N.Y. Times “Media Decoder” David Carr‘s commentary on Variety‘s whacking of chief film critic Todd McCarthy is worth a listen. The assessment isn’t startling, but there’s something about Carr’s delivery that makes it seem extra-sage. I hate the Times‘ mule-headed policy of being…what, the last major news org/website that refuses to provide embed codes?
I’m not going to remember those who’ve been left out, so if anyone can post them. They always blow people off. Jean Simmons, David Carradine. “Zapata, in the name of all we fought for, don’t go!”…Joseph Wiseman! Michael Jackson gets two and a half seconds.
I’ve watched almost all of the N.Y. Times video pieces by Melena Ryzik, who took over David Carr‘s Oscar-beat “Carpetbagger” column late last year, and they’re quite good — personality, pizazz, smoothly produced. And her Oscar-race analyses are snappy and perceptive.
So why do I have this back-of-the-neck feeling that she’s not quite getting the attention that Carr got in years past? The buzz ain’t the same. Is it fair to say she doesn’t have that mix of wise-guy personality and flip humor that Carr had — that eye-rolling routine that suggested in a hundred different ways that the Oscar beat was beneath him, and that he felt deeply humiliated by doing red-carpet interviews and yet enjoyed the chance to peel back the layers and toss off the occasional bon mot? Of course it’s not. But it’s true.
Ryzik has no alternative but to be herself, obviously. She projects an agreeable mixture of brains, sophistication and straightforward perk. Ryzik’s stuff works for me. I loved the Nine video piece when she danced. But at the same time a little voice is wishing she could be…oh, Kathy Griffin maybe? Or Camille Paglia? Maybe call people on their bullshit a little more?
I started to think this through after a veteran reporter friend wrote the following this morning: “It’s nearly the middle of January, about a month away from the Oscars, and nobody is talking about Melena Ryzik‘s Carpetbagger stuff. Carr himself is still drawing attention with his artlcles about Mo’Nique and his other N.Y. Times pieces on Roger Ailes and the Apple tablet. But Ryzik not so much.”
The N.Y. Times has posted an amusing, very clever little video piece about how David Carr has handed the Carpetbagger reins to Melena Ryzik. Refresh Content’s Nick Dawson graciously sent the embed code along [which I had to remove due to an automatic launch function], and yet the fact remains that somebody in the Times pipeline is refusing to make the code easily available.
It would be one thing if the piece was easily findable on YouTube, but it’s not…if it’s there at all. I’d prefer to grab a YouTube code because the one Dawson sent me automatically launches the video whenever a reader refreshes the HE page.
I called the Times a few times and left messages…nothing. An embed code is not going to re-direct traffic to someone else’s site, and yet the Times — increasingly isolated in its mule-like refusal to roll with the 21st Century swing of things — refuses to let dumb guys like me (i.e., who can’t figure how to capture the code inside the guts of the Times website) access their codes and post their videos.
Can someone from the Times at least send me a code that won’t automatically launch the video?
“All the airports kind of feel and look the same now,” Jason Reitman told the N.Y. Times‘ David Carr in an 11.25 interview piece. “Some are more beautiful, some are less beautiful, but for the most part you’re going to find a Starbucks in every airport. You’re going to get your coffee and the USA Today or New York Times in every airport. All the things that you want are there, so you can land anywhere, and you feel at home. You’re given the sense that you’re everywhere, but you’re nowhere; that you are constantly with your community, yet you have no community. There’s kind of a terrific irony to that.”
But you do have community in an airport. You’re surrounded by hundreds of people who are just like yourself. You just don’t usually talk to them as a rule. And some airports are more soothing than others, especially those in Germany and Swtizerland.
As I put it without irony on 9.27…
“No man-made atmosphere makes me feel quite as serene as an airport. When I’m waiting for a plane, I mean. (And after I’m through the security scan.) A blissful feeling of being neither here nor there. All my cares and anxieties suspended. It’s actually kind of beautiful.
