Day: April 23, 2013

I spent all morning working with a brilliant web maestro who converted Hollywood Elsewhere to WordPress. We’ve been trying to make the new re-design look right, and it just won’t. And then I spent a long time having an email argument with a close colleague who thinks the design we’re working on is basically shit and that I’m moving too fast. (I want to get this done before flying to Germany.) He’s telling me that I need to hire a serious pro. But I don’t want to re-invent the wheel here.

You have to be good at a certain craft or art form (as I am with writing) to know when you’re not so good at something else. I am at best a mediocre designer. My design tastes are overly conservative. But I have a reasonably good sense of visual balance and I know when something looks pretty good or at least tolerable. But I’m not good enough to amaze myself. Which is why I feel beat and beaten.

All good members of the online cognoscenti are hereby required to give this trailer their full consideration and then offer whatever comment and criticism that may seem appropriate.

Hunter Todd‘s Worldfest, an annual Houston event for the last 50-odd years, is no one’s idea of a major-league, must-attend film festival. But at least it’s getting some press over an alleged racial profiling incident last Saturday in which Todd asked a woman dressed in Muslim attire to allow him to check her backpack.

Is it really that crazy for a nice-enough guy like Todd (whom I’ve met) to ask a female University of Houston student who was dressed “in a full Muslim hijab” to let him please check her backpack to make double-sure that festival attendess aren’t about to be blown up? This was five days after the Boston bombing, remember. Then again this woman may have been (and may still be) an idiot. If I was wearing Muslim garb I sure as hell wouldn’t walk around with a backpack, for Chrissake. Would anyone with a shred of common sense? You can bet she would have been questioned if Worldfest was based in Tel Aviv.

The Houston Chronicle‘s Robert Stanton reports today that University of Houston student Mike Rudd “confronted Todd [after Saturday’s incident] and accused him of racially profiling the UH student.” Seriously?

“Todd acknowledges that he singled out the woman because of the Muslim attire she was wearing,” Stanton writes. “He said he initially did not know if the person was a man or woman. ‘She’s dressed in a full Muslim hijab and was carrying a heavy backpack, and I was concerned about the safety of my guests,” Todd said. Todd denied racially profiling the woman. He said he was on guard because of the explosion that rocked the Boston Marathon just days earlier, killing three people and injuring at least 140.

“‘What am I supposed to do?,’ he asked. ‘Allow a terrorist to blow up 200 people?'”

It’s been nearly 15 years since I caught a show at the Greek Theatre, but I would go to this May 5th Los Lobos concert if I wasn’t going to be visiting the Monuments Men set in Germany. Conventional wisdom says Los Lobos peaked a quarter-century ago but I really liked The Town and The City (’06).

There’s absolutely no question that Pain & Gain director Michael Bay said to Miami Herald critic Rene Rodriguez that “I apologize for Armageddon” — here’s the mp3 of Bay blurting out these exact words — but he meant the hyper-fast pacing of that 1998 blockbuster and not the film as a whole.

Pain & Gain director Michael Bay at last night’s Los Angeles premiere.

Two days ago I reported that Bay had “literally apologized” to Rodriguez in a 4.21 Miami Herald piece “for the frame-fucked, machine-gun cutting of Armageddon.” But then other outlets ran this and sloppily made it sound as if Bay was apologizing for the entire damn thing. And then Bay said on his website that he’d been misquoted by Rodriguez.

In a piece called “I’m Proud of Armageddon,” Bay said Rodriguez had gone “too far in reporting false information. He has printed the bare minimum of my statement which in effect have twisted my words and meaning. What I clearly said to the reporter is [that] I wish I had more time to edit the film, specifically the the third act. He asked me in effect what would you change if you could in your movies if you could go back. I said I wish we had a few more weeks in the edit room on Armageddon.”

Here, again, is the line in which he says the phrase “I apologize for Armageddon.” (I’ve tried six times to post a somewhat longer passage in which Bay talks about the process of cutting Armageddon‘s third act, but the damn thing won’t play.) Bay can’t deny what he said, but the mainstream press — not Rodriguez — did distort his meaning by implying Bay was apologizing for making a crappy film or something. Which he certainly didn’t do.

The Bay apology story is apparently being covered on tonight’s Access Hollywood (which goes on at 7:30 Eastern). Rodriguez offered to let Access Hollywood record his tape of Bay saying what he said but the staffer he spoke with declined, apparently deciding that running a transcript of the conversaton would suffice.