I’m going to briefly pretend I’m a low-information boob and just say that this photo of Barack Obama and Gen. David Petreus, which accompanies a 7.22 N.Y. Times story by Richard A. Oppel, Jr. and Jeff Zeleny about Obama’s visit to Iraq, is very visually appealing. Vittorio Storaro-level lighting. Cool-ass Top Gun shades, headphones, mouth mikes. No white flare-out from the window — you can see the topography and the colors very clearly.

Yesterday the New York Observer‘s John Koblin cited evidence that 2008 may be the worst year in modern newspaper history. Okay, he asked if this was the case. But who’s disputing? “On Wednesday morning at 11 a.m., Arthur Sulzberger and Janet Robinson will be managing a conference call that, from the looks of it, won’t be much fun,” he writes. “They’ll be reporting The New York Times Company’s second-quarter earnings.”

“If you’re really cynical you might even say that X Files: I Want to Believe illustrates why the show was cancelled in the first place: because it ran out of fresh ideas.” — from an anonymously-written review (not even a nom de plume?) the Sci-fi Movie Page. The review seems authentic, plus an industry professional whom I know and trust passed it along.

Obsessed With Film‘s Ray DeRousse argues strenuously against a “mumbling backlash” that has attacked Heath Ledger‘s Joker performance, or at least the Oscar talk that has greeted it. These contrarians are saying, he says, that Oscar talk wouldn’t he happening if Ledger were alive. Anonymous chatrooms where? On how many sites?

I sat down today with the American Teen quintet — Hannah Bailey, Colin Clemens, Megan Krizmanich, Mitch Reinholt, Jake Tusing — at Jerry’s Deli (i.e., the one on Beverly near San Vicente). I couldn’t separately mike them plus myself so I just relied on the Olympus digicorder to do its best. As I feared, there was too much clatter and ambient noise inside Jerry’s so the whole thing came to naught. On top of which we didn’t get that far in the chat due to the lunch ending sooner than expected. A nice bunch, though. Bright, polite, candid, friendly.

American Teen star Colin Clemens, Jake Tusing — Monday, 7.21.08, 1:55 pm.

The conversation took a turn at the very end, however, that I’d like to briefly discuss in a calm manner. It was just me, Colin and Jake (everyone else was outside) when I asked, “So where is everyone politically? Is anyone…you know, a Ron Paul fan? Or Nader? Anything out of the ordinary? Or are you all for Obama or…?”
Nobody, they both said. Nada, zip, no interest. Jake said he hasn’t paid any attention at all to the candidates or the election. I asked if he might want to think it over sometime between now and election day in November so he could vote for somebody — Obama, the Libertarian guy, McCain, whomever. “No,” he said. Doesn’t pay attention, doesn’t want to know, TV off.
Colin said the same thing. I didn’t record him or take notes, but he basically said that “politics and politicians are a game…it never changes…it’s not something I care about…maybe when I get older but…I don’t know, but not now.”
Not now? These guys are about to start their junior year in college. They’re adults with a responsibility to think and do beyond themselves. The world is going to hell in a global-warming handbasket, we’re at a fork in the road, the stakes couldn’t be higher, the world needs to change like it never has before, and the youth vote has been estimated to be bigger this year than ever before. But I sucked it in and just said to them, “Well, other people your age feel differently.” They said yeah, we get that.
That happened six or seven hours ago, and I’ve been thinking about it since and I have to say that I don’t get where they’re coming from or, frankly, respect them at all for choosing to be uninformed and inactive with a major election going on and the future of the planet at stake. They’re nice guys with good hearts and nice smiles, but this attitude and posture doesn’t cut it.
I told a journalist friend about what they’d said and he replied, “Well, they’re from Indiana.” What’s that supposed to mean? “Kids from that part of the country are…they have their own world. They take their cues from their parents, and obviously their parents are apolitical. That’s the Midwest for you. The politically active kids are all from the cities and the city suburbs. It’s who they are. I would just let it go.”
Let it go? Well, okay, sure…it’s not that big a deal. But on the other hand, know-nothingism and selfishness and tunnel-vision are a social cancer, I told him. I thought kids were supposed to be coming out of their shells this year and getting into Obama or Ron Paul or whomever, I said, and these guys shocked me.
I asked the friend what he would do if, hypothetically, he was interviewing these guys and they said they were white supremacists. “I would run with that because it’s a good story,” he answered. But apathy, which delivers more harmful consequences to society than white supremacy because it’s more widespread and allows political evil to run rampant, is not?

