The Girl With the Embargoed Reviews

Mikael Blomkvist: What are you doing?
Lisbeth Salander: Reading the reviews.
Mikael: But they're embargoed!
Lisbeth: ... 

 

Perhaps you've heard about the kerfuffle with the breaking of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo embargo? Usually these behind-the-scenes details are kept private but what happened was simply that David Denby ran his review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo early since he works for a weekly magazine rather than a daily blog and according to this thorough roundup at The Hollywood Reporter he felt he had to cover some of the important Christmas movies early (space and time limitations) else wait til January for some of them. Sony got very very angry even though the review was positive and basically a love letter to Rooney Mara who I can confirm --- no wait, I can't... I'm under embargo! In the end this amounts to nothing so much as free publicity for Dragon Tattoo and free publicity for David Denby and The New Yorker so everyone wins... though you'll surely read differently elsewhere since people like to get on soapboxes about such things.

Scott Rudin claims that Denby will be banned from his future movies but embargos are broken every year and nothing happens to anyone who breaks them. The studios are so inconsistent about how they handle them from movie to movie -- and even often from journalist to journalist on the same movie -- that it's not always easy to take them seriously. I always obey them but this is only because I'm polite and from the Midwest. But I wish I didn't ;) Playing by the rules generally doesn't help you and you may have heard that 'there is no such thing as bad publicity'? You've heard it because it's true.

Five Linky Pieces

• Empire The original Hobbits reunite for The Lord of the Rings 10th anniversary photoshoot.
• Pajiba ten favorite 'screen couples on the lam' 
• The Lost Boy Peter Knegt is bragging about his fabulous life again
• Towleroad Ryan Gosling and Justin Timberlake's Mouse Club years by way of Ellen Degeneres chat .... shades of Drive?
• Tom Shone saves you time in reading about In Time with a 361 word review that I feel safe in assuming is ten times more insightful than most reviews three times its length will be. Did that sound fannish? Guilty!

"the human head weighs 8 lbs"

<--- Blog Stage Awwww, tiny cute person Jonathan Lipnicki (Jerry Maguire) is all grown up. Just celebrated his 21st birthday.
Empire file this one under: extremely odd news. Seems that Lynne Ramsay of Morvern Callar and We Need To Talk About Kevin is planning a sci-fi film inspired by Moby Dick. Of all things.
i09 ZOMG! Y'all know about my strange "Dazzler" fetish from all of those Red Carpet convos where the mutant superhero x-woman disco star kept coming up. Now an artist has reimagined her as a man.

Clutch Magazine Occupy Hollywood
Aint It Cool Looks like it's more crime dramas for director Ben Affleck rather than another filmed version of Stephen King's The Stand.
Fashion Telegraph a clothing line based on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? Make it stop! I think Joanna at Pajiba said it best when she said... 

I’ve always wanted to dress as a mentally unstable, violent victim of abuse."

Animation Kung Fu Panda becomes an animated TV series next month. 
Self Styled Siren on James Wolcott, Pauline Kael and critic wars
Indie Wire has a list of the Cinema Eye nominees, honoring documentary filmmaking the top category goes like so.

The Arbor (Clio Barnard)
Senna (Asif Kapadia)
Project NIM (James Marsh)
Position Among the Stars (Leonard Retel Heimrich)
Nostalgia For the Light (Patricio Guzmán) 
The Interrupters (Steve James) 

 I keep meaning to write about The Arbor. So fascinatingly heavy and interesting.

Even the Blind Film Critic knows that Tom Cruise isn't quite right visually to play "Jack Reacher", his upcoming franchise role...

In Ye Olden Times when Tom Cruise used to get cast in roles he wasn't right for -- hi, Lestat! -- it could easily be blamed on his #1 position in Hollywood's star structure. But what's the excuse now? Hmmmm...

Game Off

Three stories of how I'm off my game.

1. In the podcast post about "Midnight in Paris", I was all "you should read these articles" and then I didn't link to them. D'oh. We briefly mentioned Fandor's "TOP TEN FILMS ABOUT FILMMAKING" which you should definitely look at (I did the Sunset Blvd honors therein and I shared a personal ballot) and we talked about Mark and Joe's series on Oscar nominated Original Songs which has covered 1980 "Fame", 1981 "Arthur", 1982 "Up Where We Belong", 1983 "Flashdance", 1984 "I Just Called To Say (I Love You)", 1985 "Say You Say Me" and 1986 "Take My Breath Away" thus far. It's great fun to read.

