In my book A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips were sharp and engaging co-hosts of At The Movies, but the bottom-line Disney-ABC execs didn't like their ratings so they're not only whacking Scott-Phillips but pulling the plug on the show. That's it, finito, all she wrote -- the final program will air on Aug. 14th.

I'm sorry. I really liked watching these guys do the At The Movies shpiel. But honestly? I only watched them twice. I was actually trying to find an embed code of their review of Greenberg this morning, but the Disney-ABC webmasters don't provide them.

Nobody wants...Read More

A 3.22 Brent Lang Wrap article uses dog-eared box-office data to remind that Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Cameron Diaz, Michael Cera, Sean Penn, etc. have starred in several weak earners, and therefore don't seem to put arses in seats. Even Christian Bale has toplined his share of wipeouts outside the Batman franchise. I think we've heard this one before. If the public smells a stinker or a rental or what-have-you, stars mean nothing. It's the bolt, it's the buzz -- i.e., what the film has in its heart or its head. Stars are tinsel.

I finally got around to reading that ALL CAPS David Mamet memo to the writers of The Unit, which got cancelled last year. The part that I agree with the most reads as follows:

"QUESTION:WHAT IS DRAMA? DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, ACUTE GOAL.

"AND SO WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES OF EVERY SCENE THESE THREE QUESTIONS: (1) WHO WANTS WHAT?; (2) WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY DON'T GET IT?; (3) WHY NOW?

"THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE LITMUS PAPER. APPLY THEM, AND THEIR ANSWER WILL TELL...Read More

Oliver Stone's South of the Border will be domestically distribbed by Cinema Libre Studio. The doc preemed in September 2009 at the Venice Film Festival, and then showed weeks later at Lincoln Center. It also played last month at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. It'll be released in New York on 6.25, and will open in nine or ten cities after that. Here's my admiring review, posted on 9.24.09.

36 hours ago N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply posted a what's-up-with-this? article about James L. Brooks' How Do You Know (Columbia, 12.17), a relationship dramedy about a softball player (Reese Witherspoon) involved in a kind-of love triangle with a nice business guy named George (Paul Rudd) and a professional baseball player named Manny (Owen Wilson). Jack Nicholson plays Charles, George's father.

Triptych stolen from New York's "Vulture" site.

It's a little weird for a film to have a title that's a question (like Quo Vadis?) but spelled without a question mark. Cieply leaves off the question...Read More

If Steve McQueen had kept on, he'd be 80 friggin' years old today.

I don't know what owesies or side favors are involved, but the Weinstein Co. has just picked up U.S. rights to John Wells' The Company Men, a corporate downsizing drama that was generally seen as a dud at Sundance 2010. (Here's my 1.23.10 review.) It's not a "bad" or poorly made film per se, but, as I said two months ago, "this drama of layoffs and despondency affecting three Boston-area white-collar guys (Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper) plays like an intelligent funeral in a nicely furnished minimum-security prison."

In this recently-shot clip, George Bush is shown wiping his hand on the fabric of Bill Clinton's right sleeve after shaking the hand of a boogie blackamoor Haitian native. It's possible -- let's be extra fair -- that the guy's palm may have been sticky or sweaty. You can see Bush's hand reacting right away to something. But talk about the appearance of being busted. This seems to reveal in a nutshell why Bush didn't try harder with Katrina relief.

During an Avatar home-video press session yesterday James Cameron called Glenn Beck "a fucking asshole" and "a madman," and threw down a challenge to debate the Fox News agitator about global warming and Beck's "poisonous ideas" in general.

James Cameron, Glenn Beck

Referring to Beck and his regressive brethren, "I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads."

Wells to Beck: Be a man and please do this! I'm getting wet just thinking about it. I would pay $20 to see Cameron...Read More

Additions to the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival (4.21 to 5.2) were announced yesterday. The two essentials for me are Sex & Drugs & Rock N' Roll (i.e., Andy Serkis as Ian Dury), which I've written about a couple of times, and Jacob Tierney's The Trotsky (Jay Baruchel as a reincarnation of Leon Trotsky), which had its North American premiered six months ago in Toronto.

Others include Aaron Schneider's Get Low (close to excellent -- saw it at Sundance), Michael Winterbottom's The Killer Inside Me (woman-hating, obsessively violent, largely despised at Sundance), Spike Lee's Kobe Doin' Work (saw about half of...Read More

As I came out of Monday night's Harry Brown screening at the Brill building, I saw a hand-written sign on a door that indicated Barry Levinson's You Don't Know Jack, a Jack Kevorkian biopic starring Al Pacino, was being worked on inside. The HBO film, which costars Susan Sarandon, John Goodman and Danny Huston, debuts on 4.24.

"How do you like that word pairing: suicide doctor? Thats like pyromaniac fireman. Suicide doctor -- what's malpractice for this guy? You live?" -- comic Rob Weinstein on jokes.com.

