When I read that Patrick Goldstein, author of the L.A. Times column The Big Picture, was launching a new blog under the auspices of the paper, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. I think the exact thought that popped into my head was something along the lines of, “Oh hey! He likes to package pseudo-populist opinion as though it’s unimpeachable fact––he’ll fit right in!”

But the rest of the internet is, like, freaking out. Shoutcasting the story as “BREAKING” news, FishbowlLA went on to relate that the Times plans to put “Goldstein’s knowledge and sources to work in a blog that brings responsible journalism to the faster-than-pulp pace of 24/7 online entertainment reporting.” Finally, a “responsible” corrective for our chaos!

But all meta-commentary on this issue of international importance pales in comparison to the hundreds of words put forth by Jeffrey Wells. …Read more

This review first appeared in slightly different form during the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Operation Filmmaker opens in New York tomorrow.

As a portrait of post-Sadaam Iraqi youth, Operation Filmmaker doesn’t have the “wow!” factor of another recently released movie about Iraqi kids looking for refuge in American popular culture. But for a film that began life as a vanity project designed to document an act of kindness on the part of a Hollywood star, it’s a surprisingly evocative examination of privileged, well-intentioned ignorance. That director Nina Davenport chooses to resolve the story on a pat, inappropriately jokey note is thus maybe a fitting way to end a story of conflict between the self-oblivious and a master manipulator, but it’s still a disappointment.

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I’m going to spend about four hours this weekend with my celebrity boyfriend, Young Albert Brooks, at Anthology Film Archives‘ double feature of two of Brooks’ early, still super-relevant films, Modern Romance and Real Life (see above). But if you’re not lucky enough to be in New York, there are three films opening in general release that we covered at SXSW.

Chris already mentioned Run Fatboy Run today. He also reviewed Robert Luketic’s gambling porn thriller, 21: “[I]t’s basically Little Caesar set in the world of card counting, which in fact isn’t illegal, yet in Vegas is viewed as being just as criminal as bootlegging was during Prohibition…[but] nerds just aren’t as entertaining as gangsters and blackjack and brains just isn’t as cool on screen as bank robberies and machine guns.” And then, of course, there’s Stop-Loss. Michael Lerman said MTV/Kimberley Pierce’s Iraq PTSD movie is too centrist for its own good: “Perhaps the performances and plotting would’ve worked better as less of an unbiased study of aggression and more of a critique of the current political situation, as the script seems to be. It’s as if the two things are working against each other and the actors are veering off in a different direction from the themes.”

Another season of MTV’s faux-reality melodrama and grade-A guilty pleasure The Hills debuted last night, and it was greeted by yet another New York Times review comparing its “plotlessness and dreamy cinematography” to the cinematic style of Michaelangelo Antonioni. As you know, I’m a big fan of cinema-conscious analyses of the Hills. But when the NYT’s Ginia Bellafonte calls The Hills — a by-all-accounts highly manipulated soap opera about “real” people, produced for the consumption of young, female mass audience — “Antonioni-esque,” what does she actually mean? I carefully watched the season premiere this morning on MTV.com and came up with five areas where this tale of California blondes of the aughts converge with Antonioni’s mid-to-late century masterpieces of modern isolation.

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No Oscars host has done better Best Picture parodies than Billy Crystal. And no awards show has had better parodies than the MTV Movie Awards (specifically the Max Fischer Players reenactments from the 1999 show). So it is interesting that MTV’s movies editor Josh Horowitz has made a video in which he’s aping Crystal’s opening shtick. And comparatively, he’s not very good. Some of it is kind of funny, including the whole No Country for Old Men phone call, especially the line about Juno being Abigail Breslin with the mouth of Dennis Miller, and the bit about how in There Will Be Blood Kevin J. O’Connor’s mustache seemed to be trying to compete with Daniel Day Lewis’. But I was completely bored by the Michael Clayton bit.

It is at least funnier than that Vanity Fair “In Memoriam” thing. And that There Will Be Blood thing with David Spade. But it’s not quite as funny as the Diablo Cody video from earlier today.

The video is worth watching for one reason, though: Kurt Loder, scarier than ever. The next time I see him in person, I might actually run away screaming. He’s definitely more frightening than The Ruins looks. I have to say, though, as creepy as he is, I can’t wait to see him in Big Trouble in Little China 2.

