The basic thrust of this 3.28 Hollywood Reporter story by Hal Espen and Borys Kit is that Ain’t It Cool News is no longer the big-cheese website it was in the late ’90s and early aughts, at least as far as ad revenue is concerned. The shocker is that last July AICN honcho Harry Knowles found himself in big trouble with the IRS, owing $300 grand in back taxes. Harry gradually managed to get himself out of dutch (glad to hear it), but he’s still scrambling as we speak.

All to say that the bearded, overweight, medically afflicted editor/columnist is no King of the Mountain in today’s realm. But I guess we’ve all known that for years. The curious thing, I’m told by a source, is that the business manager who got Knowles into tax trouble, Roland De Noie, is still in Harry’s employ.

“It was July 2012, and Harry Knowles was working up a sweat,” the story begins. “Eighteen months earlier, the creator-owner-figurehead of Ain’t It Cool News collapsed and had back surgery to treat the effects of spinal stenosis, a chronic condition stemming in part from a 1996 fall that left him intermittently reliant on a wheelchair. So now he was walking on a treadmill at a clinic near his Austin home as part of his physical therapy.

“His phone rang. Still trudging, Knowles answered. It was Roland De Noie, his business manager.

“‘I really f—ed up,’ said De Noie in a panic. ‘It’s all my fault.’ He had discovered that Ain’t It Cool News — the website Knowles started in his Texas bedroom that grew to be the scourge of Hollywood, redefined the nature and pace of entertainment journalism and turned an overweight, ginger-haired self-diagnosed movie nerd into the face of a geek nation on the rise — owed about $300,000 in unpaid taxes.

“While Ain’t It Cool News had been making $700,000 a year in gross advertising revenue at its height in the early- to mid-2000s, that had dipped to the low-six figures by 2012. The business had no cash reserves and no way to pay the bills. Its bank account had been seized. ‘We’re not going to be able to get out of this one,’ said De Noie.”

It used to be that mass-market CG fantasy-action flicks would open in the U.S followed by overseas engagements a month or two later. These days it’s fairly common for U.S. and foreign openings to happen concurrently. Which makes it unusual for Jeff Wadlow and Matthew Vaughn‘s Kick Ass 2 (Universal) to open on July 19 in the U.K. followed by an 8.16 debut stateside. By the time it opens here it will have been internet-ted to death.

It looks and feels like a sequel that isn’t as good as the original, and I didn’t even like the original that much. Well, I guess it was okay. I certainly loved Chloe Moretz, you bet — she was the thing to see.

But I’ll say it again: cool as Moretz was in Kick-Ass, that final fight scene in which she decked several big bad guys just wasn’t believable. I don’t care how skilled she is at martial arts — she’s not big enough to fight full-sized men.

Are you going to tell me that if Moretz were to meet Universal marketing honcho Michael Moses in a ring that she’d put him on the canvas? Think about that.

Here’s how I put it on 8.24.10 in a piece called “Girls Can’t Deck Me“:

“An 8.21 Denver Post article about films starring female action heroines underlines a basic fact — women are simply not big or strong enough to defeat most male opponents in hand-to-hand combat. They can wound or cripple but they cannot kick real-life butt unless their male opponent is some Woody Allen– or Arnold Stang-sized guy. Even larger-proportioned women just don’t have that upper-body-weight advantage.

“Which means that it’s doubly ludicrous to see slender, smallish women like Angelina Jolie and Chloe Moretz deliver serious ass-stompings to male opponents, some of whom are bigger and brawnier with gorilla-sized arms, legs and feet.

“There are dozens of ways female action stars can go bad-ass in movies (cops, assassins, soldiers, spies, MOSSAD agents, CIA agents, homicide detectives) but they really aren’t that good at beating up most guys — not in real life, they’re not. And if you ask any guy out there the suspension-of-disbelief required to buy into this is just too much to ask for. The knock-downs that Salt‘s Jolie and Kick-Ass‘s Moretz have handed out (among others) are pure hokum.

