Every time Kurt Kuenne’s Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, my review of the film gets a new flood of angry comments. Since my analytical response to the documentary seems to be so thoroughly out of tune with the emotional responses of MSNBC viewers, I thought I’d excerpt from a few of these comments in order present the argument of the other side:
“Katrina ,
Your pure uttering of nonsense assures me that you yourself suffer of some form of illness. And I am not saying this as an insult. I truly believe you must be scarred or simply looking to rile up attention by being simple.” — michelle
“Can’t you see that Karina wrote an amateur minded article with the purpose of stirring up emotions? … Move on to a quality review, secure in your own ideas and inspirations.” — John
“I’m stunned at reading the the above “review”, - or that this film was even ‘reviewed’ at all by anyone…The basis for this film are horrid, the final outcome is unthinkable, and for YOU to criticize “how” it was made is beyond me. Just how many devoted friends to you have Karina?” — Judy
“I’m writing to Karina and I just want to say that people like you are what makes up the crazy in this world. I will say a prayer for you.” — tammy
Lessons learned: Documentaries shouldn’t be reviewed; film reviews shouldn’t ask you to question “your own ideas and inspirations”; my name is Katrina, and I am sick and mad because I tried to do my job, which I’ve always thought is not to assess a film’s merits based on how it made me feel, but on the choices made by the filmmaker, his/her degree of craft, and the quality of the finished product divorced of the maker’s noble intentions. I guess I was wrong!
At the Kansas City Star’s TV Barn blog, Aaron Barnhart examines MSNBC’s strategy of devoting as much as a third of their schedule to “documentary” programming. Barnhart takes issue with the channel’s use of the word “documentary” to encompass content as disparate as, on one hand, Witness to Jonestown (an original production of the newish MSNBC Films combining new interviews with ample footage from NBC’s archives) and Dear Zachary (which MSNBC Films acquired in partnership with Oscilloscope straight from the festival circuit); and on the other, the schlocky stuff that makes up the bulk of their “Doc Blocks,” like the Lockup series of Dateline-style exposes set inside various North American prisons, and the COPS knock-off Caught on Camera.
Amazingly, when Barnhart went to Michael Rubin, who programs all of this stuff for the network, and asked, “What’s the deal?” Rubin basically went on the defensive. Not only did he call Lockup specifically “a jewel,” but he insisted that MSNBC’s viewers make no distinctions between high-brow and low-blow non-fiction content. As he puts it:
It finally happened: my obsession with MSNBC has dovetailed with legitimate movie news! Sort of!
Tonight the New York Times broke the news that over a year ago, Dan Mirvish (filmmaker and co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival) and Eitan Gorlin (whose directorial debut, The Holy Land, won the Grand Jury Prize at that festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award) made up a fake adviser to John McCain named Martin Eisenstadt. On Monday, MSNBC’s David Schuster reported on air that Martin Eisenstadt had taken credit for the “Palin thinks Africa is a country” leak. Eisenstadt had indeed published a post on his blog (tagline: “Because freedom isn’t free”) claiming to be the leaker, which no one at MSNBC bothered to look into deeply before Schuster’s report, otherwise they might have discovered that Eisenstadt a) is a made up person, and b) didn’t actually talk to Carl Cameron, the Fox news reporter who broke the “anonymous sources say Palin doesn’t know Africa is a continent” story.
With Halloween dragging the weekend box office down by over thirty percent, High School Musical 3 took the top spot with just $15 million. The Weinstein Company says Zack and Miri Make a Porno came in second with $10.7 million, but rival studios say that projection may be inflated.
MSNBC Films has picked upWitch Hunt. The documentary, which premiered at Toronto and is narrated by Sean Penn, willhave an Oscar qualifying run and then air on TV next year.
Variety has picked up the “Joaquin Phoenix is quitting movies” story. They’re running an AP item which says the actor, who showed up to Saturday’s Two Lovers premiere at AFI with the phrase “good bye” written on his knuckles, confirmed to reporters that he’s leaving the business to “focus on music,” and promised, “I will emotionally impact you with that, as well.”
Universal Studios is building a ride in its theme parks in Singapore and Los Angeles, based on Michael Bay’s Transformers. The attraction is expected to “use 3-D HD footage with special effects, robotics and track to place humans in the middle of a war between the friendly Autobots and evil Decepticons, who can turn into cars, trucks, planes and other vehicles.” Yay, war!
Meanwhile, Universal the studio is planning to sell genre division Rogue Pictures to Relativity Media for $150 million. Rogue has been moderately successful producing low-budget hits like The Strangers, to which a sequel is in development; Relativity will get the development slate as well as the library, although Univeral will agree to distribute all Rogue films through 2013.
