Category Archives: Musings

Scientology Video Proves Tom Cruise Crazy, But Intense

Amusements, Musings

It’s desperately old, I realize, this YouTube clip of Tom Cruise chatting up the benefits and power of Scientology in strange, circuitous fashion, but I hadn’t watched it prior to its spoof in last weekend’s Superhero Movie, so what’s that perfectly annoying saying NBC coined — “It’s new to you!” Well, that applies here. If you have nine or 10 minutes and still haven’t seen it, it’s well worth checking out. Hell, even the first couple minutes will give you a sense of the top-shelf crazy on display here, what with Cruise talking about Scientology being “the authorities on the mind, the authorities on improving conditions.” Err… OK. And what the hell is “Crim-Anon?”

“Being a Scientologist, people are turning to you, so you’d better know it. You better know it,” Cruise offers up at one point, with his trademark intensity and… menacing pause. “And if you don’t, go and learn it.” Other bon mots find Cruise rhapsodizing that he “will not hesitate to put ethics in on someone else” (?!), which is a trait I believe he might share with President Bush. If the cumulative effect of all this really forceful rhetoric is mesmerizing and definitive — Cruise is as madly persuadable as he is madly persuasive — its actual meaning and real-world application is still fuzzy, though. There’s a lot of talk about change and action, and an emphasis on doing, on recognizing complexities and “creating new and better realities.” But there’s never any sense of what sort of “other world” Cruise (or any other Scientologist, for that matter) is specifically advocating. I mean, other than the same sort of fuzzy liberal rap hung around the neck of every Hollywood actor, what socio-political agenda or causes (other than the anti-psychotropic drug stuff) does Scientology advocate? Change and action, on a certain substantive level, mean engagement with the real world, not shrouded secrecy.

Wading Into Henry Poole…

Irritations, Musings

The fact that Mark Pellington (Arlington Road, The Mothman Prophecies) is directing gives me some pause, and hope, but if I were fishing for irksome independent-flavored summer product, then Henry Poole is Here, a character ensemble being billed as “a modern day fable about the unexpected wonders of the everyday,” looks like it might fit the bill handsomely, perhaps largely because of the presence of Luke Wilson, and the visions of his well-worn, rumpled shtick that photos like the one below conjures up.

Starring Wilson, Radha Mitchell and Adriana Barraza (an Academy Award nominee for Babel), the film, opening in limited fashion on July 25 from Overture Films*, is described as being about a disillusioned man who, shattered by circumstances beyond his control, attempts to hide from life in a rundown, suburban tract home, only to discover he cannot escape “the forces of hope.” Those, one supposes, are embodied not by Barack Obama, but instead by Barraza’s well-meaning busybody neighbor, Esperanza — who drops by with a plate of homemade tamales and discovers a mysterious stain on Henry’s stucco wall that is seen to have miraculous powers — and Dawn (Mitchell), the beautiful young divorcée and single mom living next door, with an 8-year-old daughter who hasn’t spoken a word since her parents’ break-up.

This sounds very much like the sort of thing adapted from a novel, and yet the fact that’s actually not (debut screenwriter Albert Torres gets the credit) makes me feel as though it was written as a “statement” by a frustrated and/or unpublished novelist, and thus downgrade it accordingly. Does that make me cynical bastard? Perhaps. And yet, if I’m going to spend 90-120 minutes watching someone who’s threatening to sink in on themselves, and either drink themselves to death (e.g., Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas) or withdraw depressively from society, then it should be someone with some glimmer of an outwardly manifested engaging personality, the better to starkly highlight the snuffed flame. In short, it shouldn’t be Luke Wilson.

* UPDATE, 4/14: Henry Poole is Here is now scheduled to open August 15, 2008.

PG-13 Shotgun Stories?

Amusements, Musings

I was a big… well, decent-sized fan of Michael Shannon’s intense work in Bug (less so in World Trade Center), so I was already predisposed to think about casting an eye toward his next indie offering, Shotgun Stories, even before news that the revenge flick — a $68,000 festival darling which
centers around a feud that erupts between half-brothers following
the death of their father — scored writer-director Jeff Nichols CAA representation and a gig directing another movie, for Killer Films. Then came the effusive advance critical praise (above), from Variety and Roger Ebert, among others. So you can imagine my considerable surprise when I then saw that the film which has been dubbed “a point-blank buckshot blast of American rage” is actually rated PG-13. Is that possible? I mean, rage, real rage — and, even more specifically, American rage — connotes something harder, with edge. Not necessarily graphic, but prone to profane outburst and pot-boiled-over intemperance. Something rated R, not PG-13. Poor word choice, perhaps? Or does the movie skirt critical issues it purports to examine?