For me, Nanette Burstein‘s American Teen is too much of a hybrid to be called a “documentary.” It’s remarkably tight and clean and well-shaped. Almost too much so, it seems at times. Some of the dramatic “scenes” unfold so concisely and with such emotional clarity that it almost feels scripted. As if every so often Burstein had told the kids, “Cut! That was good…but once more with feeling.” That never happened, everyone says. Teen was just heavily covered and edited. 1,200 hours of footage were cut into a 100-minute film. But still…

Teen is about five teenage seniors from Warsaw, Indiana — a basketball jock (Colin Clemens), a rich blond bitch (Megan Krizmanich), a plucky-sensitive X-factor musician girl (Hannah Bailey), a geek-nerd with serious acne who wears a 1965 Beatle haircut (Jake Tusing) and a hunky, nice-guy jock with a sensitive side (Mitch Reinholt). It follows them through their final school year — relationships, crises, family dramas, college plans. And it also takes us on a rewind tour of our own.
Sounds cliche-ish, right? Except American Teen breaks through all that by immersing us in all the essentials — conflicts, hidden goblins, insecurities — churning inside. And so you gradually forget about the slickness and start paying attention to the deep-down stuff.
I was kicked out of an American Teen screening during Sundance last January when I couldn’t find a seat. But I had seen the first ten minutes’ worth and didn’t like it much. Too glitzy, too familiar, same old stuff. So I didn’t feel too badly about having to leave. The trick is to get past those first ten minutes, because the movie does get better and deeper and more layered after that.

All high schools are composed of brutal societies with rigid caste systems. The result is that things are almost always awkward, difficult or at least unpleasant for anyone who marches to a slightly different drum. Only the jocks, the student-council dweebs and the pretty blondes seem to find any satisfaction or serenity. I was 85% miserable in my high school. I love it that many of the “stars” of my class are now kind of average, pudgy, diminished from what they seemed to be in their youth, pot-bellied, not up to very much. Hah!
Colin is the nice lanky basketball star with a John Kerry jawline who needs a scholarship to get into college. Hannah is an arty, free-spirited musician who wants to go to film school in one of the big cities. Megan is the dishy blonde with the haughty attitude who’s called “the biggest bitch” in school by Hannah. Jake is an acne-plagued geek who has no girlfirend, doesn’t run with a crowd and seems to have esteem issues. Mitch is a jocky fair-haired hunk with a sensitive side and a nice sense of humor.
They all go through tough times. Colin feels he has to be a superstar on the court in order to land that scholarship, which leads to the wrong on-court attitude and lots of inward perspiration. Dealing with a terrible family trauma and under much paternal pressure to get accepted by Notre Dame, Megan is shown to have inner anger issues, which are manifested early on in a stupid vandalism crime. Worried that she might inherit her mother’s manic-depressive chemistry, Hannah loses it after a longtime boyfriend dumps her, and then she gets dumped again after hooking up with nice-guy Mitch. And poor self-denying Jake gets dumped by his first girlfriend, although his luck turns down the road.

Nanette Burstein

It’s all good dramatic stuff and definitely absorbing, although, as mentioned, there’s something about American Teen that just feels too polished. Despite assurances to the contrary, a suspicion lurks that portions of it may have been vaguely rigged on some level. Variety‘s Dennis Harvey mentioned a moment when “the camera catches two future sweethearts making eyes at each other in a crowded room, before they’ve even met.” And why isn’t anyone getting high? Everybody turns on in high school, right?
I liked, however, the animated sequences that dramatize the kids’ innermost fears and desires. This is a pretty good way of conveying how high-school kids really feel about their personal dramas. The sense of drama is very acute at that age. Teen is definitely worth catching this weekend. It’s worth catching, period. It’s a full-meal movie.
The student crowd I saw it with at USC last week were chuckling and “ah-hah”-ing from time to time. A couple of girls sitting near me gasped in shock when Hannah’s mother, who comes off as easily the least nurturing parent in the film, says to her “you’re not special” and does everything she can to talk her out of going to San Francisco in order to follow her dream. Hannah knows who she is and hates the idea of living a life of caution and limits in Indiana, and yet her mom can only talk about the risks and the pitfalls of the big scary world out there. All parents of creative people say this to their kids. Be practical, play it safe, have a back-up plan in case you fail. My parents said this to me. This is why I related to Hannah the most.

