Last week we began with the shuttering of In the Company of Glenn, former Premiere editor Glenn Kenny’s shop on movie blog row. As it turns out, Kenny has wasted no time in opening up in a new location: Some Came Running, named after the Rat Pack movie you need to see right now if you never have. “I'll be posting like mad shortly, as this blog will be one of possibly several outlets for which I'll be covering Cannes. The reorganization of staff at Premiere coming at this particular time put even more of a whammy on my head than it might have otherwise, but I thought I'd best get myself out there anyway. Stay in the game, as it were (Jeff Wells will be proud of me, I trust), although what I'd like more than anything at the moment is a bit of a rest…First, though, I post to thank everyone who rang in with compliments, concern, and coverage in the wake of my termination. I felt a little like Tom Sawyer at his own funeral...except far more moved, and incredibly grateful.”
The PopMatters blog Short Ends and a Leader offers a manifesto of sorts, an Open Letter to the Online Critic. “The time is now. It’s our moment to put up or forever shut up. Print is dying, there’s no two ways about it, and those left rummaging for readership are turning to the old fashioned wire services for their rote, by the book copy. As a community, we’ve been waiting for an opportunity to shine, to show that we are just as legitimate as the men and women who dictated filmic fashion for the last 60 years. New technology may mean a new way of communication, but frankly, we’re doing a piss poor job of getting our point across - that is, when we can come up with a cogent and coherent argument to begin with. It’s time to cast off the amateurish aura given off by what many of us do and recognize the role we will play in the next decade.”
At Beyond the Multiplex, Andrew O’Hehir asks what would happen if Austin Powers were French and funny – and then answers his own question. “Let me direct you to the hit French comedy OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, featuring explosively weird Gallic comic Jean Dujardin as its eponymous super-spy, an unhinged cross-Channel cousin of Sean Connery's 007. (In his original, more straight-faced incarnation, OSS 117 was the hero of more than 250 French pulp novels and several 1950s and '60s films.) Director Michel Hazanavicius captures the jet-age atmosphere, form-fitting wardrobes, jazz-ethnic soundtrack and bouffant hairdos of JFK/de Gaulle-era espionage films in perfect detail, but it's Dujardin's performance as the suave, confident and utterly clueless Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath (to Francophones, a name that drips with phony aristocratic pretension) that gives OSS 117 its edge.”
At the House Next Door, Sarah D. Bunting revisits Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders and concludes that it works better with the sound off. “A first-time watcher of The Outsiders could easily follow and appreciate the plot without having to listen to the dialogue; everything is telegraphed visually, whether by the director and cinematographer (here, and on Rumble Fish, Stephen H. Burum) or by the actors. This will probably come as a relief to those of you who would maybe like to watch it again, but remember the dialogue as embarrassingly earnest, which it is. In fact, it's as sugary and purple as an Easter Peep, and while Coppola's fidelity to the source material is quite striking in some ways (more on that later), the blame for lines like the oft (and correctly) pilloried ‘Stay gold, Ponyboy’ lies squarely with S.E. Hinton's original. ‘Let's do it for Johnny, maaaaan,’ ‘Sure, little buddy, we ain't gonna fight no more’—they land like balloons filled with ricotta.”
And finally, here’s a gallery of “kill faces” courtesy of Arbogast on Film, guaranteed to get your Friday off to a rip-roaring start.