Careful what you wish for. Snarky blogger Nikki Finke has won a huge following. Now her targets are fighting back. Rod Lurie has his say at The Wrap, which is reporting healthy initial traffic after two months.

Freelance critic Elvis Mitchell talks about the state of film criticism.

Life Magazine is reincarnated online as a photo archive.

Pristine Wolverine is leaked to film pirates.

It's rare for a European actress to carve out a career in Hollywood. But honing her English with rounds of Berlitz and winning both the best actress Oscar and Cesar awards for La Vie en Rose have spun Marion Cotillard into a whirlwind of film roles. First, she went to Chicago to shoot Michael Mann's Public Enemies, playing moll Billie Frechette to Johnny Depp's gangster John Dillinger (July 1).

Three days later she was on the set of Rob Marshall's Fellini-inspired movie musical Nine, using her own singing voice as Luisa Contini opposite best actor Oscar-winner Daniel Day Lewis (November 25). The script for Nine was the last one completed by the late Anthony Minghella.

After just two days in Paris, Cotillard flew to the Morroco desert to shoot the French-language Le Dernier Vol (The Last Flight), co-starring her boyfriend, Guillaume Canet. Let's hope she catches a well-deserved break before starting her next, Inception, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Page.

Here's the Public Enemies trailer:

Viggo Mortensen mentioned the possibility of appearing in the Peter Jackson/Guillermo del Toro production of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit while accepting the Jameson Empire Icon Award Monday night in London:

“Empire magazine was an early and ardent supporter of Lord of the Rings before it even came out. I've been thinking, I don't know about you, they're going to try to make more money from it now. They've got a Mexican making it now, with Guillermo del Toro, who's very talented. Now as far as I know we're not in The Hobbit but they're going to try and find a way, just for fun. I'm not necessarily against the idea. They may try to link that book to the book we were in. But I was looking at Tolkien's version of the world. In order to do a prequel to The Lord of the Rings, I'd probably have to be changing Boromir's diapers because I live longer or whatever."

Paramount has launched a viral marketing campaign for their upcoming biopic The Soloist, starring Jamie Foxx as a homeless violinist who is profiled by an L.A. Times columnist (Robert Downey Jr.). Here's a piece on street musicians from around the country: some aren't bad.

Last week as I rushed from meeting to meeting in New York City, I kept entering the magnificent portals of architecturally significant headquarters of publishing giants with fabulously designed commissaries full of anxious employees trying to hang on to their gigs. How many jobs at Hearst, Conde Nast and The New York Times could have been saved with the billions spent on changing the Manhattan skyline? Staffers at Barry Diller's stunning IAC Building at 18th and 10th, designed by Frank Gehry, are worried about the economy like everyone else: but relative to print publishing, the online future looks bright.

Sadly, I was not able to photograph my tour of NYC's fab new towers, as I drowned my Nikon Coolpix with a leaky water bottle in my purse. I took the battery out of my pocket camera and aired it out, but the damage was done—my friends at Popular Mechanics say that I should have put rice inside to soak up the moisture. Now I know.

When I visited Renzo Piano's stunning 14th floor NYT commissary, staff reductions were announced that very day. (Poynter.org posted a letter by by the late John Walter, former executive editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and founding editor of USA Today, here, in which he argued that three people are to blame for the death of newspapers.)

At the ecologically-correct Hearst Tower on 8th Avenue and 57th Street (top), stunning escalators surrounded by a waterfall rise to a high-ceiling dining room where diners line up for meals prepared by short order cooks and sushi chefs.

The Conde Nast building at 4 Times Square features a Gehry-designed 4th floor dining room where the first orange booth is kept open for S.I. Newhouse, Jr.; Vogue's Anna Wintour (who inspired Meryl Streep's character in The Devil Wears Prada) rarely shows up, while Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter can be spotted on occasion at a yellow table. The guy I hoped to see: The New Yorker's resident Godard expert Richard Brody, hired by old pal David Remnick to edit movie listings, who's now making his mark via his often arcane film blog, The Front Row. No such luck.

I always wondered why the studios didn’t want to sell their classic libraries online, in pursuit of the long tail. Well, Warner Bros., the first distrib to stick a toe in the water by offering some 150 titles starring the likes of Greta Garbo and Demi Moore, found out instantly how much demand there was. From the first day it went live last week, unexpected customers flooded Warners' new classic DVD archive, reports The New York Post's Lou Lumenick: within two hours of the site going live, "orders were placed for 140 of the initial 150 titles." Warner exec George Feltenstein, who plans to make available some 5000 titles from the WB, MGM and RKO libraries, told him: "If initial sales are any indication, we're in for a long ride."