Coming Attractions founder Patrick Sauriol read this morning’s piece about the general popularity, essentialness and vitality of the old CA site, and has written to announce Coming Attractions 2.0 will be up and running less than 30 days from now. Excellent. The old CA ’90s current lives again! And more ad dollar competition to boot!
“I just read your piece on the site today,” Sauriol began. “Thanks for the love. I can also give you some good news that you can break on your site if you want: Coming Attractions is coming back next month.
“In 2006 I decided that I wanted to relaunch Coming Attractions. It’s been a nightmare trying to find the right development team that can execute what I want with CA 2.0, taking the better part of two years to get to where I’m at: less than 30 days away from launching the new Coming Attractions, so your article asking about whatever happened to CA comes at almost the right time.
“I’m purposely downplayed the noise and tried to keep it low that CA 2.0 is in development, mainly because it’s been hell trying to get it built but also I’m a strong believer in ‘show, don’t tell.’ I’ve tried to keep in mind all the cool things about CA 1.0 that people tell me they liked and make sure that it remains in CA 2.0. That said, there is going to be a ton of things that the new CA will bring.
“Rest assured that there will still be movie database pages but now there will also be picture galleries, budget and box-office info, the ability to leave comments and two absolutely amazing apps that I am really excited about that will be able to tell the reader how hot or cold the hype for a movie is throughout the film’s entire production history. For example, you can see the ups and downs of the production cycle of James Cameron‘s Avatar in a single image that can also be manipulated by the user. You can see how casting news, the release of a trailer or any other buzzworthy event impacts the film’s hype throughout any stage of the movie.
“The way that I explained this to the development team is this: suppose CA 1.0 was the old Battlestar Galactica and CA 2.0 will be the new Galactica — take the cool ideas that worked for the old series and then use them to make an even better version of the original idea. That’s what I’m hoping readers will see in CA 2.0.
“To answer your other questions…
“Back in 2003 Cinescape offered me the chance to report movie news through their site (and at the time their magazine). Part of the deal was that I would be exclusive with them for the duration of my contract (2 years) but that CA would redirect to their site.
“Financially speaking it was a better deal for me because my overhead was still way too high (internet costs had just started to roll back due to the fallout from the dot-bomb days of ’00). Instead of having to use 2/3rds of the revenue made from advertising on CA to cover bills I could actually pay myself and make a living as a writer. With a baby on the way I took the job offer. The Cinescape contract was written so that all the content I produced, I still owned. I never sold any part of Coming Attractions. I still own all of the thousands of pages, which is important for what I’ll be doing this year.
“FYI, I never got a big selling out check. Cinescape paid me a decent monthly amount so I could write online full time but it was never a buy out situation.
“In late 2005 Cinescape started to go under. Just before the company dissolved UGO.com approached me about coming to work for them full time. I started in the fall of 2005 with UGO. One of the things that I did there was create their movies blog which broke a number of world exclusives including the review of the Justice League movie script and spoilers about the new STAR TREK movie.
“In spring 2008 UGO decided not to renew my contract and I was let go. At around the same time a local Vancouver internet start-up called MovieSet.com approached me about blogging for their site. Eventually they asked me to come onboard full time when their funding came through. That’s my 9-to-5 job right now. I took the job because I liked the vision for the company (they want to deliver an authentic movie experience for fans and also offer a complete online solution for movie crews to help with their production and they like my writing, so how could I say no?). There’s a lot more I can tell you about MovieSet. It’s got a helluva ambitious idea behind it (think IMDb meets Facebook), but I can always get into that at a later time if you want to know more.
“In-between all of this work stuff there was also a lot of personal heartache and it impacted my creative side. In the space of three years I lost both of my parents to illness and my wife and I also suffered through the loss of a baby. I’m close to family so each of these events hit me like nuclear bombs — events like these put into perspective writing about the latest cool movie trailer or so-and-so being cast in X-Men 4. 2008 has been a lot better for me, both in speaking of my career and personal life.
“Anyway, I hope that gives you a better idea of where I am and what’s going on. If you want to follow up on any of these things ask away, and feel free to publish what I’ve said on your site. And when I launch CA 2.0 I planned on dropping you an email anyway, to ask that you change the link you’ve got on your site.
“Thanks again for saying the nice stuff about CA and me.”