2. Today is the 50th anniversary of THE PARENT TRAP (1961) only one of my favorite movies of all time. I think I was born loving it. Maybe I was meant to be twins? And I forgot to write it up. *sniffle* Forgive me Hayley & Hayley!

Yes, it is amazing!

3. You have to be chosen! With each passing day my own Green Lantern review fades in my own estimation (and I was so happy with it when writing it) whilst my hatred for the movie grows.

First Christopher Orr at The Atlantic provided the funniest traditional review, absolutely skewering the movie's hateful messages. I had tried to do the same with that "thinking is bad for you!" anti-intellectualism angle but the Tyranny of Beauty complaint is just as valid when it comes to the movie's deplorable subtext. Now Topless Robot has an incredibly funny but, more importantly, entirely accurate synopsis of its "best" scenes. It's hilariously precise and a great reprimand to all future movies that would like to have their screenplays written by committees and portray"heroes" as assholes whilst demanding that you root for them.

Remember how juvenile and bratty that movie Jumper was wherein the "hero" basically called everyone watching it "schmucks" in the opening scene and then we were supposed to root for him and his enormous and undeserved powers anyway? Green Lantern is totally like that... but it gets away with it a bit more on account of cocky Ryan Reynolds winning the sweepstakes of "who would you rather stare at you in 'puny human'* contempt mode?" sweepstakes handily over whiny Hayden Christensen whose ass you could probably kick anyway.

*I realize I just mixed up superhero tropes. Shut up! My ego has already taken a beating.

I will diminish and go into the East and remain Nathaniel.

Links: Refn Gosling Love, Tang Wei Wins, Green Lantern Bile

Alt Screen rounds up takes on Martin Scorsese's New York New York (1977) now that it's freshly released on Blu-Ray. Liza Minnelli is so great in that movie. I'm so excited to see it again. The Blu-Ray is still in its wrapping though. Must get to that soon.
Film Dr "12 notes comparing a purple bottle cap with Green Lantern" (One thing I deeply appreciated about dumbass movies like Green Lantern is the creativity they inspire in critics.)
<--- Movie|Line goes to the LA Premiere of Drive (2011) and enjoys Nicolas Winding Refn's freewheeling intro speech including this bit.

Now, I want to thank Ryan Gosling, because he gave me the opportunity to come to Hollywood and do this movie with him. It all started on a very strange blind date between us that led to a very strange, notsexual encounter, but it led to a mental creation between us. And of course, we couldn’t have done that without Jim Sallis’s book called Drive, which I highly recommend. 

i09 great find: an old "Equal Pay Act" PSA starring Batgirl from the Batman tv series.  ♥ 
Twitch has a series of neon movie posters from artist Mr Whaite. Here's Pulp Fiction.

I said god damn.

Pajiba "how homophobia lost its cool" good piece from a hetero man which kicks off with the homoeroticism of Michael Fassbender & James McAvoy in X-Men First Class
The Awl really lets loose the bile with Green Lantern and what's become of a too dominante subgenre of movies. (Note: We all know that reviews do not exist in a cultural vacuum so will the mass hatred for Green Lantern help or hurt Captain America reviews next month? It could go either way...) 
IndieWire Vera Farmiga hits Provincetown to promote Higher Ground 

FINALLY...

I'd like to personally congratulate Tang Wei, who many fine actress connoisseurs have been rooting for ever since her startling debut in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution (2007). In the past two months she's picked up not one but two awards for recent performances in the romantic films Crossing Hennessy and Late Autumn. To make those rewards more impressive, one was from China (and remember they forbade her from working for a time after the sexual explicitness of Lust, Caution) and the other was a Korean Award which had reportedly never gone to a Chinese actress before. You can see her winning that one in this clip below. (She starts in Korean, switches to English, and then moves over to her native tongue.)

Will Crossing Hennessy and Late Autumn ever make it to US or European theaters? Stay tuned.