Variety published three separate but similar “Top Stories” Sunday (one - two - three) on the topic of blogs and how certain bloggers (mainly Nikki Finke, pictured) exhibit questionable journalistic practices. What seemed at first to be an excessive, behind-the-times and otherwise forgettable trio of articles has today (and initially last night) become a topic of discussion for many film bloggers, including some who were mentioned in these Variety pieces who felt the need to respond.

My personal response is primarily, as I said, one of disregard. But here’s a quick commentary: I enjoy Finke and others as I might have appreciated Louella Parsons or Hedda Hopper decades ago — with a grain of salt. The fact that some bloggers are taken more seriously for their rumors and faulty reporting styles than, say, any one of the hundred other fanboy movie blog sites out there is the problem of the reader (especially the one who’s a Hollywood player), not the writer.

Though the timeliness of Variety’s blogger-hating trilogy comes on the heel of recent errors and conflicts involving Finke and others, there’s no more necessity in such articles as there would be for a trio of stories about the trustworthiness of Fox News. Don’t read the blog, don’t watch the channel, don’t read the trade magazine if you don’t like their content.

Anyway, I’ve given my two cents; read what others have to say after the jump:

…Read more

Remember that interview that Variety EIC Peter Bart gave MTV in June, responding to the “boycott” of his publication by a handful of fanboy sites who insisted that the trade had repeatedly failed to properly credit their “scoops”? Variety’s Anne Thompson resurrected the debate and the Bart quote this morning in a blog post pegged to Comic-Con, where a gang of outlets of various sizes––including us––will be fighting to post the same material at the same time. If my post about The Watchman goes up 20 seconds after Cinematical’s, will I get in trouble for not giving them “credit” for “breaking” the story? What’s the netiquette??!!???

She’s mostly looking at the divide between a “legit” outlet like Variety and the independently run sites like Film School Rejects, but I think Anne makes some good points about this stuff not being the black-and-white matter of thievery that some of the sites would like to believe. As far as I’m concerned, this is the key part of her piece:

…Read more

We all freaked out when famously blog-hostile reporters Peter Bart and Patrick Goldstein recently got on their knees and started their own blogs, but really, the weird part was that these guys were so insistently anti-blog to begin with. They’re both big on railing against critics, and their alleged impotence when it comes to influencing the audience (to reject industry product); they both act like for a professional critic to offer an assessment on a Hollywood film is to somehow throw handcuffs on the potential ticket buyer’s ability to exercise free will (to consume industry product). Well, what are blogs, if not a space where the audience shrugs off those and other types of handcuffs in order to trade notes on their consumptive desires and experiences? You’d think they’d be an industry booster’s dream.

All of that’s a long lead up to the fact that I don’t know exactly how to parse this blog post by Goldstein, in which he once again beats the “who needs critics?” drum, and uses his blog to annoint Hollywood producer Avi Lerner as the “out of touch” review slinger’s populist replacement:

…Read more

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

• The headline of Variety’s “Get Smart made a decent amount of money and Love Guru got what it deserved” story: “Audiences make the ‘Smart’ choice.” Is this qualitative analysis, right in the headline? I love it!
• Scott Sternberg, producer of Peter Bart and Peter Gruber’s “stating an opinion as if it is fact is more legitimate on television than on a web site updated in reverse chronological order” chat show Sunday Morning Shootout, is setting up a division of his production company to make feature-length non-fiction films. His first topic? Hasidic jews, of course!
• In what looks to me like a sign that somebody’s finally admitting to themselves that they can only bleed money on untested auteur experiments for so long, The Weinsteins are planning to take advantage of “all these properties that lend themselves to musicals.” They’ll make Broadway shows out of a bunch of crap that they own, including Finding Neverland and Pink Floyd’s The Wall.
• She Unfolds By Day took the top prize at the CineVegas film festival, which announced its awards on Saturday. I was on the shorts jury at the fest, but Variety didn’t name the shorts winners in their writeup, so no disclosure needed, right?

Peter Bart now has a blog, but that’s no reason for him to play nice with the blogosphere. In a post from earlier this week, he did his best to discredit any opinion about this impending Hulk movie that is not his own:

The dweebs may not like the effects. The star, Edward Norton, may not like the cut. And the blogosphere is steeped in bad buzz. So here’s what Universal decided to do about it Sunday night: Throw a party, invite 5,000 folks to a screening and celebrate The Incredible Hulk as an instant hit…The audience roundly applauded the set-pieces of CGI mayhem, as if to tell Comic-Con-ish doubters, “Get a life.”

