The rest of the line-up of the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival has been released — that is, the Encounters, Spotlight, Showcase, Restored/Rediscovered and Midnight sections. As expected, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience is there, as are quite a few Sundance holdovers, and the Oscar Winner That No One Has Seen, Departures. Earlier this week, I summed up the competitions; my picks for the most-promising-looking of the rest, with descriptions provided by the festival, follow after the jump.

…Read more

Last week in Park City, we joked more than once about being thankful for both the recession and global warming, for making Sundance 2009 the most pleasant installment of the festival I’ve ever attended - diminished crowds at screenings and events, and 40 degree weather to enjoy whilst traveling between. One night at a dinner table, I worried aloud that this joking would look pretty bad to an outside observer — us, the elitists who still had jobs and/or travel budgets, laughingly toasting the apocalypse.

And now, just three days later, comes the news that Variety has slashed 30 jobs, including those of Mike Jones (who I tagged in that silly Sundance meme post before seeing the news, obviously), Jeff Sneider and, maybe most surprisingly, Anne Thompson. Thompson “ankled” the Hollywood Reporter less than two years ago for the Variety job. Her most recent post on her Variety-hosted Thompson on Hollywood blog says she’ll keep the blog going, and is also “actively involved in a web start-up which is in stealth mode; details will be available soon. And I will continue teaching film criticism at USC and hosting Sneak Previews at UCLA Extension.”

I’m sure Anne, Mike and all the smart and talented people let go today will land on their feet. But I still wish I could take back the jokes.

It’s great when a person or trade publication can laugh at him or itself, and Variety is exhibiting good spirits today by showcasing a new video from FunnyorDie.com that pokes fun at its usage of industry-defining slang terms. The trade is well-known for using such jargon as “Gotham” and “Oz” to refer to New York City and Australia, respectively. And all of us who read Variety on a daily basis have come to accept terms like “actioner,” “boffo” and “pic” enough that we use them in our own writing. Variety even has its own “slanguage” dictionary on the publication’s website.

But if Variety is already forthright about its coining of terms, is it really necessary to lampoon the practice? Much of the trade’s invented lingo has completely entered American lexicon, and the Oxford English Dictionary features more than 20 terms originating in Variety’s pages, including punch line, show biz and wow (as used as a verb). So, even though the idea behind this sketch is minimally amusing because much of Variety’s slanguage is actually quite silly, the terms made up for the video are not near as funny as some the trade’s real creations over the years, like “shim” (a ’70s-coined slang for transvestite) and “hoofer” (dancer).

For a much funnier parody of a writers meeting revisit the old “Writers of Lost” sketch from SuperDeluxe.com.

• 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?

“Why did everyone have Che wrong?” reads the headline at Variety’s festival blog The Circuit. “The headline all over last week’s Cannes prognostications were about how Soderbergh’s Che epic wasn’t going to make the Croisette,” Mike Jones writes. “Today, all the Cannes headlines lead with Soderbergh. Surprise, surprise: Che will storm the south of France - all 4 hours of it.”

Jones says that after sales agency The Wild Bunch failed to find a distributor for the film in Berlin, “the Cannes rumors started, becoming a near-fact in the blogosphere that there would be no revolution on the Croisette.” The implication is that Wild Bunch spread rumors that the movie wouldn’t make it to Cannes, in order to make it instant news when it did.

But the thing is, I just did a pretty exhaustive Google BlogSearch, and though I found several post-Berlin posts indicating that Che would make its debut in the south of France, I couldn’t find a single blog post trying to pass off Che’s absence from Cannes as fact dated before this Variety story from April 17. …Read more

Films by well-regarded international auteurs such as Michael Haneke rarely receive the critical drubbing afforded to Funny Games. Haneke’s scene-for-scene remake of his own film did actually earn high praise from a few major critics (Owen Gleiberman and Scott Tobias among them), but most critics concurred with J. Hoberman: “Haneke is pretty much a humorless pedant,” the Village Voice critic wrote. And then, the antithetical poster quote: “Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there’s no reason why you should.”

So you know things are bad when the one story that makes an effort to rehab your film’s rep from “atrocious” to “polarizing” is itself something of a trainwreck, boasting quizzically misread facts and apparently rushed to publication before its time.

I’m particularly troubled by the effort within this Variety story to make excuses for Games‘ disappointing opening weekend performance. Diane Garrett writes: “The pic did resonate with a certain aud, generating $520,000 at 289 theaters for a $1,799 per-screen average in its opening weekend.” How many screenings do you get from Friday-Sunday––say, 15? So $1,799 divided by 15 is about $120. Assuming the average ticket price is $8, that means 15 tickets were purchased for each screening. Is that the kind of number that passes for “resonance” these days? We know it’s Variety’s job to tell the studio’s side of the story (at least, apparently), but isn’t this a little extreme, even for them?

