Outdoor promenade adjacent to western wing of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 20 minutes prior to watching Robert Bresson‘s Diary of a Country Priest at LACMA’s Bing theatre — Friday, 4.22, 7:10 pm.
The recently opened Civilianaire on West Third Street, prior to a breakfast with the Relativity gang (Adam Keen, Kristin Cotich, Emmy Chang) at Toast Bakery & Cafe.
The legendary Jane Russellpassed earlier today at age 89. I spoke to her in July ’97 for a People story about the death of Robert Mitchum ; she seemed like a bright, sharp and collected lady. Russell and Mitchum made His Kind of Woman and Macao together. Both were minor noirs, at best, but she and Mitchum had a vibe — they seemed to really amuse and enjoy each other.
So my default image of Jane Russell isn’t the big-boobed hottie-in-the-hayloft in The Outlaw or even her singing and dancing with Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but sparring or toying with Mitchum in some monochrome bamboo bar in some glistening, okay-but-not-that-great Josef von Sternberg film about martinis, guns, smuggling, waterfronts, smart patter and guys in panama hats.
Russell was everyone’s idea of a beguiling presence (terrific smile and dark eyes, great rack, above-average singer) but she was never anyone’s idea of a world-class actress. She had a five-year career as the mythical Outlaw girl (from ’41 when the Howard Hughes -produced western was shot, to ’46 when it was finally released). This was followed by roughly eight years as a big-name star in The Paleface (’48), His Kind of Woman (’51), Double Dynamite (’51), Macao (’52), Son of Paleface (’52), Montana Belle (’52), Road to Bali (’52), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (’53) and Underwater! (’55).
Russell had another 13 or 14 years of gainful employment from the mid ’50 to late ’60s — a gentle downswirl phase.
The Telegraph‘s Philip Sherwell, Robert Mendick and Nick Meo are reporting that during his last 18 days in power, deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubrak “is understood to have attempted to place his assets — more than 3 billion pounds, although some suggest it could be as much as 40 billion — out of reach of potential investigators.
“On Friday night Swiss authorities announced they were freezing any assets Mubarak and his family may hold in the country’s banks while pressure was growing for the UK to do the same. But a senior Western intelligence source claimed that Mubarak had begun moving his fortune in recent weeks.
“We’re aware of some urgent conversations within the Mubarak family about how to save these assets,” said the source, “And we think their financial advisers have moved some of the money around. If he had real money in Zurich, it may be gone by now.”
With the great Ed Helms in the lead, Miguel Arteta‘s Cedar Rapids (Fox Searchlight, 2.11) may look like another raunchy, wild-ass Hangover-type deal in a midwestern setting. Well, it is somewhat, I guess, but it’s a much better thing than The Hangover because it’s a comedy about values , and it basically cares about people in a way you can really accept and settle in with.
(l. to. r) Whitlock, Reilly, Heche, Helms.
It’s a commercial confection, sure, but it’s about trust and corruption and naivete and mad sex in swimming pools, and about friends doing for each other when the chips are down. It has principles, feelings…a soul.
Phil Johnston‘s script, in short, is about way more than just trying to generate laughter. It and Arteta and producers Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (i.e., the Sideways guys) are working on a level that The Hangover never dreamt of. Now watch the Eloi go to the plexes next month and say, “Hoo-hah, not bad, pretty funny…but it would have been a little bit better if Helms had lost another tooth.” People never seem to appreciate that it’s a much better, higher-plane thing to blend laughs and feelings and values than to just blow confetti out of your ass.
Helms plays a touchingly but almost ludicrously naive small-town insurance salesman — his values and sexual attitudes are roughly that of a solemn-minded 15 year-old — who’s sent by his boss to a big insurance convention in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. His assignment is to secure a kind of good business seal of approval prize that his company has won three years previously, and which enhances its value in the same way that a positive review from Robert Parker makes life great for winemakers.
Things go to hell, of course, when he arrives at the convention hotel and his assumptions and beliefs graudally fall apart. A back-home love affair with an older ex-teacher (Sigourney Weaver) goes down the tubes, and nocturnal shenanigans get him in trouble with the convention’s big cheese (Kurtwood Smith), and then an encounter with corruption further darkens his brow.
