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Under discussion:

Juno  (2007)

• Let there be a Juno backlash, and let it begin with Modern Fabulosity. And let it continue with Craig Kennedy: “Some folks are even looking at this as being an Oscar contender. I don???t think it is, but when I???m ultimately proven wrong I???ll be the first to admit it. Of course, if I???m right I???ll be shouting it from the rooftops.” Finally, at Reverse Shot, Elbert Ventura concedes that Fox Searchlight has found “this year???s Little Miss Sunshine“–which should not, under any circumstances, be considered a compliment.
• The Reeler talks to Jennifer Venditti about Billy the Kid and, most interestingly, the subject’s complicity in its construction: “He met Heather, and after that he would come up to me on the way home and say, ‘I think tomorrow we should do a scene where we’re holding hands walking down the street.’ Of course we didn’t do those things, but he was going with it in his head and getting into it.”
• Both Alan at Burbanked and Chris at Movie Marketing Madness have complaints about the new one sheet for Be Kind Rewind. I hate to say it, but their fears were confirmed by a friend of SpoutBlog, who called with a four word review on his way out of a Rewind press screening this afternoon: “It sucked my ass.”
• Anybody else wish Kevin Smith would quit crying wolf and just actually stop pillaging his first film for scraps already?

Under discussion:

Knocked Up  (2007)

From the Biting The Hand That Fed Me $5.7 million and an Emmy Department, a dead horse gets new life:

Katherine Heigl is knocking her summer hit Knocked Up for being “a little sexist.

???It paints the women as shrews, as humorless and uptight, and it paints the men as goofy, fun-loving guys…It was hard for me to love the movie.???

Honestly, I don’t know why I spend so much time defending Knocked Up as not only *not* sexist, but kinda sorta maybe a work of semi-realism. There’s gotta be something wrong with *me*, right? No, I don’t buy the idea that she would have taken him back at the end??????I don’t even buy the idea that that guy had the means to up and move into his own apartment, unless there was a scene where he asked Harold Ramis for a loan that we didn’t see. But as I’ve said before, I totally buy the idea that that girl would fall for that guy, and I’m still annoyed by the blase, “but she totally would have gotten an abortion” argument.

I’m comfortable being lonely with my unfashionable opinions. What I don’t get, is this sudden need for realism in regards a dude com. Was anybody convinced that Old School could have really happened?

Under discussion:

Hannah Takes the Stairs  (2007)

Agnes Varnum has an interesting post at Re:Sources about blogs and bias. There’s this old chestnut about bloggers, that because our voices are distinct and our biases are supposedly transparent, our audiences can trust us more than a mainstream outlet. But Agnes notes that internet outlets are susceptible to some of the same bias issues as corporate media. Specifically, the editorial at larger sites is often beholden to the interests of their advertisers, and the all-attention-is-good-attention competitive business model can lead to a tabloid mindset, wherein “some days, they might have to just bend the truth to make it juicier.”

Implying that the impartiality of the Gawker blogs should be taken as less than a given, Agnes drops a reference to a review of Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs by Emily Gould (who, coincidentally, abruptly announced her resignation from Gawker last Friday).

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