Karina on SpoutBlog

Under discussion:

My Effortless Brilliance  (2008)

• Chris Thilk points to Mark Bell’s take on that “asinine piece that appeared in The Hollywood Reporter that seems to hang the failure of independent movies on their inability to get a major newspaper reviewer.” Says Bell: “I know that an audience exists for indie film; I am a part of that audience. I don’t think that audience is waiting or needing to be pandered to by the print promotion and corporation whores anymore, though.”
• In a recent New York Times column, Maureen Dowd made an offhanded analogy comparing George W. Bush to the late Gene Kelly. Kelly’s widow was not amused. “To suggest that “George Bush has turned into Gene Kelly” represents not only an implausible transformation but a considerable slight,” fumes Patricia Ward Kelly at the Huffington Post. “If Gene were in a grave, he would have turned over in it.”
• Sean Nelson, star of Lynn Shelton’s SXSW Competition entry My Effortless Brilliance (see review here) blogged his festival experience for The Stranger.  “Though there are several competitions—narrative, documentary, short, etc.—within the festival, the atmosphere among the artists is 100 percent noncompetitive. Even when you’re all drunk.” Via GreenCine Daily.

Under discussion:

Sex and the City  (2008)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and/or have better things to do than spend your days on trashy filth-peddling websites like, um, FOX News and MSNBC), you’ll have already heard that two stars of the upcoming Sex and the City movie have been in the tabloid news this week. First, news broke that Kristin “The Cute, Demure One” Davis had starred in a sex tape; by late Tuesday, the scandal had been downgraded from “sex tape” to “just sex photos” (see them in their very not-safe-for-work glory here). Then, blogs started passing around an excerpt from a British magazine interview with Sarah Jessica Parker, in which the SATC star/executive producer reacted defensively towards a MAXIM article designating her “the unsexiest woman alive.”

Imagine, two actresses from the same heavily-anticipated film with “Sex” in the title, making headlines for their sexiness of lack therof in the same week! What an incredible coincidence, right? No matter how furiously both actresses camps try to paint their clients as women wronged totally independently of each other or the multi-million dollar project both are promoting, there’s evidence that the SJP story, at least, was fully manufactured.

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I’m fairly certain Cary Grant was never asked by an interviewer to watch internet scat porn so that his word-for-word reaction could be printed in a major magazine, but poor George Clooney lives in a different time. Presumably because there’s very little new to say about Clooney––he’s good looking! He’s liberal! He’s an Oscar winner prone to making casually derogatory gay jokes about Brad Pitt!!!––and yet, there’s endless demand for his silver foxiness on magazine covers, Esquire’s AJ Jacobs spent a day with the actor. Surfing the internet.

Towards the end of their session, after Clooney confessed to a certain affection for a YouTube clip called “Monkey Smells Butt,” Jacobs decided it was time to move on to the harder stuff: the poo and puke internet porn sensation of late 2007, 2 Girls 1 Cup. The clip, which spawned a wave of reaction videos last fall, sent the one-time Batman running from the room in disgust. If only Jacobs had whipped out a video camera ala Joel Stein––not only would there be something simply cool about the idea of Everyone’s Favorite Movie Star participating in an online video meme, but I’m sure the document of Clooney’s squeamishness would have been a page view bonanza for the magazine. Alas. Excerpt from the Esquire story after the jump [Via Indie Eye].

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