Jeffrey Wells

In explaining his $70 million lawsuit against CBS, Dan Rather recently claimed on Larry King Live that news reporting is being routinely diluted, brainwashed and diminished by corporations and big government “Somebody, sometime has got to take a stand and say democracy cannot survive, much less thrive with the level of big corporate and big government interference and intimidation in news,” he told King last Thursday.

In other words, the de-corporatized and disenfranchised Rather repeated almost precisely what was said four years ago in Robert Kane Pappas‘ Orwell Rolls In His Grave.

Boiled down, the doc (which I reviewed at the end of Sundance/Slamdance ’03 when I was working at Movie Poop Shoot) is about the effects of the news media companies all being owned by six or seven giant corporations, and the increasing uniformity and lack of diversity that’s resulted in their coverage of major stories and issues.

Pappas noted that the mainstream media system is basically a subsidiary of corporate America, and asked if big-media companies have become an anti-Democratic force in this country.

The doc went on to present the case that the news media companies aren’t as interested in exposing facts or keeping an eye on political corruption as much as perpetuating their own power as the shapers of a kind of dozing, status-quo, no-rough-edges view of the way things work, while scrupulously avoiding hard truths about same.

Rather told Bill Maher the following last March: “This nexus between the press and the people they’re supposed to cover has become far too close, far too chummy. And, frankly, I think there’ll be some correction as a result of the Libby trial, or at least a little more often, saying, ‘You know, I need to have access, but there’s a limit to the price I will pay for that access.’

And: “You cannot claim to be a well-informed citizen and only look at the internet. But I don’t think you can be a well-informed citizen anymore and not look at the internet.”

In today’s N.Y. Times, Terrence Rafferty reminds that Francois Truffaut‘s The 400 Blows (a new print of which will show at N.Y.’s Film Forum on Wednesday) is “a lyrical and surprisingly tough-minded little picture about a 12-year-old troublemaker named Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), as seen by a sympathetic and slightly more seasoned troublemaker named Francois Truffaut.

Snapped four years ago in the Cimetiere de Montmartre

The originality of this 1959 film “lies in its willingness to trot along to the quotidian rhythms of a boy’s life,” Rafferty explains. “Antoine’s childhood (which bears some similarity to Truffaut’s own) is crummy, but in unexceptional ways. Right from the start of his career Truffaut had the sly gift of holding our attention while appearing to be doing almost nothing, just moving at his own casual pace away from the traditions that dogged him and toward something that might have looked to him as huge and vague and daunting as the ocean.”

A deluge of photos appeared two or three days ago of Sarah Jessica Parker and Chris Noth shooting scenes in Manhattan for New Line’s Sex and the City movie, but I found this one (taken by Anna Zozulinky and supplied by Israeli columnist/ blogger Yair Raveh) especially intriguing because it shows you all the heavy-duty location-shoot regalia — trucks, canvas coverings, metal lighting stands, light reflectors and filters and whatnot.

Sarah Jessica Parker, Chris Noth (i.e., “Mr. Big”), shooting three days ago on upper Fifth Avenue — Thursday, 9.20.07

I’m hardly a production veteran but Parker and Noth look a bit over-flanked. This is how location-shoot hardware looked in the ’80s and ’90s, but does today’s hand- held, ultra-light-sensitive, high-def Red One visual aesthetic really need all this stuff?

What this shot “says” is that Sex and the City‘s dp John Thomas (who shot Whit Stillman‘s Metropolitan way back when but has since worked mostly for television, including 36 episodes of the Sex and the City series) is key-lighting this film within an inch of its life, no doubt having been told to make the cast members (most of whom are 40ish and 50ish) look as young and squeezey as possible, which in itself tells you this the film is probably going to be on the glossy and fastidious side.

Not that anyone expects Sex and the City to be William Friedkin‘s The French Connection or even a mid ’70s Antonioni film, but there’s always hope that a feature-film version of a TV series will kick things up to a higher (grittier, less poised, more New York authentic) level. This photo tells me that ain’t happenin’.

The people giving Into the Wild those terrific per-screen averages in four theatres (which looked like $50,000 per situation yesterday, and now looks more like $52,000 and change) are, of course, the big-city fans of Jon Krakauer‘s book who’ve been reading the rave opening-day reviews of this Sean Penn-directed film and champing at the bit. In other words, it’s been patronized right out of the gate by a bright, thoughtful, literate crowd. It’s a foregone conclusion that the Good Luck, Chuck crowd won’t be as ardent, but the big test is whether or not Into The Wild will attract Midwestern jocks, bright but lazy dilletantes, fence-sitters, under-achievers, etc.