But the donkey-ish Helms finds allies in three newfound chums — a loutish party animal type (John C. Reilly), a hot insurance-rep mom looking to kick out the jams when she’s away from her husband and kid (Anne Heche) and a straight-laced workaholic (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) — and together they stumble through and bond together against the hypocrites and the skunks. And Helms — who doesn’t make fun of his character in the slightest — leaves the schoolboy mindset behind to some extent.
If only the third act wrap-up didn’t come together so easily Cedar Rapids might have been even more, but let’s not quibble over milk not even poured. It isn’t a great film but a very good one. And Reilly gives a howlingly funny, ethically grounded performance that — I’m serious — is good and triumphant enough to be called the first Best Supporting Actor-level turn for 2011. The man is a genius at this sort of thing. The second he arrives on-screen you’re going “uh-oh, the man!…here we go.”
Boiled down, Cedar Rapids is a comedy about facing reality and choosing your friends in an ethically clouded world. It’s partly ape humor, and partly warm and reflective. I don’t want to build it up too much — it ain’t art — but it is roughly akin to Billy Wilder‘s The Apartment in that it’s about a youngish insurance company employee (Jack Lemmon played his variation 50 years ago) waking up to things and deciding which side he’s on.
Is it as good as The Apartment? No. It doesn’t dig in as deeply into personal pain or look at the darker aspects of human nature as bluntly. But it’s an honorable ally of that classic 1960 film. And also those Preston Sturges comedies of the early ’40s about clumsy but lovable dolts (Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve, Eddie Bracken in Hail the Conquering Hero) being confronted by ethical shortcomings in whatever realm.
Cedar Rapids is somewhere between a ground-rule double and a triple — the kind of HE-approved commercial comedy that happens all too rarely. I knew it was a big hit ten minutes in.
The whole cast nails it — Helms, Reilly, Whitlock, Heche, Smith, Alia Shawkat, Rob Corddry, Stephen Root, Mike O’Malley, Thomas Lennon, etc. The producers are Payne, Taylor and Jim Burke. Helms executive produced. And it wasn’t even filmed in Iowa! The principal shooting location was Ann Arbor, Michigan. And cheers again to Johnston’s script.
Some kind of ridiculous fever got into the systems of certain fair-skinned actors of yore when they applied face-paint and pretended to be ferocious African or Middle-Eastern or Indian warlord types. I’m thinking of Laurence Olivier as the Madhi in Khartoum, Herbert Lom as General Ben Yusuf in El Cid, and Eduardo Cianelli‘s Thuggee “guru” in Gunga Din.
Their performances were campy and racist in a kind of minstrel-show way, but they were so outlandish their performances went beyond the mere chewing of scenery. They didn’t inhabit the realms of excess and absurdity — they feasted on them. They made demonic possession almost into a form of comedy…but not quite.
Many of today’s boomer-aged neocons probably received their first images of aggressive Islamic fundamentalist wackjobbery from Olivier and Lom’s brown-skinned messengers of Allah.
I’m not sure when white actors began to think better of playing African or Middle-Eastern guys, but I think it was sometime in the late ’70s. The last time a major actor dared to pull it off was when Sean Connery played Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli in The Wind and the Lion (’75). I do recall that Alec Guiness‘s portrayal of an Indian wise man named Godbole in A Passage to India (’84) was seen as fairly ridiculous.
A lack of fair proportion is evident in today’s Rotten Tomatoes ratings. 88% for The Fighter, okay. Black Swan is also at 88%, Biutiful is holding at 81% and Somewhere is at 78%. I might dispute this or that but I can live with these estimations. What I don’t get is True Grit‘s 96% rating.
I’m not a huge fan but I respect Grit for being an expertly made “straight” western with two or three exceptional set pieces, some wonderfully flavorful 19th century dialogue and a gamely spunky debut performance by Haillee Steinfeld. But it’s just not a 96. It’s not a real Coen Brothers movie, for one thing. It’s not playful or darkly funny or wicked or perverse or ironic. It’s basically about honoring the Charles Portis novel and in so doing is a dry and rather cold thing — a high-end “meh.”
The reason it has a 96% rating is that critics have been cowed by the Coens’ reputation as first-rank filmmakers. The Coens are now enjoying the same kind of wave-through reviews that Clint Eastwood has been getting since Unforgiven. Many critics have become the Coen’s bitches, in effect. And most of them have taken the easy way out with True Grit and waved it through despite the fact that it’s obviously not a brilliant and/or groundbreaking effort.
