, David Poland’s getting into the act, with this revelation: “I don’t really like ghosts as much as I enjoy the living.”
• A week or so ago, Jurgen Fauth mentioned that he’d bought an URL that he didn’t know what to do with. He’s since figured it out: IDrinkYourMilkshake.com has now become a web portal dedicated to aggregating discussions––and inevitable video mashups, as above––concerning There Will Be Blood. Act now, and you can even get an @idrinkyourmilkshake.com email address!
• Bob Westal ponders Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. “Could this film be the next Duck Soup combining the silliest comedy and the sharpest satire?”

• For you and me, last night’s Golden Globes “news event” was an unpleasant reminder that the walking balloons who present entertainment news need writers just as badly as anyone in the industry. But for “Golden Globe vets,” writes Timothy M. Gray, primarily the journalists who cover the thing, it initiated some kind of psychic break. “Totally disorienting…the short evening was dreamlike, both familiar and unfamiliar…[attendees] walked around with furrowed brows and slack jaws, obviously confused by the whole thing.”
• News flash: no matter how the awards are handed out, people still like to win things.
• The Bucket List and First Sunday almost tied for first place at the box office this weekend, with the former earning $19.5 million to the latter’s flat $19 million. The news that movies for “urban” youth are efficient counter-programming for movies about old people was big enough to push There Will Be Blood’s latest box office triumph ($15,039 on each of its 129 screens) to its own story (and no, that’s not a complaint).

At this point, not even Clooney could act fast enough to end the WGA strike in time to allow a “real” Golden Globes ceremony to go on, but we must be strong. So later this evening, I’ll be blogging what ever’s left of the event live, as I watch it on television. Matt Lauer will play Barbara Walters on a two-hour Dateline special with some of the nominees beforehand, which I may comment on if it gets totally ridiculous, but the press conference proper starts at 6 PST/9 EST, and that’s when my live blog will start, here at this URL, in earnest.

LIVE BLOG FOLLOWS AFTER THE JUMP!

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Sneaky! I was just about to shut my computer down for the weekend (figuratively speaking––you know I don’t actually turn my computer off, ever) when I got the WTF? Variety alert of the week, in a five-day span that’s been full of them. Due to “financial bickering” with NBC, the Hollywood Foreign Press has decided to put what’s left of the Golden Globes telecast “up for grabs”–meaning, they’ll produce the “news event”, and anyone who wants to show up with a camera can air it. “Under the new arrangement, there will be no restrictions placed on media outlets covering the press conference,” quoth the press release.

Jesus. NO restrictions? Anybody in LA want to show up and blog this horror show for us?

BUTTERKNIFE promo: Best Trip Ever

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• Above and at this link: short film inspired by Butterknife, directed by and starring Barlow Jacobs.
• Why you can’t watch Netflix films on your Mac.
• Cloverfield and 9/11: who knew we’d need Harry Knowles to draw a reasonable connection to the two?
• The Fall of the Golden Globes: bloggers accept the awful truth in six stages.
• Loving/hating the movie references of Chris Matthews.
• Documentary filmmakers and festival programmers unite to create a new award.
• A web video star fails to find the humor in a web video spoof of David Lynch’s old school crabbiness.
• Trailers lie! But, we reviewed a bunch of new ones anyway, including: Over Her Dead Body, Paranoid Park, The Business of Being Born, Snow Angels, Hellboy II.
• A widely-reviled film critic gets fired. Is it a boon or a bane for criticism on the whole?
• Put “celebrating the superficial” on your calendar for the first week of February.
• Steven Spielberg is too good for press conferences.
• Tom Cruise is to L. Ron Hubbard, as John Cassavetes was to the devil. I think.
• Has pop culture trained us to prefer a black male president to a white female candidate?
• Pedophilia and bestiality in a possible sequel to Alvin and the Chipmunks.
• Ken Burns: the new Obama Girl.
• Michel Gondry, via Twitter.
• There Will be Blood sends Chris shopping for a Bible.
• More on the “Juno is an indie film” swindle.
• Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other presidential candidates on the big screen.
• Viggo Mortensen backs Dennis Kucinich, who in turn blames Disney for his lack of viability as a candidate.
• The first big winner of the WGA strike? Paul Haggis.
• On the podcast: Joe and Ronnie talk about Butterknife, and two friends of Spout talk about I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.
• A first glimpse at SXSW 2008.
• Impersonating David Lynch.
• An academic’s bold stance on National Treasure.
• Will Smith+Scientology=probably nothing worth getting excited about.
• Is a sequel to the Rocketeer on its way? Chris hopes so.
• Sonic Youth by Claire Denis.
• Designing Berlin Alexanderplatz.

