• For all the griping about how critics just don’t get the stuff that fanboys love, a show of the numbers suggests that reviews from Tomatometer and Metacritic ranked critics are more friendly to movies based on comic books than maybe any other single genre. Jim Emerson elaborates on his findings.
• Rumsey Taylor on the “brand ambience” of Mad Men: “When Draper is describing each of these products, you’re held rapt by his words, and how they pronounce, with consummate precision, their transcendent significance. It’s all bullshit, of course, but what wonderful, wonderful bullshit.”
• Last night at Largo in Los Angeles, “Maya Rudolph and Fred Armisen performed a series of light and effortless vignettes co-written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.” According to Vulture’s Nick Confalone, the performance felt “like sneaking a peek at P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love notepad, exploring that movie’s notion that there’s someone for everyone, even though everyone is a little bit weird and fucked up. Whatever the future for this show, last night it made us grin like an idiot and tell our friends, ‘Love is awesome, right?’” Wonderful bullshit indeed.

Britney Spears to play lesbian killer in Quentin Tarantino film!!!!!!

The exclamation points are mine, but they’re implied in this Telegraph headline, which is quickly making the rounds of the “publish first, conveniently forget to retract later” gossip blogs. The rumor is that Britney has been hand-picked by Quentin to “play dancer Varla in a remake of the 1965 cult film Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”

The reality check: as far as I can tell––Tarantino has never even confirmed a Liz Smith report from way back in January claiming that he’s making a remake of the Russ Meyer schlock classic. And, since that story mentioned that Britney was in the running, even if there is something to it it’s kind of old news. It might be a strategic PR drop (I don’t know by who––does Britney even have a publicist anymore?) to counteract the Page Six item from last week, which suggested (without comment from the Tarantino camp) that porn star Tera Patrick was getting the role. But I have a hard time believing that this is anything other than a publicity game at this point, considering that Tarantino hasn’t even finished casting the epic that he plans to screen in seven months at Cannes.

That said: if it’s between Spears and Patrick, we definitely vote for the former. She needs it more.

Under discussion:

Beautiful Losers  (2008)

So: Sidetrack Films, the producers of Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard’s doc Beautiful Losers (see our SXSW coverage here), have signed a deal with Nike to sponsor the film’s release in five cities, starting with its New York premiere this Friday.

Like Mark Rabinowitz, who wrote a post on indieWIRE’s new Docsider blog pondering What This All Means in relation to the state of documentary film distribution, I have mixed feelings about this.

The most obvious, knee-jerk response is, of course, something about how big bad corporations are big and bad, long live indie DIY poverty integrity, etc. But Beautiful Losers is a film about artists (Harmony Korine, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Shepherd Fairey, etc) who started as cultural reactionaries very much in line with a DIY ethos, and then found ways to work within the system and for corporations (designing ambiguously racist sneakers for Adidas, directing Bud Light commercials starring members of the Silver Jews, etc) without losing their identities. If this kind of deal makes sense for any film, it’s probably this one.

So on one hand, it’s great to see a corporation supporting an art form in need of support. On the other hand, should we really take this as a sign that Nike cares about documentaries (or even film, or even art), or is it just a cash deal for cred? On the other hand, in a market niche that has all been abandoned by Hollywood distributors (partially because said distributors are abandoning their indie divisions, but that’s a topic for another time), and where grossing even $1 million is considered a victory, shouldn’t we keep an open mind about docs reaching a wider audience By Any Mean Necessary?

One thing that sticks in my throat a bit: the indieWIRE story mentions that Rose “has a longstanding relationship” with Nike––in 2005, he partnered with the shoe giant on “two limited ‘Beautiful Losers’-inspired Nike Blazer Hi shoes” (and, as part of the deal for the film, Rose will work with Nike to produce “22 Nike Dunk Hi shoes each telling a different part of the ‘Beautiful Losers’ story.”)  This may be a groundbreaking moment in indie documentary distribution financing, but is it going to mean anything in the long run if this kind of deal is only open to indie filmmakers who happen to have existing relationships with corporations?

Questions, questions. Got any answers?