Day: December 24, 2008

All that Valkyrie neg-dissing you’re reading and hearing from online reporters and columnists (which I haven’t contributed to with any real gusto, being something of a mezzo-mezzo responder), is one reason why there’s some talk/expectation that Valkyrie will become a “surprise hit” over the next Xmas weekend. The new-release champs with the “just entertain us” crowd will be Adam Sandler‘s Bedtime Stories (which has big family appeal), Old Yeller/Marley and Me, and Valkyrie in third place, I’m told.

I was listening to a couple of 20-something DJ/talkshow guys on FM radio during yesterday’s big drive. Movies were on the table, and one of them, sounding like a fairly well-educated GenYer, said that when he sees a black-and-white film on the tube he goes into an auto-pilot reception mode because in his head (and, he said, in the heads of a lot of his contemporaries, raised on visual intensity/CGI/video games/IMAX/3D) “all black and white movies are the same movie.” My mouth fell open. I give up, I said to myself.

Caroline Kennedy–Chris Matthews link from Politico‘s Anne Schroeder Mullins…fine.

On 7.21 Patrick Sauriol, webmaster of the legendary Coming Attractions website which ruled from the mid ’90s to the early 21st Century, announced a re-launch of the site — Coming Attractions 2.0. He said it would be up and rolling within 30 days or so. It’s now five months later, and a Beta version is finally up and rolling.

What’s missing at this stage is new information inside the Movie Database. Sequential backstage histories of this and that film is mainly what I used to visit CA for in the old days. I remember going to CA over and over when I worked at People from ’96 to ’98 — everyone in the office who covered any aspect of the film business did. If you want this kind of thing now (i.e., possibly reliable traces of the sometimes dirty skinny about any given film, early screening reactions, early location photography) you go to the IMDB commenters, among other options.