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UPDATE: Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, known as the "West Memphis Three," were freed from prison Friday, August 19, 2011. They were incarcerated for 18 years for the murders of three young boys in 1993. Filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky made two HBO documentaries about their case -- "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" (1996) and "Paradise Lost 2: Revelations" (2000). A third film, "Paradise Lost: Purgatory," is due to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September. It will need a new ending. HBO will be presenting the first two films, on cable and through its mobile app HBO GO, in the next two weeks.

John Mark Byers, the stepfather of one of the victims who demonized the West Memphis Three in the earlier films, today believes that they are innocent:

Above: Joyce McKinney and Errol Morris at a screening of "Tabloid" at the Vista Theatre in Los Angeles (Los Feliz), July 13, 2011. I believe that's her dog's leash she's holding. (photo by Tiffany Rose)

"Joyce and I are getting along just fine. (Another Q&A in LA with an extraordinary woman.)"
-- @errolmorris, Twitter, July 14, 2011

At the end of my review of Errol Morris's "Tabloid," I quoted from a New York Times story about his "Tabloid" subject and primary storyteller, Joyce McKinney, appearing at pre-release screenings in Austin (SxSW), Sarasota, San Francisco, Seattle and New York, to protest the film's portrayal of her. In the Times piece, she said:

"I sat till the audience started to leave and waited for the precise moment, and then jumped up and yelled, 'I'm Joyce McKinney!' " she said, with considerable glee. "They went crazy."

I quoted one of the producers of "Tabloid" (in which he called the picture "a Looney Tunes 'Rashomon'") and concluded: "Do these people know how to sell a movie or what?"

In recent interviews, Morris has been asked about these appearances and he's professed some bewilderment -- not only about her motivations, but how she's financing her transportation. Morris told Matt Singer at IFC.com:

From my piece on Errol Morris's latest, "Tabloid," at Press Play:

Ripped from today's headlines, Errol Morris's sensational "Tabloid" uncovers outrageous stories of sex, bondage, Mormons, kidnapping, cloning, drugging, buggery (or at least bugging) and betrayal circa 1977, and features more than one dog named Booger. The movie premiered almost a year ago, at the 2010 Telluride Film Festival--yet, between the surveillance scandals at Rupert Murdoch's gossip rags and the Tony-sweeping Trey Parker-Matt Stone missionary-position musical phenomenon "The Book of Mormon," "Tabloid" could hardly be more of-this-very-moment.

Given the timing of its release and the nature of its subject, you might say "Tabloid" suggests that history doesn't have to begin as tragedy and repeat itself as farce; it can be farce every time. The lurid reports recounted here swirl around Joyce McKinney, a blonde 1970s beauty queen (Miss Wyoming) with an IQ of 168 who goes all-out to win the man of her dreams, a clean-skinned Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson. When they met, she says, "It was like in the movies." Long story short, she and a (besotted slave?) accomplice wind up accused of kidnapping and sexually abusing the object of her desire. The way Joyce tells it, her beloved suddenly disappears without explanation as they are planning their wedding. With the help of a private eye and a good platonic friend, she tracks him down in England, rescues him from his Mormon "cult" brainwashers, and takes him to a cottage in Devon where she ties him to a bed, ravishes him (consensually) for three wonderful days of fun, food and sex. And love, too. Preparing to give him a warm cinnamon-oil back rub, she rips off his Mormon underwear and burns the "smelly" garments in the fireplace, an act both practical and symbolic.

Last week Slate ran a story about the "Hollywood Career-o-Matic," which claimed to use data from Rotten Tomatoes to chart the trajectories of Hollywood careers. Interactive feature: Just enter the name of an actor or director and it will instantly generate a graph showing that person's critical ups and downs.