When I interviewed Jane Fonda for More Magazine last year I was stunned that this vital, canny and beautiful actress --even after the commercial hit Monster-in-Law--was not getting movie offers. Her autobiography My Life So Far is a best-seller and the strong-minded political activist still commands massive fees to speak on the lecture circuit. Luckily, even if moviemakers are still focused on the younger demo, Broadway isn't. The theatre has always welcomed mature movie stars, from Lauren Bacall to Glenn Close. So 46 years since she last trod the boards, the 71-year-old Fonda is back on Broadway, earning raves for her role in Moises Kaufman's 33 Variations, where she projects to the balcony through eight shows a week. Take that, Jeremy Piven.

Fonda carries the Amadeus-like 33 Variations, which compares two composers, one famous and one not, and parallels two people in different time periods fighting against the dying of the light. An ailing musicologist (Fonda) feels compelled to travel to a Bonn archive to figure out why at the end of his life, Beethoven (Zach Grenier) composed 33 variations on a waltz by a minor composer. Even though she is declining fast from Lou Gehrig's disease, the obsessive researcher refuses to come home. Eventually her costume designer daughter (Samantha Mathis) and nurse boyfriend (Colin Hanks) insist on coming to Germany to attend to her.

The play shifts back and forth in time to show the ill and increasingly deaf Beethoven’s obsession with finding every possible variation on the waltz. We hear the variations, performed live on piano. The play works, thanks to the radiant Fonda, who starts out strong, confident, and insistent on solving the Beethoven mystery, even as she faces her body’s disintegration. As she gets weaker, she is forced to become more intimate with her daughter. Mathis and Hanks, making his Broadway debut, are also fine.

Susan Sarandon is currently starring on Broadway too, in Exit the King, opposite Geoffrey Rush.

Seth Rogen opens Monsters vs. Aliens this weekend, his fifth animated film; he just debuted Jody Hill's Observe and Report at SXSW, where I flip-cammed him; he's wrapped old mentor Judd Apatow's mordant comedy Funny People for release July 31; and he's delightedly working with new director Michel Gondry on his and partner Evan Goldberg's script for Green Hornet, for which he is slimming down in order to play the lead. In my Rogen profile, he reveals that he managed to use his newfound clout to get his way with Warner Bros., but lost his battles with Harvey Weinstein over Zack and Miri Make a Porno. And he never thought he'd be a movie star. As far as he's concerned, he's a writer first, actor second.

Hollywood has been abuzz for months with the possibility of a William Morris/Endeavor merger. The problem is the personalities involved. This deal is fraught with fragile and hungry egos. Kim Masters examines the merger of the old establishment talent firm (WMA) and the more aggressive agency on the rise (Endeavor). Yes, there's mutual need and greed. It's actually hard to imagine how it would ever work, given the volatile mix of power-hungry agents and their entrenched institutional cultures.

Writer-director Peter Morgan's follow-up to The Deal and The Queen, The Special Relationship, will star Dennis Quaid as Bill Clinton, Julianne Moore as Hillary (too thin!) and Michael Sheen as UK prime minister Tony Blair--for the third time. It will be an HBO movie, oddly enough, and the relationship describes the one between Clinton and Blair, although naturally the plot will delve into the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So who will play the zaftig White House intern who drove Clinton to risk his presidency? Well, most Hollywood actresses are too thin. Anne Hathaway could do it, if she gained a few pounds. So could HBO's own Gennifer Goodwin (Big Love). Who would you cast? Martine McCutcheon, who fell for her prime minister boss Hugh Grant in Love Actually, would be perfect, if she could do an American accent.

Sorry to say, missing an incredible opportunity to add some sizzle to his steak, Morgan insists he will use archive footage.

Sacha Baron Cohen knows how to work the web with Bruno.

The LAT addresses problems with the Warner Bros. studio succession.

More from Sharon Waxman on Nikki Finke.

For those of you, like me, who are fascinated by the lives and deaths of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, their son Nicholas, who slept nearby when his mother stuck her head in an oven at age 30, has also committed suicide. Blimey.

Update: The Daily Beast looks at the genetic risks of inheriting depression.

Bloggers are often successful because they know how to get attention, to market themselves. One example of a PR natural is Diablo Cody (Juno), who came to fame via her Pussy Ranch blog. These days the Oscar-winning scribe seems to be neglecting her MySpace/United States of Tara blog in favor of tweeting; she already has more than 28,000 people following her on Twitter. She also gets regular exposure via her regular column in EW, and recently landed a fashion layout with her screenwriter gal pals in the NYT.

