New York Magazine Unleashes Pet Vulture

It's about damn time: New York Magazine's Web site finally got around to launching an entertainment blog that taps into local goings on, including movie happenings. Vulture flies today, and already my brilliant colleague Logan Hill is uncorking his ruthless online persona:

On Friday, film critic Stephen Hunter lazily explored the idea that Cho Seung-hui may (or may not!) have gleaned some inspiration for his hammer-wielding self-portrait from the South Korean film Old Boy. ... Pulitzer Prize winner Hunter moonlights as a pulp-fiction novelist whose most popular books depict the lethal doings of a Vietnam vet and sniper. Hunter said that Woo's movies "celebrated violence even as they aesthetized it” -- but what about his own books, with titles like Time to Hunt? Barring any evidence, isn’t it just as likely that Hunter's books inspired the Virginia Tech massacre?

Hill invokes A.O. Scott's more scorching Hunter rebuke from today's NYT ("It is hard to say what all this proves, other than that Mr. Hunter has no peer when it comes to wielding the conditional tense on deadline."), and even before that, he ruminated on the new Universal poster art positioning Matt Damon's Jason Bourne as perhaps a "Post-9/11 Avenger."

Look for more David Edelstein as well (thank God) and possibly some spiffy red carpet scoop throwdowns as The Reeler and Vulture hit the premiere circuit this spring and summer. Jada Yuan, consider yourself warned: There's only room enough for one Tony Scott fashion second-guesser in this town.

Posted at April 23, 2007 4:01 PM