Anyway, good luck to Jon Stewart this Sunday. And remember, if you’re in NYC, you can watch his monologue and the rest of the ceremony with your friends at Spout and our friends at The Reeler. See here for details.

MTV has posted a fantastic interview with Jack Nicholson, in which he talks in depth about Chinatown, its sequel, The Two Jakes, and a planned third film that was to complete the trilogy, but, because of the poor reception to Jakes, never got made. An excerpt:

We always planned on making three films. We wanted it all to be tied into elemental things. Chinatown is obviously water. The Two Jakes is fire and energy. And the third film was meant to be about Gittes’ divorce and relate to air.

MTV: Was the third film in the Chinatown trilogy ever scripted?

Nicholson: No. I would imagine Robert [Towne] has some kind of outline. I can tell you it was meant to be set in 1968 when no-fault divorce went into effect in California. The title was to be Gittes vs. Gittes. It was to be about Gittes’ divorce. The secrecy of Meg Tilly’s character was somehow to involve the most private person in California, Howard Hughes. That is where the air element would have come into the picture.

Nicholson goes on to say that he “certainly would consider” making Gittes vs. Gittes if Paramount and Towne were to show interest. That and much more here. The interview’s a two-parter, which I usually find annoying, but Part One was good enough that I’ll happily be back for Part Two tomorrow.

I’ve been slowly gathering material for an academic article about the film references used by both bloggers and “real” journalists to talk about MTV’s The Hills. Stories and blog posts that discuss the show using the language of academic film/media criticism, some likening certain aspects of the show to the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Eric Rohmer, have begun to stack up. Now, Jim Carrey and Peter Weir have been thrown into the mix, with a post on PopWatch titled, ‘The Hills’ is Like ‘The Truman Show’, Only Awful.

This cinematic reference is, in terms of the literal conditions of The Hills‘ production, probably more accurate than most, but when held up to any sort of scrutiny in terms of the content of the show, it’s proven to be off the mark.

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The music video is primarily a medium of close-ups and wide tableau, with very little in between. In its traditional, performative form, framing is designed to either be tight enough to confirm lipsynch accuracy, or far away enough to properly present multiple bodies in slickly choreographed motion.

I am convinced that no director of music videos has worked the close/wide divide better than David Fincher. To be fair, I haven’t seen Zodiac, but I could take or leave his previous five feature films. In my mind, Fincher reached his creative and technical peak between 1989-1990, when he was directing music videos for Paula Abdul, George Michael, Billy Idol and, most impressively, Madonna. Is any image filmed in 1990 more iconic than this frame, from Fincher’s video for Madonna’s “Vogue”?

Fincher’s best video works actually function in part as tribute to the very concept of the close-up glamour shot, and he reached his absolute peak using Madonna as a more-than-willing sponge for the visual detritus of the studio era. Three of his Madonna videos (”Vogue”, “Express Yourself” and “Oh Father”, all of which made the Top 15 of Slant Magazine’s Top 100 Greatest Music Videos list) are so good that even now, 18 years on, watching them occasionally sparks a tear in my eye. A fourth Madonna/Fincher collaboration, “Bad Girl”, is incredibly silly, but still compulsively watchable. Even in Fincher’s lesser works, it’s the close-ups that punch me in the gut. In terms of his Madonna videos, Fincher’s close-ups are the most intimate images of the star that we’ve ever known.

Notes on Fincher’s signature close-ups after the jump.
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MTV has the exclusive trailer for Stop-Loss, Kimberley Pierce’s long-awaited follow-up to Boys Don’t Cry. The film–which has already been the subject of much partisan bickering, sight unseen–stars Ryan Philippe as a decorated Iraq War veteran who resists a loophole that would send him back into combat after his tour of duty is up.

Fox Searchlight is in the process of casting Notorious, a drama about the life and death of slain rapper Notorious B.I.G. (AKA Biggie Smalls, AKA Christopher Wallace), a project which Biggie’s mother and former managers have been trying to get made for seven years. Having apparently exhausted Hollywood’s supply of obese African-American actors (”His looks, his stature, what he represented, the swagger, the sensibility of the man — all those elements are very difficult to find, no matter where you go,” says producer Wayne Barrow), they still can’t find a leading man. So starting this Sunday, the production will begin accepting audition tapes from the general public via BiggieCasting.com.

