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Under discussion:

Baby Boom  (1987)

Teorema  (1968)

No Reservations  (2007)

I Know Who Killed Me  (2007)

The 11th Hour  (2007)

Now Voyager  Production Year

I’ve got an unlikely double feature planed for today–a press screening of the Leonardo DiCaprio-narrated environmental doc The 11th Hour, followed by a special screening of Pasolini’s Teorema at BAM–and it’ll keep me away from the computer for most of the afternoon. So here’s a round of things you really should read before checking out for the weekend:

• “I don’t like movies in which a strong, confident woman learns (often through humiliation) that her life simply isn’t going to be fulfilling until she finds herself a man and maybe a child or two. I don’t care if it’s Bette Davis in Now, Voyager or Diane Keaton in Baby Boom, it’s insulting to single women, and I was a single woman for long enough that I still feel insulted.” That’s the cold open to Jette Kernion’s No Reservations review at Cinematical.
• The Reeler’s Annaliese Griffin notes that this year’s lineup for Scanners, the annual video festival which opens tonight at Lincoln Center, “grapples with our sex obsession in surprising ways…Traditionally form, not content, has been the shocker at video festivals like Scanners, and while plenty of experimental videos are on the program this year, artists are pushing the boundaries with their subject matter far more than their editing software.”
• NewTeeVee’s Jackson West has a round-up of the top ten traditional filmmaking techniques that are put to use in the majority of web videos. Number 9 is “Fixed Camera”: “The first films shot by the Lumiere Brothers were simply a single camera fixed on a tripod shooting a single set and scene with no editing. Web cams also lend themselves to this style — hence, the Lumiere Challenge project where people tag their video posts shot under the same restrictions the Lumiere brothers were subject to.”
• According to a Defamer operative who attended a cast and crew screening last night, Lindsay Lohan’s I Know Who Killed Me might be destined to become the next unintentional camp classic. “Also, in the scene where Lindsay gets hit in the face with a shovel– a scene meant to be terrifying–the audience erupted into laughter.”

Under discussion:

Sin City  (2005)

After 18 years, is there anything new to say about The Simpsons that hasn’t already been said? Possibly, but if so, A.O. Scott isn’t saying it. At the Vulture blog, Dan Kois and/or Lane Brown (no byline on the post) notes that the film critic has basically spent his entire tenure at the New York Times dropping obsequious references to The Simpsons in places where they probably didn’t belong. To herald the arrival of Scott’s review of The Simpsons Movie, in which the critic leads off by announcing his contention that “the entire history of American popular culture — maybe even of Western civilization — amounts to little more than a long prelude to The Simpsons,” The Vultures round up eight examples of this, which stand in addition to Scott’s 2001 Simpsons hagiography, Homer’s Odyssey.

All of this begs the question: when a critic has shown an inordinate bias for or against a director/star/brand/topic/theme, should they then be recused from reviewing its associated products? Is it possible for even a professional critic to apply their usual acumen to a cultural product that they’ve already professed to being deeply in love (or hate) with? I don’t know. My long-burning crush on Clive Owen didn’t keep me from thinking Sin City was another soulless bit of hack-work from Robert Rodriguez. Whose films I uniformly can’t stand. So, uh, yeah, maybe.

Under discussion:

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull  (2008)

The massive Paramount panel took place at Comic-con yesterday afternoon, where the studio leaked tidbits on Iron Man, Beowulf, Indiana Jones 4, and two J.J. Abrams projects. Here’s some notes from those who were there.

According to MTV, Abrams confirmed that Cloverfield is not going to be titled Monstrous. It still *could* be titled Cloverfield. But probably not. Also, there’s a new poster, which is getting a lot of bloggy attention. While most of the chatter seems to center around the question, “What is this, a Godzilla remake?” MOVIEBOB notes that visually, the poster looks a lot like a certain photograph taken on 09/11/01:

Now, Michael Bay can get away with it when he claims that he doesn’t think of 911 when crafting city-destruction scenes because, well, Michael Bay was born without a human soul. But Abrams and company, being both human and extremely insightful about humanity, MUST have either intended the analogous gut-punch this poster provides or at least recognized it and decided it was appropriate. I’m now even more strongly thinking what I was only considering when the blurry “spy” shots of this first appeared: Is this the real key to what this mystery-movie actually is?

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Originally posted on:Spoutblog