Because of course, it’s better to manufacture the illusion of “an instant hit” than to actually make an attempt to appeal to the “Comic-con-ish” built-in fans of the brand. I could go on and on about how to claim that the reaction of an invited audience (probably predominantly made up of people on the Marvel, Paramount or associated payrolls) is more valid that the worries of a film’s core ticket buyers is unforgivably solipsistic and probably not in line with Variety’s ostensible mission to couch all value judgments in assessments of commercial viability. But instead, I’ll just quote at length from one of Bart’s more articulate commenters, Shawn Bowers, after the jump.

…Read more

• We’d like to extend a hearty, totally sincere “welcome to the blogosphere, dude!” to Variety editor-in-chief/known blog skeptic Peter Bart, who has launched his own bloggy shingle. The first person to send in a Photoshop mockup of Bart wearing typing whilst pajamas and/or in bed and/or in a basement wins a free Spout t-shirt. Via Anne Thompson.
• Attendees of the Book Expo of America were greeted with a giant banner bearing a picture of Michael Moore and the phrase, “He’s Back!” According to FishbowlLA, Michael Moore didn’t actually show up.
• This headline on a story about the Universal Studios fire at The Playlist sent us to YouTube, looking for the Public Enemy video for “Burn, Hollywood, Burn,” which we’ve always like a lot. Instead, we found the above clip, described as “A music video for D.W. Griffith’s repellently racist 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, set to Public Enemy’s “Burn, Hollywood, Burn!”

• Disney celebrated Earth Day by announcing Disneynature, a new production shingle exclusively devoted to making documentaries about the environment. Films in the pipeline include Oceans, the lastest from Winged Migration director Jacques Perrin.
• Jackie Chan has been recruited by the MPA as the poster boy for a new campaign targeting piracy in China. The action star will appear on a “huge” anti-piracy billboard, to be displayed in Beijing’s Silk Market for two weeks.
• The RAAM Conference on British and Irish film distribution will lure surely reluctant attendees to an advance screening of Iron Man, by first presenting an award to Variety porn analyst/editor-in-chief Peter Bart.

Peter Bart is worried about porn. “The drop in porn rentals and sales is worrisome on several fronts,” he writes in Variety.” Till now, porn has been a recession-proof business. Further, with the country already in a dispirited mood, the fact that porn has gone limp may indicate a true plunge in consumer confidence.”

Bart devotes about 400 words to the adult film industry’s woes, then awkwardly segues into a discussion of Judd Apatow’s “crusade to defy the code by making the full-frontal phallus an important co-star of all his films.” The basic thrust of the piece: fetishing erections is so five minutes ago. The limp penis––and, significantly, the mocking laughter it apparently induces in girls––is the symbol of our recession-depressed times.

…Read more

• Nikal Saval has an admittedly cranky but masterful takedown of I’m Not There at N + 1. Calling Todd Haynes’ pastiche the Worst Movie of 2007, Saval scratches particularly aggressively at Haynes’ habitual referencing and naked larceny: “Haynes is drowning in his film school education, just as his audience is drowning in allusions, and not a single original idea floats by to rescue him or us.”
• I still haven’t received my copy of Berlin Alexanderplatz (I know you’re concerned; right now, it looks like the problem is with UPS and not Amazon, and I’m working on it), so I’m going to avoid Ed Howard’s episode-by-episode recap of Fassbinder’s series, for the time being. Via The House Next Door.
• Erin at Steady Diet of Film has a helpful translation of what Jason Reitman, John Sayles, Adam Shankman and Joe Wright were REALLY saying on a recent episode of Sunday Morning Shootout. Useful information gleaned: Reitman, who “hates going to awards shows because he has to stop dressing like he’s homeless,” has a masterful death stare, but Sayles is not impressed.
• Lots to report today on the Berlinale front, including the news that Martin Scorsese’s long-delayed Rolling Stones doc Shine A Light will finally make its premiere at the festival–and on opening night, no less. David Hudson has two roundups.

• While I was out, AJ Schnack wrote a couple of amazing, insightful posts about the minor tragedy that is the Academy’s Best Documentary shortlist. Those posts have produced a flood of generally well-thought out responses: see, for starters, Danielle DiGiacomo, Dan Eisenberg, and shortlisted director Tricia Regan on Agnes Varnum’s blog.
• Twitch reports the very good news that Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, which was banned in its home country of Thailand, is coming to DVD in the US on January 15.
• The Reeler joins us in berating Variety for that stupid headline about “art films”: “It’s obviousness-stating time for Pamela McClintock and her headline-writing colleagues…And if you’ll kindly turn to page 10, editor-in-chief Peter Bart has the latest on Watergate.”
• At NewCritics, I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski, a new tome dedicated to the fan cult surrounding the Coen Brothers’ epic stoner comedy, has Dennis Cozzalio feeling a little like Garbo: “I closed the back cover wanting…to have been left alone with my own perceptions, about the movie and the cult. In this way, the Coens reticence to offer DVD audio commentary or any kind of ascension to the various theories floating around about their work, this film included, can be seen as the ultimate respect for fans of their movies—they are willing to let us do all the heavy lifting when it comes to assessing what those movies mean to us.”
• Death of a President, that terrible faux-doc about what hypothetically might happen if a hypothetical George W. Bush was hypothetically assassinated, just won an International Emmy. Sometime Spout Guest Blogger Chris Campbell accidentally ambled past the ceremony.

