Day: September 17, 2004

In that participle-title chart submitted by Pittsburgh reader George Bolanis that ran last Wednesday, George forgot to include two participle flicks that pre-date all the flicks he listed: Killing Zoe (directed by that great Hollywood Wild Man, Roger Avary) and Chasing Amy (directed by my former boss). And this went right by me.

Peter Rainer has been canned as New York magazine’s film critic and replaced by Entertainment Weekly‘s Ken Tucker, as mandated by mag’s editor-in-chief Adam Moss. Tucker’s an excellent writer, but he’s not part of the monk’s order of sanctified film critics; he’s essentially a rock music critic. This hire follows a trend of bringing in non-monks to fill prestige berths, with examples like (a) Richard Roeper taking Gene Siskel’s place alongside Roger Ebert, (b) L.A. Times TV writer Carino Chocano taking Manohla Dargis’s slot as second-string film critic under Kenny Turan, and (c) a reported interest among Chicago Tribune editors in not wanting to hire a 40ish or 50ish white-guy monk (and to find a younger woman, perhaps) to replace re-assigned Chicago Tribune film critic Mark Caro.

David Poland writes in his Toronto Film Festival capsule review of P.S., the brand-new film from Roger Dodger helmer Dylan Kidd, that costar Laura Linney “[looks] so good in this film that I spent time trying to figure out whether she had gotten cosmetic surgery. (I am told that the answer is ‘no.’).” Next time a woman I know fairly well turns up at a party looking especially attractive, I’m going to go up to her and say, “Wow, you’ve never looked so good and…well, I don’t get it. I mean, I know how you usually look. Did you go under the knife or something?”