The News: Almost a Pullquote for Quiet City

By S.T. VanAirsdale

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

--Stephen Holden's glowing review of Quiet City -- easily the best film screening in IFC Center's ongoing Generation DIY series -- in today's NYT gets within one word of director/self-distributor Aaron Katz's critic-blurb wet dream. And then that phrase comes up: "Tender and sad, it is a fully realized work of mumblecore poetry." Lovely. I'm sure the producers will take it, but the air of condescension is so thick it's shorting out my computer.

--"These things have to stand on their own two feet," screenwriter Billy Finkelstein recently told Los Angeles Times Scriptland contributor Jay Fernandez about his screenplay Bad Lieutenant '08 -- the sequel to Abel Ferrara's harrowing 1992 cop drama Bad Lieutenant. "Listen, how many movies have been made about Jesse James and Eliot Ness? There are certain characters that are part of our literature and they will be revisited -- that's just the nature of it. There's a difference between appreciating something and putting it in amber." He calls it amber, I call it pitch-black. Either way, if there's a more intellectually bankrupt motivation for franchising a character, I'd like to hear it. If you need me, I'll be in the shower. (H/T: GreenCine Daily)

--Morale at the MPAA skyrocketed Tuesday when chairman Dan Glickman, showing off the DVD-sniffing labs Lucky and Flo to an adoring press corps at City Hall, told the NYT: "These dogs are our best employees. ... The dogs give us a way to personalize this. These dogs have been subject to a contract on their lives: in Malaysia, $30,000 was offered their heads." An underpaid receptionist at MPAA HQ is surely baking poison dog treats as we speak. (H/T: Defamer, which also has video)

Posted at August 29, 2007 9:52 AM