Roman Polanski is a brilliant director.
Roman Polanski has suffered great life tragedies of the type that often destroy people.
Roman Polanski is a bit of a coward.
Roman Polanski is in custody.
It kind of strikes me like an intervention. After years of self-imposed exile from the United States, Polanski has been dancing around coming back to face the music for years now. The exposure of misconduct by the judge – mostly suggested before Marina Zenovich’s documentary, but certainly given focus by the doc – and the victim’s active forgiveness of the man have suggested that he has a good chance of looking at little more than time served and perhaps, probation, as a price.
Because, ahem… he did fuck a little girl.
Sorry for the graphic language… but as brilliant as the man is, we should all keep in mind, no matter how much we now blame her mother, the girl herself, or the judge… no matter how forgiving the now-grown-woman is… a mature, aware man gave an underage girls drugs and had sex with her… and whether she wanted it (the drugs or the sex) or not, not many of us would be okay with that if it was our daughter or loved one in that position.
And to play The Devli’s advocate, is a life of freedom in Europe really such a severe punishment?
Of course, I have no problem with people feeling that enough time has passed, that his life has faced a limitation here, and that he is now being persecuted and not prosecuted. And I have no problem with people who disagree. What I feel personally… not the point.
But it seems like Polanski facing the music, whatever the legal tune, has been a long time coming… even just measuring the 7 years since The Pianist. And now, the hand of fate has reached him in a place he thought was safe, Switzerland, and it’s the LA DA’s move.
Interesting.
Finally, I must say, if the US does not demand extradition of the man in this situation, then the charges must be dropped fully. Holding him on a string of the threat of prosecution is not right if the government does not feel strongly enough to prosecute. So the next step is coming.
I suspect that Polanski will be in front of an LA judge by late this week. And if he is not, time to cut him loose. Either way, this should be the moment of resolution in this long, sad, very human story.

Megan Fox continued to keep many of us wondering what her next act is, even if the show didn’t do much to surprise… the writing was as lame as it’s been in a long while…
But she did take shots that will be internet classics for a long time to come… (no, not a pun, Lex)…

The full interview…

The teaser…

The climate for film festivals is even harsher than the climate for studios and indies. The first major fest to now announce a complete wipe-out is CineVegas, a festival that quickly became a favorite with journalists, boasting happy Vegas accommodations and some tiny finds along the way.
IndieWIRE breaks the news, but offers no real answers as to why the plug got pulled. “Quality” is a bullshit answer, with due respect to all.
My bet would be that they either lost The Palms as the central sponsor or the Brenden Theaters multiplex (inside The Palms), where the festival was held… or both. Vegas is hurting. And all things considered, CineVegas probably never earned the casino hotel a single room night sold.
The Palms is all about showy promotion, but the tipping point for CineVegas was 2007′s premiere of Ocean’s 13. Brad, Matt, and Don walked the red carpet.
In 2008… The Rocker.
2009… St John of Las Vegas.
Game over.
Studios are not spending on festivals the way they used to. Vegas casinos can get celebrities on their carpets for less. And CineVegas never emerged as a sales fest or even a festival that could draw media together – which it did – to get behind a film that would go on to have even minor commercial success.
The effort of the entire team is to be respected. Dennis Hopper could not have been a more willing and available advocate. But festivals that survive this economy will have to have a purpose clear enough to draw sponsors. Fewer days, fewer press events, less money spent on traveling talent… it’s already started, but it’s only going to get worse from here.
Yes, I hope there is a new CineVegas resurrected in the years to come. It was not a cynical effort by those who ran the event. Not at all. But if and when it comes back, expect it to do even more to service its sponsors in a city that is built on hype.

The defining moment of Capitalism: A Love Story, for me, so far, came last night, listening to Bill Maher slather Moore’s bullocks with the slimy slick saliva of his tongue for minutes… only to gently explain after the licking was done, why the movie’s conceit really makes no sense. Seriously… Maher has a future doing movie quotes for Rolling Stone.
But the sad part of this exchange was watching Moore’s eyes… I think he knows that his latest film is coming up short. He looked sad, not enraged. He was saying all the words that he must as One Of The Greatest Salesmen On The Planet. But he is sending a movie out into the world that is right out of Animal House, when Belushi’s Bluto gives his “Nothing is over until we decide it is!” speech and no one follows him.
“What the fuck happened to the America I used to know?,” Moore must be wondering. But the question America may be wondering is, “Where is the Michael Moore we used to know?”
The answer is also in that same scene in Animal House. Bluto is pure Id in that film. But after being beaten down, the Deltas won’t follow pure Id anymore. It’s when Otter acts as The Ego, putting Bluto’s unstructured rant into a perspective that his frat brothers can connect to (even if he is still being a bit silly.)
The genius of Moore has been that he is Id and Ego in one as a filmmaker. And this film, like much of Sicko, is all super-ego. We still see that fun, thoughtful maniac in there… glimpses of the Id and Ego. But mostly, he wants to be a moralizing Super-Ego these days. And part of that, I would suggest, is because he is making a movie that is dealing with issues too fresh for him to get perspective on, much less give us perspective on.
Last night, on Maher, he talked about wanting to make a movie that was so outrageously honest that no studio would ever fund another one of his movies. Epic Fail, Mike. There is not a single thing exposed in the body of Capitalism: A Love Story that Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, David Letterman, and even Jay Leno haven’t already mocked… and mocked in a more funny way. No one needed a film to tell us that bailing out banks sucks and that people being thrown out of their houses – that they took insane loans on, of their own greedy accord, btw – at the same time feels like a shot in the gut. America gets it.
You used to convert. Now all you seem to want to do is to preach to the converted.
I truly love your work and believe in your gift, Michael Moore. But you need to get further out ahead of the news cycle or you become just another f-ing talking head for the liberals instead of the idiots of Fox News who do the same crap on the other side.

