Bryan Appleyard takes a look at the artists who died in 2007 for The Times, and says a few infuriating things about the state of comtemporary filmmaking in the process. The thrust of the piece is a bit of Summer 2007 nostalgia: “The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman drew painful attention to the lack of great European auteurs.” Post-colonial angst is SO exhausting, but let’s engage with it anyway, shall we?

In assessing the year’s disappointments, Appleyard lumps Quentin Tarantino in with Francis Ford Coppola and Philip Roth as artists “who did not die but, somehow, faded.” He dismisses Tarantino on the grounds that Kill Bill was “dismal” (although, both critically and commercially, it was undeniably successful, at least in the States). Death Proof also gets an unrealistic drubbing. In calling Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse “not so much a film as an act of pathological self-indulgence [which] convinced even some of his most devoted fans that the game was up,” Appleyard ignores the fact that Death Proof, which beat out films like Sweeney Todd, The Lives of Others and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in indieWIRE’s comprehensive 2007 critics poll, is widely considered to be the chunk of Grindhouse that could actually stand on its own.

When Appleyard moves on to consider candidates for The New Film Auteur (with a straight face, as if there’s going to be an election, or maybe a competition show on Bravo), his logic betrays even more personal bias.

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• Count on The Hater to find a movie-centric angle to this whole Britney’s pregnant sister thing, and as with a good 50% of the time wasters in the film blogosphere these days, it has something to do with Juno. A side-by-side comparison reveals that Jamie-Lynn Spears’ teen pregnancy seems to be somewhat less loveably quirky than that of a certain fictional character. Consider the contrasting fathers to be: “Juno: Quiet, shy high-schooler who loves running track and orange tic-tacs. Aptly played by Michael Cera. Jamie-Lynn Spears: Quiet (at least in Ok!) college student who loves statutory rape. Adequately played by Some Dude.”
• This week marks the 10 year anniversaries of both the death of Chris Farley, and the release of Titanic. Whitney Matheson memorializes the former, Ryan Stewart wonders if/why the former merits memorializing at all.
• At The Circuit, Mike Jones has a suggestion for Sundance’s “woefully attended” New Frontier program.
• Is Rob Zombie turning the fake trailer he made for Grindhouse into a feature, or is he just playfully asking his blog readers what they want for Christmas?

Eventually Hollywood will learn it doesn’t make sense to spend millions of dollars on a B-movie. It may just take awhile. But if the road towards re-education didn’t begin with Grindhouse, it will possibly start with Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C., the trailer to which is now available courtesy of CHUD.com. The $75,000,000 movie follows a tradition of cheesy Saturday afternoon flicks like 1940’s One Million B.C. and its 1966 remake One Million Years B.C. Of course, back then the B.C. stood for “before computer (effects)” and featured the spectacular — and silly, maybe — visual effects of Roy Seawright and Ray Harryhausen, respectively.

Sure, in terms of effects and spectacle, 10,000 B.C. looks cool, just as Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow looked cool, but it also has the potential of being unintentionally funny, in the same way the primitive people in Battlefield Earth came off as ridiculous. Emmerich may as well have put in dinosaurs, despite the historical inaccuracy, because this isn’t the kind of movie to be taken seriously, anyway. The one thing the movie may have going for it is it’s combination of historical epics like Alexander with fantasy epics like The Lord of the Rings, which gave us its own mammoth-like creatures. I just imagine the story being nowhere near as believable as either one of those examples.

Anyway, if attempts to make big-budget B-movies didn’t work for Tim Burton (Mars Attacks!), Peter Jackson (King Kong) or Tarantino and Rodriguez (Grindhouse), could it really work for the guy who already failed such an attempt with Godzilla?

The NY Observer says Robert Rodriguez has lost Universal’s backing for his Barbarella remake, over the filmmaker’s insistence that his fiancee, Rose McGowan, play the title role. Rodriguez and McGowan “fell in love” on the set of Planet Terror, which led to the end of Rodriguez’s 16-year marriage to his producer, Elizabeth Avellan. According to the story, when the studio was first informed that Rodriguez intended to cast McGowan over “more famous names [like] Nicole Kidman, Halle Berry and Jessica Alba”, they re-calibrated Barbarella’s budget from $100 million to something “in the double-digit millions.” Rodriguez denies this; he says Universal will give him $60 million to make the film, no questions asked, but he thinks he needs $82 million, so he’s shopping the project around to other studios.

