Variety‘s legendary breaking-news reporter Mike Fleming has resigned to run the New York office of Deadline Hollywood Daily. He obviously won’t be the east-coast Nikki Finke — Fleming is Fleming — but he’ll certainly be seen as a compliment of her column from here on. (And vice versa.) They’re not exactly married now, but it’ll be fair to call them a brother-and-sister act.
Indiewire‘s Anne Thompsoncalls this “a smart hire” but adds the following: “Over two decades Fleming has built a network of sources who go to him with scoops because they trust him to take care of them. He is the exact opposite of DH’s Nikki Finke, who uses scare tactics and bullying as well as good old-fashioned power-mongering to get her stories.”
MCN’s David Poland said this: “Of course, the most significant thing about Mike Fleming going to NikkiVille is not that she has added value, but that Variety is all but done now. Another one of their stars out the door. Interesting times.”
Yuan mentions at the end that N.Y. Press critic Armond White is no fan of Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking, Juno or Up In The Air. An amused Reitman states that his films are polarizing, and then says the following: “I would be curious to hear what Armond thinks of The Insider, a film that goes [slams down fist]: ‘Smoking bad! Tobacco people bad!’ And for me that’s so boring. But, look, for some that’s the experience they want and those movies exist for them.”
Most of the moviegoers who’ve heard of The Insider probably still think it’s an anti-smoking drama (a misconception that Disney marketing let slide when the film opened), but you’d think that a smart guy like Reitman would know better. The Insider is about the killing of a major 60 Minutes news story, and about the wreckage (personal, professional, cultural) that this action causes. At most the film was peripherally or tangentially about smoking. And the fact that the 60 Minutes news story was about Big Tobacco was secondary.
The fact that Big Tobacco had enough money and legal power to make CBS corporate feel legally threatened (and thus leading to the story being de-balled on 60 Minutes) is what’s crucial to the story. It was a movie about big-time TV journalists being pushed around and then folding their tent. But the adversarial element could have just as easily been weapons manufacturers or any politically powerful concern.
Big Tobacco turned the pressure on, CBS corporate candy-assed out, and the top guys at 60 Minutes (except for Al Pacino‘s Lowell Bergman) did what their corporate bosses told them to do.
Since The Insider was released in ’99, it’s become common knowledge that due to their corporate-ownership and corporate priorities, major news media orgs can’t really be counted upon to report the tough stories (’03 Iraq invasion, WMDs). Robert Kane Pappas‘ Orwell Rolls In His Grave (’04) spelled this out pretty clearly. For my money the serious hardball information today comes sporadically from the N.Y. Times and from Bill Moyers’ Journal but mostly from online reporting and columnists and from the British newspapers. TV network news is pretty much out of the game.
In today’s N.Y. Times, director Douglas McGrath ( Infamous, Emma) makes a case for Doris Day, now 87, receiving a special career-honoring Oscar. McGrath writes persuasively and with feeling about Day’s special qualities. She committed to her light-comedy roles, held her own with the likes of James Stewart, Kirk Douglas and James Cagney, etc. But there’s one negative he can’t wave away.
I’m speaking of Day’s ghastly performance in Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Man Who Knew Too Much. I love aspects of this 1956 thriller (the murder in the Marrakech marketplace, the assassination attempt in Albert Hall) but Day’s grating emotionalism makes it a very hard film to watch. She cries, shrieks, trembles, weeps. And when she isn’t losing it, she’s acting pretentiously coy and smug in that patented manner of a 1950s Stepford housewife. Or she’s singing “Que Sera Sera” over and over again.
I’ll give her credit for almost everything else that McGrath brings up, but she’s so awful in Hitchcock’s film that this single performance almost tips over the entire apple cart of her career. (The shrieking and moaning kicks in around the two-thirds mark in the clip above.) The same thing goes for Linda Hamilton‘s shrill acting in Terminator II: Judgment Day (1991). I tried watching it the other day for fun, but I couldn’t stand her spitting rage.
Aaah, whatever. If the Academy wants to give Day a Lifetime Achievement Oscar, fine. There’s no reason to strenuously argue against it. I can bury my issue. She was great in Lover Come Back, Young Man With A Horn and Love Me or Leave Me. I remember something true and tolerable about her performance in Young At Heart, in which she played the love interest of a dark-hearted Frank Sinatra.
