Robert Lloyd’s review of the new At the Movies, which debuted on TV this past weekend, hits on a good point that often gets lost in the, “Wow, The Two Bens were bad” pile-on. It’s not just that neither was very good, but that even in their badness, they were poorly matched:
Mankiewicz (grandson of “Citizen Kane” writer Herman and the great-nephew of “All About Eve” writer and director Joseph) was clearly better versed than Lyons (son of “Sneak Previews” host Jeffrey) in the literature of film, but that tended to make the show seem unbalanced. The original hosts could be spiky toward each other, but they always came off as equals; when they disagreed, Mankiewicz tended to make Lyons look wrong.
Lloyd is correct that the new version, starring A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, “restores the balance” between critics that made the old Siskel and Ebert battles so entertaining. But the show is not as humorless as those shiny table promo shots might have you believe. Witness my favorite moment of the first episode above, in which Scott approaches his review of Guillermo Arriaga’s The Burning Plain as a dry, conceptual joke.
Above: the nearly five minute trailer for the new incarnation of At the Movies, starring A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips. Of note for the strenuous attempt to imprint the notion that this pair is all that those young, recently fired guys named Ben were not. Actual titles used on screen within the first minute of the trailer: “Two accomplished critics”; “Serious reviews”; “Serious journalists.” The trailer also allows Philips and Scott to casually run down their list of professional credentials, and then goes behind the scenes of a photo shoot producing a very serious promotional shot of the two critics sitting at a big shiny table. It’s all very, very serious. Which is awesome.
Present Company is ostensibly about two young parents in a fading relationship who suffer cohabitation in a parent’s basement for the sake of their toddler, but director Frank Ross tells us what his film is really about in the first scene. The director stars as Buddy, an insensitive, immature twenty-something who is apprenticing in construction. We meet him on the job, where his co-worker has just opened a can of some kind of hazardous chemical. Not wanting to inhale the fumes, Buddy recoils. “I’ve got a long life ahead of me man,” he protests. A few lines later, assessing the work they’ve done, Buddy says, “We kind of glued ourselves into a corner, huh?” “Not me, man–you did it,” his co-worker responds.This is a movie about a boy stuck in a situation that feels interminable, who instead of taking responsibility for having glued himself in a corner, tries to share the blame with everyone around him. Too on-the-nose? Maybe, but it’s forgivable as a kind of thesis statement for a film that otherwise refuses a black-and-white analysis of its characters and their behavior. Somewhat less concerned with physical space than his last film, Hohokam, Present Company concentrates on making tangible the invisible space between people, and the lying, cheating and play-acting that we do to either transverse the space or willfully ignore it.
After explaining why Lionsgate declined to screen the film for critics, Armond White begins his review proper of Why Did I Get Married? on contrarian autopilot: “Most critics don’t ‘get’ Tyler Perry basically because most critics are whites who are not only clueless about Perry’s African-American culture, but unsympathetic to his particular expression.” Okay, probably. But isn’t that obvious? I started to wonder if old Armond wasn’t losing his touch.
Oh, but wait! Further down the page, he hits us Whiteys where it really hurts, by attacking sacred dude-com cow Judd Apatow. “Nothing in Knocked Up is as meaningful as Perry’s spectacle of men who must restrain their anger physically or his politically incorrect fashion show of women proudly, luxuriously wearing furs as signs of pleasure and achievement,” White sniffs. It gets better, when White insists that the derogatory terms most commonly used to describe Trapped in the Closet would be better applied to SuperBad. And I could go on. Just read it in full.
Late Friday, the AP ran a story about Roger Ebert’s on-going contract negotiations with Disney/ABC (the producers of Ebert & Roeper) with the headline, “Ebert, No Thumbs, Up or Down, on TV Show“. Along with the wife of his former partner, Gene Siskel, Ebert owns the trademark to the “thumbs up” concept, and according to a press release submitted by ABC to the AP, Ebert had “exercised his right to withhold use of the `thumbs’ until a new contract is signed.” The AP story goes on to report that two episodes of Ebert & Roeper have been taped sans both Ebert and thumbs.
Contrary to Disney’s press release, I did not demand the removal of the Thumbs™. They made a first offer on Friday which I considered offensively low. I responded with a counter-offer. They did not reply to this, and on Monday ordered the Thumbs™ removed from the show. This is not something I expected after an association of over 22 years. I had made it clear the Thumbs™ could remain during good-faith negotiations.
In his statement, Ebert expresses a desire to resolve the dispute, and to get the thumbs back on the air as soon as possible. But is that still a viable possibility?
Brian Lowry has a favorable review of The SimpsonsMovie: “Put simply, if somebody had to make a Simpsons movie, this is pretty much what it should be — clever, irreverent, satirical and outfitted with a larger-than-22-minutes plot, capable (just barely) of sustaining a narrative roughly four times the length of a standard episode.”
Variety has a loooong consideration of Lindsay Lohan’s future career prospects, as well as an update on the status of Poor Things, the film the rehab rat was scheduled to begin shooting next month alongside Shirley MacLaine. Can Linds make a Robert Downey Jr.-like comeback? The story quotes sales agent Andrew Herwitz, who speculates that Lohan might be able to find redemption in indie film: “She wanted to break free of kid roles, anyway. A lot of indie producers are probably going to be able to cast her in interesting parts because she will actually be reading their scripts. Not a lot of other scripts may be sent to her for a while.”
Way back in April, Spout partnered with The Reeler to bring you video coverage of the Tribeca Film Festival. Now S.T. VanAirsdale and friends have re-launched ReelerTV as a weekly show, and I had the honor of being a guest on this week’s installment. After a rundown of the week’s news and a man-on-the-street segment, I join The Reeler himself in the lobby of the Pioneer Theater, to discuss two films opening this week: Hairspray and Goya’s Ghosts. I’ve embedded the episode above; you should also be sure to check out TheReeler.com to watch and/or subscribe to past and future installments.
***Director Kathryn Bigelow has cemented a cast for The Hurt Locker, which is, as far as I can tell, the first film by a major Hollywood director to be set in present day Iraq. The film was scripted by journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with a bomb squad. He tells The Hollywood Reporter: “We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can’t see on CNN, and I don’t mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn’t actually put photographers in with units that are this elite.”
***Variety’s Brain Lowry watched I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry so that you never, ever have to. And though he concedes that “Sandler’s fans should enjoy hearing him toss off lines about being ‘big-time fruits’ or having ‘boarded the dude train’,” ultimately “it will be slightly depressing if a barrage of schoolyard gay jokes passes for ‘edgy’ a quarter-century after Victor/Victoria.”
***After the massive critical success of her feature directorial debut Away From Her, Sarah Polley will return to the other side of the camera to star opposite Jared Leto in Mr. Nobody. It’s the first English-language feature for Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael, and THR’s Borys Kit says the script is “a multilayered love story inspired by the ‘butterfly effect, the chaos-theory notion that the beat of a butterfly’s wings can cause a storm thousands of miles away.”
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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After explaining why Lionsgate declined to screen the film for critics, Armond White begins 
***Director Kathryn Bigelow has cemented a cast for The Hurt Locker, which is, as far as I can tell, the first film by a major Hollywood director to be set in present day Iraq. The film was scripted by journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with a bomb squad. He 
