Black Snake Moan: Ludicrous Pullquote Round-up

When your film's got a bleached-blonde, wild-eyed Christina Ricci half-naked with a chain around her waist, you really don't need a critic's blurb to make your poster. But, just in case the folks at Paramount Vantage decide to pursue critical credibility with the DVD release of Black Snake Moan, here are their best bets for the pullquote:

"Capra for alcoholics and bar-hounds!" - Vadim Rizov, The Reeler

"[Should] be remembered come Oscar time ... Justin Timberlake has a commanding presence!" - Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle

"Outlandish, hilariously overripe, and possibly sexist! A very colorful movie!" - David Edelstein, New York Magazine

"The good ol' boys [will get] what they came for!" -- Rob Nelson, Village Voice

"A wet, hot, lurid Bible lesson and music jamboree! Accessible to boys and men who mostly want to see Ricci's peachies!" - Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

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The Hub-bub Over "300" Or, Why Telling The Truth is Not A Crime

My alma mater Cinematical was at the center of a bit of controversy this week (and yes, this is totally inside baseball, so if you have no interest in The Politics of Bloggery, click away now).

Here's what happened: Erik Davis was representing the site at Berlinale, and a couple of days ago, he filed a report from the press screening of Frank Miller's 300, where, he said, the comic book adaptation was greeted to a "chorus of boos." That report earned an inordinately large amount of comments for a Cinematical post -- mostly from fanboys/girls who could/would not believe such blasphemy. One particularly innane commenter slammed Erik for being "incapable of standing behind" his hopes that the film would be good in the face of its utter craptasticness. Warner Brothers, who are releasing 300, are corporate cousins of Cinematical, and Erik soon felt pressure from all sides to retract his report, on the grounds that it was, at the very least, unnecessarily harsh, and at worst, completely inaccurate.

But it wasn't inaccurate. How do we know? Because other bloggers rushed to confirm the information within. And it's not just friends backing up friends; bloggers have no incentive to lie for one another, because the entire circle jerk of bloggery would end were everyone to voluntarily agree.

The lesson: it's simply stupid for anyone who believes they're being slandered by a blogger to demand a retraction. If the blogger really is making something up, other bloggers will take the opportunity to point out why the first blogger is full of shit, and then the initial report will lose all power. But if the blogger is telling the truth (and most of the time, we are, because it's just not worth the possible fallout to make anything up), even if you scare them into backing down, chances are another blogger out there will continue the meme. Even if the Cinematical editors had immediately wiped the post off the site (and I'm glad they didn't), it would have been too late to suppress the idea that 300 was a) booed, and b) is, as Filmbrain put it, "the new Showgirls".

I'm not denying that a film festival report such as this can cause damage to a film -- I saw how a handful of French boos completely blocked Marie Antoinette from reaching its intended audience. But instead of wanting the chatter to go away, in this case, Warners should embrace it. This is priceless market research -- this tells them that though they have no chance with the film snob crowd, they've got a large comic geek base that will stand by them no matter what. Even better, at this point, bloggers that would have slammed the pic closer to its release will have heard enough to completely avoid it. It's a win/win!

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reporting on out-of-body experiences in a parallel universe

I'm interrupting my self-imposed vacation from blogging for an essential blockquote: with the Top Ten list the latest battleground in the epic mass plea for attention pissing contest that is film bloggery, J. Hoberman prefaces his '06 list with a predictably spot-on reclamation of the practice:

A curious form of journalism, film reviewing is highly topical yet essentially timeless. It consists of reporting week after week on out-of-body experiences in a parallel universe—subject to its own laws but intermittently visited by millions of others and filled with references to so-called real life. For this reason, a reviewer's annual 10 Best list is not just a barometer of taste. It's an exercise in autobiography (however veiled) and a contribution (however modest) to the history of the present.

Film criticism as an exercise in public autobiography? It sounds accurate, if not necessarily palatable.

Full disclosure: S.T. Van Airsdale and I are friendly colleagues; Hoberman is a former professor of mine; my own crimes in the name of attention-seeking have been well documented (mostly by me).

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Blogging "Before the Code" - Update 1

David D'Arcy weighs in on a few selections from the series at GreenCine Daily. On The Bowery:

The Bowery opens in a bar called "Nigger Joe's," and from there to the end, not a single stereotype is spared - Jewish tailors swarm around an unsuspecting buyer of a suit, an Irish hoodlum played by Jackie Cooper sets "the Chinks" on fire, and the Irish break into drunken brawls every few minutes. There's a turf battle between two gangsters - Chuck Conners (Wallace Beery), a bloated boss who turns out to have a soft heart, and Steve Brodie (George Raft), a sharpy who moves like an acrobat. Each of them runs a private fire brigade that makes money when someone's house burns down. (If you ever believed in Bush's vision of privatizing essential services, you won't after this.)

Earlier:

"In large part, Hoopla works because [Clara Bow] is not really required to transform at all -- it's the men who have to come around and see her for who she really is, and to accept the fact that she can sell her sexuality for a living without losing her soul -- or even weakening her marriage." -- Me

"Using dissolves, sound bridges, long takes, and character punctuating close-ups, Brown blessed Quick Millions with both gutter swagger realism and pulp expediency. It is the most undervalued directorial debut in the history of American film." -- Bruce Bennett (reposted from the NY Sun)

"Born to be Bad, (starring Loretta Young as a mother out of wedlock and Cary Grant as the married man who falls for her) and Coming Out Party (the arrival of a debutante carrying her immigrant boyfriend’s child) are just a few in the program demonstrating the racial and sexual quandaries present during the Great Depression -- not to mention the anxiety felt by many Americans over the changing depiction of urban life in America." -- Jessica Freeman-Slade @ The Reeler

Semi-related: Peoria Pundit reminds us what 30-something Norma Shearer looked like as Marie Antoinette.

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