That Engish-language version of a French-subtitled trailer for Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead on Awards Daily is fine as far as it goes, but the cutting on this UGC trailer, posted on Brightcove last July, is more engrossing. (Thanks to cjKennedy for providing the link.)

Online columnists “don’t own their blogs,” Variety‘s Peter Bart wrote two days ago, “their blogs own them.” Right away I laughed because it’s half true. More than half!

“In fact, their blogs have changed their lives,” he goes on. “Forget the morning coffee. Now the first thing they do upon waking is to nervously check the blogosphere to see if someone has beaten them to a story. Then the panic really starts: What can they concoct that someone out there might pay attention to? Why was yesterday’s traffic disappointing? Surely there should have been more hits.

“Perhaps this is why my blogger friends seem ever more driven and neurotic than in their pre-blog days. They have anointed onto themselves a weird sort of stream-of-consciousness freedom, but they are always peering at their ratings like a herd of TV programmers. Hence, the new lexicon of blogdom is all about traffic, not about ideas.”

That’s wrong. The kind of traffic that matters comes because of ideas, opinions, advancing the conversation. Being consistently willful, contentious, outspoken, waterfront-covering.

“The bloggers I know are so hungry for attention that they suffer from attention deficit syndrome.” That’s half-true, but you can’t let this side of things get to you.

“Their blogs have become a narcotic: The highs are downright beatific.” True — they can be.

“Then the numbers come in and they trigger the low.” Well, there’s always room for improvement.

Sneaking back east as we speak, and showing itself to Pacific-area audiences in two or three hours. Terrific! Something to go to besides those heavy-duty dramas like In The Valley of Elah and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. For people who just want to kick back and be entertained…right?

I just noticed this several-days-old sentence from Time‘s Richard Corliss in a 9.16 Toronto Film Festival piece on Julie Taymor‘s Across The Universe: “I forget who said this — a movie producer, I think, appearing on a making-of promo video — but he characterized the quality of his film as ‘somewhere between Sergeant Pepper the album and Sergeant Pepper the movie.'”

I don’t think this is a fair analogy — Across the Universe is more reminiscent of Milos Forman‘s Hair — but the quote reminded me of a famous headline that appeared on the front page of the long-defunct L.A. Herald Examiner (not the entertainment section but the actual front page) on the opening day (7.24.78) of Universal and Robert Stigwood‘s catastrophic musical, St. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The headline read “St. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Bomb.” Universal marketing executives hit the roof and, if I remember correctly, cancelled advertising with the paper for revenge. I remember it being a huge furor for two or three days.

I was at the all-media screening for this musical at the old Rivoli theatre (B’way at 49th) a few days before the New York opening. I was sitting in the orchestra dead center, and I distinctly remember that as costar Peter Frampton began to sing “The Long and Winding Road,” a guy in the first or second row couldn’t stand it and yelled out, “Ecch! Ecch!”

For all the HE talk-backers who slammed me for writing that Darjeeling Limited director Wes Anderson “will wade into ground-level sensibilities” when he makes a personal appearance at an upcoming Santa Monica screening of the film, I rest my case.

Why is the N.Y. Times Sunday magazine running a pages-long John Wray piece on Michael Haneke‘s Funny Games with the distributor, Warner Independent, not opening it until next February? I can imagine what might have happened but….

Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern has finally joined HE in dissing those idiots employed by various bars, hotels and electronic stores who show images that are obviously intended to be seen on conventional 4 x 3 TV screens in a horizontally expanded format on their 16 x 9 flatscreens. This looks absurd to anyone with a sense of visual and biological proportion, and yet the people who understand that it’s infuriating to watch incorrectly widened images seem to be very much in the minority.

Is it fair to say that the people who look at these stupidly distorted 16 x 9 images in sports bars and say nothing as they chit-chat and sip their vodka and tonics are complacent to a fault? Maybe, but let’s not go there. However, the people who run the bars and hotels and electronic stores who deliberately set their widescreen TVs so that the entire screen is filled to the brim even if the images are from a 1.33 to 1 film from the 1930s or ’40s need to be taken out back and slapped around.

These bozos have been insisting on showing distorted images for one reason only — they paid for the damn 16 x 9 flatscreens and are determined to subject their customers to the full width of the image even if it looks ridiculous. So that people know they’re looking at a 16 x9 image that they’ve paid for (!), and not some old TV leftover from the ’90s.