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.

For the time being don’t click on this YouTube link. Click instead on this mp3 and try to answer the following: (1) Who’s the actor?, (2) Who/what is he playing?, (3) What TV show is this from?, and (4) What’s The Name of the Episode? Hint: the actor became a hyphenate when he got older.

This? Where’s the idea, the edge, the special whatever? He’s just standing there with a big weapon. And what’s with the brown hair?

Four days hence Barack Obama will will give his big Berlin speech in Tiergarten Park (German for “animal garden”), beneath the monument topped with the big golden angel known as the Victory Column. Some say the site has an unpleasant association with military aggression. But for most of us it means Wim Wenders‘ Wings of Desire (’87), and particularly those two middle-aged angels, Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander, standing atop the tower and vibing out. Which, for me, makes it a place of dreams, reflection, longing, compassion.

“Given that Heath Ledger‘s Joker performance is worthy of a nod, but hobbled by its generic provenance, what’s the extra magic ingredient that will put Ledger over the top come next February?,” asks the Guardian‘s John Patterson. “Will it be the stark and depressing fact that he’s dead, and thus worthy of posthumous veneration. Or will it have more to do with The Ugly?

“I’m betting on The Ugly. Death is no way to get Oscars. Back in 1968 there was a furious campaign to prevent the recently deceased Spencer Tracy being nominated as best actor for Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, on the sound basis that plenty of living actors deserved a break. Only in 1976 was this taboo finally overcome, with the recently deceased Peter Finch‘s victory for Network, but that was the 1970s, when everyone was crazy.
“So, The Ugly. Ledger went all Lon Chaney on his Joker. He worked out the makeup largely on his own, lathering himself up a Catweasel-style hair-catastrophe, and smearing his face with white powder to contrast with his two horribly healed, livid-scarlet cheek-slashes, which resemble what hangs out of the sides of a pastrami sandwich. For anyone who thinks Ledger got too involved in his role, bear in mind that Chaney — champion makeup man — actually pulled his eyeballs from their sockets with wires for his 1926 Phantom Of The Opera. He called it ‘extreme characterisation.’
“Ugly’s quite big this season. Hellboy endures snotty teenagers shouting, ‘Dude, you’re ugly!’ at him in his forthcoming sequel, and the Hulk ain’t no oil painting when his blood’s up. But Ugly isn’t bad for Oscars, or at least for nominations. The Elephant Man, Mask, Monster and The Hours (renowned babe to butt-fugly horror being a favored rite of passage in movie-star self-abasement trajectory) — all those harrowing sojourns in the Ugly Chair, all that falling out of the Ugly Tree and hitting every branch on the way down, it adds up in terms of prestige and awards.
“Beautiful Hollywood always loves an ugly loser. So maybe it’s Heath’s year after all.”
When was the last time that a villain performance was talked about so confidently and so early in the game as an all-but-certain Oscar nominee? Javier Bardem‘s Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, of course. (My bad for spacing.) Before that, Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs.

An interesting Newsweek piece by Fareed Zakaria (dated 7.19) that carefully explains how the rap on Barack Obama (i.e., softheaded idealist who thinks that he can charm America’s enemies) is off the mark, and that his world view “is far from that of a typical liberal, [and] much closer to that of a traditional realist.” From an historical perspective, at least, Zakaria claims that Obama seems more “the cool conservative” — particularly given his reported admiration for the dispassionate foreign policy moves of the first Bush administration — “and McCain the exuberant idealist.”

“Putting a violent spin on the Superbad formula (envelope-pushing raunch plus unexpectedly sweet affirmations of male friendship), Pineapple Express emerges as a fitfully funny, tonally trippy but not entirely satisfying effort from the Judd Apatow comic fraternity,” writes Variety‘s Justin Chang in a review that went up last night. Chang is obviously hedging, fence-straddling, not sold. Is this an omen of reactions to come, or is Chang just some fickle Variety guy off on his own beam?

“Featuring Seth Rogen and a scene-stealing James Franco as two pot-addled losers on the run from a ruthless dealer, director David Gordon Green‘s first mainstream venture is an unruly, literally half-baked hybrid of bloody hijinks and stoner laughs.
“This is certainly one of the better-looking efforts to come off the Apatow assembly line, composed in crisp widescreen images by d.p. Tim Orr, whose poetic lensing in Green’s previous films helped earn the director comparisons to Terrence Malick. But production values are somewhat beside the point when the movie in question is more Harold & Kumar than Badlands.”
Interesting observation: “In addition to its many nasty instances of stabbing, shooting, groin-kicking and head-smashing, the pic offers perhaps the most graphic case of ear mutilation since Reservoir Dogs. [But] beyond that, neither the comedy nor the carnage warrant further Quentin Tarantino comparisons.
“Some choice lines aside, too much of the humor is predicated on the notion that watching others get high is inherently funny (unless the viewer happens to be in a similar state, it’s not). And while its genre-blurring may seem audacious by studio standards, in the end, Pineapple Express still feels too safe, too constrained by buddy-comedy uplift, to have any real bite. Ironically, the stakes seemed higher, the test of the central duo’s bond more wrenching, in the far less eventful Superbad.
“At the same time, the pic’s feel-good aura is undeniably part of its appeal, rooted in the chemistry of its two leads. As the more rational, stressed-out Dale, Rogen makes a perfectly panicky foil to Franco, who delivers a hugely likable turn as a genial bum who’s lonely at heart and loyal to the core. McBride also scores laughs as the corruptible but surprisingly resilient Red.”