Highly proficient, yes. Full of that exacting Coen-esque current. But very few critics have had the grit to call a spade a spade, which is that True Grit is a first-rate thing that doesn’t say or mean a damn thing other than the fact that the Coens are superb filmmakers.
To me, some of True Grit‘s reviews sound absurdly overblown. IGN Films‘ Jim Vejvoda has called it “the best Western since Unforgiven.” Aisle Seat‘s Mike McGranaghanwrote that True Grit “is done with such inventiveness that I was in moviegoing ecstasy.” Total Film‘s Philip KempsaidTrue Grit “is the first great movie of 2011.”
Let’s come down to earth, shall we? Here are some review excerpts that challenge these hat-in-the-air sentiments.
The Toronto Globe & Mail‘s Liam Lacey: “Though No Country For Old Men and True Grit are westerns, and have their share of sardonic humour and carnage, Grit is a much tamer offering, wry rather than comic; melancholy rather than weighty. Though handsomely made and well acted, the film never completely escapes the sense that it’s an exercise in genre excavation.”
Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn: “True Grit mainly functions as an elaborate homage that results in [the Coens’] most conventional outing behind the camera. It’s hard to shake the feeling that they settled for consistency over innovation…[it’s] obvious that they can do better.”
Mark Reviews Movies‘ Mark Dujsik: “True Grit, nearly on par with the original [Henry Hathaway] film, is a reliable, if insubstantial, genre piece.”
Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips: “Craft this strong should not be taken for granted. [But] It feels more like an assignment fulfilled than a passion pursued.”
Roger Ebert: “I’m surprised the Coens made this film, so unlike their other work, except in quality. This isn’t a Coen Brothers film in the sense that we usually use those words. It’s not eccentric, quirky, wry or flaky. It’s as if these two men, who have devised some of the most original films of our time, reached a point where they decided to coast on the sheer pleasure of good old straightforward artistry.”
“The Coens…have declawed themselves. They’re playing it straight. The sensationalistic wickedness of their most provocative work has, for one movie, been banished. This isn’t a rousing movie as much as a reassurance. The brothers prove they can play it straight, but they’re preferred, for better and worse, at a sharp angle.”
San Francisco Chronicle‘s Mick LaSalle: “My only reservation about the movie…is that watching the film it’s hard to see why the Coens wanted to make it. It’s a respectable, entertaining Western, but it’s not so radically different or innovative that their need to make it seems overpowering.”
Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas: “The Coens do their best to mix iconic Western tropes with their own sense of style and comic timing, but their adaptation of True Grit feels fairly uninspired compared to previous efforts making it fairly blatant they should stick to their own original material in the future.”
Entertainment Weekly‘s Lisa Schwarzbaum: “What keeps us at arm’s length…is the almost reflexive Coen instinct to favor controlled surface style over emotional mess and to dote on weird slapshots of violence that don’t leave room to feel real horror. And while No Country for Old Men and especially their stunning personal drama A Serious Man nudged these always erudite, often insular filmmakers out of their comfort zone into fresh air, this more climate-controlled Western retreats to safer ground. It’s just tasty enough to leave movie lovers hungry for a missing spice.”
Director Blake Edwards, 88, has passed. It’s become an HE tradition to always say something a little too honest on these occasions, so here goes. For the last 45 years Edwards has been celebrated as a master of slapstick, but I found most of his stuff laborious, in part because so many of his films (certainly beginning in the early ’70s) exuded a square establishment sensibility. A respected auteur, surely, but he always seemed to me like a schmaltzy, well-paid, Malibu-colony type of guy.
I never sensed, in short, that Edwards’ film were about anything more than (a) the fact that he had a certain instinct for comic timing and orchestrating pratfalls, a gift that arguably put him in the same realm as Mack Sennett (but nowhere near that of Buster Keaton), and (b) that he enjoyed livin’ the high life and therefore felt compelled for some reason to stock his films with evidence or reflections of this. And I always hated the way his films were lighted and shot in typical big-studio “house” style.
Edwards had a good run with Peter Sellers, of course, but Sellers’ greatest director friend/ally was Stanley Kubrick, not Edwards.
Truth be told, there are only two Edwards films I really and truly admire (as opposed to liking or tolerating). One is Experiment in Terror (’62), a creepy no-frills noir about a terrorized bank teller (Lee Remick) and a cop (Glenn Ford) trying to protect her. The other is SOB (1981), an inside-Hollywood satire that feels somewhat realistic (Edwards finally got down with this one) and is full of roman a clef characters (Robert Vaughn as Bob Evans, Marisa Berenson as Ali McGraw, Shelley Winters as Sue Mengers, etc.)