“I know and accept, of course, that airport environments are no substitute for anything, least of all the real rock ‘n’ roll of life. I only know what I feel when I’m inside them. I’m in a kind of womb — a place in which the normal heave and pitch of things doesn’t happen or disturb. The appointments, challenges, pressures, deadlines — all that will surround me and more after I’ve landed. Expected, understood. But what a charmed feeling it is to be within an airport with all of that stuff outside, and with nothing to do inside but chill. I especially love three- and four-hour layovers. I adore browsing around, having a cafe au lait, leafing through magazines, looking at the hundreds of travellers. (Especially the women.)”
David Carr‘s decision to retire from his N.Y. Times Oscar-beat “Carpetbagger” column, announced on 10.21, threw me somewhat. I’m sure his replacement, Melena Ryzik, will perform brilliantly once the change-over happens on 12.1, but I like Carr and his writing alot and didn’t want to see him go.
(l.) David Carr; (r.) Melena Ryzik.
I finally got around to saying this in a note sent this morning. “So David, your strategy is to lower your profile,” I said, “and not continue to do the one thing that aside from your book has put you on the map as a personality/celebrity/character of considerable acclaim? Why? This whole thing floors me. What ‘s the real thinking behind this?”
Carr replied an hour or so later: “If you read the news, I think you know the media story has hit a critical inflection point. Carpetbagger may be that ‘one thing’ in the hothouse of Hollywood, but we all contain multitudes and I think that working as a media columnist and blogger for a national newspaper is a pretty big deal.
“I made the hand-off this year, which I always thought would happen at some point, because now would not be a good time to have my attention divided. I am moving toward the story that matters most to me and my employer accommodated with enabling a very graceful handoff to Melena. I made my desires known and we all agreed that she was the natural, easy choice.
“Melena is the Carpetbagger in blog and in video, and she will be smashing — mark my word. And Paula Schwartz will be the Baguette, as she has always been, working to help cover what ia a very big waterfront. She knows the territory, works the carpet and the phone like nobody’s business, and will be invaluable to Melena and the blog.
“As you may also have noticed, I have not lost my interest in popular culture. Last Sunday, I did Amelia and the new record from The Swell Season. I have two other movie stories in the works and will be reading the Bagger like everyone else. But most of my reporting will be spent on the media story, new and old, digital and not, and all of my blogging will be going into Media Decoder, which is a very big deal to us at a critical time on a story where we think we have a significant competitive advantage.
“I love movies, I love the Oscars, I love all my fake movie-star friends, and I really enjoy the people on the beat, especially my fellow bloggers. But spending the next five months trying to decipher the new math of 10 nominations, which I think is a fascinating story, would pull me out of the narrative on media matters at the precise time I should be paying the most attention. That story is happening right now at a velocity that will put us all to the test.
“I might write something here and there about the Oscars in the paper and am angling to attend the Oscars because I’ve never been other than the press room, but I’m on media, 24-7. All good things must end, even if you and others think its silly to walk away.
To which I replied: “Of course you’re on it. Of course you haven’t lost your interest in popular culture. And of course your filings rule. I was just lamenting your having forfeited the Carpetbagger handle. It’s really a thing of honor and lustre in my book, and it’s taken years to build it up to that level. And it was just a little bit of a ‘whoa…he’s throwing that hard-won identity away?’
“We all contain multitudes, I suppose (some perhaps more than others), and there’s no disputing that your Media Decoder stuff and general reporting has always been and always will be first-rate, but I’ll miss you in the Carpetbagger context. You lent a touch of class, erudition, seasoned judgment, distinction, etc.”
Carr then reminded “it was Michael Cieply who came up with the Carbetbagger handle, so it’s not like I own the concept. As Jack Nicholson would say, I just showed up and worked the uniform.”
Once costars Glenn Hansard and Marketa Irglova fell in love sometime in the summer of 2007, during a tour to promote the film. And now, roughly 15 or 16 months later, they’re toast. But they’re feigning a kind of serene acceptance of this melancholy fact (or so it seems to me) for the sake of promoting Strict Joy, which everyone is calling their “breakup album.”
Marketa Irglova, Glenn Hansard
And now N.Y. Times guy David Carr, in a very nicely but carefully written profile, has passed along their recent history (the success of Once and the Swell Season on top of the whole gettin’-over-it-and-movin’-on thing) and taken a measure of the album as a portrait of this.
