Day: January 21, 2011

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann announced tonight his sudden departure from (and the total collapsing of) Countdown. Shocker. TheWrap is reporting that the underlying motive may have been to create a “new media empire.” But the suddenness of the departure indicates some kind of dispute with MSNBC’s Phil Griffin.

Olbermann is a brilliant and perceptive analyst, naturally funny and quippy, has a nose that is highly attuned and has never missed the subtlest bullshit-dealing trick, and is an excellent if not glorious world-class hater for (almost) all things right, fiendish, regressive, hee-haw, stupid, Fox/, Tea Party, corporate, Palin, Bachmann, etc. May God love and embrace him for this in this life and the next. Re-surfacing is a fait accompli, of course. I’ll follow the guy anywhere.

From AOL News: “Olbermann’s peripatetic career landed him at MSNBC eight years ago — his second prime-time stint on the network — with a humorous show counting down the day’s top stories. That changed on Aug. 30, 2006, when Olbermann aired the first of a series of densely-worded and blistering ‘special comments,’ this time expressing anger at then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld‘s criticism of opponents to the war in Iraq.

“More anti-Bush administration commentary followed. Olbermann dropped any pretense of journalistic objectivity, and he became a hero to liberals battered by the popularity of Fox News Channel and its conservative commentators. Olbermann openly feuded with Fox, often naming personalities like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck one of his ‘worst persons in the world’ for some of their statements.

“Countdown became MSNBC’s most popular show. Instantly, a network that had often floundered in seeking a direction molded itself after Olbermann. Opinion was in, and MSNBC’s prime-time lineup was filled out with Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell, who both had been subs for Olbermann when he was away.

“During his moment on his final Countdown Olbermann “thanked several people, including the late Tim Russert, but pointedly not MSNBC honcho Phil Griffin or NBC News president Steve Capus.”

About 11 hours ago I wrote that I was planning on seeing five films today. It’s now 7:55 pm and three have been bagged — Jim Kohlber‘s The Music Never Stopped, J. C. Chandor‘s Margin Call and Alison Ellwood and Alex Gibney‘s Magic Trip. I have to be at the Eccles at 9:15 pm for a screening of Tom McCarthy‘s Win Win, and then I’ll be cabbing to the Egyptian for an 11:30 pm showing of Jason Eisener‘s Hobo With A Shotgun.

I got stalled late this afternoon by a personal/business matter, and that killed my writing time. I also have to post two more items before leaving for the Eccles, but every year I come to realization that I’m good for two or three films a day, tops, if I want to keep up with the filing. Five feels industrious, but nothing happens on the site.

My twitter-sized reactions so far:

(a) The Music Never Stopped is an intelligent but tiresome estranged-father-and-son drama blended with a ’60s classic rock soundtrack (not “laid on” but integrated into the story) with fine performances from J.K. Simmons, Lou Taylor Pucci, Julia Ormond and Cara Seymour. The writing is straight and unpretentious and true to the mark, but the film feels tame and square.

(b) Margin Call is a moderately engaging Wall Street drama — I’m giving it a 7.5 — that uses reasonably well-sketched characters in a brokerage firm to dramatize the 2008 meltdown. It’s a decently made film with one especially riveting boardroom scene, but without much snap or tension overall, and it radiates a fair amount of gloom. Solid, workmanlike performances from Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci. Jeremy Irons is the standout as the ruthless top dog.

(c) Magic Trip offers fascinating color footage of the original 1964 coast-to-coast bus trip of Ken Kesey‘s Merry Pranksters, and tells the legendary story more or less completely with two glaring exceptions. One, there’s no mention whatsoever of Tom Wolfe or his book that almost single-handedly sculpted the Kesey/magic bus legend, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” And two, there’s only one mention of the word “enlightenment” in the whole film and no down-deep discussion at all of what LSD did for people during the early to late ’60s. The latter strikes me as borderline surreal given that LSD was the prime catalyst for the spiritual revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s.

Day #1 is always ambitious so the plan is to catch five films — The Music Never Stopped at 9 am, Margin Call at 11:30 am, Alex Gibney‘s Magic Trip at 2 pm, Bobby Fischer Against The World at 7:30 and Tom McCarthy‘s Win Win at 9:30 pm. There’s an option of catching Andrew MacLean‘s On The Ice at 8:45 pm but I don’t know.

What defines a must-to-avoid “townie” restaurant in Park City during the Sundance Film Festival? The host has a suspicious, guard-at-the-gate attitude when you walk in and say you’d like to hang at the bar, as I did last night at 350 Main. No well-mannered restaurant host in Manhattan would adopt a look of faint alarm and a ready-to-rock tone and say “do you have a dinner reservation?”

I was about to say “no, but I’ve got 15 minutes to kill and thought I’d chill” but the hostess was a mixture of Faye Dunaway in Network and a barkeep in a Sean O’Casey play and the confrontational vibe was like a Queen lyric — “We will, we will stop you!” Things went downhill from there.

I’ve always gotten this attitude from 350 Main staffers — “Are you riff-raff or are you here to sufficiently spend? You don’t much look like a skiier and that worries us. Don’t come in here with any sort of journalistic-swagger attitude because we have a business to run, bub.” I know that Sundance attracts crude simian types to Main Street and I don’t blame any high-toned establishment for wanting to keep this element from cluttering the place up, but townie eateries always overdo it. Another Park City establishment that I wrote off years ago for having this “hold it, fella!” attitude is the Grub Steak, located across from Prospector Square.