The Edwards films I regard as “fine,” “okay” and/or “relatively decent” are Breakfast at Tiffany’s (except for Mickey Rooney‘s awful performance), Days of Wine and Roses (a very good drama), A Shot in the Dark (moderately funny at times), What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? (loved some of this), The Party (some brilliant portions), Wild Rovers (decent western), 10 (overrated but funny at times), and the low-budget That’s Life (Jack Lemmon facing old age and male menopause depression — an honest and decent film).
The Screen Actors Guild nominations are up, and there are at least three if not four outrageous omissions. Many fine people have been honored, but SAG, I feel, has truly shamed itself by failing to nominate Javier Bardem‘s legendary performance in Biutiful for Best Actor as well as Lesley Manville‘s shattering turn in Another Year for Best Actress.
Perhaps the biggest fall-on-the-floor WTF is SAG’s decision to nominate Jeff Bridges‘ True Grit performance as one of its five Best Actor hopefuls. This is just sloppy, chummy, boomer-fortified cronyism, pure and simple.
The third SAG outrage is nominating Hilary Swank‘s sufficient-but-nothing-special performance in Conviction for Best Actress. Because in so doing they’ve blown off the much more deserving Manville as well as Michelle Williams, who kills in Blue Valentine. It just makes me sick.
If you ask me Valentine‘s Ryan Gosling should have also been Best Actor-nominated, but I recognize that there are only so many slices in the pie and someone has to be left holding an empty plate.
They also blew off Animal Kingdom‘s Jacki Weaver for Best Supporting Actress. You know why? Five’ll get you ten a good portion of SAG’s membership hasn’t bothered to watch the Animal Kingdom screener. Plus they ignored all three of the Social Network guys — Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake and Armie Hammer. And yet they nominate Jeremy Renner for delivering a standard chilly psychopath turn in The Town? What bullshit!
The Bridges thing is mind-blowing. What is the big award-worthy deal about snortin’ and harumphin’ and stumblin’ around as scuzzy old Ruben Cogburn? Bridges knew he had a problem because of Cogburn’s similarities to his drunken Crazy Heart performer so he went with a deeper, drawlin’ gravel-gut voice and scowled a bit more and got to wear some old western duds and shoot a bunch of guys. And this results in a SAG nomination at Bardem’s and/or Gosling’s expense?
I’m not putting Bridges down. I would have done the same thing in his shoes. But the Ruben Cogburn role isn’t that intriguing or compelling. Was Bridges nominated because he’s charming and likable? That’s true, Bridges is that. He’s a very personable guy. So are the Coen brothers — a couple of very witty and likable fellows. So is Matt Damon — an ardent Hollywood lefty, hates Jimmy Kimmel, narrated Inside Job. So is John Boehner, I’ll bet, after a couple of drinks.
The other SAG-nominated Best Actor contenders are Colin Firth (The King’s Speech), James Franco (127 Hours), Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) and Robert Duvall (Get Low). Good for them.
The Best Actress nominees besides Swank are Natalie Portman (Black Swan), Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right), Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone) and Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole).
The Best Supporting Actor nominees besides Renner are Christian Bale (The Fighter), John Hawkes (Winter’s Bone), Mark Ruffalo (The Kids Are All Right) and Geoffrey Rush (The King’s Speech).
It’s good that both Amy Adams and Melissa Leo have scored Best Supporting Female noms for their work in The Fighter. Good also on The King’s Speech‘s Helena Bonham Carter, Black Swan‘s Mila Kunis and True Grit‘s Hailee Steinfeld.
Congrats to Winter’s Bone director Debra Granik and distributor Roadside Attractions for nabbing two Gotham Awards last night. The grimly realistic Ozarkian drama that launched Jennifer Lawrence took the Best Feature and Best Ensemble Performance trophies. And cheers to the three big honorary award recipients — Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky (looking very dapper with his Preston Sturges moustache), Get Low star Robert Duvall and Conviction star Hilary Swank.