Film Criticism’s Future: Targeted Screenings?

Irritations, Musings

Richard Horgan, over at FilmStew, chews over a bunch of recent news regarding the demise of both print newspapers and professional film criticism, and arrives at an interesting place when he writes, in conclusion:

“In a sense, the Internet has turned the entire world into one big test screening audience. Scraps, rumors, planted AICN items and more are fomented to determine which way the hoi polloi
compass is pointing. And if you think it’s crazy now, just wait until
the studios can point, via secure and super-fast broadband download,
specifically requested movies to specific individual citizen critics — customized to their articulated likes and dislikes, this transom will
constitute the final dagger in the heart of professional film criticism.”

I’ve written about this before, because it’s already going on to a certain extent in the manner in which some studios are playing coy, and keep-away, with genre product, crafting selective invite lists apparently based solely on whom they feel will be most receptive to (read: non-critical of) their movies. But Horgan is right — once the ability and technology of targeted download is upon us, print publications will be mortally wounded as far as arts coverage. The bigger point here, though, is that most Hollywood studio PR machines regard the Internet as inherently more corruptible, susceptible to back-slapping and favor-trading.

Corpse of Print Dragged Back Out, Beaten Again

Irritations, Musings

The old media hits just keep coming. A couple days after the Newspaper Association of America reported that print newspaper advertising revenue was down 10 percent from last year, the worst drop in half a century, comes word, per Anne Thompson, Radar‘s online site and others, that Newsweek‘s David Ansen is the latest veteran film critic to soon find himself without a home, accepting an effective-at-year’s-end buyout along with more than 100 other staffers.

“Obviously the climate at newsmagazines is not great — more cost-cutting, more trimming,” both cited pieces above quoted Ansen as saying. Ansen looks forward to writing
books, teaching and “not going out to screenings every night. I want to watch DVDs of movies I might actually like, and read a
book or two. Face it, a lot of movies are not that interesting to write
about these days.”

Happy Birthday, Amy Smart

Birthdays, Musings

It’s a happy 32nd birthday to Amy Smart, who forever earns the gratitude of the laddie-mag set by helping to ease, if not fully erase, memories of rail-thin DJ Qualls getting squashed in flagrante delicto in 2000’s Road Trip, with her own moment of pleasant, hurrah! toplessness (below).

Smart is a B-level talent, I guess, and there’s no great sin in that, certainly. Still, she was really quite good opposite Ryan Reynolds in the underrated Just Friends, which is entirely enjoyable in a yawning sort of way, and obviously has a serviceable sense of comic timing and an ability to not take herself too seriously. She’s just never really been in anything that’s hit big, and given her a punch-through kind of platform, at least beyond the genre/fanboy crowd.

I don’t know if she’ll be back for the Crank sequel, but she should definitely consider it if they give her a nice enough bump in salary and character utility, since that movie was a success on its own terms. Other than that, Smart’s got an atrocious-sounding dance flick on her dance card, and I guess she’s the younger sister (?) of Kiefer Sutherland in High Tension writer-director Alexandre Aja’s next horror film, Mirrors. Still, my advice to Smart is roughly the same as it is to all young actresses who have looks and some ability to navigate funny terrain — maniacally seek out young writer-director talent, and get yourself attached to a nice romantic comedy with some pop, in dialogue, character and/or formula. Plow through 100 scripts if need be, but if you find the right one, that will make casting directors and execs rearrange their callback lists, and open up other sorts of plum studio assignments.

Demi Moore Talks Leeches on The Late Show

Musings

Demi Moore appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman last night, selling Flawless, her period-set diamond heist picture with Michael Caine, and proved two important things in the process: 1) that she still has the effortlessly engaging anecdotal talk show circuit skills of a pro, flat out, and 2) that there’s an undeniable, very real culture gap between Hollywood and the rest of the country. The latter became evident when Moore started talking about a recent jaunt to Austria for… leech therapy?! Yes, seriously.

She described the process in some detail (and, I’ll give her minor props, how it detoxifies the blood, at least as she understands it), saying they used her belly-button as the… ummm, point of entry? “After it gets super-drunk on your blood, it just rolls over, kind of like it’s stumbling out of a bar,” she explained. Lovely! She also mentioned rocking a turpentine bath or two. The audience was engaged, and laughing during Moore’s two segments, but also, you could tell, thinking, “Who the hell is this chick?” I don’t want to say that it’s shit like this that gives Hollywood a bad name, but… it’s shit like this that gives Hollywood a bad name.

