• In yet another sign that 2008 is the new 1928, Hollywood, impressed by the massive first-weekend success of High School Musical 3, is rushing a number of music-based projects into production. Paramount is bumping their Zac Efron-starring, Kenny Ortega-directed remake of Footloose up the calendar; Nick and Norah director Peter Sollett has been asked to punch up the script before a spring shoot. Meanwhile, Fox is setting up their own big-screen musical around a passel of Disney Channel stars: this time, it’s the Jonas Brothers, and the project is the first film in a hoped-for franchise based on the “Walter the Farting Dog” books. Yes, there are apparently childrens books about farting dogs. Maybe it’s not The Great Depression 2 — maybe it’s Idiocracy 0.5.
• Perhaps surprisingly, Dan Glickman says that although “there’s no fundamental difference between Obama or McCain on intellectual property issues,” an Obama administration might be slightly more favorable for the MPAA’s fight against piracy, as Obama be expected to connect to “newer, younger White House staffers and appointees about the value and importance of IP.” But the studios’ lobbying board would clash sharply with a Democrat administration over net neutrality, which Obama strongly supports, and Glickman … doesn’t.
• DETAILS Magazine has invited their readers to submit film pitches. In partnership with Larry Meistrich of Shooting Gallery and Film Movement, the mag will seek a winning idea targeted at “intelligent, modern, metropolitan men,” they’ll then actually produce.

I was planning to weigh in on this week’s big digital rights story, the MPAA’s lawsuit against Real Networks for releasing its new RealDVD movie-copying software, but that was at the top of the week. This is the Internet. Everybody said everything that’s to be said on the matter in the first two days or hours or minutes of this, um, controversy. It’s hard to work up any Real passion on the subject anyway, as nobody really likes Real Networks (onetime online audio pioneers, now junky iTunes wannabe) or the MPAA (aka the movie police). But it all seems kinda simple to me: big, ravenous companies trying to expand/protect revenue streams, dressing it up as a copyright/artists’ rights issue. Ancient stuff.

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• 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.

• Naked pictures of a stripper? Not news. Naked pictures of a stripper-turned-Oscar winning screenwriter? Eh. Pictures of a stripper-turned-Oscar winning screenwriter emulating the naked-but-for-whipped-cream scene from the classic James Van Der Beek vehicle Varsity Blues? News enough!
• Meanwhile, proving that no good-intentioned attempt to bridge the cultural-political divide goes unpunished, some people are mad that soldiers presented Oscars. Interestingly, most of the complaints conflate the two documentary awards into the claim that the Academy implicitly mocked the soldiers by forcing them to give an award to the anti-Iraq war film Taxi to the Darkside. In fact, the soldiers presented the Best Documentary Short award, which went to Freeheld. Debbie Schlussel, probably the most hateful of the Hollywood haters, gets that part right, but she also repeatedly insists that Diablo Cody is fat, which, as the above pictures of her ribcage should show, is definitely wrong.
• David Bordwell credits “piracy” for ensuring the classic status of His Girl Friday. “If Columbia had renewed its copyright on schedule, would this film be so widely admired today?” Jason Mittel agrees in theory, but takes issue with Bordwell’s use of the p-word. “Once the film lapsed into the public domain, all of the resulting shoddy copies were legal and licit, not pirated. A more accurate term would be ‘unauthorized’…”
• I guess WIRED bloggers aren’t allowed to say “fuck.”

In late 2005, Jon Avnet (who, it should be noted, is a very successful producer who hasn’t directed a film you might have seen since Fried Green Tomatoes) directed Al Pacino in a “real-time thriller” called 88 Minutes. A trailer for that film seems to have shown up on the web around this time last summer. According to IMDb, 88 Minutes was released on DVD in Brazil this past February and in a handful of other countries theatrically over the course of the spring; the pic’s US release date has been bumped several times, and is now listed as sometime in 2008.

Perhaps now we know why. In an interview with Pitchfork, indie rock guitar virtuoso Marnie Stern admitted to having recently downloaded “40 or 50 movies” while touring with Hella drummer Zach Hill. “But,” she says, “Every movie is a pile of garbage!” Stern elaborates on one recent download:

Another movie I saw last night was Al Pacino in 88 Minutes, I don’t even know if it went to the goddamn theatres. He looks unbelievably terrible. Like, in the Rolling Stones category. Dyed hair, he’s over-tanned, he’s really is not looking good at all. And in the movie he’s having sex with 25 year-olds.

So what do we learn from this little anecdote, beyond the fact that Al Pacino is no longer a credible love match for Alicia Witt or Leelee Sobieski? That studios might as well release dust-collecting duds, because the piracy chain is now so massive that an up-and-coming American rock star is easily able to illegally gain access to a film before any American film critic, and then ultimately tell the Wall Street Journal of hipster websites all about how ridiculous it is? Yeah, I guess that’s all kind of a big deal, but mostly, I’m just really hoping Marnie Stern starts a film blog. In the meantime, you can watch the video for her song “Every Single Line Means Something” above.

