Day: April 4, 2009

For the sin of shutting down around 8 pm last night and ignoring all online happenings, I missed the news — broken by Nikki Finke — about Fox 411’s Roger Friedman getting fired for posting that review of the pirated Wolverine work print. I can’t say I was surprised, given Friedman’s provocation and the stakes involved.

(l. to r.) former Fox News columnist Roger Friedman, Wolverine star Hugh Jackman, Fox Filmed Entertainment chairman Tom Rothman, Fox News chief Roger Ailes.

“I hear the move was done with the full support of News Corp,” Finke posted at 5:57 pm Pacific last night. A Fox News source told Finke that “[Friedman] promoted piracy…he basically suggested that viewing a stolen film is okay, which is absolutely intolerable…so we fired him. Fox News acted promptly on all fronts.”

Actually they took a couple of days. Friedman downloaded and viewed the film on Wednesday evening. His review (which has now entirely disappeared) was posted on Thursday morning. Fox issued its condemning press release on Friday. The axe, I gather, fell more or less at the same time. And Finke was apparently told about the dismissal sometime on Saturday afternoon.

I wrote Friedman on Friday morning, asking him what’s what, looking for any kind of update or elaboration — nothing.

Although I suspect he thought he was doing 20th Century Fox a roundabout solid by posting a thumbs-up response to Wolverine (which, let’s face facts, has not been the recipient of ecstatic buzz so far), Friedman’s Thursday column did appear to blithely approve of an illegal downloading of the 20th Century Fox release, which will open on 5.1.09. Friedman especially conveyed this in the cavalier tone of his prose.

Certain columnists (Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny, MCN’s David Poland) called for Friedman’s dismissal. It goes without saying that Poland — a longtime Friedman hater — is delighted.

Friedman put his neck on the block in doing what he did. He blundered. Piracy is too threatening an issue for 20th Century Fox and Hollywood in general for Newscorp. not to react as it did.

I for one feel badly for Friedman. He screwed up in this instance, but he’s a ballsy, sharp-eyed reporter-columnist who knows what he’s doing, and who’s delivered some very solid and tough reporting.

In his now-disappeared Thursday column, Friedman wrote that he decided to review the downloaded print because “the cat is out of the bag and the genie is out of the bottle” and “there’s no turning back.”

A guy identified as “Kenny” in Finke’s talkback section wrote that “Friedman wasn’t advocating a crime — he was just telling it like it is. But rather than find a way to monetize reality, Fox pretends most people aren’t already aware movies are easy to find on-line. As long as Fox would rather grandstand then try to monetize what’s already happening, they’ll lose money to people stealing their movies.”

When you go to the URL where Friedman’s Thursday column appeared, you see a message that says “this is Google’s cache of http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,512139,00.html. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Apr 4, 2009 13:20:23 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime. These search terms are highlighted: roger friedman. These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: wolverine.”

“The March employment numbers, out this morning, are bleak: 8.5 percent of Americans officially unemployed, 663,000 more jobs lost. But if you include people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a job, the real unemployment rate is 9 percent. And if you include people working part time who’d rather be working full time, it’s now up to 15.6 percent. One in every six workers in America is now either unemployed or underemployed.” — from a 4.3.09 Truthout piece by former Labor secretary Robert Reich, called “It’s A Depression.”

“I’d also argue that Duplicity hit the zeitgeist slightly wrong,” Variety‘s Anne Thompson wrote on 4.2. “Greenlit before the recession, the movie painted a portrait of rapacious uncaring corporations and workaholic ambitious untrusting spies that may have cut just a little too close to the bone at a time when anxious Americans are seeking escape, fun and comfort.

“[Director-writer Tony] Gilroy is a smart cookie whose next film I look forward to seeing. While he has every right to chase Hollywood budgets and status, I’d prefer to see him go back to the Michael Clayton model: lower budget, stars at a cut-rate price, and the freedom to throw off the shackles of trying to please the suits.”

It’s understood that Quentin Tarantino is incapable of writing or shooting anything unironically — everything he does has to have quote marks. He’s never tried to ape Bressonian simplicity (which is pretty much the opposite of ’70s exploitation shlock, which is where he lives), and he could never replicate it if he tried so why bring it up? I’m just saying I’d be delighted if Tarantino had shot Inglourious Basterds in black and white. God, think of the lusciousness.

From the just-published Vanity Fair gallery of Inglourious Basterds stills.

Vague spoiler in third paragraph on this article…beware!: For the last several days I’ve been grappling with one of the roughest cases of movie-contemplation blockage I’ve ever dealt with, and over a film I mostly liked and admired when I first saw it at Sundance ’08. The film is Rupert Wyatt‘s The Escapist, which opened yesterday at Manhattan’s Village East and will open next Friday (4.10) at Laemmle’s Sunset 5. And I’ve only just figured out why I haven’t been able to write anything about it despite five or six tries.

Brian Cox in The Escapist.

There’s no denying that The Escapist is a prison-break film cut from fresh cloth. On top of being dramatically pungent and atmospherically ripe, the story it tells is nothing if not original (or at least atypical). It uses a flashback/flash-forward editing scheme that I felt was diverting enough. And despite adhering to a conventional tale of a small group of convicts planning and executing a complex escape from a tough jail, it all boils down in the end to being a father-daughter love story — the father played by the great Brian Cox and the daughter…leave it alone.

The bottom line is that The Escapist bears a slight similarity to Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge , and after catching it a second time last week at home — seeing it cold as it were, as opposed to seeing it under enthusiastic communal conditions at Park City’s Eccles theatre some 14 months ago, with everyone in that huge theatre spellbound and into each and every twist and turn — I began to feel a bit differently about the finale.

