Another hit job on Nikki Finke has surfaced, this time in an online-only Film Comment piece by Roger Smith: “Finke’s MO is a time-honored one: for fear of becoming a target, high-level sources feed her fairly juicy stuff, hoping to placate her. If those sources are expecting long-term loyalty, or even semi-permanent placation, they had best reevaluate those expectations.

“Of course, this is also a case study in the internet’s extreme degrading effects on journalism — both its ethical standards and its very economic basis. What Nikki Finke has done is combine a deep knowledge of her subject — the business of Hollywood –with a laser-like sense of people’s insecurities and the fact that the instantaneous presentation of ‘news’ 24 hours a day values speed over accuracy, ‘readability’ over thoroughness, and downright thuggishness over professionalism.”

Wells comment #1: It sounds a bit fogeyish to lament readability over thoroughness. The medium is the medium, and I think it’s fairly well understood that in the case of major online columns penned by former print journalists that every post is as thorough as the author was able to make it before publishing. If it’s not 100% thorough, then it’s a fairly safe bet it will improve and be honed with updates and corrections over the next several minutes, or certainly with an hour or two. And if the authors don’t correct soon after they’ll soon be writing their own epitaphs.

Obviously no one posts anything unless they’re 97% or 98% certain that everything in a piece has been researched and double-checked, but if they post with an error or two…wham, you can fix ’em right away as long you’re alert at the keyboard and not going out for a two-hour lunch without your iPhone or Blackberry.

Back to Smith: “With near-perfect timing, Finke’s online dispatches have provided an alternative to spending 30 minutes or so a day reading the trades. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter are chopping staff by 50 percent in a desperate attempt to stay ahead of precipitous drops in ad revenue — an effort that may or may not succeed in saving franchises that are 105 and 79 years old, and until quite recently, almost invariably profitable.

“But there is also a very real question as to whether the blog business model can be sustained over time. Deadline Hollywood, bolstered by Jay Penske‘s cash, has recently stolen three top journos, one each from Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, plus a senior London-based entertainment writer, the beginnings of building a serious staff and its attendant costs. Whether the website’s ad revenues alone will cover those costs is highly doubtful. And should Deadline Hollywood, down the road, choose to erect a ‘pay wall’ will it see its traffic decimated?”

Wells comment #2: HE’s business model works, I can tell you, by keeping operating costs way down. One full-time salary (mine), two part-time freelancers (advertising and tech) and no collateral office expenses — it’s all done from my pad — and no health or dental insurance costs to speak of, and no operational expenses save for a monthly fee paid to the server, plus necessary equipment (laptop, cameras, desktop computer, chargers, cords) purchased when needed.

Back to Smith: “And until Finke’s million or so unique monthly visitors are asked to pay, they can continue to enjoy, gratis, Finke’s near-patented style of innuendo, unsourced quotes, outright vilification, and attempts to redact her mistakes into ‘updates.’ It appears that the internet, Hollywood and Nikki Finke were made for each other.”

Wells comment #3: The “thuggery” thing I obviously agree with, having tasted it first-hand. Then again power constructs high stone walls and heavy wooden gates and hires goons to guard them, and you can’t get in unless you’re tough and aggressive. That’s the way of the world. But I really detest the mindset that constantly assumes and anticipates that venal or under-handed motives are in play at all times, and that you need to wear armor 24-7 and always keep your handgun loaded with the safety off.

We all need to keep our guard up, of course, but if you allow your dark angels to run too much of the show you’ll be consumed by them. I once admonished a journalist friend for thinking like Herman Melville, for believing in a vision of life in which snapping serpents are constantly slithering through the ponds and rivers and along the terra firma and under the flora, and if you’re not careful you’ll step on one and get bitten in the leg, and maybe even swallowed.

“The sea is calm,” said Claggart, the master-at-arms in Billy Budd. “Peaceful. Calm above…but below a world of gliding monsters, preying on their fellows, murderers all of them. Only the strongest teeth survive. And who’s to tell me it’s any different here on board or yonder, on dry land?”

But can someone name the last romantic-relationship film in which the leading lady clearly outweighed and could probably pin the leading man in a wrestling match, and probably in less than ten seconds? No criticism or judgment implied here. I’m just asking. (Common has, I would say, a physique not unlike this guy’s.)

Russell Crowe‘s British-accented voicing of a British Petroleum exec sounds a lot like Ricky Gervais….”a lot more fun that it sounds!” An extremely witty and funny fellow. To me he’s not the flying-phone guy — he’s the joker. He does need, however, to get back to that Fistbiscuit boxing weight.

“Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence, which is brutal, agonizing and meaningless with some oases, delight, some charm and peace. Life is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…

“I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of [one of my films]. We all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it. Everybody knows how awful the world is and what a terrible situation it is and each person distorts it in a certain way that enables him to get through.