The line between personality and news gets blurrier everyday and some days, my ability to just look away without public comment is overwhelmed by the sick feeling in my stomach that comes from falsehoods being consumed and repeated across the media spectrum because these falsehoods are designed to be eye-grabbing and not because the public author of them has given it a single thought greater than the fact that they could gather some attention.
I get angry.
And I get frustrated.
I get as frustrated with the public – some of whom are professional journalists – as I do with the self-aggrandizing sources of this kind of “news” because all that is require to change the dynamic is, in the case of journalists, the tiniest amount of attention to detail and history. And yet this seems to be beyond the level of interest in doing the job these days.
And I completely understand that when these moments of bubbling over come up, it can read like some sort of personal issue. It doesn’t help that people like Patrick Goldstein now use major dying outlets like the LA Times to go little past the personal these days.
Anyway…
Today’s drama starts, as it often does, with Nikki Finke.
Apparently, everyone – starting with Nikki – has quickly forgotten that the same person who got it dead wrong in July when she was being fed spin by Harry Sloan’s operatives that everything at MGM was looking up in back-to-back EXCLUSIVEs – “GOOD NEWS FOR MGM: Audit Will Show Struggling Studio Is A “Going Concern” and “TOLDJA! MGM Audit Shows Full Compliance With All Debt Covenants; EXCLUSIVE UPDATE: Studio Library Valued At $5.5B” – is now the person they are quoting as gospel as she finally is being fed the “news” that everyone who was actually seriously considering what was happening at MGM knew was inevitable from the time Harry Sloan pulled the already flailing situation away from Sony in the arrogant believe that he could rebuild a dying library valuation into an empire again.
The new EXCLUSIVE…”EXCLUSIVE DETAILS: MGM Makes Phone Plea To Bondholders To Stay Alive; Both ‘Hobbit’ And James Bond In Peril; Bondholders Tell Studio To Go Bankrupt; MGM Calls That Worst Possible Outcome”
And now, of course, we have media all over the place jumping on the Big Lie of the headline… that MGM’s fate will define the fate of these two partnered projects.
Anyone with a brain and any sense of the players would instantly understand that neither Barbara Broccoli and Warner Bros are going to allow their franchises to be derailed by the situation at MGM. And they don’t have to. There is money available for both projects to move forward. And even if MGM went bankrupt, no bankruptcy judge on the planet would stop significant incoming revenue -especially without a cash layout – to be created and absorbed into the company on the inflated notion by whomever is selling this shite to Nikki that maintaining distribution and a cash position in these films in spite of not being able to move forward because of a lack of cash in the company is in the interest of the company.
This is not complex.
And frankly, it is not just Nikki’s fault for being the George W Bush is a town full of Dick Cheneys, never really understanding the agenda, but selling it with all her tiny heart and soul.
When someone writes, “Some say the call lasted 6 1/2 hours. Others said it lasted 2 1/2 hours with lenders, and then the lenders themselves had a conference call that lasted another 2 hours,” that person is openly acknowledging that they don’t know what actually happened and that there are wildly varying versions of the tale being told. This opening screams, “Take all of this with a grain of salt.” But this is the Nikki-ism of it… she then boils it down to a screaming headline that is neither smart nor accurate, taking full advantage of peoples’ disinterest in actually reading the sometimes obvious subtext of her work.
People don’t want to think too hard and Nikki doesn’t want to do the journalistic job of thinking it out for them. The #1 goal is promoting Nikki, not seeking truth.
And in the current media universe, everything is a writeover waiting to happen. There is no memory. Getting it dead wrong today is not big deal so long as you get it dead wrong tomorrow.

(more…)

The Sneak Peek is here…
Sony Pictures Classics co-presidents Michael Barker & Tom Bernard sat down for a 30 minute discussion about where things stand in the business of being independent.