Jason Bourne Back for Fourths

Casting About, Musings

The Fast and the Furious franchise has already ponied up for a fourth installment, so it should come as no surprise — in totally old news, industry-wise — that Universal has struck deals with Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass on a fourth Jason Bourne picture. Last summer’s The Bourne Ultimatum did so well — $227 million domestically, and another $215 million abroad — that it was pretty much a no-brainer, even though the narrative arc of the current trilogy is pretty well settled.

The Bourne series is that rarest of commodities — a genre series with downhill, increasing commercial momentum and upmarket critical appeal. The first flick did $213 million theatrically worldwide in 2002, and played as particularly fresh and real the first summer after the September 11 attacks; two years later, with Greengrass subbing in for the crazy… err, idiosyncratic originating director, Doug Liman, the second film did just under $290 million. Each film sold butt-loads (that’s a measurable unit of sale in Hollywood, for the record) of DVDs too. Add in the fact that distributor Universal is a total whore for anything with a faint whiff of franchise appeal (see the Mummy flicks, the execrable Evan Almighty, and this summer’s The Incredible Hulk reboot, the latter coming less than five years after Ang Lee’s version), and you have all the reasons in the world (or at least in Hollywood) one needs to back a couple trucks full of money up to the houses of the guys who’ve actually made Universal some consistent coin the last half dozen years. No word yet on the release date for the fourth Bourne flick (summer 2009, I assume), but here’s hoping they, in the words of Bono, “go away and dream it all up again.”

Happy Birthday, Michelle Monaghan

Birthdays, Musings



It’s a happy birthday to Iowa-born Michelle Monaghan, who turns 32 today. Monaghan rocked the tight T-shirts effectively in Gone Baby Gone, but it’s the festive Christmas outfit from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang that her most obsessive fans probably remember.* Though the above photo, taken by Giant Magazine‘s Alex Freund, seems like a decent enough send-up of Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” music video, it does little to highlight Monaghan’s real appeal — her intrinsic relatability. That factor was at the core of Monaghan’s casting in The Heartbreak Kid, and it will continue to be in every movie in which there’s a necessary play for off-lead female sympathies; she’s the anti-Angelina Jolie in this regard.

* – by which I mean have saved as their computer’s wallpaper…

State of Affleck: Please Don’t Play

Musings

Old news, but Ben Affleck has stepped in for Edward Norton in Universal’s State of Play. This after Russell Crowe took over for costar Brad Pitt, who bailed only a few weeks before production was set to commence. The movie — based on a six-hour British miniseries of the same name — centers on a House member whose speedy political rise is
threatened by an investigation into the death of his mistress. Crowe plays a politico-turned-journalist whose relationship with the lawmaker (Affleck) is
compromised when he oversees his newspaper’s investigation into the
murder, and subsequently develops a relationship with the pol’s estranged wife.

Can anyone honestly say this pairing makes them more excited and interested in seeing the movie than a Pitt-Norton pairing? After Gone Baby Gone, I’m much more interested in Affleck’s career as a director than I am in seeing him in front of the camera anymore, especially in something where he has to lock horns with a heavyweight like Crowe. Affleck’s on-screen appeal, as it were, was always rooted in a matinee idol’s identification and a nimble sense of cleverly apportioned timing, and maybe that’s why it makes sense to some to cast him as a smooth, glad-handing politician. When he tries to play cunning, though, (e.g., Boiler Room), it just doesn’t fly. Less of this, please, Ben…

Leslie Mann on The Tonight Show

Musings

Promoting this week’s Drillbit Taylor on The Tonight Show last night, Leslie Mann showcased her very dry, tongue-in-cheek sense of humor in a quasi-performance piece trainwreck that totally didn’t play, at least with Jay Leno’s captive audience. After confessing that she and husband Judd Apatow don’t sleep in the same bed, because he’s a big-time snorer, Mann talked about instead sleeping with their youngest child, whom she sometimes forgets to properly diaper. “I wake up covered in pee, but at least that’s better than the snoring,” she said.

