RANTING & RAVING

Rage is all the rage…

Tuesday started auspiciously, with the following e-mail in response to my comments about Legally Blonde and my admittedly tasteless comments regarding the woman in Delhi who strangled herself when her husband was late to pick her up for a movie.

“You're a heartless asshole, Poland.  Between this and your 40ish eyes lecherously lusting over actresses in their 20s (and finding the need to tell us about it), you're making your column sound like a drunken frat boy with a surprisingly good sense of sentence structure.

Suggestion: stop trying to make the reader laugh with cruel xenophobic jokes based on the dead, and keep your lust for actresses half your age to yourself.”

Just for the record, I am 36, I don’t really date or try to date significantly younger women and accusations about me being a xenophobe are as absurd as calling me an anti-Semite.  Whatever.  I can’t really be too angry at people for extrapolating from my work, as that’s exactly what I do with other people’s work all the time.  I would also say that to pretend that women aren’t, more often than not, marketed as objects in this business, would be a dereliction of my duty as an honest industry analyst. 

Anyway…  The rage continued as an anonymous e-mail from “True Friends of Warner Bros. Marketing” hit the inbox.  I’ve decided not to print the e-mail here, though I suspect that you will have more than a few opportunities to read it yourself in the days to come.  The letter is an intensive attack of WB Marketing President Brad Ball and Exec VP of Marketing, Dawn Taubin.  But that’s just the start.  Marketing execs Mark Reina, Juli Goodwin and Debbie Miller all come under attack as well… mercilessly. 

The e-mail was, according to its header, send to Barry Meyer and Alan Horn.  Many others were copied.  By Tuesday afternoon, the e-mail was all over town and the hunt was on for the author inside the walls of Warner Bros.  This remake of No Way Out will probably have an unhappy ending for more than one person at the studio.  The letter says that it comes from current and former WB employees.  If they truly had the courage of their convictions, they would have signed the letter.  Ah, but that’s too much to ask, you say?  Well, of course it is.  But in studio politics, it is exposure of ugliness to the public that forces change more efficiently than anything else.  Quiet, private back-biting is so much the norm in this business that the only real effect of this letter will be a commitment to finding and blackballing its perpetrators.

Likewise, Tuesday afternoon, Inside.com’s Andrew Hindes reported that Geoff Ammer, now head of marketing for Joe Roth’s Revolution Studios, would be taking the marketing chief role at Sony, his still-in-process appointment coming somehow out of the whole “David Manning” mess.  Yet, Ammer’s transition into this role has been anticipated as one of the many steps that will be headlined by Joe Roth’s seemingly inevitable takeover of the top slot at the studio.  Remember also that only the advertising department was forced to take a hit over “Manning.”  Are we to believe that Ammer is really coming in to rein in the advertising group?  Or is the embarrassment of “Manning” now being used as public cover for a move – and for future comings and goings - that will diminish Jeff Blake’s power base and increase Joe Roth’s power base?

And then there is Bully, Larry Clark’s new film that should come with Wet Naps.  Or even better, there should be shower stalls - with locking doors – so you can get back to normal as you leave the theater.  Theoretically based on a true story of some kids who conspired to murder a member of their circle, 80 percent of the film is about objectifying Bijou Phillips, Nick Stahl or Brad Renfro in near pornographic ways.  My personal fave is the CrotchCam that Clark uses to give us a completely irrelevant between-the-thighs insert shot of Phillips in the middle of one scene.  At least Sharon Stone’s leg-crossing scene in Basic Instinct had some purpose in the story.  This felt like just-too-old-to-be-child visual molestation… nothing more profound than what’s going on with 18-year-old girls in Valley warehouses every day... but viewers of that stuff can’t hide behind the pretense of art. 

Kids may be having sex and using drugs with little thought or sense of life’s repercussions, but the simple-mindedness of Bully came as a shock after Clark’s rather interesting Another Day in Paradise.  That film seemed to show some real promise in a merger between Clark’s sensed of relaxed reality and some real storytelling skill.   Paradise has a rough edge, but it kept coming back to a real story.  But it seems Paradise was an illusion and that Clark was forced to stick to business because real actors like James Woods and Melanie Griffith probably wouldn’t go for the CrotchCam or its like.  Bully features some really sexy kids, male and female.  But it’s hard to even pay attention to the movie when the director is taking such advantage of their urge to please.  A movie about the ugliness of this murder could have been fascinating.  Knowing that movies are not remotely random, as this murder seems to have been, I’m not sure which perps I would be more comfortable with around my nephew or niece.

Meanwhile, back in New Delhi, Gadar, the film associated with the suicide I wrote about so carelessly yesterday, has been the focus of efforts to keep it from being screened.  It has nothing to do with the death, but rather the film’s story, with takes place in the midst of the 1947 India/Pakistan partitioning riots.  Vandals have attempted arson and have stoned theaters that are showing the film.

The phrase, “it’s only a movie” comes to mind.  Everybody chill. 

READER OF THE DAY:  Various ragers sent this in:  “THE NATIONAL TICKET PICKET - Friday, July 13 (all day) to protest the outrageously high price of movie tickets, DON'T see a movie this Friday July 13th. Just wait until Saturday.

Please tell all your friends and co-workers!

By collectively boycotting movie theatres for one day, we can send a clear united message to Hollywood that we shouldn't have to spend $10 to see a movie. We can show the showbiz industry that we control our entertainment dollars, and we're not going to remain seated for this kind of box office avarice.

Let's work together to see some lower prices on the big screen. We Can Do This.

SEE YOU AT THE MOVIES--NOT!

For more information about "We Can Do This: world activism projects," please visit our webpage or email wecandothis@quitesmart.com

Thank you.

-TMR

REMEMBER, DON'T SEE A MOVIE ON FRIDAY THE 13TH!”

E ME:  Will you boycott?