Somehow the news about Brandon Roush being stripped of his Superman tights and cape didn’t cross my screen until this morning. Variety‘s Anne Thompson mentioned it at the end of a 12.27 story; Latino Review‘s George Roush re-reported it yesterday. (Routh, Roush…?) Bryan Singer won’t helm the next Warner Bros. Superman flick, Thompson says. Routh, says Roush, “will be replaced in the stand alone sequel by whomever is cast as Superman in the upcoming Justice League of America movie.”

“There is no vision beyond page views,” Gawker media reporter Richard Morgan has said about Gawker managing editor Nick Denton to New York‘s “Intelligencer” after quitting at the end of his first day. “I was announced as being some kind of television beat writer. And I spent the day reading TV blogs and e-mailing and calling and meeting with TV folks. And Nick would tell me to post, like, something about Us Weekly getting Ashlee Simpson‘s engagement wrong. And then he wanted me to do another on Playgirl. Jesus spent three days in Hell. I could only handle one.”
But that’s the blogging game, man! You can research and interview and write your pieces, but in the meantime you have to post stuff and you have to keep it going all day and sometimes into the night. If you stop shovelling coal into the steam engine the train will slow down and stop and then you’re dead meat. The effort can be hellish, yes, but the game is the game, man, and if you can’t grim up and get down and ignore nearly everything else in your life (including doing the laundry, renewing your car registration and going to the post office) in order to keep focused and keep shovelling then you don’t belong. If you don’t come in on Saturday, don’t bother coming in on Sunday.

DGA and AMPTP reps may start talking sometime next week…. boring, listless, blah blah. I hate stories about strike representatives who are supposed to be doing things but instead are just making calls, having lunch, piddling around and kicking the tires.

“There’s a growing sense of gloom about what the WGA strike will eventually yield for the scribe tribe,” Variety‘s Cynthia Littleton reported yesterday, drawing on results of a survey of Variety subscribers conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates. “Only 9% of the total think the strike will be resolved in the writers’ favor, while 57% say it will be resolved in the companies’ favor — compared with 20% who believed it would end in the writers’ favor in the November survey.
“Even among writers, the pessimism appears to be growing, with only 10% of WGA respondents believing that it will end in the writers’ favor compared with 22% in November.
“Nearly half (48%) of all respondents said their view of the WGA hasn’t changed since the strike began, while 27% said they see the guild in a more ‘negative light’ and 23% say they see the WGA in a more ‘positive light.’ The guild’s poll numbers have dropped since the November survey, when 29% of all respondents said they saw the WGA in a more positive light since the strike began.
“Executives were most likely to say they’re taking a dimmer view of the WGA, with 49% saying their opinion of the guild has gone south since the strike began, while 43% of execs say their opinion hasn’t changed.”

“‘I’m telling you, Keith, this is Lexington and Concord — this is going around the world,’ MSNBC’s Chris Matthews told his election night co-host, Keith Olbermann, in describing last night’s Iowa victory by Barack Obama. He announced that the nation was in a rut and that the Iowa vote signaled a craving for radical change: ‘It’s taking us to a new place. The biblical term, since we’re in a biblical era, is deliverance.'” — from Alessandra Stanley‘s 1.4.08 “TV Watch” column in this morning’s N.Y. Times.

It is not enough for Barack Obama to have won the Iowa caucuses on the Democratic side, which he’s now done. Hillary Clinton also needs to come in third, which is where she is right now, just a hair behind John Edwards.
“Even if your candidate didn’t win tonight, you have reason to celebrate…we all do,” Arianna Huffington wrote a little while ago. “Barack Obama’s stirring victory in Iowa — down home, folksy, 92 percent white Iowa — says a lot about America, and also about the current mindset of the American voter. Because tonight voters decided that they didn’t want to look back. They wanted to look into the future — as if a country exhausted by the last seven years wanted to recapture its youth.
“Obama’s win might not have legs. Hope could give way to fear once again. But, for tonight at least, it holds a mirror up to the face of America, and we can look at ourselves with pride.”