Of note: McGowan face was injured in a car accident earlier this year, leading to actress to obtain major plastic surgery. It’s possible that the studio is worried the 17 Cherry Darling obsessives that might pay to see McGowan in a Barbarella outfit may not even be able to recognize her (see this related rumor about the actress’ reported post-surgery trouble landing work). Also of note: not one of the three “more famous” actresses listed above has proven that she can actually open a movie.

On my very first day as a SpoutBlogger, I wrote about a whiny blog post on MySpace by Eli Roth, in which the Hostel auteur blamed both film critics and piracy for the relative failure of Hostel 2, and ultimately declared that he was taking a year off from filmmaking. But don’t worry, he was just joshing! His next project already has an August 2008 release date.

Trailer Trash, according to an email sent by Roth to Bloody-Disgusting, will be a comedy consisting entirely of spoofy movie trailers. Roth says the project is “inspired” by the making of Thanksgiving, his MPAA-baiting contribution to Grindhouse, which Roth describes as “the most fun I’ve ever had filming anything.”

You can watch Thanksgiving above. Keep in mind, it’s not safe for work. Or, like, anywhere.

A few updates on the death of Theresa Duncan/disappearance of Jeremy Blake: The L.A. Times is reporting that a fisherman has found a partially-decomposed body off the coast of Sea Grit, NJ; the Asbury Park Press says police believe it might be Blake, but they’re trying to track down the artist’s dental records to confirm.

Also of note: in this L.A. Times story from yesterday, Chris Lee probes Duncan’s assertion that she and Blake had been stalked/harassed by Scientologists ever since Blake worked on Beck’s Sea Change record in 2004. Blogger John Stodder takes issue with Lee’s story: “This is a hit piece, disguised by the language of compassion. The Times’ speculative implications are completely meritless. The fact is, we don’t know their mental state, and because the police say they aren’t looking into the Scientology/harassment angle, we can assume they didn’t see evidence to justify a connection. Keep in mind the police have seen both suicide notes.”

Stodder also links to a few posts by Ron Rosenbaum about all this. Rosenbaum was apparently a dedicated reader of Duncan’s blog, and in a post dated July 21, he explains that he’s not content to let the matter lie with the New York Times:

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I guess Harvey hasn’t totally given up on the idea of flogging Death Proof and Planet Terror as separate films just quite yet. Robert Rodriguez’ zombie-centric half of Grindhouse has been slotted to screen at Europe’s largest open-air venue at the Locarno Film Festival next month.

Speaking of Harvey flogging, the Weinstein Company has acquired North American rights to Make it Happen, after brokering sales of international rights to other parties at Berlin and Cannes. The film, which was penned by the guy who brought you Save the Last Dance and Step Up, tracks an aspiring dancer who moves to Chicago and becomes a stripper. So, basically, it’s a remake of Flashdance.

Variety has confirmed that Kevin Spacey will be back as Lex Luthor in the next installment of Bryan Singer’s Superman franchise. In the piece, Spacey also vociferously refutes rumors that recently claimed he was retiring from movies. “In no way did I use the word retirement. Someone else pulled that out of thin air. It’s false, there’s not a lick of truth to it.”

Variety had a blurb over the weekend about Trailers From Hell. The site, recently lauched by producer Elizabeth Stanley, invites genre directors (known on the site as “grindhouse gurus”) to record commentary over trailers of their favorite B-movies of yore. The trailers can be watched with or without commentary, on the site or on the “Fun Little Movies” channel on Sprint cellphones and on the iPhone.

So far, the content on Trailers From Hell looks great. They’re spectacular trailers, they’re three-minute hyper-speed Hollywood history lessons, they’re dish-fests. Mick Garris disses Robert Zemeckis for his over-indulgent shooting methods; Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright wonders how anyone could find “Austin Powers that funny when something like Danger: Diabolique is the real deal, and is for my money as funny as Austin Powers.”

Five trailers are available on the site now, with five more in the works. I’ll definitely check back to see what Mary Lambert has to say about Village of the Damned.

Yes, seriously. Those cheeky bastards at the Pioneer Theater here in New York are capitalizing on our apparently inexhaustible appetite for Paris’ prison stint by programming a series of women-in-prison flicks throughout the summer. “See The Horrors Paris Hilton Saw!!!” promises the event’s website.

So far two films have been programmed, with more apparently on the way. Caged, screening on July 14 and 16, stars Eleanor Parker as Marie, whose “harsh experiences turn her from doe-eyed innocent to hard-nosed con.” Then, come back the following week for Shadow: Dead Riot. The trailer, embedded above, promises “cellblock vixens vs. a legion of carnal crazed zombies!” Nathan Lee, writing in the New York Times, blurbs Shadow as “obviously the greatest zombie flick ever set in an experimental women’s prison.”