But it’s also pretty clear that this version of the story was not meant for our eyes. I screen capped the story at 1pm EST (see below the jump), after waiting five hours for a glaring editorial note to be removed from the online version. As of this writing, it hasn’t been. See my screencap, with the gaffe marked in red, after the jump.

UPDATE 3:45 PM: Variety has fixed the error highlighted below, and I have fixed the error pointed out to me in the comments below. See, the internet is fact checked in real time!

…Read more

• Did you hear? Reed Elsevier is planning to sell Reed Business Information, the trade magazine pubishing division that includes such titles as Packaging Digest, Test & Measurement World, and Variety! No buyers have yet expressed interest, there’s no time table for the sale, blah blah. But I hope they sell to NBC/Universal, because as I’ve said before, Variety would be the perfect subject for a reality webseries version of 30 Rock.
• “There’s been an unusually strong awards box office bump this year,” says Pamela McClintock, “With the five best picture contenders combining to gross $97 million domestically since Academy Award nominations were announced Jan. 22.” All the more incredible, when you consider that literally the day before yesterday, this was the year that nobody was going to watch the Oscars because they haven’t seen the movies.
• Alex Gibney has made a deal to have Taxi to the Dark Side shown on HBO in the coming months, as much as a year before the film is scheduled to debut on its original cable home, the Discovery Channel. For whatever reason, Discovery announced after pacting with Gibney that they had no intention of airing the film until 2009; eager to get his film into living rooms befor the election, Gibney then sought out a side deal with HBO.
• Hey, it turns out that writers were actually allowed to write during the strike! But most of them didn’t, and now there’s a lot of hand-wringing because it’s been a week since the strike ended, and there have been no deals.

• In lieu of a more traditional 2007 Top Ten, Variety has taken the conspicuously bloggy tactic of presenting the same information with a negative spin, publishing their picks for the Top Ten Things That Didn’t Happen over the course of the last 12 months. Nice idea in theory maybe, but in practice, it’s sort of an exercise in existential futility. Item #2 is “The WGA would keep working through the end of the year.” Are we sure that didn’t happen more than any of the eight things below it that didn’t happen? If something doesn’t happen in a forest, can Variety hear it? Etc. What a conversation starter!
• Meanwhile, the WGA strike took the top spot on the American Film Institute’s list of things that *did* happen in 2007; its happening was deemed more than Iraq movies or the iPhone. And finally, to make the triumvirate of meaningless distinctions complete, The Hollywood Reporter has declared “Technology” to have been “the biggest Hollywood story in 2007.”
• There Will Be Blood made $67,951 on its first day in release, which is pretty much beyond reproach for a film with a running time of 2.5 hours, opening on just two screens. On a Wednesday.

• 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.

Three Variety writers have posted early reviews (in apparent defiance of Paramount’s review embargo, which was to extend until Monday) of There Will Be Blood. All three reviews are, essentially, positive, but they fall on three distinct points in terms of confidence in the film’s ability to reach an audience.

still from There Will Be Blood originally posted by Jeff Wells

…Read more

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

There are some stories I never tire of. Stories told through books, stage or film that I go back to over and over. Now that I’m performing in the stage version of The Wizard of Oz for 26 performances, I’ve been thinking about why I don’t seem to mind this particular repetition. In fact, the repetition started as a kid. Every year, I remember waiting, checking the TV Guide sometime late November to get the night right. Then, the whole family would gather to see Dorothy go off to the magical land of Oz where trees talk, lions are cuddly, and it’s easy to accidentally kill witches.

You know what’s going to happen, of course. You know the Wicked Witch of the West will blast up from the earth before the Munchkins finish singing “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead.” You know Dorothy and her walking buddies see the wizard and he sends them off to get the witch’s broomstick. Heck, you know the Wizard isn’t even a wizard at all. Everybody knows this.

So I’m wondering why … why do I care? Why do I watch this movie again and again? Why am I re-reading Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire a third time before seeing the movie?

With DVDs and the Internet, there’s no waiting, no checking TV Guide, no anticipation. I could watch a new film every night. That’s 365 films a year. If I dedicated the next decade of my life to this, I’d have seen 3,650 films and just scratched the surface of what Netflix and Amazon offer.

Here’s my problem: I’m confused.

I never know what to watch now. There are just too many options. My friends recommend films, but if I don’t write them down, I can’t remember them. I’m a busy woman. I don’t make the time to watch films that aren’t fun or thoughtful. Sometimes I fall asleep. Sometimes I get bored. When I do make it to a rental store, I wander around, picking up DVD cases, looking at the photos, reading the back. Will I regret this? Will I embarrass myself? Will I get scared? I hate being scared. So I go home, put in The Wizard of Oz, and spend time with what I love.

When I see the Spout website taking shape here, I get excited for me, not just because Paul will introduce me to Wong Kar-Wai. You see, I like a good solid happy endings. I like to know characters may be a little messed up, but they’re on the right track. I like things that are cute and funny. Basically, I like movies that most people are talking about when they say, I just want to see a movie tonight. I just need a helping hand in finding that movie.