***The National Legal and Policy Center has released a report intended to “shame” Google for failing to block access to pirated films on Google Video. Among other things, the NLPC charges that Google gives preferential treatment to copyright holders “it makes business deals with.” In response, a Google spokesman implied that some companies don’t want their copyright material removed from the site. “Copyright status can only be determined by the copyright holder, and their preferences vary widely.”

***Michael Tolkin, the author of The Player, has been hired to adapt the Fellini-inspired Broadway musical Nine for the screen. The Weinstein Company is producing the film; Chicago helmer Rob Marshall will direct.

***September’s Toronto Film Festival will host a Gala screening of David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises. The thriller re-teams the director with his History of Violence star, Viggo Mortensen.

On her blog, Variety’s Anne Thompson is linking to a subscription-only New York Times item which states that Lionsgate (who are distributing the pic in partnership with The Weinstein Company) have pushed up the opening of Michael Moore’s Sicko in response to the film’s widespread piracy. The health care doc will now open on one screen only in Manhattan this Friday, only to expand on its original opening date a week later.

I guess this is what passes as aggressive action against piracy these days, but I’m not sure what good it will do. It’ll force the Times to run their review a week early, possibly pushing Evan Almighty off the the Arts front page (which, if Nikki Finke is to be believed, could do further damage to the already poorly-tracking most expensive comedy ever made). I don’t know what the stats are regarding the rate at which online piracy decreases once a film is in theaters, but I do know that releasing the movie a week earlier in Manhattan just ensures that camcorder bootlegs will be available a week earlier on Canal Street. And by admitting that piracy is enough of a problem that they need to change their release date (I believe this is the first time a studio has shifted an opening date in response to a leak, but do let me know if I’m wrong), aren’t Lionsgate effectively letting the terrorists win?

Last night I was flipping channels, and I came across a segment on my local Fox affiliate’s 10:00 news that had Michael Moore answering questions sent in by viewers. Most of these questions reflected the slant that you’d expect from the Fox News audience–my favorite: “Why do you hate America so much? Why don’t you go live in a country that you love, like Cuba, or Iran?–but Moore managed to deflect the criticism professionally (at least, he made it through the segment without cussing). The closest thing to a supportive question came from a viewer who wanted to know if the director thought that Sicko had been leaked onto the internet by insurance company operatives in order to sabotage the film’s commercial release. Moore basically responded, “Yes, that’s exactly what I think,” and then sort of backtracked and admitted that piracy is a major problem for the whole industry, blah blah blah.

As I said yesterday, I think Moore is a genius at turning a profit by painting himself as a victim, so watching the segment last night, I just figured he was taking an opening to do what he does best, and left it at that. But then this morning, I came across this post at Hollywood Elsewhere, wherein Jeffrey Wells presents a nugget of (debatably solid) evidence to support the sabotage theory:

A line from a recent news story about the YouTube offering of Sicko wasn’t used for obvious reasons, but the reporter passed it along. “While the motivation of the leaker(s) remains unclear,” it read, “one full copy of Sicko uploaded to a pirate website includes ’suckourdicks’ in the file name.” Does that suggest anything to anyone? “Suck our dicks” as in “fuck you, Moore!!…and we hope this hurts as a kind of payback for stretching the truth and flim-flamming in order to push your cause in Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11“…or words to that effect

This isn’t the most airtight argument I’ve ever seen, but it’s interesting that this story is floating around the very same week that Eli Roth encourages his fans to use filesharing to combat Hostel 2 piracy. In a way, the actual motives behind the Sicko leak don’t really matter–the idea that some entity is trying to enact revenge on Moore via piracy will now become part of the lore of the film. The only question is whether or not Moore can use it to his advantage.

Above: A bizarre clip in which perennial possible presidential candidate Fred Thompson implies that Michael Moore belongs in a mental institution.

Poor, poor Michael Moore. The millionaire Oscar winner, whose Sicko opens June 29th, has already been saddled with the twin burdens of bailing The Weinstein Company out of their flop hole and saving a commercially sagging genre, neither of which will be an easy task considering the fact that Sicko is already available online. Then, this weekend, a reporter asked Moore to comment on an independent documentary critiquing his filmmaking methods. Moore responded by calling the makers of that film “f-ing liar[s]“, and went on to accuse them of spreading misinformation about “a fictional character that’s been created with the name of Michael Moore.”

The documentary in question is called Manufacturing Dissent, and it was one of the most talked-about films heading into the SXSW Film Festival this past March. The film aims to unmask Michael Moore as an unethical documentarian, a Capitalist hypocrite and, perhaps most egregious in the minds of the filmmakers, a not-very-nice guy. Dissent was dramatically billed as an attack on the Left (or, at least, on one of the American Left’s most visible icons) from the Left. Directors Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine, self-professed ‘liberals”, start out as fans of Moore, but end up painting an unflattering portrait of the filmmaker after failing to secure access to his inner circle. The picture ends up vaguely alluding to some interesting academic questions about the nature of truth-telling on film, but is ultimately unable to accuse Moore of anything other than being a really, really good propagandist.

