In the wake of the massive success of Stuff White People Like––the sometimes funny (but usually in a really annoying, condescending, post-collegiate know-it-all jerk-off sort of way) blog-to-book sensation that’s taken, um, seven or eight other blogs by storm over the pas six months––there have been, of course, imitators. The most recent is Stuff Hollywood Assistants Like, the most recent in a short line of semi0nonymous blogs which purport to offer tales from inside the drudgery of minimum wag Hollywood employment (see also Hollywood Temp Diaries, and wasn’t this the original gimmick behind Defamer?)

I like SHAL more than some of its competitors, if for no other reason than it actually has a voice and an idiosyncratic sense of humor … you know, like a blog should? Some recent entries of note: Earthquakes, Las Vegas, and Swingers (the diner, not the movie).

The best thing about Alex Holdridge’s In Search of a Midnight Kiss (trailer above) is its conceptual audacity: not only is it a film about walking in L.A., but it devotes much of its screen time to romanticizing corners and aspects of the city well-known to natives but rarely seen on film (and never as the backdrop for meet-cute one-night-stand cinema). As long as it sticks to being a visually stunning love letter to the much-maligned city, an inverse of the L.A. segment of Annie Hall, a filmic rehab from City of Quartz to a city of romantic fantasy––I can totally get on board with it. It’s when the actors open their mouths that I start to have a problem.

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I had to leave Westwood on Saturday before the much-anticipated (well, at least, by me) screening of Heaven Wants Out, the long-gestating film at the center of Mark Mann’s documentary Finishing Heaven. I’ve been eagerly awaiting published reports that would clue me in on what I missed, but saw nothing for days. Finally, Craig Kennedy has weighed in at Living in Cinema. “I’d love to report that Heaven Wants Out is a belated triumph that will change how we perceive cinema,” Craig writes. “But…

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I grew up in Los Angeles and have fractured but fierce memories of seeing movies in Westwood, the theater-packed micro-city surrounding UCLA, in which the Los Angeles Film Festival is now based. I think I saw Jurassic Park four times at the Avco. I know I saw my first Lubitsch movie (Design for Living) at UCLA. Yesterday I was standing in line at Rite Aid and had some kind of out-of-body flashback experience of getting ice cream at the same Rite Aid after my mother took me to a matinee of Flight of the Navigator. I’m sure people go to film festivals in their hometowns all the time and don’t think it’s weird at all, but I get painfully nostalgic. I, like, went to school and stuff, but hanging out in these theaters for entire summers is how I fell in love with movies.

Funny, then, that I’ve been here for almost two full days and I haven’t yet been able to see a single film. Part of this is a scheduling issue––I got in too late on Monday to make it to a screening, and I had already seen many of the films that played yesterday, including Medicine for Melancholy and The Pleasure of Being Robbed. I did actually try to make a screening of Largo, the documentary about the famed Fairfax club, but I, um, went to the wrong theater by mistake and missed it. And then, there were parties to go to. More on that, with photo evidence, after the jump.

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• Today’s tale of strike woe comes from a meeting of the L.A. City Council’s Housing Community and Economic Development committee, where writers, economists and city officials (and not a single rep from the AMPTP) testified as to the wider implications of the work stoppage. Economists estimate that the strike has already cost the city of Los Angeles $342.7 million, and the tally could rise as high as $2.5 billion before it all ends. Among the sectors hardest hit is the local food industry, which contributes 13% of the city’s tax revenue.
• Sam Raimi is expected to direct New Line’s suddenly-in-the-works pair of Hobbit films, but first, he’s going to make an Evil Dead-esque “morality tale”called Drag Me To Hell.
• After barely coming to play in 2007, Hollywood studios are looking to promote their 2008 slate in a big way via Super Bowl ads. Among the scheduled highlights: Will Ferrell will appear in character in a co-branded spot, promoting both Budweiser and Ferrell’s upcoming New Line comedy, Semi-Pro. Oddly not mentioned in the Variety story, but relevant: with the writers strike heavily impacting ratings of regular programming, a massive sporting event like the Super Bowl suddenly becomes one of the only opportunities to use TV to reach a mass audience.