A director-writer hyphenate is telling me that the WGA membership is not 100% behind the WGA negotiators. His crowd would like to get back to work, he says, and would like to see Patrick Verrone & Co. be a little less Sonny Corleone and a little more Tom Hagen and approach this thing as a business deal that needs to be made. He says the dissenting writers would publically express this view but they’re keeping silent because they’d just get shouted down by the hard-liners.

He’s also saying he wants the WGA to follow the lead of whatever deal the DGA comes up with, which he thinks will happen within a week or two.
“I write because I didn’t want to work with a shovel,” he says. “I write because I like to sleep in late. Because I love movies and wanted to do what I wanted to do in life. No one ever asked me to be a writer. It’s a cushy job. If I couldn’t make a living doing it, I’d get a real job or figure out something else out, but that’d be second choice.
“Do what the production staff, or IATSE guys do? No way, that’s hard work. If I couldn’t make a living I wouldn’t spend a whole lot of time whining about it though. I’d be glad for the time I got to be a writer, and if I really still loved it, I’d write short stories for myself and my friends. Or I’d rack my brains to come up with new ideas.
“Sorting this through in my head has led to me to a conclusion about what’s happening now with the strike, and I have to confess I’m not thinking as lockstep as some of you might want me and others to be, so get ready for a dose. I’ve also been influenced by watching The Godfather recently and considering the words of Robert Duvall‘s Tom Hagen, consigliere for the Corleone family, when he said to James Caan, “It’s business, Sonny…not personal.”
“A lot of the ‘writers’ need to get honest fast,” he says.
“No one ever asked us to be writers. This is a choice we made.
“All the talk about the ‘little guy’ that the WGA fights for is sad when you think how little most of the writers care about the ‘little guy’ who is out of work right now, along with the crew members and the office staff.

“This is a good two-way disagreement with true greed on both sides, but the ‘writers’ need to get real about our side of the landscape here.
“There’s a lot of talk about ‘creators’ and how ‘important’ writers are. Thing is, ‘creators’ are paid well. Really well. More than most studio execs in fact. Way more. Hired writers on shows are paid well too. Just not as well. That’s life, but the top dogs in our union are making sick money. Peter Chernin sick. Don’t think they aren’t. They have every right to (and it’s really the reason most of you are in the TV business).
“And we aren’t ‘forced’ to give away our copyrights, people. We sign the contracts willingly. Why? Because we want the money. We want to be in business with the people that are giving us the check. No one puts a gun to our head. You want to keep your copyright? Don’t take the check. I’ve taken the check and I’ve had to think about giving my ownership away and it hurts and when I couldn’t, I didn’t. You want the copyright? Figure out how to get it or write a novel. A play. This is a different medium and as writers sometimes we’re having a hard time accepting that.
“I appreciate what the union has done in the past. We should be proud. But the people who are hijacking it and whipping the town up right now shouldn’t be all that proud. They’re hurting a lot of innocent people in a very tough time for this town. It’s very selfish.
“Get back in there and negotiate for the internet but everything else is a powerplay. Animation? Reality? Let them strike on their own if they want to be in the union. It’s all so sad. Our people are like sheep, they get so whipped up. Do we really just want to be mad so we listen to these people? Why aren’t we just as mad at them? You really think the consensus is so unanimous? Wrong. Those of us who don’t agree with you don’t bother to go to meetings to get yelled down.
“I play poker with a guy in the WGA committee. A guy who hasn’t sold a script in a lot of years by the way. He calls it ‘war’. ‘We’re at war. It’s not ‘war’. It’s business. Figure out a way to make a damn deal.