MSNBC Films, the documentary unit announced by NBC/Universal’s news channel in June, has firmed up plans for their first two releases. The festival circuit acquisition Dear Zachary will premiere at Tribeca Cinemas on October 29 before rolling out to at least four markets, and in-house production Witness to Jonestown will premiere on the channel November 9. Being that two NBC employees died covering the events at Jonestown, this may be the closest thing to a personal project that a cable network could make.
“I thought it was a great drag show, like Mrs. Doubtfire. You’ve blown the family, it isn’t working, so you come back in a different costume, and you take custody of the kids. So you come back asMrs. Doubtfire.”
As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit addicted to MSNBC, mostly because it’s where loose-canonconservatives go to fade away. So I’ve been watching it, like, a lot. And I know they’re working live without a script, but is that really an excuse for the whole team to fall back on the Chris Matthews gold standard of dragging metaphors out of movies? In the past 12 hours, I’ve heard Brian Williams, Andrea Mitchell and Joe Scarborough all compare Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech to The American President, the Rob Reiner/Aaron Sorkin political romantic dramedy starring Michael Douglas and Annette Benning.
No, probably––thankfully––not. In fact, despite recent reports that the 76 year-old Hollywood icon was on her death bed, she probably hasn’t even died of natural causes.
There’s a malware spam email goingaround, masquerading as an MSNBC news alert, with the headline “msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: Elizabeth Taylor found murdered at home.” If you go to MSNBC.com, you’ll find that the story doesn’t exist. Delete the email!
I had MSNBC on for a while in the background while I was working yesterday, and they were giving what seemed like an inordinate amount of attention to the trailer, released over the weekend, for Oliver Stone’s W. Most of the talking heads were just mocking the trailer and Stone, but gossip reporter Courtney Hazlett had an interesting observation. Noting that Stone is pushing his crew through a (probably ill-advised) grueling seven month production and post-production schedule, Hazlett predicted that crowds might come out just to see a finished product produced under such duress. With a gleam in her eye, she said, “It could be a hot mess!”
Leaving the wildly off-base assumption that moviegoers actually care about the conditions under which a film is produced aside, it’s interesting to see W’s rush to release as a selling point, especialy since so many bloggers are, in the wake of the trailer release, saying the exact opposite.
Jeff Wells points to the above clip of Kal Penn talking about Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and it’s worth watching just for the spectacle of seeing an actor on a cable news program explaining the “dual purpose” of poop jokes.
But I must do a bit of fact checking: Olbermann introduces his guest by bragging that Guantanamo was “reviewed by one critic as a ’scatological remix of a Keith Olbermann tirade.’” That “one critic” was Joe Leydon at Variety. The actual sentence? “Not that the entire pic is a slapsticky, scatological remix of a Keith Olbermann tirade.” Olbermann/his producers justify centering their top story of the evening on a stoner comedy in its third week of release by loosely tying it to the recent release of a Sudanese journalist from the military prison, but it’s not enough to cover up the evidence that this is a Google Alert taken out of context.
I’ve been keeping a vague log of Chris Matthews’ tendency to wedge non-sequitor movie references/analogies into his ostensibly hardcore-wonky political chat shows for awhile. Hands down the worse that I’ve seen: on the night of the Iowa caucus, Matthews tried to diagnose Mike Huckabee’s popularity thusly: “He appeals to a lot of people in the middle of the country, mostly because of I Heart Huckabees.” Really, Chris? Really?
When you consider that my minor obsession with this has required me to become a faithful viewer of Matthews’ god-awful, cheap McLaughlin Group-knockoff Sunday morning chat show, I probably deserve a medal. But give me the silver, because whoever put together the montage on last night’s Daily Show––proving that Matthews is not the only guilty party, but certainly the undisputed champion of the “This event is EXACTLY LIKE that one movie…” genre of political analysis––deserves the gold. Skip to about 4:25 on the above clip to go straight to the good stuff.
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.
filmcouch-114
At the Kansas City Star’s TV Barn blog, Aaron Barnhart examines MSNBC’s strategy of devoting as much as a third of their schedule to “documentary” programming. Barnhart takes issue with the channel’s use of the word “documentary” to encompass content as disparate as, on one hand, Witness to Jonestown (an original production of the newish MSNBC Films combining new interviews with ample footage from NBC’s archives) and Dear Zachary (which MSNBC Films acquired in partnership with Oscilloscope straight from the festival circuit); and on the other, the schlocky stuff that makes up the bulk of their “Doc Blocks,” like the Lockup series of Dateline-style exposes set inside various North American prisons, and the COPS knock-off Caught on Camera.
With Halloween dragging 
Universal Studios is 
