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• This is ollllld, but what can I say? I was out of the office. “I don’t even hate Juno,” writes Rich Juzwiak at FourFour,“But I finally figured out exactly why I couldn’t connect with its snotty-assed namesake: Juno MacGuff is the antithesis of My So-Called Life’s Angela Chase, who’s quite possibly my favorite teenage girl of all time (real or fiction). Juno is a know-it-all; Angela is a think-it-all.” He backs up his assertion with a video montage devoted to the wisdom of Angela Chase, embedded above.
• Chris Cagle introduces a new collaborative effort: The Film of the Month Blog, “an internet forum for watching and discussing movies. Each month a member will select a film, after which other members can watch and post their reflections and reactions.” The first selection, chosen by Girish Shambu, is The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On.
• Rotten Tomatoes has posted part one of a two-part interview with famously fired Village Voice film critic Nathan Lee. His answer to the boiler-plate question “What has been your most bizarre movie-going experience?”: “Watching a 3-D IMAX underwater documentary while on LSD.” Via The House Next Door.
• “Have I ever told you guys about my one career-counseling moment with a woman who would, alas, soon become a porn star?” Glenn Kenny wonders. Why, no, Glenn, you haven’t! He says details are forthcoming “this afternoon, Eastern time. I think you’ll find it worth the wait…”

Matt Dentler offers exciting news: the Jeffrey Tambor Acting Workshop, which began as a panel at SXSW featuring the sometime George Bluth, Greta Gerwig and Kent Osbourne, is becoming an actual acting workshop at the Santa Monica Playhouse. Extra layer of excitement: The Playhouse is the very place where Your Blogger was part of a young adults theater company in the early 1990s. There might even be a picture of her at age 13, in heavy stage makeup, on the premises. Be afraid.

Regardless, the class begins June 2nd, and it’s open to the public. Matt has details on how to sign up at his blog, where he also points to the above clip from the SXSW version…courtesy of the YouTube auteur who brought us Howl (For Lindsay Lohan).

Under discussion:

Run Lola Run  (1999)

Pirates of the Caribbean [Film Series]  Production Year

Transformers  (2007)

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer  (2006)

I honestly don’t mean to keep devoting time and blog space to Uwe Boll, but when the guy manages to say something hilarious or interesting every other day, what else am I to do? Write about serious issues like the future of film criticism? Karina’s got that covered quite sufficiently and efficiently, so I might as well stick to the fluff.

Of course, I can still relate the fluff to film theory, as in the case of Boll’s latest peer slamming, located at MTV Movies Blog. After criticizing the uneven work of Tom Tykwer (sorry, Uwe, but Perfume is a far better film than Run Lola Run), Gus Van Sant and Michael Haneke, he goes off again on his favorite nemesis, Michael Bay:

“I think he’s really bad. And I think the point is, if you get $250 million for every movie you do, how you gonna make a bad looking movie, with bad sound, bad special effects, whatever?” Boll criticized. “But everything dependent on directing is bad in his movies. And so I think it’s kind of absurd, how some people are getting counted like they are geniuses or whatever. But the reality is that in a lot of these $150 million movies, the real credit deserves to the special effects people. Or the second unit crew.”

As Shawn Adler points out, Bay has probably never been called a genius, but I get what Boll is saying. Each of the moviemaker’s blockbusters opens with the title “a Michael Bay film,” insinuating the guy is at least some kind of auteur. Of course, Bay might be a bad example considering he has enough of a unique signature with his movies that his style has been aped and parodied. But what about Hollywood’s other hired hacks, the ones who would be nothing without their special effects teams?

Unfortunately, there are a few too many technicians and artists involved in these sorts of movies to be able to label them “a ______ film,” or the alternate “a film by ______”. And there are a few too few technicians and artists who have successfully transitioned from effects to directing to validate Boll’s theory that movies like Transformers and perhaps the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy are really authored by FX people. Then again, how many of us consider the term “a Ray Harryhausen film” not in reference to one of the few movies he actually directed but to those he worked on as an FX artist?