Dissent sparked a bit of controversy at SXSW, but not for the intended reasons. At the time, filmmaker AJ Schnack (who attended SXSW 2007 with his documentary Kurt Cobain: About a Son) pulled together a lengthy blog post summarizing some of the discussion surrounding the film. He spoke for a lot of us who saw (and were disappointed by) the film when he called BS on the filmmakers supposed mid-production shift in slant. “How in the world can anyone who is making documentaries, particularly documentaries on somewhat political or tabloidy subjects, not be aware of all the arguments against Michael Moore?” Schnack wrote. (Schnack was summarily accused by a colleague of “bad form” for questioning a fellow filmmaker.)

I was reminded of Schnack’s argument against Dissent when reading about Moore’s screed against Melnyk and Caine. On the one hand, Michael Moore is not known for his restraint, and it’s implausible that he would be so oblivious to an attack on his character and livelihood that he’d wait three months after the source of the attack was profiled in the NY Times to respond. This outburst was clearly timed to coincide with the release of Sicko–Moore actually gains credibility with a segment of his core audience by defining himself as the ultimate truth-teller surrounded by vicious liars.

On the other hand, maybe Moore took so long to respond to Dissent because it’s just so not a legitimate threat. A muddled mix of personal travelogue and pseudo-investigative expose, Dissent turns on the meek, overly-earnest Melnyk’s inability to get Moore to consent to a lengthy on-camera interview. Why would someone of his stature assign credibility to the complaints of a disgruntled fan?

On the OTHER hand, by responding so vehemently to questions about Manufacturing Dissent, does Moore maybe protest too much?

I don’t know. I’ve never been a fan of Moore’s methods, but I’m fascinated by his ability to mainstreamize (no, that’s probably not a real word) niche debates. I’m going to see Sicko on Thursday, and I’ll report back post haste. In the meantime, watch the Sicko trailer above, and talk about your love/hate for Michael Moore on the Spout Documentary board.

I should say upfront that I’m strangely ambivalent when it comes to Hostel mastermind Eli Roth. There’s a kind of sick humor baked into his baroque, balls-out extended death sequences, that, as a Dario Argento fan, I appreciate, but like most modern horror movies, sitting through the bad dialogue and endless setup that threads together the torture scenes is, actually, torture. On the other hand, I kind of get a kick out of Roth’s pretentions about the socio-political allegorical value of his movies. There’s something about the petulance of a horror movie director favorably comparing himself to Dick Cheney that I can’t resist.

That said, is it just me, or does this whiny, panicky, super-dramatic blog post on Roth’s MySpace page kind of read like those coked-up interviews Dirk Diggler gave Amber Waves for her documentary in Boogie Nights? It’s like the beleaguered filmmaker’s equivalent of the ill-advised drunk dial.

“All over the map” would be an appropriate phrase to use here, if there were a map in the world big enough to encompass all of Eli Roth’s paranoia. The ostensible purpose of the post is for Roth to announce that he’s taking some time off from filmmaking, but in attempting to explain that decision, he manages to cast blame on every conceivable outside force for therelative failure of Hostel 2. Piracy, he says, “is really hurting us, especially internationally.” He then jumps to blame film critics (who aren’t usually allowed to see allegedly “critic proof” films like this before they’re released) for allegedly reviewing the pirated workprint of the film instead of the completed version. Which critics did that? Roth “wouldn’t dignify them by mentioning them by name,” but he’s going to make damn sure they’ll lose all legal access to his films (which doesn’t seem like much of a threat, since these critics would apparently rather watch a pirated workprint than go to a press screening anyway). My favorite part is when Roth tells his fans they can help fight piracy with … piracy? “Flood file sharing services with fake Hostel II downloads just so no one can ever actually get the movie,” he declares.

A rant like this is obviously candy for for haters. Nikki Finke, one of the most vocal opponents of the so-called “torture porn” genre, ate it up. “Notice how it doesn’t even enter his mind that moviegoers rejected his twisted content of torture porn,” Finke sniped. “Maybe this year off will help Eli get a clue.” Roth is obviously playing passive-aggressive, putting himself out there as a victim so that his fans will rally around and beg him to make another movie. It’s hard to imagine a successful film director actual being so immature that they would not see how such a tactic would be doomed to backfire.

What’s the real problem with Hostel 2? Did everyone who really wanted to see it really watch it online before it opened? Could it just be that the movie industry is cyclical, and the torture porn cycle is simply dying its natural, inevitable death? For what it’s worth, the Horror Movies 101 group here at Spout hasn’t really shown much interest in the Hostel films. Whether or not you’re a Roth fan, does such an, um, impassioned message from a filmmaker make you any more or less likely to support their work?