“The Chicago Film Critics Association has attracted scads of attention and even more sympathy this week for its boycott of films released by 20th Century Fox,” the Reeler‘s Stu Van Airsdale has written.
“The notoriously press-hating studio pushed back its previews of The Simpsons Movie to all-media screenings a few nights before the July 27 release; this was the last straw for the group led by Chicago Daily Herald critic Dann Gire, who sent word to Fox publicists that he and his colleagues would no longer contribute features or profiles about Fox films.
“Reviews, evidently, are exempt. The Los Angeles Times and Radar Online, among others, laid out the ‘problem’ over the last few days: Fox’s hostility to online media, where coverage and reviews leak at a rate that studio reps feel compromise their control, is no longer acceptable, particularly when that hostility extends to print critics, whose convenient sense of outrage defers only to their enduring sense of entitlement.”

How much of the current 20th Century Fox-vs.-internet critic hoo-hah is about simple communication skills, or a lack thereof? The thorniest relationship problems have a way of disappearing like that when this or that combatant decides to apply a little charm and openness and friendly back-pats. And yet I’ve long noticed a curious reluctance on the part of certain Fox publicists to being responsive and friendly (as opposed to be polite or “correct”) and talking frankly about things — the upper-crusters believe they’re too good to actually talk to writers who don’t work for Newsweek or the N.Y. Times — and returning phone calls.
These tendencies, I’ve found time in the past, are usually rooted in the personality of this or that senior executive. Frosty butch-boss publicists are unfortunately a fact of life in this town. You have to get over them or get around them or placate them or something, but they’re not going to go away. I could name five or six of the worst ones right now, but what would that get me? It’s usually best to just ignore them and do your work, and then six months down the road you’ve forgotten what the fight was about and so have they and it’s back to business as usual.
What’s happed in the Fox situation is that hissy-fitters have poisoned the well by refusing to return calls or be truthful (I was apparently lied to about Chicago Film Critics Assn. boycott being a non-starter) or communicate quickly about this or that, and many journalists have become irate about this and now there’s a “situation.” Needlessly. And yet once these things start, it’s hard putting out the fires.
Right now everyone hates Big Fox (although Fox Searchlight is totally cool …they’re not in this in my book) and online critics all over the country are voicing complaints, writing pieces about these complaints and pledging solidarity with the Chicago Film Critics Assn. boycott on features about Big Fox and Fox Searchlight films. “Twentieth Century Fox is on the edge of an internet publicity crisis,” L.A. Times reporter Gina Piccalo has written.
This will all go away sooner or later. It always does. Besides, who cares about Babylon AD, Starship Dave, Alvin & The Chipmunks, Alien vs Predator 2? These are all instant dumpers in my mind. The only one that looks good is Doug Liman‘s Jumper…maybe.

“Rupert has confirmed to me that we will have Page 3 girls…but in a concession, they will be dot drawings” — a Wall Street Journal staffer indulging in gallows humor under the shadow of Rupert Murdoch‘s looming purchase of the newspaper, as related in a 7.19.07 N.Y. Times story by Richard Perez-Pena.

Leslie Hill, a member of the Bancroft family who has opposed selling the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch, is depicted in a poster hanging in the paper’s offices.

Okay, it’s official: director Rod Lurie intends to get his own movie about the Joe Wilson-and-Valerie Plame affair — a roman a clef that will costar Vera Farmiga, Kate Beckinsdale, Edie Falco, Matt Dillon and Alan Alda — into theatres before Warner Bros. and producers Akiva Goldsman and Jerry and Janet Zucker write, shoot and release their version, which, if it happens, will be based on Plame’s memoir, Fair Game.

Vera Farmiga; Valerie Plame

Goldsman and the Zuckers once looked like Wilson-Plame front-runners, but no longer. It seems fair to say that they asked for this situation by dragging ass. If they’d only gotten going they could have been in production by early fall, which might have conceivably scared off the other guys. But with Lurie now locked into shooting Nothing But The Truth come October, Goldsman and the Zuckers are stuck with sloppy seconds.
Am I alone in presuming that Farmiga will be an excellent Plame-like figure? She’s the closest thing we have to being the new Meryl Streep, after all. It’ll all work out (probably) as long as Lurie doesn’t insist that she dye her hair blonde.

A few months ago I read Peter Buchman‘s two Che Guevara scripts, The Argentine and Guerilla, that Steven Soderbegh will begin turning into moving images starting on 7.25 in Spain. I’m bringing it up because Catalina Sandino Moreno has joined the cast of both films. Emiliano de Pablos‘ Variety story doesn’t say which character she’ll be playing, but pretty much everyone on the Che side of the battle in Guerilla winds up dead.