I’m absolutely positive Paris would be able relate to such horrors, and so is the Pioneer. The website also promises that “two seats reserved at each screening for Paris Hilton, if she would like to join us - and perhaps hold a q&a after the screening.”

Harvey Weinstein has always prided himself on being a maverick, the go-to guy for filmmakers whose visions didn’t fit within the standard Hollywood rules. And it used to work pretty well for him. “Let me see someone break my [Oscar] record,” he boasts in this week’s FORTUNE Magazine. “I’ll be the first to give them the cup. I’ll be Bobby Hull passing the baton to Wayne Gretzky.” But both Harvey’s record and his reputation were largely cultivated on Disney’s dime, and in a post-Miramax world, success-via-audacity has proven harder to come by. Here are three signs from recent press stories that the Weinstein camp is starting to look a lot like a “real” studio”

1. Harvey Sides With Powerful Politician Over Filmmaker

One of the more entertaining segments in Sicko is a montage devoted to Hillary Clinton’s attempt to reform health care in the early 1990s. Using long-forgotten TV clips and archival photos, Michael Moore first paints the first lady as a hero, a glamorous spitfire (that hair! those suits!) who gave those grumpy old men of Congress an injection of much needed “sass.” But in typical Moore style, it’s all set-up for the real volley: not only did Hillary fail to actually socialize American medicine, but as a Senator Mrs. Clinton has become the second-highest recipient of financial contributions from health care companies.

Harvey Weinstein is not only a Clinton supporter, but a family friend. According to the Washington Post, the mogul “begged” Moore to remove the second, damning part of the montage from the film. Moore refused, and Harvey eventually gave up — but does this sound like the same Harvey Weinstein whose support Moore thanked God for when Disney wouldn’t distribute his last film?

2. Quentin’s Making Sequels

You might not have noticed this, but Hollywood makes a lot of sequels (and prequels, and (gag) threequels, and ad infinitum). This is not because fine auteurs like Tim Story and Gore Verbinski really believe they need six or eight hours spread across three years in order to tell their epic stories properly–it’s because, in accordance with simple consumer theory, the studios believe that what they were able to sell once, they’ll be able to sell again.

IMDB currently knows nothing about it, but this past weekend, Kill Bill producer Bennett Walsh told press at the Shanghai Film Festival that two Bill sequels are potentially on the way. Quentin Tarantino had previously alluded to following up with several of the Bill characters years down the road, but according to Walsh, “plotlines [have] already been written”, and production could begin in China “somewhat earlier” than originally expected.

This is all speculation, but bear with me. Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a much-ballyhooed director coming off a super-pricey failure, one your longtime friend/producer and his studio clearly see as an embarrassment. Would it be inconceivable for someone (maybe even that longtime friend/producer, who is under pressure to come up with a handful of hits, and fast) to suggest that your safest bet going forward would be to shore up commercial credibility by pushing up plans to revisit a past success?

3. The Weinstein Board is Hiring A CEO

That FORTUNE story also promises that the board of The Weinstein Company is looking for an outside CEO-type to come in and manage day-to-day operations, so that Harvey can get back to the business of supporting filmmakers. It would be a big deal if it actually happens, but who’s gonna want the job of telling Harvey (and Quentin and Kevin and Bob Rodriguez…) to reign in the spending? As Nikki Finke puts it, “Good luck finding, as one board director said, somebody who’s both a top-level CEO and would be compatible with the market and investors and the brothers.”

***Brian Grazer has hired Rush Hour auteur Brett Ratner to direct Playboy, a drama about the life and times of Hugh Hefner. It’s the third stab at a Hef biopic, after several drafts by Oliver Stone and a musical version (!) proposed by 8 Mile’s Scott Silver failed to pass muster. According to Variety, Ratner got the job by sending Grazer a Playboy pinball machine.

***Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to sign at least one two bills aimed at luring movie production back to California with tax incentives.

***ReelzChannel, a new movie-centric cable network, has picked up ten episodes of What I Learned About (Blank) From The Movies, a Best Week Ever-esque series in which “comedians comment on those ‘valuable life lessons’ hidden inside” classic films.

***The Weinstein Company’s quest to turn Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse into an overseas hit has failed. The extended cut of Death Proof has earned just $10 million in four weeks across ten European markets. Variety adds insult to injury by noting that “French patrons were much more interested in maintaining support for Shrek the Third in its second frame.”