SpoutBlog on spout.com

Under discussion:

I Could Never Be Your Woman  (2007)

• Don’t criticize Chris Matthews when Jeffrey Wells is looking. Says the film blogger of the MSNBC anchor: “He’s the greatest free-associating blabbermouth provocateur on the airwaves right now. A brilliant shoot-from the hipper, an old-school boomer newshound, a Bill Maher facsimile, a sardonic preacher, a print guy from way back, an agitator, a stalker of evasion, a carrier of the old-liberal Kennedy nosalgia flag and a bullshit spotter par excellence.” Also, he really likes movies.
• There have been so many tributes to the late Roy Scheider on the web today that by early-afternoon, I felt like I had nothing else to add. Self-Styled Siren offers her own, as well as a compilation of some of the best from other sites.
• A female writer at Entertainment Weekly contends that an Amy Heckerling movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer is going straight to DVD because movies about middle-aged women are unmarketable. Erin at Steady Diet of Film calls bullshit on that, as well as the notion that Pfeiffer hasn’t worked in six years. “Uhm don’t tell that to anyone who saw Hairspray or Stardust (totaling $335M worldwide).”

Young girl with problems writes song about said problems; song becomes major international hit, thus putting girl in situations that feed those same problems; girl hits rock bottom one month before major awards show and a big, public deal is made of getting her help for the problems she said she didn’t need help with in the song; shy and contrite but somehow still aggressive, girl performs the now-mythic song on said awards show; almost immediately thereafter, she is told via television monitor that she’s won a major award for the same song; over the course of a few seconds on live television, she falls apart, asks for help and then miraculously and brilliantly regains her composure??????thus essentially reenacting the above cycle in a compressed space; girl is welcomed, problems or not, back into the embrace of semi-polite mainstream culture.

I’ve expressed my doubts about the media event that is Amy Winehouse before. I don’t deny that the girl has been photographed in some bad situations, but the whole crack video to rehab to Grammy triumph trajectory just seems a little contrived, a little too perfect a story of celebrity redemption. But whether her much-documented problems have been exaggerated, or even underplayed, there’s no denying the power of the clip above as an exclamation point on the end of this narrative. Just those few moments where she appears to be taking in the news of her Record of the Year win via the satellite monitor, and her face cracks and her hands grip for something that isn’t there??????this is Judy Garland stuff. You can’t make that shit up.

(more…)

The winner of our Julian Schnabel Poster Contest is Ed Howard. Ed’s contest entry is posted after the jump; you can also check out his extended thoughts on The Diving Bell and the Butterfly at his blog. Congratulations, Ed??????and please contact us with your mailing address at karina AT spout DOT com so we can get the poster out to you.

(more…)