The Drudge Report revealed this morning that less than a week after running Barack Obama‘s “My Plan for Iraq” piece on the N.Y. Times Op-Ed page, the Times editorial board rejected a counterpoint Iraq War article written by John McCain. “The paper’s decision to refuse McCain’s direct rebuttal to Obama’s [piece] has ignited explosive charges of media bias in top Republican circles,” Drudge writes.
Obviously using material forwarded by either McCain campaign strategists or friends of same, Drudge quotes Times Op-Ed editor David Shirley as having said in an e-mail last Friday that “it would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece, [although] I’m not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written.'”
Drudge’s piece includes the original McCain article. One portion of the article indicates, however, that the Times did McCain a roundabout favor by not running it.
“In 2007 [Obama] wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost,” McCain wrote. “If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance. To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.”
Hello? Despite his attempt to walk back his recent Der Spiegel statement, Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable. So McCain should be glad the piece didn’t run. On top of the Times guys having given him a liberal-media-bias issue to run with for a few days, which will help his cause.

Every so often non-obsessive film mavens who don’t monitor the news on a day-to-day basis must wonder whatever happened to Patrick Sauriol and Corona’s Coming Attractions (’95 to ’03), the best news and gossip-tracking site in movies that ever lived. Seasons change, details fade, things slip away, and suddenly you’re going, “Wait…what happened there again?”

We know what happened, of course. Sauriol bailed on CA in ’03 to become a Cinescape reporter/editor and then he went on to write stuff for Vanity Fair and “other publications.” He was described in this undated Movieset Corporate profile as “happily married [with] two wonderful children, three cats, one dog and way too many DVDs.”
I wrote Sauriol this morning for some information. I think he lives in Vancouver. No reply at press time.
Five years and four months ago Online Journalism Review‘s Marc Glaser posted a piece about Sauriol having taken a buyout deal with Cinescape magazine, which effectively ended the glory days of Coming Attractions, which Sauriol founded in 1995.
“No, we haven’t been bought out and absolutely nothing’s changing about the way Coming Attractions reports about the movies,” Sauriol says in the piece. “That could be technically true,” replied Glaser, “but one important change for readers is that they now have to slog through Cinescape’s graphic-heavy site to find Sauriol’s movie news, which are mixed in with book and videogame news. Worse still is the loss of the weblog format, forcing readers to load a separate page for each item.”
I’m just saying I seriously miss Coming Attractions, and that it’s a damn shame it went away.
This whole jag started when I was sifting through web articles this morning about the good old days of Comic-Con. This led me to a piece I wrote eight years ago for my Reel.com column about attending a Comic-Con panel called “Caught in the Net: Movie Webmasters on Hollywood, the Internet, and the Future of Their Bastard Child.”

Wow, Gore and Poland looked so much younger eight years ago. I guess we all did, right? Gore vs. Bush, pre-9.11…what a time it was.