Obviously political and terse and rugged, Buchman’s scripts are about how living outside the law and fighting a violent revolution feels and smells and chafes on a verite, chapter-by-chapter basis. They’re about sweat and guns and hunger and toughing it out…friendships, betrayals, exhaustion, shoot-outs and trudging through the jungle with a bad case of asthma. What it was, how it happened…the straight dope and no overt “drama.”
If Soderbergh does right by what’s on the page, The Argentine and Guerilla (which Focus Features will open within weeks of each other in 2008) will have, at the very least, a Traffic-like impact. The films will almost certainly be Oscar contenders, and you have to figure that del Toro, playing a complex, conflicted hero who ends up dead (i.e. executed in a rural schoolhouse by a drunken Bolivian soldier), will be up for Best Actor. The Guevara role is too well written (nothing but choice, down- to-it dialogue from start to finish) and del Toro is too talented an actor — it can’t not happen.

Warner Bros. No Reservations (7.27) is sneaking nationwide on Saturday night, which obviously means that studio strategists believe it will sell itself. You could also take the hard-nosed view and say it hasn’t been tracking all that well and they need to do something to wake people up. I know they wouldn’t be showing it if didn’t work, so maybe there’s reason for a little uptick.

If the no-end-in-sight hunt for Osama bin Laden “was a movie, we’d trace the saline in Osama’s dialysis machine, target it with a laser and blow up the mountain,” writes N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd.
“W. swaggers about with his cowboy boots and gunslinger stance. But when talking about Waziristan last February, he explained that it was hard to round up the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders there because ‘this is wild country…this is wilder than the Wild West.’ Yes, they shoot with real bullets up there, and they fly into buildings with real planes.
“If W. were a real cowboy, instead of somebody who just plays one on TV, he would have cleaned up Dodge by now.”

“Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows doesn’t come out for another [two] days, and already I’m seeing ‘SPOILER ALERT!’ in my sleep. We might as well all unplug our broadband connections and sit in a corner going ‘La la la la la’ until 12:01 a.m. Saturday when we can get the book, [and then] hide in a cave with a flashlight and start reading.” — from a Mark Caro/Popcorn Machine riff titled “The Literary Terrorists Have Won.”

Paolo Barzman‘s Emotional Arithmetic, a drama about three Holocaust survivors reuniting at a Canadian dinner party after 40 years apart, sounds moderately intriguing, especially with actors like Gabriel Byrne, Susan Sarandon, Max von Sydow and Christopher Plummer costarring. All the better that Emotional Arithmetic will be the closing night film at the Toronto Film Festival.
But talk about a title that will grab each and every low-thread-counter in each and every city across the globe and say to them, “Don’t see this movie unless you know exactly what ’emotional arithmetic’ might specifically mean. Clearly, the use of this title indicates that we ourselves don’t know what it means, which is a way of saying the movie may be an art-house circle jerk. Lord knows, there is emotional arithmetic to be calculated when you order 99 cent cheesebugers at your local McDonalds — it’s a totally meaningless term.”

MCN’s David Poland has written a calm, intelligent, maturely reasoned assessment of the 20th Century Fox vs. online critics hoo-hah going on right now. It’s so calm, intelligent and maturely- reasoned that the sound and smell of the emotional elephant in the room is made even more palpable than if Poland had acknowledged its presence.
I heard a few minutes ago from a reputable online critic and commentator, and while I’m sure he would strive to put his thoughts together in a mature Poland-like manner if he were to address this issue in print, he has no problems with acknowledging the elephant in private. The piece I posted an hour or two ago is “on the right track,” he said. “Fox has declared war. We’ve been on the receiving end of this for a few years, and no one gave a shit because it was just us. Now that Fox is widening their attitude to everyone, people are now paying attention. Fox hates critics. Fox hates the press. Fox hates their audience. That is the truth.”
I don’t know if that’s altogether true, but I know that things have gotten emotional lately. Unduly and needlessly, I would add. I don’t wanna pickle. I just wanna ride on my motorsickle.

Rope of Silicon has posted photos of Tom Cruise‘s in-costume appearance as Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the German officer who led a failed plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944, in Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie. And it was announced yesterday that the World War II drama has a release date — August 8, 2008.

I don’t know that it means anything one way or the other for the Cruise- Wagner United Artists to release a high-profile thriller in the beginning of the August dump season, but I’m sure this story will further the Paul Dergarabedian idea that old paradigms are changing and August is starting to become “the new June.”