Film Fatale

As if you know know their site, or some site exactly like it.

The Guardian hoists a black flag and introduces us to the Swedish computer geeks whom Hollywood despises: the pirates behind Pirate Bay. (The link is to the newspaper story, not the torrenty site.)

Obligatory fuming quote from the MPAA: "The bottom line is that the operators of The Pirate Bay, and others like them, are criminals who profit handsomely by facilitating the distribution of copyrighted creative works," says John Malcolm, the group's MPAA.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 08:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though I've done my fair share of entertainment business writing, I find it's generally best to leave the dollars and cents reporting these to David Poland, or to link to Anne Thompson at Variety.

But a recent, jawdroppingly stupid story in the New York Times makes me break that rule.

Film business reporter Brooks Barnes, who comes to the Times from the Wall Street Journal (and therefore surely ought to know better) gives an update on the slurry of ongoing negotiations between the Writer Guild of America and the studios, and the fears of a strike in Hollywood.

One issue is how to allocate residual payments - the money paid to writers (and directors, actors and producers) when a film or TV title is re-shown or sold on DVD, television, the internet or on some new media yet to be invented. How do you value each new media platform as it becomes more or less popular?

Boring, complicated accounting stuff: but it's how entertainers and variety acts make money on repeat performances, adaptations and sequels.

The New York Times' Barnes doesn't get this. He starts his story with an analogy only a studio accountant would make.

"Jasper Johns isn’t paid based on the number of years his flag paintings remain popular attractions at museums. Rem Koolhaas doesn’t cash a check every time an architecture fan takes a trip to Seattle to see his space-age public library. So why should the writers, directors and actors responsible for box-office bombs like “Gigli” be able to pocket some cash every time somebody buys the DVD?

It's a question that cuts to the heart of the biggest fight in Hollywood these days and sums up a fundamental choice the troubled entertainment industry needs to make: whether to cling to old blueprints for running the business or to draft a whole new set.

No. That's not the question at all.

Continue reading "Add It Up: This NYTimes Residual Story Makes Zero Sense" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 03:01 PM | Permalink

For most people, a celeb story in a magazine should be exactly as diverting and time-consuming as it will take for one's toenails to dry at the manicurist.

In the Washington Post, film writer Ann Hornaday has a wide-ranging piece on why the art of the celebrity interview could use a makeover.

Oh, admit it--you still read them, no matter how bad, redundant and uninformative these celeb profiles are (that 5,000 word Esquire cover story of Angelina Jolie was a recent example of the self-serious, expanding gas to fill the space variety. Nice cover shot, though.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

An award is due to the people of Nerve's film blog.

Bilge Ebiri and others reviewed (endured) revolting liplocks from such non romances as RETURN OF THE JEDI (Jabba the Hutt licks Leia), THE ELEPHANT MAN, and the PLANET OF THE APES remake to choose the most horrifying screen kisses.

The ickiest by far: what happened to Sharon Stone in THE SPECIALIST. Mauled by the male stars - Stallone, Eric Roberts and James Woods -- she did her best to act aroused. It was sickening.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have no use for this particular product and cannot even tell you what it smells like. But I heartily endorse its endorser, Bruce Campbell, and this witty advertisement. Nice choice of music, too.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In San Franscisco's Mission District, where real estate prices are as steep as the hills, who in the film and TV industry can afford to rent a creepy, derelict old building left vacant when the National Guard moved to better quarters?

Only the enterprising adults of the specialty adult direct-to-web video.

Peter Acworth of Kink.com convinced City Hall agree to sell him the State Armory and Arsenal building which looks like a Moorish castle -- for $14.5 million. The Wall Street Journal online has the story on the community reaction and the Kink company's efforts at community outreach: cleaning graffiti, fixing windows and offering internships in film/video production.

Reporter Vauhini Vara got this choice quote from a city planner as to why the city "didn't notice the wordly about NC-17 films."

"Frankly, I kind of missed that," he says.

Another city planner says,"The planning code...is not really worried with moral propriety."

You know how we can tell that that this company's on the level, just like an ordinary film production company? Because the WSJ.com story (available for free if you register for a two week trial) says internship rather than paid internship. If you intern on a indie/art film, you don't get paid. If you're a production assistant on an adult film: you should expect to be paid. If not at the end of the day, at the end of the shoot. In cash.

Continue reading "WSJ: San Francisco Armory Zoned For V. Indie (NC-17) Film" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 10:28 PM | Permalink

I am blinded - blinded! - by the sleek silver elegance and warmed by sunlit accents of Entertainment Weekly's EW.com redesign.