For example, here's one for M. Night Shyamalan, with each dot representing the Tomatometer score for the features he has directed:

Slate concludes that, according to Rotten Tomatoes data, the Best Actor in movies is Daniel Auteuil, with John Ratzenberger the best American actor, since he's voiced a character in every Pixar movie. Best Actress: Arsinée Khanjian. Worst Actress: Jennifer Love Hewitt. Best Director: Mike Leigh. Worst Director: Dennis Dugan (veteran of Adam Sandler movies such as "Happy Gilmore," "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry," "You Don't Mess with the Zohan" and "Grown Ups").

Yes, this is all so silly that the mind boggles, but let's start with the premise itself: What is the correlation between reviews and careers in Hollywood? Adam Sandler and Michael Bay wouldn't look much more impressive than Shyamalan if you looked only at reviews. And the Slate piece is riddled with misconceptions about the Tomatometer:

I'm kidding, of course. The guy's only directed three theatrical features. His lens flares are still in training bras. But just you watch. Next week you'll be reading a multi-page, info-nugget viewer's guide in which some helpful listmaker sets out to sort the wheat from the chaff: "Mission Impossible III," "Star Trek" and "Super 8": Will two of them be "best" and the other one be "worst"? Or the other way around? Look for it! (Coming soon: "The Best and Worst of Terrence Malick.")

If you followed the gossip from the recent Cannes Film Circus, you will have heard that there were two incidents of scandalous behavior by directors who had films in competition. One of them involved Lars von Trier, who felt so alienated during the press carnival for his film "Melancholia" that he tried to inject some provocative humor into the proceedings and wound up making Nazi jokes that didn't go over at all well. As he later told Dennis Lim in the New York Times: "I got carried away. I feel this obligation, which is completely stupid and very unprofessional, to kind of entertain the crowd a little bit."

Von Trier's actions got him declared "persona non grata" by the authoritarian Board of Directors, while the other filmmaker, Terrence Malick, got the Palme d'Or by behaving even more shockingly (if some of the press reports were to be believed): He didn't walk the red carpet or attend press conflagrations for his movie, "The Tree of Life"! Strange as it may seem, some people -- even movie directors -- don't crave the attention. Brad Pitt, the extremely famous movie star who did a fine job fielding mostly inane and redundant questions from the keyboard paparazzi after the press screening, noted, as did others, that Malick prefers not to be hailed as a demigod in a festival atmosphere. Imagine that.

... and Germans and Jews and Albert Speer and Susanne Bier, etc., at the post-"Melancholia" press conference at the Cannes Film Circus. The quotations I've seen in print have been fragmentary and/or inaccurate, and understandably can't convey tone. This isn't the whole press conference, either, but, for the record, it should give you a better idea of how the thing actually unraveled, and how it played in the room. It's excruciating to watch somebody flounder and dig himself in like this (how much of it is meant to be a provocative joke? a perverse publicity stunt? an artistic confession?), but from this angle you can also see Kirsten Dunst squirm in mortification. She and the moderator try to interject and rescue him, but he won't give up.

To me, it appears he has some vague idea of where he's going (something about understanding the worst in human nature, perhaps?), but gets hopelessly lost on the way there -- until, in apocalyptic von Trier fashion (hey, he just made a movie about the end of the world), he throws up his hands and drops the bomb in a desperate attempt to dissipate the gathering tension by saying exactly what everybody is fearing (or hoping) he'll say... And what was the question again?

UPDATE (05/19/11): The festival has now declared von Trier "persona non grata," though what that means is not entirely clear. Ben Kenigsberg of Time Out Chicago reports from a post-press conference gang-bang interview with von Trier:

In his latest column, Nicholas Kristof poses some important questions that undermine the myth of "fair and balanced" journalism. He recounts the story of the photo above, taken by Portland Press Herald photographer Gregory Rec on Friday, September 10, showing local Muslims gathering to pray for Eid al Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan. It appeared on the front page -- the kind of image accompanied by a feel-good story about "faith and forgiveness" (as the headline said), that has provided the traditional, benign, pro-religion front-page news-feature in American papers for decades. No problem there.

