Bottom 50.

#1's easy: Jack Valenti. But then the list turns fun and harsh but never too harsh. #2: Cuba Gooding, Jr.. "Has any one person done so little with an Oscar?" Don't get the impression, either, that the FT staff is merely shooting fish in a barrel blind-folded. #10's Christopher Walken, alright?

It's in this spirit that FT publisher Chris Gore, ten years after writing and directing Red, has announced that he's writing and producing My Big Fat Independent Movie, taglined "a low brow comedy for the high brow crowd." Among the targets of the parody are to be, well, Wedding, of course, but also Amelie, Memento, Secretary, Pulp Fiction and Run Lola Run.

And just as a reminder that it's not all ribbing and giggling over there at FT, a fine interview: Brad Cook gets Eric Saperston to talk about his Journey.

Over at the Criterion Forum, there's a lot of speculation going on as to what Jon Mulvaney, the company's Customer Liaison, may be referring to when he says, "What's in the works? One dog, one cat, one bird, two Sicilians, three women, four cops, five films never before on home video (at least), and six hours of suffering. Not to mention a couple of masks, a mamma, and a messiah. And The Lower Depths."

Doug Cummings offers a fascinating and important account of a screening of Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, a new documentary by Charles Burnett, "the epitome of a cult hero - almost famous for not being famous," as Nelson Kim writes in the Senses of Cinema piece Doug quotes. Read this entry through; Doug's tentative conclusion, which sound about right to me, is that varying reactions to Burnett's film and Claude Lanzmann's Sobibor reveal disturbing traces of racial and class prejudice that still linger.

Mark T. Conard, co-editor of The Simpsons and Philosophy and Woody Allen and Philosophy, puts Tarantino on the couch for Metaphilm. In Kill Bill, "Tarantino is here not only confronting his past, in good psychoanalytic fashion, he is remaking it at the same time.... Our mothers were the heroes and villains of our lives. They were the leading players, the ones who held everything together in our fathers' absences." Meanwhile, the Metaphlog points to Jesse Walker's riffs on Revolutions.

More Matrix explication: Corporate Mofo (via Tagline, where Stephen Reid seems very excited about Robert Zemeckis's next film, Polar Express) and Brian Takle (via Matt Clayfield, who's got a few legitimate and thought-provoking worries regarding the future of his filmmaking career).

Lots of responses to Shroom's challenge at Milk Plus: "Name a family film that would be truly acceptable to the entire family."

"They've been told it's too edgy. They've been told it's too indie. They've been told there are no stars. They've been told it's too dark, it's too light, too smart, too dumb; the only thing they haven't heard by way of criticism is that it's too in color and too in focus." SignalStation points to a piece in the Dallas Observer by Robert Wilonsky on Martin & Orloff, a film evidently very deserving of a distribution deal - but "you'll never see it."

Margaret Cho defends Courtney Love.

Oleg Kireev tells the Nettime list how Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy has been received in Russia. You've probably heard about the redubbings before but you may not have heard them compared to previous stunts by the likes of the Situationist International before. By the way, a minute or two of online viewing: "The Towers are the Players."

Scott Green's roundup of anime news at AICN is actually digestible this time around. For Anime News Network, Allen Divers interviews Monkey Punch.

In the New York Times Review of Books, Dwight Garner calls Bruce Wagner's Still Holding "the hippest, funniest and most angrily humane novel written about Hollywood in the last 20 years, and it bumps Wagner up to another level as a novelist."

More books: Karen Karbo reviews Elizabeth Hay's Garbo Laughs a novel about Harriet Browning, "a melancholic novelist, a wife and mother of two, a woman so preoccupied by old movies and old movie stars that it threatens to break up her family." From the first chapter:

"No, wait. Just this time. Who's better? Frank Sinatra or Marlon Brando?"

"Are you ready for this?" she said. "Can you take it? I'd have to say Marlon Brando."

"You're crazy, you're nuts. I can't believe what I'm hearing."

She laughed, as one nut laughs with another, since she too wore her movie heart on her sleeve.

Briefly noted: Phillip Lopate's Getting Personal and Patrick McGilligan's Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. And in the Guardian, Nicholas Lezard reviews Anthony Lane's Nobody's Perfect.

In the NYT Magazine: Walter Kirn: "Remote-control sex ed. What's not to like?"; Johanna Berkman: "[T]here's a battle currently raging in Silicon Valley for control of your living room"; and from Ted C. Fishman's piece, a quote from a prof that resonates in ways he might not have intended: "Big TV's now require less depth than books."

Posted by dwhudson at November 15, 2003 1:25 PM