Met with polite titters, Mann then proffered: “I feel bad… we’re not gay or anything — not one of those couples who pretend to be a couple.” More uncomfortable laughs and even a gasp or two, with surely plenty of folks not making the necessary leap in logic. No matter the smoothness of delivery, this chop-busting humor — the same sort of stuff Michelle Obama got dogged on for dropping on her husband Barack — requires that it comes from a known, vetted commodity, i.e., someone of a similar public stature. Mann doesn’t have that. Yet. So her run-downs of Apatow and other wide-eyed biographical confessions (about how she believes in ghosts, and once dated a homeless man), whether true or not, don’t play. I’m sure she’s been on The Tonight Show before, but she’s clearly still in “introductory mode” with mainstream audiences. Except that someone forgot to tell her…

Doomsday Is Bad… and Loud, Too!

Irritations, Musings

I’ve noted this past week just how bad Doomsday is (a couple times, actually) but previously failed to mention that one of the more unusual and curious elements of its failure is the sound design, which is mixed too high only, and notably, in non-action scenes. Composer Tyler Bates‘ cheesy instrumentation notwithstanding (he dabbles all over the map, to poor effect), Doomsday‘s sound mix masks simple dialogue and (arguably) crucial expository set-up, which is usually a sign of a director not trusting his or her script. The rub? Director Neil Marshall wrote the screenplay here as well, raising the crucial question: is a somewhat self-aware hack better than a hack who doesn’t know they’re a hack?

Obama Delivers Landmark Speech on Race

Musings, Politics

I’ve talked before about his cinematic oratorical punch, and in a riveting, landmark speech on racial division today in Philadelphia, Senator Barack Obama tackled head-on the incendiary statements of his former pastor that have been dominating recent headlines — rejecting the content of his divisive statements, but diagnosing a generations-long “racial stalemate” with personally felt clarity, civility and clear-eyed perspicacity. “I can no more disown [Reverend Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community,” Obama said. “I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”



Sometimes honesty meets challenge, but very rarely, it seems, in the political sphere. Cannily dialing down his affected and slightly exaggerated preacher’s cadence — doubtless a source of discomfort anyway for some unswayed downmarket white voters — in a sign of deference to the subject matter, Obama spoke difficult truths to both blacks and whites alike, perhaps in a way for which he alone on the national scene is uniquely qualified, but certainly in a way that was brave.

Nuanced, shaded and roundly unpatronizing, it was a speech that, radically, acknowledges such a thing as fair reaction, and then makes a case for hard-work healing and higher discourse. Part of the home-stretch wrap comes via this assertion: “For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, conflict and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle, as we did in the O.J. trial, or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina. Or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies. We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.”

In talking about inequalities passed along from earlier generations, Obama strings together grievances, anger and fear, connecting the dots of the unspoken and obvious in a manner that is at once breathtaking and infuriating — the latter because it makes you realize, if there were any doubt, just how much of the political oxygen is self-serving, power-grab pap. I don’t need to read or hear Senator Hillary Clinton’s response to know that she just got H-bombed, in this news cycle and for many to come. Just the little picture of her on MSNBC and other news sites — with the blurbed, lift-quote phrase “It’s an important topic,” from her deemed-necessary response — tells you everything you need to know. Clinton is a politician to her core. Shrewd, intelligent and a master of her craft, yes, but a politician nonetheless — someone who never could or would lean forward into incoming fire like this, and deliver a heartfelt, unblinking call for unity and elevation. That is the opposite of her essence, which is brokerage and willful division. For more, the full text of Obama’s speech is available here.

A Glance Back at The Big Lebowski

Ephemera, Interviews, Musings

I’ve linked some of my adventures in punditry previously, and I recently submitted to an interview regarding the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski, which ran this past week as part of a 10th anniversary retrospective cover story by Roger Yale in the Weekly Surge, the preeminent free weekly entertainment paper in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. My Blogcast software isn’t feeling a direct link, so if interested in taking a spin click here, and select from “Looking Back at Lebowski” from the drop-down “Main Story Archives” tab.

It’s an interesting and amusing piece, and I was especially heartened that it got into a bit why the film has spawned eponymous bowling festivals and the like. My take? “Each generation goes through a period of ‘creative loafing,’ where
you have your interests, [but] the real world is starting to encroach on
you with responsibilities and obligations, demands on your time. So you’re trying to find out… how much of
these interests and enjoyment you can hold onto. You want to carry it
all, but how much can you realistically take with you? For that
reason, The Dude remains a really appealing character and always will,
hence, ‘The Dude abides.’ The phrase is simple but it’s shorthand for a
character that is a little bit older and [yet still] free from a lot of these
responsibilities.” Again, for more click here.