The problem was the date of the paper.

The day of this issue's publication, was September 11. And some readers were outraged that these images of American Muslims praying should appear on the anniversary of a deadly attack by radical avowed Muslims nine years earlier. If they'd waited for the next day's (September 12) paper, with coverage of the memorials that took place on September 11, they might have found the balance they were looking for, but on September 11 the paper was bombarded with complaints.

Revisiting Dwight Macdonald's famous essay, "Masscult & Midcult," and other ideas old and new -- continued from "When 'I get it!' means 'I don't get it!' and vice-versa."

"It seems to me that nearly the whole Anglo-Saxon race, especially of course in America have lost the power to be individuals. They have become social insects like bees and ants. They are lost to humanity, and the great question for the future is whether that will spread or will be repulsed by the people who still exist..."
-- Roger Fry (1866-1930), from a letter quoted "Roger Fry," a biography written by Virginia Woolf(1940); also quoted by Dwight Macdonald in "Masscult & Midcult"

A while ago I added to the epigraphs in the upper right corner of this page a quotation from writer-actor-director Tom Noonan that echoed something I had long felt to be true, but had never articulated: "I don't think you go to a play to forget, or to a movie to be distracted. I think life generally is a distraction and that going to a movie is a way to get back, not go away." I don't feel that way very often anymore; gone are the days, when I was first discovering the richness of the still very young art of film, when I might see several masterpieces in a week, or even a day -- in classes, film series, rep houses, art houses, mainstream cinemas or on TV. But I was inclined to feel that movies,the art form of my time (and literature, music, art of all kinds), brought me closer to my own life by focusing my attention on what it means to be alive. Like millions of others, I found the only religion in which I could whole-heartedly believe in movie theaters, libraries, bookstores, and concert venues.¹

In "Masscult & Midcult" (1962), published when "Citizen Kane" was as old as "GoodFellas" and "Miller's Crossing" are today, Dwight Macdonald contends that art (movies included) no longer seeks engagement with an audience, but is content to serve as another opiate of the masses: "The production line grinds out a uniform product whose humble aim is not even entertainment, but merely distraction."

I'm late to mention this piece by William Saletan, published in Slate August 23 ("Is a mosque near Ground Zero 'insensitive'?"), which gets to the bottom of this manufactured emotional wedge issue like nothing else I've read. After briskly demolishing the initial rumors about the Park51 development, Saletan quotes the fallback position of opponents who have questioned the sensitivity of the project: Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol... all people renowned for their respect of others' sensitivities.

Feelings about 9/11 are raw and real. Many people, including families who lost loved ones that day, find the prospect of a mosque near Ground Zero upsetting. I've heard this reaction in my family, too. But feelings aren't reasons. You can't tell somebody not to build a house of worship somewhere just because the idea upsets you. You have to figure out why you're upset. What's the basis of your discomfort? Why should others respect it? For that matter, why should you?

This kind of reflection is missing from the sensitivity chorus....

Last week I used a clip from the AMC series "Rubicon"¹ (re-posted after the jump) to illustrate what I felt could be interpreted as a parable about film criticism. Since then, it has come to my attention that "President Obama is a secret Muslim" and somebody is planning to build a "terror mosque" at Ground Zero. OK, those notions have been floating about for a while, but people have very, very strong opinions about them. I haven't seen any evidence that the president is a Muslim, secret or otherwise, and I'm not sure what a "terror mosque" is, but I know that the proposed Park51 Islamic cultural center (at the site of a defunct Burlington Coat Factory outlet) isn't at Ground Zero because I used Google Maps to look it up. The Pussycat Lounge, a strip club one block south, is closer, but people aren't expressing their opinions about it, maybe because it's been there for many years, like some of the other mosques in the neighborhood. So, I'm wondering: Where are all these opinions coming from and what are they grounded in? Mostly, it turns out, they have sprung from other opinions. Which are, in turn, based on disinformation or just something somebody heard somebody else say they heard from somewhere.