“Some people distort it with religious things. Some people distort it with sports, with money, with love, with art, and they all have their own nonsense about what makes it meaningful, and all but nothing makes it meaningful. These things definitely serve a certain function, but in the end they all fail to give life meaning and everyone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.”

No link or hint is being provided to identify the speaker. I’ve pruned some of it down to make it sound less repetitious, but you’re supposed to know who this person is without even thinking about it.

The interesting thing about this just-released schedule of Cannes Film Festival selections is that Doug Liman‘s Fair Game — a competition pic with big stars (Sean Penn, Naomi Watts) — won’t screen until Thursday, May 20th, at which point many U.S. journalists are either packing their bags or have already left town. It’s curious that the festival has decided to screen this Bush-era political drama (which runs 106 minutes) so late in the schedule.

You might think with a digitally restored print of Fred Zinneman‘s From Here To Eternity having shown at the Academy last November and also being shown next Thursday (5.13) at the Cannes Film Festival’s Cinema de la Plage series that a Blu-ray Eternity might be released later this year. Nope. I’m told that Sony’s home video division is looking at late 2011. The applicable metaphor is managing air-traffic control at LAX, and having to make some planes wait before they can land.

A guy asked a while ago if Jake Gyllenhaal is a good fit when it comes to starring in brain-dead Eloi popcorn movies like Prince of Persia (Disney, 5.28) and Source Code. Will the public buy JG, he meant, as a quipping musclebound fantasy action hero when they basically see him as an anxious, internally-driven, reality-based guy to start with?

I don’t know if they’ll accept him as a rugged hero-stud, I replied, but JG is a reliable and believable actor with big shoulders and nice pecs, at least. And he seems as committed to prostituting himself in the service of big Babylonian bullshit movies like this one — i.e., Ali Hunky, Cousin of Alexander the Mummy — as Liam Neeson or anyone else. These movies aren’t about presence and confidence and force of spirit on the part of the actor as much as whether or not the producers, the director and the screenwriters have hack attitudes or not.

If Prince of Persia is a stinker I don’t think that’s Gyllenhaal’s problem, really. He can probably relax, in any event, because (a) he’s already gotten paid for Prince of Persia and (b) he’s costarring in a supposedly high-quality Ed Zwick film out later this year called Love and Other Drugs.

This is an allegedly illegal Machete trailer so watch it quickly before it gets yanked. My God…it’s hilarious. For the first time in a long time I’m actually looking forward to a low-rent Robert Rodriguez cheeseball film.

After my latest attempt to find a script for Chris Nolan‘s Inception, a friend explained that it’s “been on lockdown because it has some huge reveal in the third act.” Doesn’t this make you want to see it all the more? There are reasons why Patrick Goldstein‘s summer trailer posse called Inception their #1 must-see, and this is one of them. Pass it along, memorize it, repeat it — “huge reveal in third act.”

Huge waves slammed into the beaches of France’s Cote d’Azur yesterday. The waves, reportedly between four and ten meters high, “overturned cars and battered seafront restaurants” and sent Cannes merchants scrambling to clean up a week before the start of the 63rd Cannes Film Festival.

Iron Man 2 does that basic CG pulverizing thing that Eloi movieogers all seem to want to see. I’m not blaming director (and costar) Jon Favreau, exactly — he did the job that he was paid to do (at least in approximate terms), but this thing sure as shit isn’t The Dark Knight, I can tell you that.

Taken from third floor of Manhattan’s AMC Empire plex after last night’s all-media showing of Iron Man 2.

Plus it’s so loud and bludgeoning that I began to wish that Downey could recede into the background and that the whole thing could be about Sam Rockwell‘s glib, slickly dressed yuppie-scum character. Between this and his deliciously comic performance in A Behanding in Spokane, I’ve totally turned around on Rockwell.

Does Mickey Rourke take pills in order to make himself look bulky and scummy? And those sausage-sized fingers with those grime-caked fingernails that look like they were transplanted from the claw of a giant sloth….my God! Rourke himself is a very good place spiritually, but every time I look at him I go “what kind of genetic inheritance…?”

I have a basic prejudice against any film that uses Monaco as a backdrop, even if it’s just for one sequence, because it’s a soul-less over-developed corporate hell-hole that seems to attract nowhere people — a place like Atlantic City or Cancun or Las Vegas or Orlando DisneyWorld. If you go on vacation to any of these places you have a serious blockage affecting the state of your soul.

In my mind this is Robert Downey, Jr.‘s second super-budgeted, high-impact, untethered fart-slamming movie in a row (after Sherlock Holmes). Plus he constantly steps on Gwynneth Paltrow‘s lines, to the point that I kept losing the thread of their discourse. On top of which he’s wearing too much make-up in this thing so I’ve pretty much had it with him — for now.

I’m not saying Downy is irrevocably toast but he definitely has to make something that will counter-balance the Sherlock/Iron Man 2 double-whammy effect to get himself out of dutch. The good will he enjoyed in the wake of Tropic Thunder is out the window — I can tell you that.