Premiere Folds

No, I havn't read it much since college (and even then, it was the late 90s and the mag was already in decline), but the news that PREMIERE magazine is shutting down after 20 years in print is still kind of bummer. Obviously, it's one less outlet for film freelancers to pitch to -- and, in the dumbest irony in recent memory, I was actually in the midst of digging up the mag's contact info so I could send a querie when I heard the news. But also, by my accounting, it was the last U.S.-based, mainstream film magazine standing, and it seems incredibly unlikely that another print title will pop up in its place. Will Premiere itself be missed? Maybe not by anyone who wasn't currently on the payroll. But with pretty much every other relevant film magazine remaining obstinately indie-minded (and/or operated by a non-profit), I'm in deep nostalgia for an era of serious, mainstream film journalism which may or may not have ever truly existed.

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Netscape Stuff, 11-20-2006

Rather than clog my blog with posts linking over to my stuff on Netscape, I'm going to start aggregating most of them into a single post per day.

• Happy Feet = leftist propaganda? "The film's abrupt third-act turn to environmental advocacy pops up in nearly every review listed on Metacritic, and responses range from hostile to incredulous."
• Weekend box office: "A more productive gauge of Casino Royale's performance comes from looking at it in the context of other recent Bond openings... Casino's is comparable in scale to the opening of GoldenEye, Pierce Brosnan's first 007 outing after taking over the role from Timothy Dalton."
• Sugarcubes reunion show: "The Sugarcubes are Iceland's second most famous cultural export...So far, all blogged reports of the show have been positive."

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The Scourge of C-List Celeb - and Friend of Stamos:

Jonathan Bernstein's profile of Perez Hilton in The Guardian reveals the one shocking secret left about blogebrities -- they're fucking hard workers:

You might imagine that someone so skilled at promoting hate and fear among the C-list would live a shadowy existence. But at around 6.15 every morning, Mario Lavandeira, the beefy, 28-year-old gay Cuban-American who hides behind the pseudonym Perez Hilton, sets up his laptop on a table outside the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. Until 9.30 at night, when the club-hopping and whisper-gathering begins, he downs endless coffees and fires off endless malice-tinged posts.

Of course, it would be unwise to suggest that most professional bloggers -- hard-working though they might be -- are paragons of virtue, or even people you'd actually like to have a drink with:

He's even more incredulous when asked if he ever feels regret for anyone he might have wounded. "Not a single time. Not even when I put up the pictures of Princess Diana as she was dying. I didn't put it on my main page. I said, 'Click here to see the pictures', and even then people were outraged. But they made a choice to see those pictures and then they had the balls to fucking criticise me for it."

...unless, apparently, you're John Stamos:

"The people that last, the Tom Hankses, the Julia Robertses, my friend John Stamos, are the ones that are nice." I can't let that pass. What about Madonna - who's more horrible and unappreciative of her fans than her? Perez looks as if his head is about to explode. "Madonna's insanely talented!" But you said the people who last are the nice ones...It's almost endearing that this scourge of the C-list celeb who has Hollywood trembling is still so starstruck that he can come out with such a clueless statement.

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