Taken from balcony behind the stage as honorary award-winner Robert Duvall was delivering remarks. Notice Black Swan star Natalie Portman (excellent evening dress!) and her director Darren Aronofsky sitting ringside. I can’t tell if the other guy is Portman’s ballet choreographer b.f. Benjamin Millepied or someone else,
It’s good for an ornery little film like Winter’s Bone to get some hugs and positive attention. Does this mean it’s a “better” film than competitors Black Swan, Blue Valentine and The Kids Are All Right? No — it means that the Gotham award-deciders said “let’s politely blow off the highly respected and admired Blue Valentine, a John Cassevettes-like indie with killer performances, and go with an even smaller little rural film…this way we won’t look like Black Swan or Kids Are All Right star-fuckers or obsequious ass-kissers in any way shape or form….it’ll re-enforce our indie cred.”
I showed up around 9:30 pm after seeing True Grit uptown. And no, I’m not saying anything until the embargo goes up tomorrow at 1 pm eastern.
I had half-expected that Lena Dunham would win the Breakthrough Director Award for Tiny Furniture, but nope — they gave it to Kevin Asch for Holy Rollers. Ronald Bronstein won the Breakthrough Performance award for his work in Daddy Longlegs. Don’t give that Gotham love to the small marginal guys whom people know and like somewhat — give to the really small and marginal guys who’ve barely penetrated public consciousness.
The show, as usual, happened at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. Awards presenters included Natalie Portman, Bill Murray, Melissa Leo, Steve Buscemi, Sam Rockwell, Winona Ryder, Anthony Mackie and Paul “I thought I was going to get some awards attention for my performance in How Do You Know” Rudd.
No offense but co-hosts Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci should give it a rest after this. Every time I turn around they’re always saying smart and gracious things at a lecturn in front of a big well-dressed crowd.
Just-announced Oscar co-host Anne Hathaway presented a special tribute to Focus Features CEO James Schamus.
Kids Are All Right star Annette Bening attended, but I didn’t see her anywhere.
I mentioned to Duvall in the press room that I’d just received my Warner Home Video archives DVD of John Flynn‘s The Outfit, and that it’s one of my favorite ’70s noirs. He liked hearing that and walked over for a quick chat. He said that it didn’t play on very many screens because “the mafia didn’t like it for some reason” and made some moves to block it.
Winter’s Bone dierctor Debra Granik.
Get Low star Robert Duvall in press room after winning his honorary Gotham award.
I’ll have wifi on the bus, but I’ll probably spend a good part of this evening sitting in a cafe somewhere and posting. Okay, and maybe wandering around and taking pictures. I’m determined to relax and socialize for at least an hour or two later tonight, although I know not where as I speak.
All this time I’ve been assuming that the rally will take place on the National Mall in front of the picturesque Lincoln Memorial, which is where the Glen Beck rally happened. But no — the Sanity rally is happening on the eastern end of the National Mall near Seaton Park, which is next to the National Museum of the American Indian and not that far from the Capitol building.
Yesterday a film-critic friend told me he’d be going down with his wife. But today he said nope. “It looks like we’re not making the trek tomorrow after all. I have to spend the day unpacking the contents of a moving van full of stuff that arrived from my late mother-in-law’s house.”
“That sounds a very amiable and helpful and cooperative-husband thing to do,” I responded. “You have my respect and understanding. But it’s a capitulation to the mundane.
“What if someone offered that excuse not to attend Martin Luther King‘s 1963 ‘I Have A Dream’ speech on the National Mall in 1963?
“Son: “Hey, dad, what was Martin Luther King’ s speech like? You went to that rally, right?” Dad: “I actually didn’t go to the rally, son. I stayed home and spent the day unpacking the contents of a moving van full of stuff that arrived from my late mother-in-law’s house.”
There are always boxes of stuff from your late mother-on-law’s house to unpack. There have always been boxes of stuff from your late mother-on-law’s house to unpack. There always will be boxes of stuff from your late mother-on-law’s house to unpack. But moments in history happen only once.
Last night I read Jeffrey Goldberg‘s Atlantic piece about the apparent likelihood that if Barack Obama doesn’t man up and do something about Iran’s nuclear-bomb capability (aside from economic sanctions, which aren’t likely to influence anything), Israel will probably bomb Iran’s nuclear sites sometime next year. Which will bring hard rain down upon everyone and everything, to put it mildly.
“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,” Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells Goldberg. “When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the world should start worrying, and that’s what is happening in Iran.”