• “Thank God for the strike,” says Bob Rehak at Graphic Engine. “There is just too much new content out there, and with the scribes picketing, we now have a chance to recover — to catch up.” Meanwhile,
  Nikki Finke reports that Jason Bateman is just one star who is refusing to promote an upcoming film by crossing picket lines to tape interviews. We think Micheal Bluth would have accidentally driven the stair car through the picket line.
• At Re:Sources, Pamela Cohn conducts a “case study in indie distribution” with Ben Niles, director of the documentary Note By Note: The Making of Steinway L1037, and Jim Browne of Argot Pictures. Browne says that if you really want to book your self-produced film in theaters, you’ll have better luck if it’s a documentary: “Theaters aren’t willing to take a chance on narrative features that have no name actors in them. I see little indies all the time that are really strong, well-made movies, but they don’t have the cash to take out the kind of advertising you would need to drive audiences to the theater, or they don’t have any kind of recognizable talent.”
• Spout Maven Demndiary has posted reviews of Frownland, The Tracey Fragments, Grace is Gone and tons more from the Denver Film Festival.
• At Libertas, Dirty Harry says liberal polemics like Lions For Lambs are failing because blogs like his have pulled back the curtain and engendered mass distrust of the Hollywood system. Of course, they also spread negative buzz sight unseen from the moment the logline appears in Variety, but that’s just part of the process…
• On Day 10 of AFI Fest, Craig Kennedy calls In Search of a Midnight Kiss “the nicest surprise of the festival.”
• In the name of making a “dent on [his] December bills with money that I earned by expressing myself on this website,” Michael Tully is taking a Radioheadian approach to blogging.

• Robert Mitchum’s son Christopher Mitchum and two partners acquired remake rights to High Noon at AFM. The team is on the hunt for a director and a star to make the remake for about $20 million.
• A poster and a synopsis for a sequel to George Romero’s Diary of the Dead were unveiled at AFM, but Romero claims there’s not yet a deal to make the film. “I don’t have an idea yet, but if the idea and the money can meet somewhere in the middle, it’s possible.”
• For Craig Kennedy, Chop Shop is “a nicely rendered slice of life at the fringes of civilization with a near documentary feel and a series of fascinating observances.” Short reviews of Honeydripper, Blind Mountain and 1000 Journals at the same link.
• Scott Foundas had a long profile of Robert Redford, the director of AFI’s opening night selection Lions For Lambs, in last week’s LA Weekly.
• Photo evidence: Michael Jones has snap shots and swag shots at The Circuit; Mark Rabinowitz captures a 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days dinner at The Rabbi Report.

Yet another gem from the Silent Movie’s stellar fall schedule that I somehow forgot to mention: The New Naturalists, with Saturdays in December devoted to a handful of works from “America’s new-fly-on-the-wall auteurs.” The Puffy Chair, Mutual Appreciation, Frownland and Old Joy and will be joined by Jennifer Shainin and Randy Walker’s Apart From That. All that, and not an M-word in sight.

I’m swooning this morning over a 16-page PDF, advertising the fall programming schedule for Los Angeles’ Silent Movie Theater, which has recently been remade as a full-service rep house. Growing up in Los Angeles, the old Silent Movie was a key constellation on the moviegoing map, along with the New Beverly, the Nuart, the Music Hall, that shitty discount Cineplex Odeon on Fairfax and Beverly, and the (recently-shuttered) Rialto in Pasadena. Now that I’ve been spoiled by New York theaters like Film Forum and the Pioneer, I understand that none of these places were all that adventurously programmed when I was frequenting them in the mid-to-late 90s, but within Los Angeles’ oppressive strip mall non-culture, there was something exciting about watching something like King Kong with live organ accompaniment at the Silent, or even just getting a car full of people to drive out to Pasadena to see a print of Ghostbusters that actually had scratches on it.

But with the new Silent Movie, Los Angeles finally has the rep house that it probably doesn’t deserve. The program for the remainder of 2007 is wildly exciting. I’ve listed some highlights after the jump; you can download the gorgeous PDF program here.

[Via Filmmaker Blog]

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This NME story points to the trailer for Passions Just Like Mine, a documentary about Morrissey fans directed by Kerri Koch. According to the movie’s website, the film focuses on one fan in particular, a working-class Mexican immigrant named Jose who “credits Morrissey with saving his life.”