Carr makes it clear which side he’s on when he describes Hansard as “a gifted, emotive frontman who sings as if he must, with a heart on his sleeve that is constantly throbbing” while calling Irglova “the embodiment of a harmonist, a supporting voice on the edge of the limelight whose feelings seem buried deep behind a smile of musical contentment.”
Are we following the drift? Guys almost never break things off unless they’ve fallen for someone else, and there’s no hint of that having happened with Hansard. To me, Irglova is almost certainly the one who snapped the branch. She’s the solo dancer, the decider, the disappointed party…or so I suspect.
I realize I’m just spewing hot air, of course, but with Irglova-Hansard declining to talk and Carr refusing to dig for the truth, what’s an interested party to do? Carr’s diplomatically deciding to let the ex-lovers slide is understandable from a certain perspective, but burying the blow-by-blow doesn’t feel right. What happened? Nobody detonates a two-year love affair and then smiles and says “everything’s cool” and “the show must go on” two or three months later like it’s so much spilt milk. Love is never that orderly or tame. There’s a serious love story here, and I for one would like to know what it is…or at least was.
On one level Larry Cohen‘s Q (a.k.a., The Winged Serpent) is a ludicrous crap-level B movie about a prehistoric flying dinosaur wreaking havoc upon Manhattan from a perch atop the Chrysler building. On another level it’s one of the wittiest genre goofs ever made — a kind of loose hipster comedy that almost lampoons the monster-threat aspect — with an almost mystifying performance by Michael Moriarty as the ultimate doofus-dweeb protagonist.
There’s a legendary bit when Moriarty, a part-time scat-singing performer, spazzes out as he watches the serpent attack an unsympathetic victim, nearly frothing at the mouth as he yells “eat ‘um! eat ‘um!” (The way Moriarty yells this over and over is especially delicious, like he’s some hyper retarded child.) David Carradine plays it dryer and more low-key, but delivers hoots of his own.
This trailer is hilarious but it doesn’t begin to suggest the subversive sophistication in Q. By emphasizing the obvious and the ludicrous it makes it seem like one of the stupidest monster movies of all time. The crucial difference when you watch the film is that Cohen clearly knows this, and has decided to play with the absurdity the way a cat plays with a captured mouse while letting Moriarty pull out the geek stops.
It’s an almost certain fact that Q‘s producer Sam Arkoff was completely unaware of what Cohen was up to, and that he didn’t care.
Sample dialogue (all of it spoken by Moriarty): (a) “Maybe his head got loose and fell off”, (b) “I want a Nixon-type pardon!”, (c) “Eat ’em! Eat ’em! Crunch crunch!” (d) “Stick it in your brain. Your tiny little brain!”
Following advance ballyhoo, Variety‘s Anne Thompson (a.k.a., “Thompson on Hollywood”) today became an official hotshot IndieWire columnist. Same column name, fresh redesign, different URL…and it’s off to the races. Her first IndieWire column is about how Hollywood is playing it safe, but Thompson says she’s now planning on being a bit more of a freewheeling, let-the-chips-fall reporter/opinionator.
As Thompson admits, this was not entirely her signature style when she wrote her Variety column as well as her previous “Risky Business” column for the Hollywood Reporter. She told it straight but with an eye toward political ramifications. “I had to write within the realm of the trades,” she says. “I had to write within the box. But that no longer exists [for me].”
Everybody who works for a trade (or any mainstream print publication) does the same. Movie critics included. This doesn’t mean staffers necessarily pull their punches as much as occasionally sand off a story’s edge with carefully sculpted prose (i.e., phrases like “remains to be seen”) rather than laying their cards totally face up and blunt-ass.
Nonetheless, Thompson’s statement about being a bit more of a come-what-may candor dispenser at Indiewire reminds me of a story that James Farmer once told about a conversation he had with Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office. Farmer told Johnson he’d never been much of a civil-rights advocate when he represented Texas in the Senate so what accounted for his passionate support of civil-rights legislation as U.S. president? Johnson replied by quoting a famous line by Martin Luther King: “Free at last, free at last…thank God almighty, I’m free at last!”
