The book on Harvey. (And other books, too.)

In the New York Observer, Jake Brooks writes that when the final nominee for Best Picture was announced on Tuesday morning, Seabiscuit, "an audible gasp could be heard from the gathered crowd. It was a little after 5:30 am Pacific time, but suddenly movie executives on both coasts were wide awake and reaching for the speed dial. Cold Mountain, Miramax's award-season thoroughbred about the cost of war and the strength of love, had been beaten by a 75-year-old horse."

Harvey Weinstein himself did a rather interesting thing. He gave an interview to Salon, but more specifically, to Rebecca Traister. She's the reporter on the receiving end of one of Weinstein's infamous tantrums, as described in Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures and recapped by Elizabeth Spiers a few weeks ago. It's a cooler, more tolerant Harvey he's presenting himself as here, all thanks - no kidding - to a low carb diet, evidently. However calculated or uncalculated, sitting down with Traister and calmly explaining why Cold Mountain has not been snubbed by the Academy (when it clearly has been) is not a dumb move at all.

As countless Sundance reports have it, Down and Dirty was the underarm accessory at the festival this year. To catch up with a few reviews, mentions and so on:

First off, Biskind will be a guest on Your Call, the radio show hosted by Laura Flanders, today, Thursday, 10-11amPT/1-2pmET. If you're reading this too late, there is an archive. Among the questions to be addressed: "Did 'Indiewood' destroy the independent film movement, or are the new digital technologies making for a truly independent film renaissance?"

In the same "Book Club" at Slate, David Edelstein and AO Scott have been chatting about this one and the latest from J Hoberman, who happens to review a few books himself - they're on the blacklist - in the Village Voice. But in his opener, Edelstein introduces The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties as a book that "conjures up an era - the 60s and 70s - in which movies were woven into our political and cultural lives in a way they just aren't anymore," while Down "sets out to chart the rise and the studio appropriation of what had looked to be a revolutionary movement in cinema, the "independent" film, yet gets all gummed up in a couple of titanic (or maybe sociopathic) personalities."

Down also prompted another piece from Scott in the New York Times: "[P]erhaps the strangest legacy of the indie-film boom... is that a movement passionately committed to defending the integrity of cinema as an art form has helped to spawn a film culture obsessed, as never before, with the arcana of commerce."

Matt Zoller Seitz calls the book "a nasty, extremely personal prosecutorial document: the Starr Report of independent cinema" in the New York Press.

John Anderson in the Washington Post.

%&$@#!! New York magazine's guide.

Esquire's Adrienne Miller.

Jay Rayner in the Observer.

But there are also other books of note out. As for Joe Eszterhas's Hollywood Animal, for example, Michiko Kakutani warns in the New York Times that the book offers nothing but "large heapings of egomania run egregiously amok." Surprised?

"Did you know that The Beatles were actually interested in bringing The Lord of the Rings to the screen? John Lennon as Gollum anybody? (And, yes, that was seriously considered)." For Kamera, Laurence Boyce reviews Tales From Development Hell by David Hughes. Also: Richard Armstrong reviews Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum and Adrian Martin.

Doug Cummings incorporates a solid mention of The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America in his excellent entry on a recent benefit screening of the film.

And as for that other book, cinetrix says it best: "For those of you playing at home, today's Times piece [by Newsweek Wall Street editor Allan Sloane] is the third review of Denby's tell-all the paper of record has run in the past 30 days. Here's hoping every angle is finally exhausted because the cinetrix, for one, sure is."

Posted by dwhudson at January 29, 2004 11:46 AM