Doomsday Is Bad

Irritations, Musings

A full review will follow soon — definitely tomorrow, maybe sooner — but Doomsday is stupid bad, just one of those theatrical experiences that leaves you cross. It’s poorly written, sure, but it doesn’t even succeed as a throwaway apocalyptic romp, mainly because writer-director Neil Marshall can’t make sense of even the simplest of spaces. A lot of times… well, OK, sometimes, studios miscalculate when they don’t screen movies, thinking critics aren’t going to give a fair shake to a certain genre (or toxic actor or actress, perhaps). This time they had it right, though; Doomsday is just a stupid, steaming pile of crap.

Keith Olbermann Slams Clinton Campaign

Musings, Politics

Peter Finch would be proud. MSNBC Countdown host Keith Olbermann put an impassioned, cinematic/oratorical spin on his “special comment” direct address to Senator Hillary Clinton last night, stemming from Geraldine Ferraro’s comments about Senator Barack Obama only being in the position he was because he was a black man, and it was a pretty powerful thing (“Voluntarily or inadvertently, you are still awash in this filth”). Whatever you think of the man, the Democratic candidates or this controversy, Olbermann can write. And to me, his points are pretty much on point: the serpentine, surreptitious courting of casually prejudiced voters — the sort of folks who might not forward along the email touting Obama as a closet agent of Muslim, but silently nod to themselves in clucking acceptance when hearing about its reportage — has gotten a lot more advanced and, dare I say, intelligent over the years. And the Clintons don’t have their doctorates in hardball by accident. They play to win, and a vote is a vote, no matter if it’s in the positive or negative. Ergo, the Clinton campaign has been remarkably adept at maintaining plausible deniability. You can’t reasonably assign intent to any single one of these statements or controversies Olbermann addresses. But once the “pattern” cat is out of the bag… well, you’ve really irritated if not forever lost those who care most deeply and sincerely about equality, and abhor political ploys of cheap division.

Trailer Watch: The Ruins

Musings, Posterized!, Trailer Watch

The trailer for The Ruins, opening April 4 from Paramount, is online, and it looks like a matinee-level mash-up of Turistas (the travelogue elements, the latent xenophobia) and 2003’s Cabin Fever (the viral elements, the in-fighting). An R rating (which this movie has as well) and arguable “realism” presumably somewhat dented the former movie’s grosses, limiting it to only $7 million domestically in late 2006, while the same rating was seen as a big part of the latter’s insurgent, $21 million success. Here I expect it will act as more of a suppressor, necessarily excluding 14- to 16-year-olds who might otherwise drift in.

Starring Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Laura Ramsey (above right) and Shawn Ashmore, The Ruins is based on Scott Smith’s novel about a group of friends whose leisurely Mexican
holiday takes a turn for the worse when they head to an “ancient Mayan temple, off the beaten path,” where some long-dormant evil
stirs and presumably makes them all pay in ways other than just insincerely “friending” it on MySpace. Ensemble cardsharp flick 21 and Superhero Movie, each opening the week before, seem to have a commercial leg up on The Ruins, and with George Clooney‘s latest directorial effort, the period piece football comedy Leatherheads, opening directly against it, I don’t see a way that The Ruins makes inroads with audiences outside of its wheelhouse demographic, especially since everything other than the setting and that one, forced perspective well shot that echoes There Will Be Blood has already fled from my mind as I write this.

With respect to the movie’s dual posters, I think the first one — of a stretched-back head, with prone neck — is far and away the most effective. The second poster, an outstretched hand, is a little bit Evil Dead, but mostly just vague. For more information on the movie, click here.

Photo Debut: Tropic Thunder

Amusements, Musings

A week and change ahead of its alleged trailer debut, Paramount has released a first-look photo of Tropic Thunder, currently slated for release on August 15.

Ben Stiller — who nursed the idea of a Vietnam War spoof more than decade ago, long before the incarnation of this script, co-written with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen — rocks at least one decently sculpted bicep as spoiled action star Tugg Speedman, though one assumes his butt cheeks are clenched tightly for this shot, and that an awful lot of money was spent on Tan-On or some other skin bronzer. That’s Jack Black in the back, as gross-out comedy star Jeff Portnoy, the melanin doppleganger of man-in-the-middle Robert Downey, Jr., who plays an intense, Australian-born method actor who goes to all sorts of extremes to get into character. It’s a nice shot, though hopefully Stiller, who’s also directing, dials down the “Blue Steel” a bit. Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, Nick Nolte, Steve Coogan, Matthew McConaughey and Bill Hader also star.