Israel, Goldberg explains, “is worried about an entire complex of problems, not only that Iran, or one of its proxies, would destroy Tel Aviv; like most Israeli leaders, he believes that if Iran gains possession of a nuclear weapon, it will use its new leverage to buttress its terrorist proxies in their attempts to make life difficult and dangerous; and he fears that Israel’s status as a haven for Jews would be forever undermined, and with it, the entire raison d’etre of the 100-year-old Zionist experiment.
“Robert Gates, the American defense secretary, said in June at a meeting of NATO defense ministers that most intelligence estimates predict that Iran is one to three years away from building a nuclear weapon. ‘In Israel, we heard this as nine months from June — in other words, March of 2011,’ one Israeli policy maker told me. “If we assume that nothing changes in these estimates, this means that we will have to begin thinking about our next step beginning at the turn of the year.”
“The Netanyahu government is already intensifying its analytic efforts not just on Iran, but on a subject many Israelis have difficulty understanding: President Obama. The Israelis are struggling to answer what is for them the most pressing question: are there any circumstances under which President Obama would deploy force to stop Iran from going nuclear? Everything depends on the answer.”
The article begins as follows:
“It is possible that at some point in the next 12 months, the imposition of devastating economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran will persuade its leaders to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons. It is also possible that Iran’s reform-minded Green Movement will somehow replace the mullah-led regime, or at least discover the means to temper the regime’s ideological extremism. It is possible, as well, that ‘foiling operations‘ conducted by the intelligence agencies of Israel, the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powers — programs designed to subvert the Iranian nuclear effort through sabotage and, on occasion, the carefully engineered disappearances of nuclear scientists — will have hindered Iran’s progress in some significant way. It is also possible that President Obama, who has said on more than a few occasions that he finds the prospect of a nuclear Iran ‘unacceptable,’ will order a military strike against the country’s main weapons and uranium-enrichment facilities.
“But none of these things — least of all the notion that Barack Obama, for whom initiating new wars in the Middle East is not a foreign-policy goal, will soon order the American military into action against Iran — seems, at this moment, terribly likely. What is more likely, then, is that one day next spring, the Israeli national-security adviser, Uzi Arad, and the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, will simultaneously telephone their counterparts at the White House and the Pentagon, to inform them that Netanyahu has just ordered roughly one hundred F-15Es, F-16Is, F-16Cs, and other aircraft of the Israeli air force to fly east toward Iran — possibly by crossing Saudi Arabia, possibly by threading the border between Syria and Turkey, and possibly by traveling directly through Iraq’s airspace, though it is crowded with American aircraft.
“In these conversations, which will be fraught, the Israelis will tell their American counterparts that they are taking this drastic step because a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people. The Israelis will also state that they believe they have a reasonable chance of delaying the Iranian nuclear program for at least three to five years. They will tell their American colleagues that Israel was left with no choice. They will not be asking for permission, because it will be too late to ask for permission.”
The first thing I noticed about the new Movie City News redesign, which looks relatively decent (or at least better than before, being more balanced), is a preponderance of robin’s egg blue. The typeface, the MCN Tweety-bird, the MCN Twitter box, the bars…light blue all around. Plus some light violet. It reminds me of the colors and the vibe in a little boy’s bedroom.
The idea is to convey a certain spirituality or placidity or something. It’s all right or isn’t a “problem,” per se, but it doesn’t feel like a sale. It needs to man up on some level. A little red or orange, maybe.
The second thing I noticed is that Hollywood Elsewhere’s status has been upgraded. After being linked and referred to by MCN for several years as a “gossip,” I’m now included on the “Mainstream Blogger” list (along with Anne Thompson, Deadline, LA Observed, Patrick Goldstein, Roger Ebert’s Journal, The Real Shawn Levy, etc.). Thank you, David. I’ve noticed, by the way, that Deadline and HitFix are listed on the Mainstream Blogger and Gossip rosters. Split personalities?
The other Gossips are /Film, Ain’t It Cool News, Defamer, Huffington Post (really?), Jezebel, Mark Malkin, Movieline, NY Daily News, People Magazine, Star, The Superficial, The Wrap (really?) and Yahoo! Movies.
The third thing I noticed is that the new design disappeared about 11 am Eastern, and that the old design was back in action. Obviously a temporary gears-and-levers adjustment.
Incidentally: I understand about capturing a page image (control – shift – 4) and that if I add control to this combo the image is supposed to appear on Clipboard. Except it doesn’t, and the usual paste function (control V) doesn’t paste it either. So the hell with it.