About eight days ago (or or about 7.24) a pirated copy of The Expendables 3 (Lionsgate, 8.15) began to be offered as a free download from various piracy sites including Asswipe.com, Billionuploads.com, Limetorrents.com, Played.to, Swantshare.com, Dotsemper.com and Hulkfile.eu. Today Lionsgate filed a lawsuit against “10 anonymous individuals” believed to be responsible for illegally sharing the swaggering all-action-star film (i.e., Sylvester Stallone, Harrison Ford, Jet Li, Jason Statham, Mel Gibson, Antonio Banderas, etc.) Lionsgate is looking for unspecified monetary damages as well as looking to stop the bad guys from distributing. At least 2 million people have viewed the film illegally since 7.24. One question: how did Kelsey Grammar get to be an Expendables guy? Whose ass has he ever kicked?

Here’s a copy of an email I’ve just sent to Melissa Silverstein, editor of Women and Hollywood:

“Melissa — As you may recall, on 7.17 Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone posted a passionate, thoughtful, first-rate piece about the hurdles that women directors face and go through in getting due or fair recognition for their work. It’s my understanding that despite the quality of the piece and the obvious synchronicity between and it and Women and Hollywood, you declined to link to it because she mentioned me in a somewhat (mostly?) favorable way. You ‘took exception’ to my being mentioned as a friend to women directors, I’m told, and so you did what you could in your own little way to limit the exposure and readership that Sasha’s piece deserves.

“Here’s the paragraph (or rather the portion of the paragraph, split into two graphs) that led to your decision not to link to Sasha’s article: ‘The world of film criticism is changing by the second. While I constantly bemoan the old guard of film critics being ousted — a lot of the new guard are aware of the state of things for women. What women haven’t had all of these years is advocacy. Since I’ve been online and aimed my own coverage more at advocacy, I’ve noticed subtle changes here and there. Many of the very loud voices out there keep the subject on women filmmakers — Badass Digest’s Devin Faraci, for instance, or Hollywood-Elsewhere’s Jeff Wells.

“‘Wells specifically champions the work of female filmmakers on his site. Wells is a controversial person to name here [as] he is so often labelled a sexist by the often hateful posts about women on his site — worse is the den of misogyny in his comments section) but I also must acknowledge that he is one of the few who goes out of his way to support women filmmakers. He has also been generous to me for years, which is more than I can say for others in our industry. Mark Harris has been a champion for women and so has Anthony Breznican at EW. David Poland at Movie City News does this as well. And many female movie writers have their eye on this topic as well, like Thelma Adams, Carrie Rickey, Anne Thompson, Susan Wloszczyna, Katey Rich and most especially Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood, who is tirelessly waging a war against the clear oppression we see around us every day.’

During August or September of 2013 Jon Stewart‘s Rosewater (set to premiere next month in Toronto, possibly also in Telluride) shot footage in Jordan, and in preparation for this costumer Phaedra Dadaleh, a well-established professional in that region, was hired. On 9.11.13 Dadaleh told a Rosewater promotional site that she was “nervous” meeting Stewart, but her concerns quickly evaporated. “He’s just the most amazing, friendly, down-to-earth kind of guy,” she said. “He just got up, gave me a big hug and immediately made me feel at ease.”

Rosewater director-writer Jon Stewart, costumer Phaedra Dahdelah during filming in Jordan last year.

That’s cool, Phaedra, and good for you, Jon. But people on movie sets have been saying the exact same thing about major above-the-line types for at least a century if not longer, and they never get tired of saying it. Time marches on and they just won’t stop wetting their pants when name-brand people are as kind and gracious and friendly to them as regular Joes are to each other in the outside world. It’s always “I was afraid this famous hotshot might be brusque or snide or otherwise a dick or a bitch, but he/she was totally the opposite…and he/she made me feel so good.” I know the feeling, and I’m not saying that that many bigtime above-the-liners — Jon Stewart among them, I’m sure — aren’t really nice to begin with. But one of the main reasons that bigtime showbiz types have made it to the top is that they’re really good — practiced — at putting on that warm, kind and affectionate face when the situation calls for it.

I wasn’t invited to the Guardians of the Galaxy all-media, and I forgot to politely beg Disney to allow me to see it beforehand (they usually oblige if I get down on my knees) so I really shouldn’t say anything until I catch it this weekend. (77% on Metacritic, 92% on Rotten Tomatoes as we speak.) But the news about last night’s $11.2 million haul — the biggest pre-opening total of the year — has hit me two ways. The upside is that it’s obviously great when a movie really hits the bull’s-eye and becomes a cultural and conversational necessity to see. The downside is that American lowbrows have once again told Hollywood loud and clear to keep cranking out CG-driven, jokey-ass comic-book movies about unlikely superheroes doing spectacular things and…you know, whizzing around in CG-land. Thank you very fucking much. The downward aspirations of American mainstream cinema have just been handsomely rewarded, the non-Catholic zombies who are in the movie business for what they can siphon out of it are now cackling and flexing their muscles all the more, and the struggle to produce quality-aspiring, human-scale theatrical fare has just gotten that much harder. Congratulations, American megaplex ass-clowns, for doing your part in the great ongoing effort to nudge American movie culture in a downmarket direction and…you know, another notch or two down the reverse-evolutionary (or devolutionary) scale.