New York Film Festival coverage:

• First day thoughts, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly 
• Day 2: Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astree and Celadon, and Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
• Sidney Lumet on the death of celluloid 

Other news:

• Listen to our weekly podcast, FilmCouch: Into the Wild, The Mosquito Coast, and Heavy Metal in Baghdad.
• It looks like Wes Anderson can have a career in advertising if the whole man-child cinema wunderkind thing doesn’t pan out.
• Why are bloggers having to play publicists on behalf of Brad Pitt’s new flick?
• Richard Kelly’s follow-up to Donnie Darko finally gets a trailer.
• Karina makes some musical confessions in support of Kurt Cobain: About a Son.
• Samsung asks Sean Penn to introduce them to new customers.
• We need Julien Temple’s The Great Rock N’ Roll Swindle now more than ever.
• Investigating the link between two Joy Division movies and the philosophy of ghosts.
• Lloyd Kaufman: Hillary-hater, indie film warrior.
• David Edelstein uses his newly-established blog to resurrect a long-ago beef with A.O. Scott.
• Peter Bart lashes out at the blogosphere yet again.
• A full cut of There Will Be Blood may surface in Austin this weekend. Plus: pictures from Fantastic Fest.

Another day, another “bloggers are the enemy” screed from Peter Bart. This time, he’s picking on his “blogger friends” (when did he start making friends with bloggers? And is that safe? He knows we don’t bathe or go outside!) for caring about traffic:

Hence, the new lexicon of blogdom is all about traffic, not about ideas. Bloggers are into “tagging.” They are obsessed with “link bait.” A hot item is useless unless it can be linked and Drudgified. Any hack can blog items about all the young celebrities who are self-destructing. The first sentence, however, had better start with Lindsay Lohan climbing out of her limo without underwear.

I’m not sure why Bart continues to drone on like this––what good is he doing for his own image, not to mention that of his publication, by persisting to embody the cranky old man trying to shove the kids off his lawn? And by consistently dismissing blogging as masturbation, he’s shadily feigning ignorance on the very existence of the blog economy––an economy in which Variety is increasingly active. He couldn’t actually be reading blogs, right? He saw Perez Hilton on TV and it suddenly hit him that he hasn’t pumped this lever in almost two months, right? He’s so above the blogosphere, there’s no way he’s going to do a Technorati search on his own name and find this post…right?

Well, just in case, below the jump you (and he) will find a round-up of some of this week’s best non-Lindsay posts from around the blogosphere.

…Read more

This weekend, Peter Bart and Peter Guber devoted a segment of their AMC chat show Sunday Morning Shootout to the subject of bloggery. I didn’t catch it myself, but judging by the write-ups I’ve read, it was…exactly what you’d expect.

As usual, celebrity gossip blogs such as Perez Hilton and TMZ were spoken of in the same breath as industry blogs such as Defamer, and blogs aimed at producing serious, non-snarky commentary were pushed to the far margins of the conversation. Bart, of course, held down the hard-line anti-blog end of the argument (at this point, this guy’s qualified to write a “You Might Be A Blogger If…” joke book); his Variety colleague Anne Thompson intelligently defended her right to produce journalism in the format of an online journal frequently updated in reverse chronological order. Guber played interference, which apparently involved repeatedly using the word “perpetrate” when he probably meant “perpetuate.” But who knows.

Because I didn’t see it, and because I’m getting really tired of asserting my right to make a living in my chosen field, I definitely do not want to comment at length. Awards Daily has a partial transcription of the show, and some fierce commentary to boot. David Poland has solid analysis at The Hot Blog; by my count, he only strays from strong logic to dig at Nikki Finke once (weeeelllll, maybe twice). See also Aaron Dobbs at Out of Focus, who offers a simple suggestion: “I don’t have a problem with Bart criticizing online journalists and bloggers, pulling to some degree the same argument lots of “professional” media likes to claim to maintain a feeling or air of superiority, but Peter, if you’re going to do that, please stop having your own publication send out “Breaking News” alerts that are simply notices that you’ve posted a new column with nothing but your same old opinions? Thanks.”