Yeah,...Read More

N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd notes that "only a week ago, Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post's editorial page editor, had written that President Obama did not seem happy in his job, that he projected 'weariness and duty' instead of the 'jauntiness' of F.D.R. and J.F.K.

"But Tuesday, when the health-reform bill was signed, 'the president was joyous, and that infectious smile so sparsely offered over the last two years lit up the East Room. Many Democratic lawmakers and Obama supporters were frustrated at the president's failure to show more spine earlier. As Representative Louise Slaughter told the Times in February, 'I...Read More

First it was Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte signing to do an HBO show, and now Kevin Kline has jumped into the pool.

Doing an indie film or a B'way play used to be how you got your career restarted -- now it's HBO. Movie parts have shrunk for older "name" performers who can't comfortably portray a superhero mentor or a flamboyant comic-book villain, so they're all running to lucrative TV gigs for their third acts. Agents are able to sell feature stars much easier on this due to the phenomenal success that 24 gave Keifer Sutherland. TV is also...Read More

I spoke rashly and stupidly yesterday when I expressed advance disdain for Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois's How To Train Your Dragon (DreamWorks, 3.26). I saw it in 2D tonight at an all-media screening, and while it doesn't re-invent the family-friendly animation wheel it's a well-written, emotionally satisfying "wow!" entertainment that will perform extremely well once the word gets out. It soars and charms and -- holy dogshit! -- is even "about" something besides a hunger to sell tickets.

It has the familiar Jeffrey Katzenberg stamp -- i.e., pure-hearted hero, colorful characters, well-contoured story, smart-ass dialogue,...Read More

Shot during a bar chat with Coming Soon's Ed Douglas following last night's 6 pm screening of Harry Brown, the London-based Michael Caine vigilante drama. Haven't time to get into it, but Caine, an East End roughneck in his youth, knows how to eyeball the bad guys and give them all sorts of pain with magnificent conviction and style. The film satisfies as nicely in this regard as the confrontation scenes in Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, if not more so.

I was taken by this chat between Maxim's Mark Ebner and 1010 News' Jerry Agar about habitual criminal and teenaged fugitive Colton Harris-Moore. Ebner states that CHM is "a folk hero, Keyser Soze, a genius...like Frank Abnagale, he might be able to one day apply his skills to the greater good. He's a true survivalist. They should drop this kid into Afghanistan.

A UK Telegraph story reports that Harris-Moore "has been on the run for almost two years and is thought to be...Read More

Recalling how N.Y. Times critic Frank Nugent panned Bringing Up Baby when it opened in March 1938, successor A.O. Scott acknowledges that Howard Hawks' film is "completely preposterous" on several levels. He also suggests that Nugent may have "missed the point. Story points don't have to be new. They rarely are. It's the execution that has to be fresh.

"Today, 72 years later, contrasted with the current crop of comedies, Bringing Up Baby is full of surprises. Who knows? Maybe in 2082 a movie like The...Read More

The audio on this clip of Vice-President Biden's "big fucking deal" line is more audible than I realized at first -- funny. I didn't mean to sound dispirited about the passage of the health-care bill because it doesn't contain what it should. I get what everyone's feeling. It's a very welcome thing, although I prefer to call it a reasonably good start.

As I submitted yesterday afternoon to yet another dental appointment (last Thursday's appointment having been cancelled), Movieline's Stu VanAirsdale posted an article called "9 Most Memorable Paycheck Roles in Modern Cinema." Stu was inspired by the news about John Malkovich and Frances McDormand joining Transformers 3...good God!

Since '04 I've written a good 20 or 25 stories that note, mock or lament the taking of a paycheck job by this or that actor (or director). The vibes exuding from these performances can be fascinating -- a mix of profound inner disgust and a professional attitude that says "I need this money to...Read More

Keith Olbermann's special comment last night about the GOP's imminent self-destruction was a goodie. If only this actually seemed so, or was actually in the cards. Here's a transcript. Every time I post an MSNBC embed code subsequent posts on my site are obliterated or the general coding is thrown out of whack. May the person who designed these codes suffer in some agonizing way until he/she wakes up.

Each year the L.A. Press Club hands out National Entertainment Journalism Awards. But on the entry page, which says that you have to pay $40 for each entry, there's a fairly significant typo.

A journalist friend says he recent read Sharon Waxman's "gloating" piece in The Wrap about how her website won nominations for all these awards. And yet none of the other folks I thought would be there, including Nikki Finke, Anne Thompson, David Poland, etc. even got a mention.

"You have to apply for a nomination and cough up forty bucks per submission...Read More

In response to Sunday's query about classic-era big-city marquees, a friend pointed to a gallery of Times Square photos on Flickr. Most were posted by Christian Montone of "central New Jersey." The 1953 Stalag 17/The Moon is Blue shot is owned by a guy named "pfala" who's requested permission to post, but didn't include contact info -- brilliant.