• Annalee Newitz looks at the five most prevalent themes in Clinton-era sci-fi. I would have thrown in a shout-out to strippers, who appear prominently in both Armageddon and Independence Day. But then, I’m usually on the lookout for chances to throw shout-outs to strippers.
• LIBERTAS accuses “millionaire filmmaker” Morgan Spurlock of –– SPOILER ALERT!! –– being too chicken shit to actually hunt down Osama Bin Laden and put a stake through his heart.
• Bob Rehak contemplates the impact the HD format wars will have/are already having on the porn industry. “How will viewers respond to the pathos and suffering at the industry’s core — of capitalism’s antihumanism writ large across the bodies offered up for consumers’ pleasure-at-a-distance — when those excesses are rendered in resolutions of 1920×1080?”
• NBC has decided that Access Hollywood will be the “news” division to cover the Golden Globes. Defamer mocks the ensuing outrage: “If the network had any interests but its own at heart, it would have made some attempt at incorporating the solemn ritual that usually begins each Globes ceremony–the consumption of Orson Welles’ transubstantiated body and blood in the form of filet mignon and stiff vodka-tonics–as a show of good faith.”

• Specialty divisions are expecting this Sunday’s stripped-down Golden Globes to deliver a serious hit in the usual visibility for their Oscar-hopeful product. But one exec quoted in this piece says some of his colleagues are “secretly thrilled” that they don’t have to take their minds off the strike and the election in order to attend one more black-tie schmoozefest. Here’s the kicker: “I had heard that stars weren’t even planning to dress up should the telecast have happened,” he said.
• Although film studios have thus far managed to remain fairly active over the course of the strike, Warner Brothers laid off more than 1,000 employees yesterday, citing an impending “decline in production activity.” At other studios, crew members from struck TV shows have been repurposed  to work on films, but the stock pile of shootable scripts can only last so long.
• Nicole Kidman is pregnant, so Kate Winslet will take the part she was scheduled to play in Stephen Dalry’s The Reader. Winslet was Daldry’s first choice for the role but had been initially unavailable.

Yet more chaos in the wake of The Fall of the Globes: yesterday, we noted that if nothing else, a minimized Golden Globes would spare us the inevitable tribute montage to Steven Spielberg, who is due to receive a Cecil B. DeMille award at the ceremony. Now it appears that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has decided (surely not without some help from the Spielberg camp) that, rather than accept the award at this year’s glorified press conference, “it would be better” (?!?) for the HFPA to just give him the same award next year, when presumably, there will be a four hour telecast to further pad with tributes to Spielberg’s special way with imperiled children, animatronic dinosaurs, animatronic children and imperiled dinosaurs.

I got the Variety email alert for this story, and I admit it––I literally, audibly cried, “Bah!” Other than that, I’ve got nothing. How about you?

If you’re on the East Coast or time zones further down the clock, you may have been already out the door by the time the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and NBC finally, officially conceded their mutual defeat: there will be no Golden Globes, there will only be Golden Globe winners, announced at a one-hour press conference telecasted by––gulp––NBC News. It took several hours for the film and entertainment blog worlds to chew up this news and thoroughly spit it out. Here then, a timeline, culled from my RSS reader, of the blogosphere’s coming to terms with The Fall of Globes, without a doubt the greatest tragedy of our…week. So far.

6:02 PM EST––The Cold Hard Facts: “The mechanics of the one-hour announcement itself are muddled. The original idea was that at some point during the parties the HFPA would stop the proceedings and make the declaration of the winners. Cameras would be poised on the nominees at the different parties, so that there would be reaction from Atonement’s Keira Knightley, for example, at the Universal/Focus party. This concept was scratched by the WGA.” — Anne Thompson

7:21 PM––Let’s Focus On What’s Really Important: “Who aren’t you wearing?! … Sorta hard to have a ceremony when no stars are gonna show … we’re just sayin’.” — TMZ

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• This year’s Sundance juries will be more star studded than I’ve seen them, particularly the Dramatic Competition Jury, which will include five boldfaced names: Quentin Tarantino, Mary Harron, Sandra Oh, Diego Luna and Marica Gay Harden. Other notable names on the other three prize-awarding panels: Eugene Jarecki, Heidi Ewing, Jason Reitman and Alan Alda.
• Marc Graser examines how the fall of the Golden Globes (which we mentioned here, but will go into in further depth later this morning) is going to have a devastating impact on the already-strike-crippled Los Angeles economy. In addition for seriously reduced paydays for party planners, photo agencies, the HFPA and NBC, there are “losses that are impossible to calculate: The film studios and networks use the event to publicize their kudos contenders.”
• Meanwhile, the strike climate may not get better before it gets worse. As Dave McNary puts it, “Despite much buzz in the blogosphere”––thanks for that––”the DGA is still far from reaching the bargaining table with studios and producers.”
• Daniel Day-Lewis, the Coen Brothers and Jonny Greenwood walked away from the Critic’s Choice Awards last night with trophies from the Broadcast Critics Association, for Best Actor, Best Picture/Best Director, and Best Score, respectively.