Advance Thoughts on The Hammer

Musings, Trailer Watch

A long day ended last night with a screening of The Hammer, radio personality Adam Carolla’s leading man big screen debut. Despite the swirl of real world irritations, I generally dug the movie on its own low-fi terms, though I confess an affinity for Carolla’s trademark saltiness, an acquired taste to be sure.

The story has its roots in the radioman and former The Man Show co-host’s real-life rise from working-class anonymity, with Carolla playing Jerry, a just-turned-40 Los Angeles carpenter who moonlights teaching boxing class at Bodies in Motion, and gets a new shot at both love and the big time, in the form of a public defender pupil and a shot at the Olympic trials, respectively. The romantic stuff of course doesn’t really play (Kissing Jessica Stein multi-hyphenate Heather Juergensen, above right, tries gamely, but Carolla is all knees-and-elbows when it comes to flirtatious banter, even of the wiseacre variety), the production design is super-threadbare and director Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, also of Kissing Jessica Stein, isn’t a great match for the material, over-relying on ADR fixes and jump-cuts to spotlight his leading man. Still, the movie has an indefatigability of spirit that I admire, and it’s also completely genuine in its unbowed, non-held-tongue affection for multiculturalism and the working class, something rare in movies, big or small.

The trailer for the film, meanwhile, highlights at least some of this vaguely politically incorrect backtalk, which isn’t the main thrust of The Hammer but is among its high points — stuff like Jerry’s aside to his friend and fellow day-laborer Ozzie’s family (“You guys seem to all love Nicaragua so much, except for the part where you risked your lives not to live there anymore”), and his snappish interjection when a fellow boxer questions why he has to train with an old white dude (“Yeah coach — when is the black man going to get a fair shake in the fight game?”). More will follow in the coming weeks, including a possible interview with Carolla; The Hammer opens March 21, from International Film Circuit. For more information, click here.

Idiot Publishers Abound, Apparently

Irritations, Musings

This paragraph, fronted by a comment from publicity consultant Steve Sugarman, from a longer piece from L.A. Weekly about Santa Barbara News-Press publisher Wendy McCaw and her predilection for outlandish litigation stemming from reportage on a massive editorial board shake-up at her paper, caught my eye:

“’Though the tactics of McCaw seem unusual as to all the litigation
she’s thrown out, unless you know the business objective of McCaw, it
is not fair to comment on the tactics of a crisis PR consultant,’
Sugerman said. Her tactics might make sense if her goals are to push
out her former editor to cut costs, keep a high-powered union out of a
small paper and produce a cheaper product that advertisers must
advertise in because it’s the only daily in a wealthy community.”

Funny, I thought. And kind of telling. As a former defendant in a $19 million lawsuit of harassment filed by the idiot ex-publisher of my one-time employer, the now-defunct Entertainment Today, I know all too well how aggrieved simpletons deal with falls from grace and/or challenges to their (frequently inherited) power.

Of course, I don’t know McCaw, so let me be clear that I am in no way commenting on what some have deemed her ongoing war against journalists and the first amendment, otherwise impugning her credibility or doing anything other than linking to this story as an act of bemused recollection. I am sure McCaw is a wonderful, intelligent woman who smells like fresh tulips and sweats Clive Christian’s #1. Of course my comments are borne of personal experience, refer solely to such, and are in no way, shape or form comparative to the L.A. Weekly piece. There… that should take care of things.

But get ready to be sued, Ross Johnson. If only because those that can sue do, even (maybe especially) when there’s nothing but noise, fury and a lingering inferiority complex on their side…

WTF: Dragonball?!?

Irritations, Musings

From today’s “Holy crap!” files… they’re actually making a Dragonball movie? And it’s directed by James Wong, who’s helmed Willard, Final Destination 3 and the recent remake of 1974’s Black Christmas? And it’s starring the heretofore entirely respectable Justin Chatwin, who’s actually shown great promise and screen presence — whatever one thinks of the movies, respectively —  in War of the Worlds, The Chumscrubber and The Invisible? And it’s costarring the much-derided Emmy Rossum and… Chow Yun-Fat? This all seems wrong in ways that stretch beyond three dimensions and bend time and space. When I just read about “a young boy named Goku seeking out [sic] upon his grandfather’s dying request for the great Master Roshi,” I want to start punching myself in the face. A bad move for all involved, no matter the payday…