Taken in August 1953 looking south from 47th Street. It seems vaguely odd to consider Billy Wilder's monochrome Stalag 17 being visually represented in grand vivid colors.

Early in the run of Stanley Kramer's...

This one was obviously written by a knowledgable conservative who remembers (or has read a lot about) what Republicans used to stand for before the foam-at-the-mouth Tea Party/Palin/Bachman idiots took over the agenda. I was ready for some great "kill" lines, but there are maybe one or two guffaws here. Downfall Hitler is a proud YouTube brand -- a funnier Republican riff is required.

I finally get to see Harry "not quite Get Carter but good enough" Brown tonight after missing it at last September's Toronto Film Festival, and after begging the film's British publicist if I could see it on a disc when I was in London last fall during the Fantastic Mr. Fox junket. She ignored my e-mails despite the Daily Mail's Baz Bamigboye telling her I was okay.

Those who didn't see Uli Edel's The Baader Meinhof Complex during its brief, almost non-existent U.S. theatrical run need to rent or buy the DVD/Bluray on 3.30 (i.e., next Tuesday).

It doesn't deliver what you'd call a "pleasant" sit, but it's about as intense and feisty as a political film like this could or should get, and every so often it plays like a good gangster/bank-robber film.

I wrote the following after catching it about 20 months ago:

"What can you say about a tough-minded, hard-nosed political drama that tells the truth, doesn't...Read More

N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman reports that "Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House -- a man celebrated by many in his party as an intellectual leader -- [said that] if Democrats pass health reform, 'They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years' by passing civil rights legislation.

"I'd argue that Mr. Gingrich is wrong about that: proposals to guarantee health insurance are often controversial before they go into effect -- Ronald Reagan famously argued that Medicare would mean the end of American freedom -- but always popular once enacted.

"But...Read More

I was a somewhat regular 24 Hr. Fitness guy for about eight or nine years, but I let the membership slide sometime around '02. Last week I grimmed up to the fact that sooner or later I'd have a Quentin Tarantino body if I didn't turn things around, so I've become an Equinox guy. I'll be going back to the usual regimen (25 minutes on a treadmill, nautilus and free weights for a half-hour) with a limited membership for only $150 per month plus extras.

"Limited" means you go to just one club. (There are several...Read More

It's very cool and commendable of How to Train Your Dragon co-directors Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders to have hired legendary Coen Bros. lenser Roger Deakins in order to "distinguish their film from other animated work...someone who could see light in a different way." Seeing How to Train Your Dragon is out of the question pour moi, of course. My age-old aversion to family-friendly animated films based on "whimsical" children's books...sorry.

Obviously a super-sized Times Square billboard circa March 1969, but a truly terrible film. You can just barely discern that Where Eagles Dare and Support Your Local Sheriff were playing at the Astor and Victoria.

The film that may have been responsible for the early to mid '70s wave of disaster films, which ironically reached their peak with Richard Lester's Juggernaut, a superior suspense film that included no disaster shots whatsoever but was funded as another disaster-brand attraction.

Vincent Canby's review of Krakatoa, East of Java, published on 6.26.69, reads as follows:

"If I hadn't...Read More

I'm not touching the no-fake-boobs-on-Pirates of the Caribbean 4 story -- it's too vapid, and besides implants would clearly violate the remarkable sense of historical exactitude that the Pirates movies have provided thus far. I'm sensing that this story may be a blade of grass foretelling what the lawn is going to look like when director Rob "tanning spray" Marshall (Nine, Memoirs of a Geisha) turns in his director's cut.

Every now and then I search around for photos of splendorific Times Square marquees from the 1930s, '40s, '50s and '60s. And I never find much. There have to be collectors out there who have shots of big-time marquees ballyhooing famous films. I'm looking for sites I haven't discovered, scans of privately-owned stills...anything. Color is preferable but I'll take what I can get -- thanks.

As I write this, the House of Representatives is enacting President Obama's watered-down, barely-worth-the-name health care legislation with no single-payer and no public option. It's 11:07 pm, and the favoring vote tally just went over 216. Better than nothing and fine as far as it goes, but more than a bit of a letdown for some of us.

"This is about as interesting as it gets in politics," MSNBC commentator Ed Schultz has just said. "The Democrats now own -- lock, stock, and barrel -- health care reform in America."

"Congress gave final approval on Sunday to...Read More

Sandra Bullock's Facebook declaration that she's "single" isn't too surprising, given the recently disclosed details. What got me was her statement that her political views are "conservative." What?

HE reader David Speranza took this in Madison Square Park at 5:44 pm last Friday afternoon. And nobody blinked or gasped or anything. It was Speranza's impression that the mordibly obese woman eating potato chips was "with" the flame-head.

Two days ago I wrote that seeing a film that was shot 18 months or two years ago can sometimes result (in your mind at least) in a slightly dated feeling -- a hard-to-define sense of diminishment due to the film having passed its peak potency in terms of relating to the here-and-now. The case in point was an Australian thriller called The Square (Apparition, 4.9).