Fortunately, facts do exist independent of anyone's opinion about them. They are verifiable. Once you know what they are, you might be able to form some opinions. But, to return to the parable, until you know what the tie actually looks like, your position regarding it (whether you approve or disapprove, like or dislike) is worth, as Edwin Starr once said of war, absolutely nothin'.

Here's something from an Opinionator column by Timothy Egan, a National Book Award-winning nonfiction author, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and writer for the New York Times (and a former colleague of mine at the University of Washington Daily!) called "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings" that ought to be read by anyone who thinks they have an opinion about something.

Some people are proposing a boycott of Newsweek because of a silly article that criticizes gay actors -- specifically on TV's "Glee" and in the Broadway revival of the Bacharach-David Musical "Promises, Promises" -- for acting too gay in straight roles. This strikes me as fundamentally hilarious for several reasons, the most obvious of which are:

1) I didn't know anyone needed additional incentive to not read Newsweek, since circulation figures indicate that lots and lots of people have been not reading it without making any concerted effort not to do so.

2) "Glee" and "Promises, Promises" are both Musicals, for god's sake. Where would the Musical be without the participation of gay actors? The movie version of "Paint Your Wagon" -- that's where. You Musical fans want to spend the rest of your lives watching and listening to Clint Eastwood singing "I Talk to the Trees"? Then go ahead and complain that gay performers are too gay to star in Musicals.

In the summer of 1981, Robert Redford gathered novice and veteran filmmakers together for the first of what has become known as the Sundance Institute's Directors and Screenwriters Labs. Eleven projects were chosen for the workshop (there are 13 for the 2010 program) -- which, over the last 29 years, has included such films as Paul Thomas Anderson's "Hard Eight," Quentin Tarantino's "Reservoir Dogs," Tamra Jenkins' "Slums of Beverly Hills," Darren Aranofsky's "Requiem for a Dream," Hany Abu-Assad's "Paradise Now," John Cameron Mitchell's "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" and Kimberly Pierce's "Boys Don't Cry."

That's the old news.

What does Variety -- once known as "The Showbiz Bible" -- think it has to offer its readers? After Monday's news that the paper has jettisoned (what's the reverse of "ankled"? I forget...) veteran film critic Todd McCarthy, whose name was synonymous with Variety even before the publication's reviews had actual bylines, I don't see much future in the once-essential trade paper. Lay off the people who are your reputation, your authority, your influence, and what's left? Nothing. There will still be a batch of web and paper pages legally entitled to call itself "Variety," but so what? It's like one of those bands that tours under a once-famous name without actually offering the work of any of the names that made it what it was.

How much is that worth to you right now?

A great, cut-through-the-crap piece by NYU journalism associate professor Jay Rosen at PressThink asks why reality has been declared off-limits in American political journalism. Rosen zeroes in on one key line in David Barstow's fair and balanced New York Times piece on the Tea Party movement, "Tea Party Lights Fuse for Rebellion on Right": "It is a sprawling rebellion, but running through it is a narrative of impending tyranny."

If tyranny is impending, Rosen asks, why isn't that a story? Is it enough to report that somebody is making serious allegations? Or might it be the duty of the press to report whether any evidence can be found to substantiate those allegations?

It kept coming up, but David... did it make any sense? Was it grounded in observable fact, the very thing that investigative reporters specialize in? Did it square (at all) with what else Barstow knows, and what the New York Times has reported about the state of politics in 2009-10? Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable? If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state... can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don't see how we can. [...]

Here's Adam Curtis's six-and-a-half-minute documentary segment on how, over the last 50 (75?) years or so, we have become a culture of increasingly paranoid weirdos. (Satirical, too.) It reminded me of "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear" (2004), the essential documentary about the politics that led up to 9/11, and how they continued afterwards. And then I realized why: They're both Adam Curtis films! From the intro to "Power of Nightmares":