Two years ago, when the film was still set to be directed by Training Day’s Antoine Fuqua (it’s now in the hands of Soul Food’s George Tillman), Barrow said the producers were considering a number of known actors, including Anthony Anderson. But I guess he forgot about that, because by way of justifying the open call, Barrow told USA Today that “no one came to mind outside of Forest Whitaker who could capture that essence genuinely” — and, at 46, the Oscar-winning Whittaker is about 20 years too old for the role.

I think this is a tricky proposition. On the one hand, I see how it makes sense–there certainly couldn’t be a more cost-effective way to hold open auditions. But in the same USA Today story, Biggie’s mom, Violetta Wallace, makes it clear that they’re not looking for a Biggie “impersonation,” and in the current spoof-obsessed web climate, you have to assume that that’s exactly what they’re going to get. Can you imagine how many skinny white college dudes are going to read about this and take it as an open invitation to corrall a bunch of coeds into a hot tub for borderline-racist (and definitely sexist) “Big Poppa“-inspired video antics?

The real Biggie formed his persona at a cultural crossroads: born into a relatively stable home set amidst the crack-infested streets of Bed Stuy, he made a conscious decision to drift away from his private school life and immerse himself into what we on the West Coast would have called “thug life” (okay, not me–I was white, suburban and 12–but that’s what I learned from watching the MTV). If the producers are really looking for someone who gets the character and his background, who will give a deeply felt performance instead of an actorly-one, I doubt they’re going to find it by appealing to the YouTube generation. But I’m sure the audition tapes will be good for a laugh.

I’ve previously expressed concerns that Google’s renewed commitment to cracking down on copyright infringement will have a disastrous impact on YouTube and GoogleVideo potential as teaching tools/living media archives. Today, via CinemaTech, comes this Wall Street Journal article (if you’re not a subscriber, try this link) about people hired by companies like Viacom to seek out and request the removal of copyright content from YouTube.

The company profiled says they earn as much as $500,000 a month from each of the media companies that employ them. Most of their focus seems to be on removing music videos that have been illegally uploaded by MTV viewers, and comedy sketches illegally sourced from Comedy Central. Since many of these videos are available for legal streaming on MTV’s Overdrive and other sites, you have to wonder: since the average YouTube “pirate” surely doesn’t care enough about a company like Viacom to try to deliberately hurt them, why would they bother uploading these clips at all? Why would anyone want to watch a choppy YouTube clip of Same Girl when MTV.com has the same video, in a slicker player and at a higher resolution?

My guess is that a big part of it is the demand for embeddable clips — you can link to MTV.com’s videos, for example, but you can’t display them on your own blog or MySpace/Facebook page. A big part of the appeal of watching online videos is being able to share them. Teenagers especially seem drawn to the practice of using YouTube clips of their favorite music videos and funny scenes as building blocks in constructing their online identities. When you’re 16, your MySpace page is your personal portal, your social resume, the one-stop shop where friends and crushes can receive all your sanctioned information. If you were that 16-year-old, would you really want to have to “express yourself” by directing your friends to go check out all your favorite videos on Comedy Central’s website?

My big concern with the YouTube crackdown is that it will make it impossible to share hard-to-find media detritus: rare interviews and TV clips, scenes from films that aren’t on DVD, etc. It’s nice to see Delaney heavily imply that media companies are taking a hands-off approach to fan-altered clips containing copyrighted content, and just about anything else that could reasonably fit under Fair Use. There’s a sense that the big media conglomerates have had to pick their battles. While Viacom pays $100,000 a month to make sure that clips of Chappelle Show aren’t allowed to circulate, there seem to be an awful lot of four-month-old, camcorder-sourced clips from subsidiary Paramount’s Disturbia.

Another interesting tidbit from the story: employees at the company hired by Viacom blow off steam by sharing vintage oddities. “They combat the monotony by passing links to quirky clips around the office,” Kevin J. Delaney writes. “One recent oddball favorite was a video of a flamboyant German disco-era group performing in Genghis Khan-inspired outfits.” Surely, somebody somewhere owns the copyright to that, too.