Bookmark EW.com's Popwatch blog (the writers include Gary Susman, Scott Brown and Whitney Pastorek) and the direct link to movie news.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 07:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Normally I don't laugh at the suffering of strangers.

Actually, that's not true. I laughed uncontrollably at this deep, serious Fox News report about waterboarding -- not at the procedure itself, which is sick -- but at the network's JACKASS approach to covering US crimes. Instead investigating allegations of US torture in Iraq, Fox News made its own reporter submit to being manhandled by a trio of masked men, then sit down in the studio to tell us how scared he felt. He sounded kind of excited, like he was up for a TASER'ing, or maybe a wrassle down with some DEA drug-sniffing dogs.

This is about as effective and revelatory as sending the local weatherman into a TV station's flooded parking lot to tell us that it's raining real hard.

I may have to watch it again. Or at least search for a TASER demo on YouTube.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Alan Moore's LOST GIRLS will be available for bookstore sales in the UK after all. Though the illustrated "porno-graphic" novel featuring the erotic adventures of Peter Pan's friend Wendy, Dorothy from THE WIZARD OF OZ, and Alice from Lewis Carroll's ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

The adult sexual nature of LOST GIRLS did not amuse the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, which has been funded by the proceeds of Barrie's beloved children's play for nearly 100 years. (

Now the illustrated novel's publisher, Top Shelf, has agreed not to offer Moore's book for sale until January 2008, when the British and E.U. copyright on J.M. Barrie's novel and play expires.

Here's a link to Galleycat's thorough coverage of the dispute between Moore and the Great Ormond Street Trust.

Galleycat's been following the dispute between graphic novelist Alan Moore and the
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/comicbookland/

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 01:36 PM | Permalink

Have we talked much about fashion here at Film Fatale?

I've never quite understood why women need to more than two handbags. One for day, one for evening. And these things should be small. A woman's handbag should be just large enough to hold her wallet, her keys, and her gun.

I bring this up because Radar has rounded up some truly terrifying accessories that bear suspicious resemblance to faces from the movies. Scary, fugly faces. Click on the link and scream. Look at the prices and scream again. The Bag Lady, who chronicles the accessory life, sees this sort of thing all the time, so she's obviously built up a tolerance this kind of thing. But I have to say it shocked me.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 08:50 PM | Permalink

Have you heard? The Young People of Today love horror movies? Sometimes they love scary slashermovies with Roman numerals in the titles. And sometimes they scary, subtle supernatural horror movies with lank haired Asian girl ghosts. Right now they love gore-filled disembowel-oramas.

Yes, horror is hot again, as it always is. But why does this kind of horror film touch a nerve?

TIME, Oct. 30, 2006.
Rebecca Winters Keegan: The Splat Pack: Wondering where all those ultraviolent movies are coming from? Meet horror's new blood.

"People say, 'How can you put this stuff out there in the world?' Well, it's already out there," says Eli Roth. He appeared on Fox News and proclaimed that it was because of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld that Americans are watching horror: "You're so scared that you want to scream."

For a much earlier and more thoughtful look at this trend, see USA Today's

USA Today, Oct. 25. 2004. Susan Wloszczyna, "Extreme Cinema Returns With a Vengeance"

"I definitely love to be scared," says James Wan, Saw's director. "It draws the primal side out of you."

Or as screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who also co-stars in Saw, puts it: "Humans are still violent animals, and you need to get that out. The killer has done a lot of the work for you by exorcising your subconscious for a while."

Some cite The Passion of the Christ as an example of the new tolerance for extreme viewing.

And for a template of the Horror = $ = ? story, here's Time's 2005 piece.
Newsweek, April 3, 2006.
Devin Gordon: "US Audiences Hungry for Blood"

One prominent critic views the trend as torture porn:

New York Magazine, Feb. 6, 2006.
David Edelstein: Why Has America Gone Nuts for Blood, Guts and Sadism?

"The issue of where the spectator’s sympathies lie at violent movies has always been a complicated one. But there’s no doubt that something has changed in the past few decades. Serial killers occupy a huge—and disproportionate—share of our cultural imagination: As potential victims, we fear them, yet we also seek to identify with their power...

[Watching IRREVERSIBLE..after the first two minutes] I didn’t understand why I had to be tortured, too. I didn’t want to identify with the victim or the victimizer."

Continue reading "Been There, 'Saw' That': TIME Rings The "Horror Is Hot" Bell" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you've been reading the Village Voice lately, perhaps you've noticed that the film review section for New York City's alternative weekly is much the same as the film review section for Los Angeles' alternative weekly. Ever since the New Times company bought the Voice, there's been a whole lot of sameness -- bad news for everyone interested in arthouse film.