Thompson also said, however, that she’s not quite the stand-alone, self-propelling entrepeneur that others are in the online realm. She’s happy about “not being in this entirely all by myself. I own the site and I designed the site myself, yes, but the guys at IndeWire really know their stuff. I know I couldn’t have done it as well without them. And I think it’s going to work.”
Here’s a David Carr/Media Decoder piece about Thompson in today’s N.Y. Times.
In a N.Y. Times profile published today, David Carr writes that with the sale of Deadline Hollywood Daily to Mail.com, Nikki Finke “stands to make more than $5 million in the next eight years, and her deal could go as high as $10 million, according to one of the people involved in the deal who declined to be quoted citing the private nature of the negotiations.” So much for the $14 million sale figure reported by The Wrap on 6.23.
I love the following passage at the end of Carr’s piece, by the way: “If the deal works out, Ms. Finke’s probing phone calls will continue to panic the suits in Hollywood for some time to come. Without saying who it was, she gave a recent example of someone who ended up as a pelt on her wall. ‘I implored him to talk to me, and he did a little, but not enough,’ she explained. ‘He should have protected himself.'”
“If” the deal works out?
The most uncompromised aspect of Nikki Finke‘s 7.16 post about Bonnie Fuller‘s hiring by Mail.com Media Corporation (MMC) to run HollywoodLife.com is — of course, as ever — the reader comments. I was particularly struck by the following comment posted at 10:53 pm last night by “Stacy,” to wit:
“Egads…Bonnie Fuller? Queen of Tabloid Lies? That woman has zero conscience when it comes to lying about celebrities, making up stories based on the pictures, terrorizing her staff and making a mockery of the media’s first amendment rights.
“Fuller is a cat with nine lives. After American Media (i.e., Star, The National Enquirer, Globe) fired her I really hoped she’d fade into the woodwork and no one would hire her to taint their organization and turn young and impressionable “journalists” into lying scumbags like she did at Us Weekly and the American Media mags.
“But when all anyone cares about is the bottom line then Bonnie Fuller is the person you want. HollywoodLife.com can kiss morals, truth, verified and named sources and just plain old good taste on the ass and wave bye-bye.
“I can see it now. On Fuller’s first day HollywoodLife.com’s homepage will read, ‘BRAD BEGS JEN FOR SECOND CHANCE’ or ‘ANGIE DRIVES BRAD AWAY FOR GOOD!’ or ‘BRAD TELLS JEN, ‘I STILL LOVE YOU”. Just when I thought this fuckery was going to end, along comes Bonnie Fuller out of the woodwork. Bleh. That’s the unfortunate thing with cockroaches — they’ll survive a nuclear holocaust and the rest of us will be deader than doornails. Roaches outlived the dinosaurs and Bonnie Fuller will outlive her fellow cockroaches.”
Stacy needed a better kicker than the dinosaurs/cockroaches analogy. And the line about “this fuckery” coming to an end is a little simple-minded given that (a) the likelihood that mindlessly made-up tabloid stories about celebrity relationships would fade away is less than zero given that (b) the young under-educated females who lap this stuff up every week have certain emotional appetites, diseased philosophies and self-esteem issues that exist independent of Bonnie Fuller’s ravings and imaginings. But the point is made.
There are many ugly and deplorable elements in U.S. society. The people who worship the ravings of Glenn Beck, for example. But sometimes, particularly after buying groceries at a supermarket, I find myself muttering that there’s nothing worse — nothing lower, shallower, stupider, and more spiritually rancid or pathetic — than the longings and imaginings and material aspirations of Fuller’s female readership.
Here is David Carr‘s dry-as-a-bone reporting about the MMC/Fuller announcement.
One of David Carradine‘s final performances was in a just-released piece of exploitation crap called Break. Look at the idiots standing around in the scene shown below. Where do they find people with such neutered expressions? I can feel Carradine’s pain as I watch it. A strong and steadfast actor dies but once, but actors who perform in films like Break suffer repeated smotherings of the soul.
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