“Does this mean they’ll eventually cease? Laughed off the screen by popular demand? Of course not. I went with Salt because it was so well put together, so as long as there’s a clever director at work these films will seem semi-palatable. On top of which they seem to fulfill a fantasy. Women enjoy female action stars demonstrating physical superiority over male opponents…right? And so these kick-butt sequences will continue to happen in the same way every superhero gets to jump off buildings and ignore gravity.

“Action has been ruined by the mid’ 90s Hong Kong influence and CGI, but no one seems to care all that much.

“Film critic Lisa Kennedy, author of the Denver Post piece (which is called “Beauty Meets Brute Force“), almost says what I’ve just said in the previous four graphs, but not quite.”

With Derek Cianfrance‘s The Place Beyond The Pines (Focus, 3.29) opening tomorrow, here’s a re-posting of my 9.8.12 review: “This is basically an upstate New York crime story about fathers and sons. It’s also about cigarettes, bank hold-ups, motorcycles, travelling carnivals, amger, nobody having enough money, bullheadedness and the general malaise that comes from living in the pure hell and suffocation of Schenectady and surrounding environs. I’ve been up there and it’s an awful Siberian hell so don’t tell me.

“It’s also about men and their lame cock-of-the-walk issues in Cianfranceville, or the Land of the Constant Macho Strut and the Eternally Burning Cigarette, and if you can swallow or suck this in, fine…but I couldn’t.

“Boiled down, Pines is about the conflicted, problematic, sociopathic or otherwise questionable tendencies of two fathers (Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper) and how their sons (Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen, respectively) are all but doomed to inherit and melodramatically carry on that legacy and that burden, so finally and irrevocably that their mothers (respectively played by Eva Mendes and Rose Byrne) might as well be living-room furniture, and the influence of schools, community values and/or stepfathers matter not.

“If you can roll with this world-of-Cianfrance view — i.e., wives and mothers are good for sex and breeding and cleaning and making meals and running errands and occasional guilt-tripping but when it comes to the issue of a son’s character and destiny, it’s almost entirely about dad — you might be able to roll with The Place Beyond The Pines.

“But I wasn’t able to. I respect Cianfrance’s ambition in telling an epic, three-act, multi-generational tale that spans 15-plus years, but I don’t respect or believe what he’s selling.

“Except for the bank-robbing and road-chase sequences I didn’t believe a single moment in this film.

“You can’t have Gosling play a simple-dick man of few words who entertains audiences with his talent as a motorcycle rider and then turns to bank-robbing on the side — that’s way too close to his stunt-driving, getaway-car character in Drive.

“Plus I don’t respond well to movies with female-voiced choral music (a device that suggests that a caring, all-seeing God is watching over us) on the soundtrack plus other musical implications of doom and heavyosity.

(l. to r.) De Haan, Cooper, Mendes, Gosling and Cianfrance before Toronto Fiim Festival screening.

“Plus I hate movies about blue-collar knockabouts and greasy low-lifes and teenage louts who constantly smoke cigarettes. The more a character smokes cigarettes the dumber and more doomed and less engaging he or she is — that’s the rule. If you’re writing or directing a film and you want the audience to believe that a character is an all-but-completely worthless scoundrel or sociopath whom they should not care shit about, have that character smoke cigarettes in every damn scene.

“The principal theme of The Place Beyond The Pines is the following: “Dads Are Just About Everything and Mothers Don’t Matter Much, but Cigarettes Sure Run A Close Second!”

“In short, I thought the movie was unreal, oppressive, dramatically forced bullshit, although it receives a shot in the arm from Dane DeHaan (In Treatment), who looks like a mixed reincarnation of Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro as they were in the mid ’90s, although he’s a lot shorter (5’7″).

“I also felt that Mendes and Byrne are too hot to live in Schenectady. Beauty almost always migrates to the big cities where the power and the security lie, and in my experience the women who reside in blue-collar hell holes like Schenectady are far less attractive as a rule. There’s a certain genetic look to the men and women of Upper New York State, and they aren’t the kind of people who pose for magazine covers or star in reality shows.”