The panel, moderated by IGN Moves’ Den Shewman, featured “TNT Rough Cut’s Dave Poland, Film Threat’s Chris Gore, writer/director Kevin Smith, Coming Attractions’ Patrick Sauriol, CHUD’s Nick Nunziata, Ain’t It Cool News‘ Harry Knowles, and X-Men producer Tom DeSanto,” as I put it back then.
I’m running this because I’d like some reactions. Read this over and ask yourselves what’s changed over the last eight years (except for people having different gigs and jobs)? How is the movie-internet world of ’08 significantly different from the one we had in ’00?
“I wasn’t disappointed” in the panel, I wrote back then. “They gave Harry some hell. His sins, they said, included the appearance of acting arrogantly and ethically irresponsible in certain ways. They rapped him for appearing to be too chummy with moneyed, honeyed Hollywood. They were especially angry about Harry having posted posting their e-mail addresses at one point during the Jimmy Smits/Star Wars Episode 2 brouhaha a few weeks back.
“Harry apologized for the posting (‘It was a mistake’), but otherwise stood his ground and even jabbed back here and there. And Smith got off some good, funny lines.
“But the discussion was a little too political and mild-mannered for my taste. No one raised their voice or lost their temper or squirted anyone with a seltzer bottle. And there didn’t seem to be any particular focus or shape to the scrapping. It was this topic, then another topic, and then something else, then back to the first topic, and then Smith would make a crack and everyone would laugh.
“I’m looking over my notes and I still can’t find a shape to it, but if there was a theme, it was probably, ‘With great power, comes great responsibility.’
“Gore got off a good one at the beginning by pointedly describing Film Threat as a site that “confirms facts,” an allusion to a recent piece by Ron Wells that calls Knowles’ ethics into question. Knowles shot right back with, ‘Did you confirm the story, Chris? I don’t remember getting a phone call.’ Poland jumped in, then Gore again, and then Harry, and things started to build.
“I had written about this fracas and wanted to see where the discussion might go, but some in the audience yelled, ‘Move on! Move on!’ So the Wells’ Film Threat article was dropped.
“The movie experience, said DeSanto, ‘has been forever changed by the internet, for better or worse.’
“Poland told Knowles that he has ‘real concerns’ about how malleable Knowles may be when it comes to studio gift-giving and massaging. Referring to a recent trip Knowles took to Prague to visit the set of Sony’s A Knight’s Tale, Poland said to Knowles, ‘I can tell you, whether you realize it or not, that Sony thinks they own your ass now and have you pretty much in their pocket.’
“At one point, I asked the panelists how they were interpreting the abrupt fall-off of business for X-Men, but that topic, too, was waved aside because the audience was becoming bored.
“Midway through the discussion, Sauriol raised an ethical issue by saying, ‘We need to check each other and to affirm basic journalistic standards. There’s this concern about being renegades or untrustworthy — reflecting only a fraction of what’s been written — that mainstream media people have about us. Without a set of unified rules, the studios are never going to respect us.’
“Instances of studios getting angry at certain Internet journalists for what they’ve regarded as intemperate reporting or reviewing were brought up. 20th Century Fox was angered awhile back at Knowles for running X-Men photos that temporarily queered a deal with Entertainment Weekly to run an X-Men photo on a cover. De Santo confirmed that they almost lost the EW cover because of this.
“Poland said he was concerned about stepping over lines that might aggravate relations with the studios. Knowles mentioned at one point that he’d been banned from getting access or inside information to Fox’s Titan A.E., to which Smith said, ‘”That’s a fucking blessing.'”
Okay, here comes the emotional part…
“Then Smith admonished Poland for what he apparently felt was an undue concern about not wanting to piss off the powers-that-be and keep things on par regarding access to early screenings.
“While Poland tried to explain what the political realities of dealing with the studios involved, Smith shot back with, ‘Fuck the studios! Who gives a shit about seeing [a film] early? Pay your seven bucks, see it on your own, write what you want, and fuck ’em! Don’t worry about those cats! The weapon of the internet is that everyone has a fucking voice.”
“Poland countered that there was no one on the panel who wasn’t ‘doing business’ with the studios. ‘If renegades are really renegades, fine,’ he said. ‘It’s when supposed independents start playing both sides that we’ve got problems.’
“At one point, Knowles said part of his role in talking early about the flaws of a film like Batman and Robin was that he thought he might save someone the $7 they’d pay to see it.
“‘You can’t save anyone $7 by saying Batman and Robin is bad,’ Smith responded. ‘Because they just say ‘Oh, yeah? How bad?’ and they pay to see it anyway.’

Citing a decision by Disney/ABC to take At The Movies with Ebert & Roeper in a “new direction,” Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert announced this morning that he’s bailing on the show altogether. This followed Richard Roeper‘s annnouncement yesterday that he’s also leaving because he and Disney/ABC couldn’t come to terms.

Reaction #1: who cares about Roeper in any light, medium or manifestation? His voice, I mean. The man could be kidnapped by aliens and taken to the planet Trafalmadore and the movie world as I know it would barely notice. Reaction #2: Ebert’s vitality and tenacity in the face of adversity is an inspiration to all of us, but surely it’s allowable to note that his vocal limitations are the key factor in his relationship with the show, and now whatever “new direction” it’s going in.

I wasn’t vigilant enough to catch last night’s update from Variety‘s Pamela McLintock (posted at 10:34 pm) that The Dark Knight actually grossed $158.3 million, or three million more than Sunday√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s estimate of $155.3 million. (And seven million more than my walked-away-from, studio estimate figure of $151 million.) She reports that the final figure was “released Monday morning” — what, East Coast time?

Using the blink-and-you’d-miss-it 7.11 opening of Death Defying Acts as a bellwether and ricocheting off those recent Bob-and Harvey-are-on-the-ropes articles in Business Week and the Hollywood Reporter, the Sunday Telegraph‘s Tom Teodorczuk posted his own assessment yesterday about how the boys seems to be “up against it.” One non-attributable industry guy is heard from, and Teodorczuk speaks to yours truly also (on the record, of course). But mainly it’s a numbers-and-business-moves analysis piece.