“You love to ride down the DGA and call them pushovers. IATSE, Tom Short are pushovers? Anyone that doesn’t see it your way is a ‘pushover’ or a ‘shill’.
“You know what the DGA did? They did their homework. That’s not a pushover. They want to make a deal that keeps their people working. Their concern isn’t the power of their union. It’s getting a good deal. It’s keeping working. Keeping our families fed. It’s business.
“Face the facts: when the strike is over staffs are going to be smaller, and there’s going to be less development. Less scripts purchased. We have not helped. In the long run, we have hurt. We have cost jobs and money. We have not and will not have gained in any way, and that is the only fact that matters.
“We need to get rid of the people doing the negotiating. Whether they’re good or bad, they couldn’t make a deal. Out. Move along. Get fresh faces in there, pare it down to what’s real, and then call the AMPTP in. The rest is just ego-fed power play. Trust me folks, this union head they hired is taking a check home every week of the strike.
“I’m not down for fighting ‘war’ when it’s really just business. There’s enough real war out there.
“There are pigs on both sides of the troft. The producers and studio people who don’t agree with the AMPTP hard-liners need to get into their faces and make them negotiate. (Are you listening Steven Spielberg, Brad Grey, Les Moonves?) But we need to get it together as well. This is not a battle between good and evil. It’s not black and white. You can kid yourself that it is, but it isn’t. They are not storm troopers and we are not the sweet-faced rebellion. Many of us are lazy, greedy, wrongheaded and power hungry. Just like the other side. I know the good-evil thing is more fun and easier to swallow, but it’s not true. It’s a common- sense business negotiation and nothing more. Both sides need to get that.
“The WGA and the loudest of the cattle-drivers don’t want a dissenting opinion. Yet it is a void that needs to be filled. They don’t want to break ranks. Talk is always of the fear of ‘breaking ranks.’ Why is that? Why are they so afraid of breaking ranks? Because they need to keep the group marching. If they slow it down, there may be time to listen to some common sense and realize that they’re mad, but not that mad… not go-to-war mad.”

Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon‘s expressions capture the way I tend to feel whenever I read a box-office assessment story quoting Media by Numbers president Paul Dergarabedian. A dependable, well-liked guy, but he zones people out. Not sassy or colorful enough. We need a movie stats guy who talks like Yogi Berra.

One Missed Call (opening 1.4) is tracking at 51, 27 and 6…very modest. Five films are opening on Friday 1.11. The Bucket List (opening wide) is at 74, 30 and 5. First Sunday— 43, 30 and 3. Name of the King — 31,19 and 1. The Orphanage — 18, 24 and 1. The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything: A Veggie Tales Movie — 39, 19 and 1.
3 films opening on Friday, 1.18.08: 21 Dresses — 56, 27 and 5. Cloverfield — 39.37 and 6. Mad Money — 57, 22 and 0.
4 films opening on Friday, 1.25.08: How She Move — 18, 15 and 0. Meet the Spartans — 31, 19 and 1. Rambo — 62, 23 and 5. Untracable — 22, 18 and 0..

Sorry to be this way, but there seems to be reason to not only dislike but resist Michel Gondry‘s Be Kind Rewind (New Line, 1.25). The plot is about a video-store clerk (Mos Def) and his eccentric best buddy (Jack Black) have to reshoot dozens of popular movies after Black’s accidentally erases the store’s entire inventory of VHS tapes. Uh-huh. I know…forget naturalism and just go with it like we did with Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotlesss Mind and The Science of Sleep.

Except I’ve chosen to not go with it this time, and I don’t care if dissing it sight unseen makes me sound small-minded or whatever. The plot sounds irritating as hell and, in the words of David Mamet, I say “no” to that.
Flight-of-fancy movies are Gondry’s signature, of course, but for any present-tense film to even half-work it has to half-resemble some fundamental aspect of the real- time world, especially if has anything to do with technology, old or new. I realize how groaningly literal-minded it sounds for someone like myself to say “no one except backwater Luddites watches movies on VHS tape these days, and finding a store that stocks only VHS is next to impossible.” But these two statements happen to be true, dammit. If I could make this awareness go away for Michel Gondry’s sake by clapping my hands, I would do that. But it won’t.
This is a movie that might have worked ten years ago, maybe. It seems so fanciful-flimsy it already feels like a mosquito buzzing around my ear. Part of me has always been vaguely irritated with Gondry, and now may be the time to slap him down like a drunk needs to be shaken hard and made to sober up with green tea or black coffee. I’m not saying I intend to trash Be Kind Rewind when it plays at Sundance, which would be stupid. But I’m halfway there.

Major differences between National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets and the trailer, according to N.Y. Times technology columnist David Pogue. “Just how different can a trailer be,” he asks, “without becoming false advertising?” My standard complaint is that trailers tend to make the films they’re selling seem much dumber and more primitive than they actually are. Deliberately, of course, because they’re always aimed at the slowest folks in the room.