The News: Lindsay Lohan, NSFW

(Photo: Bert Stern / New York Magazine)

By S.T. VanAirsdale

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

--By now, everyone and their mothers has spied Lindsay Lohan's tastefully silhouetted (read: huge) rack in her and Bert Stern's tribute to Marilyn Monroe in this week's New York Magazine. Perhaps "tribute" isn't the right characterization, however; the word on the street runs the gamut from "grim foreshadowing" to "rabbit-toothed defiance" to "alluring" to "shark... jump... eat... Fonzie... eat... Lindsay" to... oh, the hell with it. The motivation parsing is out of control on this one, but if the voluminous public buzz this week beginning and ending with Lohan's name doesn't supply the clues that critics require to solve their queries, then maybe media and entertainment aren't the right fields for them to be in. "Lindsay has NOTHING to promote, other than herself," mouthbreathed Perez Hilton. Well, yeah.

--Over at Salon, Andrew O'Hehir has a box-office culture twofer, wondering aloud if recent years' downsized awards faves portend a less Hollywood-centric Oscar future and if the relative success of mini-majors like No Country For Old Men and The Band's Visit means less room for more authentically indie titles from City Lights, Kino, Zeitgeist and the like. Maybe, maybe not, but memo to O'Hehir: If IFC were a "genuine" indie, it couldn't afford to explore the video-on-demand frontier. The paradigm isn't as upturned as it seems.

--Nearly two years after blipping in and out of Tribeca, Jamie Johnson's documentary The One Percent -- featuring meditations on wealth from the top one percent of some of the world's richest people -- re-premieres tonight in Manhattan and bows Thursday on HBO. Earnest as it is, I prefer it to Johnson's debut Born Rich, if only for featuring Warren Buffett's disinheritance of his grandaughter. That's entertainment.

--Take heed, aspiring folk singers: Don't write songs calling Ethan Hawke gay. It can only end in Klonopin.

Posted at February 19, 2008 9:16 AM