Screening Gotham: The Weinsteins Find God

Some of today's movie news of note from around New York:

--For Christ's sake: Variety reports that the Weinstein Co. is partnering with Christian entertainment group Impact Entertainment to form a "faith-based distribution label" that will crank out six theatrical releases and an unspecified number of DVD releases per year. Sounds great, but memo to Harvey: God always, always gets final cut.

--News flash: Yoko Ono just dropped out of the Sundance stand-by line for Chapter 27.

--I know I can periodically be a little hard on A.O. Scott, but credit where credit's due for his wry video review of Apocalypto. The mock-wondrous reading of the line, "... and at one point, a man's face gets chewed off by a jaguar," is kind of priceless. And the written review ain't half bad, either.

--Kyle Smith, on the other hand, is riding the Batshit Express first-class today with both his jingoistic Blood Diamond review (Actual criticism: "So natural resources cause war? That's like saying banks cause bank robbery") and his vicious, wholly unqualified pan of Off the Black. I knew this kind of meltdown was coming when the Post cafeteria discontinued serving kitten's-blood smoothies at lunch. Andrea Peyser has sucked of late as well.

--In this week's Four Eyed Monsters news, Brian Geldin reports from a panel discussion hinting that the film's "life logging" tradition goes back more than 1,000 years. Alas, centuries of sloppy care have yielded the erasure of all known cave-painting podcasts. Never forget, people. Never forget.

Posted at December 8, 2006 10:18 AM