Hollywood Elsewhere is hereby the official non-official newsblaster for all generic reports about the filming of George Clooney‘s Monuments Men in Berlin. HE’s coverage will come to a splendid, jaw-dropping climax when I visit the MM set in Germany’s Harz mountains sometime around May 5th, give or take.

I wanted to see Pablo Berger‘s Blancanieves (Cohen Media Group, 3.29), a black-and-white silent version of the Snow White legend, but not enough to actually attend a screening. I’m generally sick of fairy-tale movies as a rule, and I’ve really had it with Snow White so it doesn’t matter if Berger is an A-level director or if his vision of the tale, set in 1920s Spain, is an exception to the rule. I just couldn’t make myself send an rsvp.

Yes, I’m fully aware that this makes me sound like a peon. I’m sure I’d like it if I saw it.

The truth is that The Artist suffocated my interest in sitting through another film of this kind. I realize how small-minded and illogical this sounds, but if I never see another black-and-white silent it’ll be too soon. Yes, I’m aware that Blancanieves currently has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 86 and a Metacritic tally of 80.

But I love the rounded corners on the trailer footage. All films shot in celluloid have rounded corners, but they’re never seen this way. I wonder if the entire film is like this.

“Ironically enough, Berger wrote Blancanieves as a silent film in 2004, unaware that Michel Hazanavicius would be first out of the gate with The Artist,” Annette Insdorf says in a 3.28 review-essay. “The French movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival one week before Berger began shooting. The Spanish director acknowledged a mixed blessing: The Artist might have stolen his thunder with the element of surprise (Black-and-white?! Silent?!), but it also opened the door to popular success for a drama with neither dialogue nor color.

“If The Artist went on to win the Oscar for Best Film, Blancanieves received 10 Goya Awards (Spain’s equivalent of the Oscars), including Best Picture, and the San Sebastian Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize as well as Best Actress.

“Berger’s Snow White is reminiscent of the female children of Spanish-language masterpieces such as Cria Cuervos, Spirit of the Beehive and Pan’s Labyrinth. The heroines may be vulnerable (partly because fathers are either weak or absent), but these Snow White figures embody a spirit of magical resistance, especially towards cruelty.”

Play this song as you read this review for the full effect.

The first official trailer for Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight (Sony Classics, 5.24) gets it just right. Just enough of a suggestion of what the film is without giving the game away. It lets you know that the writing and the performances are incisive and “real” and that the Greek-vacation atmosphere is to die for, and that it will hold your interest and lead you inward and down a path of deeper thoughts and richer feeling. What else do you want from a film?

Is there any critic of note who doesn’t love this film? It’s easily the best I’ve seen over the first quarter of 2013, and certainly a landmark marital relationship…I was going to say drama but it’s not really that. It’s an encounter, a voyage, an experience, a soul-baring, a marital afternoon & evening, a place to be and open up and wander around in.

“At first I wasn’t sure how much I agreed with the ravers about Richard Linklater‘s Before Midnight, the third (and final?) Ethan Hawke-Julie Delpy exploring-all-things relationship flick (following ’95′s Before Sunrise and ’05′s Before Sunset). I felt intrigued and highly stimulated by this deep-drill, naturally flowing talkfest…but not entirely sold.

“But everything changed with the final sequence of this Greece-set film — a one-on-one confrontation of ultimate marital truth in a hotel room (and then outside the hotel at the finale) lasting…oh, roughly 35 to 40 minutes. This is what brought it all home and convinced me that Before Midnight is not only the finest film of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival so far, but the crowning achievement of one of the richest and most ambitious filmed trilogies ever made.

“This final portion couldn’t be more primal. Every marriage and serious relationship in the history of post-’60s Western culture has had to deal with this stuff — the comfort of knowing your partner really, really well and the need to accept (and hopefully celebrate) all that he/she is, persistent divorced-parent guilt, the onset of pudgy bods and middle-aged sexuality, dashed expectations vs. the acceptance of real-deal trust and bonding, unfortunate eccentricity and craziness, fidelity, personal fulfillment vs. marriage fortification…the whole magillah.” — from my initial Sundance review.