I still valued the refined moves and unusual calibration and certainly the tough, lived-in performances — Cox’s first and foremost but also those from Joseph Fiennes, Dominic Cooper, Liam Cunningham, Seu Jorge, Damian Lewis and Steven Mackintosh . But I found myself longing for the elation of a purely successful escape even more this time around, and I had a slightly more difficult reaction to where the film left me.

Prison-break movies (or plots about same) are metaphors, of course, for an escape that we all desire and dream about, which is release from the prison of our bodies, our pasts, our genes, our debts, our mistakes, our long-buried fears. I take this idea-fantasy very seriously. I’ve watched Escape From Alcatraz ten times if I’ve watched it once, and I don’t care if Clint and the gang were never found after they paddled away — the point is that they made it out, and that you could feel the euphoric release after the last barrier had been scaled or tunnelled through.

I’m just saying that if you’re going to invite the audience to become an accomplice on a very complex escape attempt, you’d do well to respect what most people want and need out of this.

I spoke to Escapist director Rupert Wyatt on the phone last week after notifying everyone I was unable to meet him at a restaurant as planned. But he was on a cell phone (somewhere in the Chelsea distrcit) and the reception was in and out so I decided not to use it.

Please don’t let my personal feelings about one aspect of The Escapist cast a shadow upon Wyatt’s directing chops. He’s audacious-minded and yet he knows his way around traditional moods and genres and shooting styles. I’m looking forward to his next film (according to Coming Soon’s Ed Douglas) — an adaptation of Sebastian Faulks‘ “Birdsong” which will costar Hunger‘s Michael Fassbender and Paddy Considine. There may also be a heist movie about stealing the Mona Lisa, to be made with his Escapist partner-producer Alan Maloney.

The problem here, obviously, is that a werewolfy-type guy half-based on the creature played by Michael Landon in I Was a Teenaged Werewolf and half-based on Kim Hunter‘s character in Planet of the Apes has nothing to do with anything. Seriously, what is this? I like the final shot though.

One of the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Meet the Filmmakers” sessions at the Soho Apple store will feature Natalie Portman (appearing on Friday, 4.24 at 3:30 pm) talking about an “entertainment web project” of some sort. Update: Portman “will join Christine Aylward on the stage of the Apple Store, SoHo, to discuss their new web project, ‘MakingOf’ — a site that promises to transform the way people view, enjoy, and participate in entertainment.”

Portman fan site webmaster Darren Buser sent along a possible indication in this 5.8.07 Gawker item. Her project may involve viral web marketing and the possible participation of Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Or not.

The Soho Apple store “Meet the Filmmaker” program schedule: Wednesday, 4.22, 7 pm — Spike Lee (Passing Strange, Kobe Doin’ Work). Friday, 4.24, 3:30 pm — Portman. Friday, 4.24, 5:00 pm — Dan Fogler (Hysterical Psycho). 4.24, 5:00 pm — Lee Daniels (Precious).

Saturday, 4.25, 4 pm — So Yong Kim (Treeless Mountain), Bradley Rust Gray (Exploding Girl). Sunday, 4.26, 5:00 p.m. — Connor McPherson (The Eclipse).

Monday, 4.27, 5:00 p.m. — Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna, Carlos Cuaron (Rudo Y Cursi). 4.27, 6:30 p.m. — Gabriel Noble (P-Star Rising). 4.27, 8:00 p.m. — Atom Egoyan (Adoration).

Tuesday, 4.28, 6:30 p.m. — Eric Bana (Love the Beast). Thursday, 4.30, 5:00 p.m. — Kirby Dick (Outrage). Friday, 5.1, 7:00 p.m. — Nia Vardalos and Donald Petrie (My Life in Ruins)

Yesterday 20th Century Fox sent out a release condemning Roger Friedman‘s two-day-old review on Fox 411 of the illegal Wolverine work print — a review which has since been taken down but is still accessible here.

“We’ve just been made aware that Roger Friedman, a freelance columnist who writes Fox 411 on Foxnews.com — an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox — watched on the internet and reviewed a stolen and unfinished version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” the release said (according to Hitfix’s Drew McWeeny). “This behavior is reprehensible and we condemn this act categorically — whether the review is good or bad.”

Friedman downloaded the work print last Wednesday night and yes, praised what he saw (particularly David Benioff‘s “streamlined” screenplay). He said the uncompleted special effects “didn’t take away from the film at all” although “a couple of times it was possible to see the harnesses on the actors.”

If Wolverine ends up suffering serious damage from the piracy (and I say “if”), it’ll be due to the pre-release online buzz and not from any prospective revenue loss due to people who’ve seen it online not paying to see it in theatres. The word so far has not been ecstatic — let’s face it — and Friedman probably reasoned he was doing 20th Century Fox a favor by posting his thumbs-up reaction.

He decided to review it, he wrote, because “the cat is out of the bag and the genie is out of the bottle” and therefore, he felt, the questions of legality were moot because “there’s no turning back.”

He said that “obviously someone who had access to a print uploaded the film onto this website, [which] begs several questions about security. Time to round up the usual suspects! Let’s hope by now it’s gone.”

I have an acute aversion to illegal downloads in all senses of the term — ethical, practical, aesthetic, political. Friedman shouldn’t have gone there, but, as noted, he probably had a notion that his positive reaction to the film would have some kind of upside effect and that Fox resultantly wouldn’t freak out. But they did.

The curious thing is that all of this broke yesterday when the Friedman piece in question was up as of early Thursday morning. You’d think 20th Century Fox would have gotten its response out that same day…no?

The correct phraseology when it comes to cats and bags, by the way, is “cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.” That’s straight from the typewriter of Clifford Odets in his rewritten screenplay for Sweet Smell of Success.