Cinematical

• Film Clips: Is 'Twilight' Anti-Feminist?
  

  Filed under: Fandom, Movie Marketing, Politics, Columns, Film Clips

  

  NOTE: This post discusses Twilight, the movie, and the Twilight book series (particularly the latest book, Breaking Dawn), and is SPOILER HEAVY. If you've not read the books and don't want to read spoilers, do NOT read this post until you've read them. It's also longer than my usual column, as I had a lot of ground to cover, so if you hate reading long pieces, skip it. Thanks.

  You're probably aware, even if you're not into books about vampires and clumsy, average teenage girls falling in love with one, that there's a popular book series called the Twilight...
  




• Film Clips: My New Media Kicks Your Old Media's Ass
  

  Filed under: Newsstand, Columns, Film Clips, Cinematical Indie

  

  Bill Lobdell, longtime writer and editor for the Tribune-owned LA Times and its subsidiaries, has an excellent, insightful piece up on his new blog titled "42 Things I Know," outlining why exactly he left his cushy corporate job and what's wrong over at the LA Times. Much of what Lobdell has to say is pretty much what those of us who work in new media have been saying for a long time now: that print media (in particular, the overfed layers of managers who spend most of their days having meetings about meetings so they can plan more meetings, thereby justifying...
  




• Film Clips: What's Up with the Weinsteins?
  

  Filed under: Columns, Film Clips, Cinematical Indie

  

  Earlier today, Peter wrote up a piece on movie mogul Harvey Weinstein explaining how The Weinstein Company created their division Third Rail as a dumping ground for movies they feel have only "ancillary value." Harvey and his younger brother and business partner, Bob, have been under a bit of an attack since ditching Disney/Miramax for their own shingle back in 2005, with a lot of sharks swimming the waters surrounding them, just waiting for enough money to bleed through the Weinstein's fingers.

  An article over at the Sunday Telegraph by Tom Teodorczuk goes into some fairly good detail about the troubles facing the beleagured...
  




• Film Clips: In Defense of Intelligent Filmmaking
  

  Filed under: Drama, New Releases, Magnolia, Columns, Film Clips, Cinematical Indie, AFI Dallas

  

  The Life Before Her Eyes, the latest film by Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog), opened this weekend in limited release. In part as a response to the negative reviews by a number of critics, Perelman said recently in an interview that he's decided that it's better for audiences to know the ending going in (I did confirm with Perelman that he actually said this, because I was rather surprised that he would). And while I understand Perelman's desire to counter the critical response to the film in...
  




• Film Clips: On Why the 'Atlas Shrugged' Film Should Be Canned
  

  Filed under: Fandom, Scripts, Movie Marketing, Columns, Film Clips

  I've been mulling over the whole issue of the Atlas Shrugged film adaptation, which, at the moment at least, seems to be churning ahead to start filming later this year, and I wanted to talk about something several commenters have mentioned: whether it would be better to film Atlas as a miniseries, as opposed to a two-hour-or-longer movie. Of course, attempts have been made to bring Ayn Rand's most famous book to the screen before, and they've never made it past the script stage.

  Why? Well, first of all, there are a lot of politics around...
  




• Film Clips: Where are the Movies Where Unattractive Women Score Hot Guys?
  

  Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Columns, Film Clips

  

  One of my favorite bloggers, Jim Emerson, gives Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells a virtual bitchslap for a recent post Wells made on his favorite topic: how he doesn't believe guys who look "normal" (i.e., to him, fat and ugly) really score with beautiful women. In a post last month titled "Eclipse of the Hunk," Wells starts off by talking about the opening of the Judd Apatow-produced Forgetting Sarah Marshall, then goes on to mourn the loss of sexy, buff leading men and the success of Judd Apatow's films, in which dorky guys like Seth Rogen and...
  




• Film Clips: Should Comedies Get a Free Pass from Critics?
  

  Filed under: Comedy, Festival Reports, Columns, Film Clips, Cinematical Indie

  

  I hit a late night screening of Heckler here at AFI Dallas last night. The film is a documentary by Michael Addis (Poor White Trash) about comedian and actor Jamie Kennedy (Son of the Mask, Malibu's Most Wanted). The film starts out talking about people who heckle comedians at live comedy shows, before diverging into an exploration of various critics who have slammed Kennedy's films. Kennedy talks to a few critics about their reviews, reading their eviscerations of his work out loud to them and gauging their reactions both...
  




• Film Clips: On the Irony of Mark Cuban Banning Bloggers
  

  Filed under: Politics, Columns, Film Clips, Cinematical Indie

  In what has to be the most ironic post he's ever written, Mark Cuban put a piece up today on his own blog explaining his decision to ban bloggers from the Dallas Mavericks locker room. Now, Cinematical isn't a sports blog, it's a movie blog, but Cuban, of couse, also owns HDNet and Magnolia, companies we work regularly with, and so naturally I found some of the things he's had to say about his decision a bit ... disconcerting.

  According to a story on the Dallas Morning News (which should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt,...
  




• Film Clips: When Conservatives Attack
  

  Filed under: Politics, Columns, Film Clips

  
  
  Although I read Libertas and other conservative sites regularly, on the premise that it's a good idea to know what the barbarians are up to before they get to your gate, I rarely post about stories I read there. This piece they had up yesterday, though, is so blatantly misinformed and misguided that I felt compelled to address it.
  
  The piece is yet another conservative rant against the liberal Hollywood machine. It starts out by linking to an article over on The Daily Standard, deemed by Libertas an "insightful piece on a disturbing trend." That alone...
  



• Film Clips: Why Aren't You Going to See Documentaries?
  

  Filed under: Documentary, Distribution, Exhibition, DIY/Filmmaking, Movie Marketing, Columns, Film Clips, Cinematical Indie, Polls

  
  
  Over at indieWIRE, Anthony Kaufman has an excellent piece up on Michael Moore's proposal that theaters across America designate a night each week at "Doc Night at the Movies." Citing the dismal box office returns for docs in the past year (only Moore's Sicko, No End in Sight, and In the Shadow of the Moon grossed over a million dollars), Kaufman seems intrigued by Moore's proposal, if somewhat skeptical it would work. Kaufman raises some interesting points about the feasibility...