And yet it’s hard to think of another living veteran of ’50s and ’60s cinema who is more of an icon for uptight middle-class values and zero sexuality. I know I suddenly liked Day a lot more when I heard that rumor about her having had a hot affair with Sly Stone — but that turned out to be bogus. Day did apparently have a fling with L.A. Dodgers base-stealer Maury Wills.
Doris Day in The Glass-Bottomed Boat
Day’s Wikipedia bio says that “both columnist Liz Smith and film critic Rex Reed have mounted vigorous campaigns to gather support for an honorary Academy Award for Day to herald her spectacular film career and her status as the top female box-office star of all time.”
It also says “while Day turned down a tribute offer from the American Film Institute, she received and accepted the Golden Globe’s Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in 1989. In 2004, Day was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom but declined to attend the ceremony because of a fear of flying. Day did not accept an invitation to be a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors for undisclosed reasons. Day was honored in absentia with a Grammy for Lifetime Achievement in Music in February 2008.”
Having just seen Variety‘s latest Avatar figures ($48.5 million domestically, $143 million overseas), a friend believes “this juggernaught has a real shot at taking $2 billion worldwide, which would be extraordinary.
“Titanic‘s $1.8 billion worldwide total is starting to look like chicken feed. A domestic weekend tally of $48.5 million is impressive enough but its foreign weekend take of $143 million is jawdropping — an actual increase over last weekend. Also factor in the appalling weather over most of Europe and we really are talking about a once-in-a-generation phenomenon.”
I’ve watched almost all of the N.Y. Timesvideo pieces by Melena Ryzik, who took over David Carr‘s Oscar-beat “Carpetbagger” column late last year, and they’re quite good — personality, pizazz, smoothly produced. And her Oscar-race analyses are snappy and perceptive.
So why do I have this back-of-the-neck feeling that she’s not quite getting the attention that Carr got in years past? The buzz ain’t the same. Is it fair to say she doesn’t have that mix of wise-guy personality and flip humor that Carr had — that eye-rolling routine that suggested in a hundred different ways that the Oscar beat was beneath him, and that he felt deeply humiliated by doing red-carpet interviews and yet enjoyed the chance to peel back the layers and toss off the occasional bon mot? Of course it’s not. But it’s true.
Ryzik has no alternative but to be herself, obviously. She projects an agreeable mixture of brains, sophistication and straightforward perk. Ryzik’s stuff works for me. I loved the Nine video piece when she danced. But at the same time a little voice is wishing she could be…oh, Kathy Griffin maybe? Or Camille Paglia? Maybe call people on their bullshit a little more?
I started to think this through after a veteran reporter friend wrote the following this morning: “It’s nearly the middle of January, about a month away from the Oscars, and nobody is talking about Melena Ryzik‘s Carpetbagger stuff. Carr himself is still drawing attention with his artlcles about Mo’Nique and his other N.Y. Times pieces on Roger Ailes and the Apple tablet. But Ryzik not so much.”
The generic definition of a “gaffe” is a remark or observation that most people would probably regard as true but will embarass nonetheless if you say it in mixed company. Sen. Harry Reid‘s racially-tinged comment about Barack Obama in Mark Halperin and John Heilemann‘s “Game Change” certainly qualifies.
Reid reportedly said that Obama was an attractive and electable candidate in part because he was notably “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one.” A horrendous thing to say, but not wrong. This is exactly why many older white rural voters supported Obama in part — i.e., because he isn’t that “black.” Does anyone believe Obama would have beaten John McCain if he looked and spoke like Tracy Morgan? Remember that SNL bit in which Morgan said he’s “way blacker” than Obama?
In any event that quote attributed to Bill Clinton in the same book is much more inflammatory.
An L.A. Times story summarizes as follows: “In lobbying the late Sen. Edward Kennedy to endorse his wife, former President Clinton angered the liberal icon by belittling Obama. Telling a friend about the conversation, Kennedy recalled Clinton had said ‘a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,’ the authors paraphrase. A spokesman for the former president declined to comment on the claim.”
