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• Butterknife stuffs: Ronnie Bronstein interviews Mary Bronstein about playing his wife both on screen and off and a video tribute by Michael Tully.
• This week on the podcast: Kevin and Paul talk about I Am Legend and the apocalypse, and Paul interviews Starting Out in the Evening director Andrew Wagner.
• Tell us you love us. Get the SpoutBlog widget.
• The Golden Globes take the concept of “sharing the wealth” to ridiculous extremes. Chris’ predictions were pretty good, but he wonders: was the Knocked Up snub deserved?
• Bluths in space! Five Possible Plotlines For Arrested Development: The Movie.
• Swoon over a There Will Be Blood outtake.
• Preston Miller’s Jones, screening at the Pioneer Theater this week, brings old-school New York sleaze back to the city.
• Will Smith and teflon stardom.
• Is TMZ responsible for the Film of the Year?
• Tiffany has stalkers, and those stalkers have their own documentary.
• Dance anarchy in Busby Berkeley’s Dames.
• I don’t think film critics should be talking about wanting to bang Diablo Cody. But that’s just me.
• Chris contemplates making (and watching) a movie in Second Life.
• Can the genius of Justin Timberlake preserve Southland Tales for future generations?
• The New York Film Critics circle: the least mysterious prize-giving body to make news this week?
• Chris takes critics and award-givers to task for being too mainstream. Case in point: the ascension of Amy Adams.
• Where’s Harvey Weinstein?
• Rufus Wainwright does Judy Garland.
• Trailers: 10, 000 B.C., Mamma Mia!, Harold and Kumar
• The Brawndo meme continues–this time, with a little bit of Robocop weirdness thrown in.
• This doesn’t technically belong in the WiR, but your blogger is in a epically bad mood today, and the above Guy Maddin short turned her frown upside down. Pass it along.

Under discussion:

Back to the Future  (1985)

Crocodile Dundee  (1986)

A Fish Called Wanda  (1988)

Ghostbusters  (1984)

Trading Places  (1983)

Across the Universe  (2007)

Hairspray  (2007)

Charlie Wilson's War  (2007)

Knocked Up  (2007)

It’s so easy to criticize the Academy Awards’ ignorance of the merits of comedy (even if such criticism is unfounded), but the Golden Globes have rarely been so deserving of scrutiny in their exclusion of the funny business. After all, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association actually has a category for best comedies of the year. Sure, the genre is still considered second fiddle to drama and has to share its category with musicals (which are sometimes musical dramas), but at least we know there’s a place that honors Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future and Crocodile Dundee as one of its year’s best pictures (thank goodness for the musical-less ’80s!). The problem is, now that the musical genre is back in (near) full force, comedies are not getting as much recognition, even in their own (shared) category.

Following the Globe nominees yesterday, there was a good deal of complaining going on that Knocked Up wasn’t one of the Best Motion Picture Musical or Comedy nominees. At New York magazine’s Vulture blog, they said, “what’s a Comedy award for, if not to reward the best-reviewed and most successful comedy of the year? Apparently, it’s to reward quasi-musicals like Across the Universe, quasi-comedies like Charlie Wilson’s War, or quasi-movies like Hairspray.” Dave Karger at Entertainment Weekly actually thought the “best-reviewed comedy of the year” got snubbed in the best actress and best supporting actor categories, too. And Carpetbagger David Carr points out that if the Best Motion Picture Drama category can have seven films listed, the Musical or Comedy box should get to have two more picks. But would Knocked Up have really gotten one of those two slots?

(more…)

Under discussion:

One Million B.C.  (1940)

One Million Years B.C.  (1966)

Mars Attacks!  (1996)

Godzilla  (1998)

Battlefield Earth  (2000)

The Day After Tomorrow  (2004)

The Lord of the Rings [Film Series]  Production Year

Alexander  (2004)

King Kong  (2005)

Grindhouse  (2007)

10,000 B.C.  (2008)

Eventually Hollywood will learn it doesn’t make sense to spend millions of dollars on a B-movie. It may just take awhile. But if the road towards re-education didn’t begin with Grindhouse, it will possibly start with Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C., the trailer to which is now available courtesy of CHUD.com. The $75,000,000 movie follows a tradition of cheesy Saturday afternoon flicks like 1940’s One Million B.C. and its 1966 remake One Million Years B.C. Of course, back then the B.C. stood for “before computer (effects)” and featured the spectacular — and silly, maybe — visual effects of Roy Seawright and Ray Harryhausen, respectively.

Sure, in terms of effects and spectacle, 10,000 B.C. looks cool, just as Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow looked cool, but it also has the potential of being unintentionally funny, in the same way the primitive people in Battlefield Earth came off as ridiculous. Emmerich may as well have put in dinosaurs, despite the historical inaccuracy, because this isn’t the kind of movie to be taken seriously, anyway. The one thing the movie may have going for it is it’s combination of historical epics like Alexander with fantasy epics like The Lord of the Rings, which gave us its own mammoth-like creatures. I just imagine the story being nowhere near as believable as either one of those examples.

Anyway, if attempts to make big-budget B-movies didn’t work for Tim Burton (Mars Attacks!), Peter Jackson (King Kong) or Tarantino and Rodriguez (Grindhouse), could it really work for the guy who already failed such an attempt with Godzilla?