Writer Anthony Kaufman over at IFC confirms that there's more bad news

This week, the new Voice editor got rid of two more film section staffers: editor Dennis Lim and critic Michael Atkinson and announced the hiring of Nathan Lee, who's written for the New York Times. J. Hoberman remains, yet the Voice's film sections offers hardly any local local voices. For past few months, most of the criticism has come from New Times' freelancers, scattered across the country, or from reprints of reviews by LA Weekly's Ella Taylor and Scott Foundas. Taylor and Foundas are top knotch writers, but every movie deserves more than one review.

I've already heard executive from a small distribution company complain about the doubling-up. "The arthouse market market is review-driven," he said. "We have limited numbers of prints and a limited advertising budget--we can't always afford to open a film in both New York and LA on the same date."

"If we open the film in LA, and we get killed in the LA Weekly (review), that's it--we already know what the review will be in the Village Voice three weeks later: the same damn thing. What's the use of buying an ad in the print edition? We'll take our chances and buy bigger ads in Time Out New York or New York magazine. Who knows what their critics will say, but at least the movie will have a chance."

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The British Film Institute has placed short films by Stephen Frears (THE QUEEN), Ridley Scott, Tony Scott and the late John Schleschinger online and available for download--for a fee. Six feature films will be online, including PRESSURE (1974), which is regarded as one of Britain's first black feature films.

The BFI archive houses 230,000 movies and 675,000 television programmes. Curators are putting films online so that these titles-many of which are rarely screened outside of arthouses, film festivals, and academia--can reach a broad audience.

Many clips are are free -- like this guide to British Film, hosted by Malcolm McDowell.

For more information, visit the British Film Insititute's website or the BFI's magazine, Screen Online.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mia Farrow, with Roman Polanski and the crew looming behind her. From a New York Magazine photo essay about cinema shot on the streets of New York. Read the text by Logan Hill.

Architect James Sanders wrote one of my favorite film books of recent years, a love letter to New York City and the city as seen in cinema dreams, called CELLULOID SKYLINE. Filled with photos and highly readable film scholarship, it's one of the best books about the metropolist that's inspired everything from romantic fables to futuristic doom.

Now Sanders has edited SCENES FROM THE CITY: FILMMAKING IN NEW YORK FROM 1966-2006, which will have movie fans tracking down the locations where Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee and others made their signature movies.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Web wank material Lonelygirl15, subject of much wasted time obsession in the blogs, has turned out to be the scripted drama everybody (please--PLEASE--tell me it was everybody) suspected it was.

With the Los Angeles Times all over this one, it wasn't long before somebody smoked out a connection at a talent agency.

Step forward, CAA.
. Hello there, actress Jessica Rose. The New York Times' Virginia Heffernan has a big story Tuesday, Sept. 12.

Can a TV/movie deal memo in Variety be far behind?

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 09:29 PM | Permalink

In recent weeks, it's become impossible to ignore the bizarre behavior of a beloved, perpetually smiling film star.

I speak, of course, of Julia Roberts, who has confounded public expectations by not making a summer movie and not doing anything scandalous or wildly emotional like getting married, divorced, or having a baby.

Roberts is acting in a play. On Broadway, no less.

That's just...weird.

But in a good way. Whatever theatre reviewers will say of her performance in Richard Goldberg's Three Days of Rain, tickets are sold out for the plays' entire run.

David Edelstein, the film critic for New York magazine, shelled out $250 bucks to see an early preview, and he writes this week about how Roberts, until now a purely cinematic performer, comes across on stage.

Here's a little of what Edelstein says in The Close-Up Is Her Voodoo

Continue reading "Julia Roberts' Onstage Voodoo" »

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 12:37 AM | Permalink

Now take off your clothes.

By now you've seen the trying-desperately-to-be-notorious cover of Vanity Fair's March issue, which pretty much sums up what it means to be young, famous and female in Hollywood.

Scarlett Johanssen deserved an Oscar nomination for Match Point. Keira Knightley got one for Pride and Prejudice. Yet there Knightley is, naked and pissed off, with some guy chewing on her ear.

The guy is designer Tom Ford, hailed by Vanity Fair as a genius because he's "all about work, work, work," (page 120), because he imagined Munich star Eric Bana "in a Speedo" (p. 126), and because he got down on his hands and knees to tie Harvey Weinstein's shoelaces. (p. 126)

If that's the definition of genius, give that man a Nobel Prize.

Posted by Justine_FilmFatale at 05:45 PM | Permalink