This makes Passions the second documentary about the Los Angeles-based subculture of Latino Morrissey fans that I’ve heard of in as many years. The first was Is it Really So Strange?, directed by William T. Jones, which I saw at Anthology Film Archives in 2006, at a hipster-packed screening where I sat behind celebrity Smiths fan Chloe Sevigny. What made that film interesting was the ingenious ways in which Jones turned his lack of access into an asset. A photographer-turned filmmaker, Jones structured the film as fan’s photo album of fandom. His only meeting with Morrissey was almost accidental, but Jones’ diary-esque telling of that encounter was compelling in an almost confessional way.

It’ll be interesting to see if Koch’s approach sufficiently differentiates her film from Jones‘, which screened at several festivals and is available on DVD via Frameline. I’ll tell you one thing: I never thought I’d have to worry about Latino Morrissey fan doc fatigue.

UPDATE: In the comments, Matt Dentler and Tom Hall point to Viva Morrissey, another doc about Morrissey’s Latino fans (this one’s a short), which screened at SXSW in 2006. I haven’t seen it, but of the three films, it certainly has the most sophisticated trailer.

I try not to get involved in inter-blog fighting, but there’s a rumble happening right now that’s just a little too weird to ignore. I’m trying to follow all of this based on Kate Coe and Mayrav Saar’s coverage at FishbowlLA. I’m still a little fuzzy as to how Fishbowl got involved, but they’ve been publishing an email back-and-forth between film bloggers Nikki Finke, David Poland and Jeffrey Wells that’s shaping up to be the cattiest thing I’ve ever seen.

It looks like it all started when Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere sent an email to Nikki Finke, to “congratulate” her for winning an LA Press Club award. The email started out like this:

Congrats — good for you, good work, hats off. That said, I have to say I’m detecting a culture of clubbiness among the winners. I get the feeling they’ve all hung and schmoozed with each other (or with LAPC board members) all year at various drinky LAPC gatherings.

Finke responded (all lower and uppercase hers):

your email wound up in my spam folder. i’ve never socialized with one member of the LA Press Club. i’ve never even met a single member. no one i know belongs to the LA Press Club. my understanding from my own newspaper is that the club itself does NOT judge the entries. i was told they send out the entries to another major press club who judges it.

Then David Poland got involved, sending an email (to Finke? to Saar?) seconding Wells’ “congratulations”. It read in part:

Considering the lame field of people who were entered in the contest, Nikki had to win. [...] Congrats! One-eyed woman, kingdom of the blind, etc; you are truly the queen of the local newspaper movie gossips!!!

Poland and Wells are clearly just getting catty because they, Finke’s fellow L.A.-based entertainment journalists, were both ignored by the Press Club. At some point, Finke apparently sent an email to the LA Press Club, complaining that other local bloggers were trying to slander their awards. FishbowlLA then published two missives from members of the club, both strenuously denying any kind of voting irregularities, and emphasizing that Finke couldn’t have gotten “drinky” with the voters, because each press club’s awards are decided by press club members in other towns. Cue David Poland:

If I was a judge in some other city and got a dozen (if that) submissions on film, I would certainly think Nikki the most entertaining by a landslide… so long as you don’t know the film business, which judges from other cities do not…Enjoy your award, Nikki. You’re the most popular car wreck in town not directed by Michael Bay. Now, go back to beating up Terry Semel on your gossip blog because some idiot friend of yours is jealous of him and doesn’t realize that Yahoo! was near death when he took over and that he is the only reason the company is at all competitive with Google.

This, apparently, was too much for Wells, who mentioned on his own site earlier this week that Poland gives him a “I’m looking at you but I don’t see you because you don’t exist” look” whenever they meet.

I realized some years ago that the only action I could take that would truly satisfy you as far as my HE jottings were concerned would be to drink hemlock or do a swan dive in front of a moving bus. All I know is, you could have been a little nicer about this.

Where’s this torrid little skerfuffle gonna go next? I know two things to be true: 1) when Saar sums it all up by saying, “This is the equivalent of watching other people’s parents fight,” she’s* totally right; and 2) The HE commenter who says he’d cast Russell Crowe and James Gandolfini as Wells and Poland in the movie of this is on to something. How about Gena Rowlands as Nikki Finke?

*added an “s” in order to connote the appropriate gender.