[Photo of Diablo Cody and screenwriter chums courtesy of The New York Times]

Wired quizes readers on their knowledge of Internet Blowhards, from Wired's own Chris Anderson to Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington.

Then there's the real Blowhard, Michael of 2Blowhards.

Warner Bros. is putting the trailer for Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' adaptation of Maurice Sendak's children's classic Where the Wild Things Are in front of Monsters vs. Aliens this weekend. Here's an advance peek at the trailer for the troubled Playtone Production which has long been in post-production. Max Records stars as Max. The movie finally opens October 16.

More photos and the poster on the jump.

The LAT picks its top 25 must-follows on Twitter and runs it as a celeb photo gallery. Kids in my USC class admit they get a kick out of getting tweets from celebs. It's the most direct, uncluttered version of fan communication there is. Stars and fans 1.0: responding to fan mail. 2.0: Twitter. Safe, no intermediary. Fans follow you but you don't have to deal with them. It's a one-way street.

NYT critic A.O. Scott responds to New Yorker blogger Richard Brody’s assault on his NYT Magazine tome on Neo Neo-realism. This is what blogs are for. What better way for Scott to draw attention to his piece, and for the less known Brody (who is an editor at the NYorker) to draw readers to his new movie blog?

One of the surprises of the year so far is how well Henry Selick’s 3-D animated gothic fairy tale Coraline lasted at the b.o.; this weekend brings DreamWorks Animation's Monsters vs. Aliens and a spate of 3-D offerings are on the way. Even the venerable Cannes Film Festival, which has made an annual tradition of unveiling the latest animated fare, will for the first time open the 62nd fest on May 13 with not only an animated movie but Disney/Pixar’s 3-D balloon adventure Up, which opens May 29.

Time Magazine talks to 3-D boosters Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Spielberg is collaborating with Peter Jackson on 3-D performance capture movie Tintin. Some industry insiders wonder if Cameron will further delay Avatar's December 19 release date so that more 3-D theaters will be available. EW rounds up the 3D future. UPDATE: The LAT interviews Captain 3-D, Phil McNally.

(EW's list of upcoming 3-D pics is on the jump.)

[Photo courtesy of Time Magazine.]

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that social networking is the the next growth area for movies. Thus it's no surprise that Netflix and Facebook have joined forces.

Who's winning this online boxing match? Avner Ronen, founder of media center Boxee, cannily took advantage of an opportunity when his statements at New York's Media Summit were reported by Contentinople and then picked up by HDNet's Mark Cuban --always willing to engage in online debate. On his blog, Cuban asked, "Why do internet people think content people are stupid?" So not to miss a trick, Ronen challenged Cuban on his Boxee blog, and away they went for a few rounds on the future of cable networks vs. consumers picking and choosing what they want to watch online.

In other tech news, Pandora for BlackBerry is now available.

The Twilight DVD sold more than 3 million units when it was released March 21, which lands it in the top five best first day DVD releases over the past two years.

The full release is on the jump:

As Variety's Peter Bart and Cynthia Littleton point out, speed and snark don't necessarily bring accuracy in reporting in the blogosphere. Au contraire.

Meanwhile Variety's Michael Fleming catches tireless Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke squelching her own rumor.

The offices at Revolution Studios on L.A.'s Olympic Boulevard are humming. Television/film mogul Gail Berman (who left Paramount's presidency in 2007) is in her element, running in and out of cast auditions for TV pilots: a total of four are in the works. Her partner, Lloyd Braun, sits in his office staring into a giant flat screen monitor tracking the day's breaking stories on the team's newest venture: Wonderwall. "It's alluring," he says, "and addictive."

A year-and-a-half after launching BermanBraun, the popcorn celebrity portal is the first-born child of BermanBraun Interactive, in partnership with MSN. Having started Yahoo OMG and recognizing the success of AOL's TMZ, Braun saw that MSN wasn't aggregating celebrity content. So BermanBraun and their internet division chief Geraldine Martin-Coppola (plucked from Braun's old Yahoo team) persuaded MSN to back a slick, visual, horizontal, content-driven celebrity site designed to hold eyeballs for more than two seconds--and lure premium advertisers.

Berman/Braun launched Wonderwall on February 5, just ahead of the Oscars. "We're fixing things as we roll out content," says Braun, who enjoys using some of his hard-won knowledge from his stint at Yahoo Media Group, where he wasn't able to achieve much of what he had wanted to do.

While celeb content is king on the web, BermanBraun's main push for Wonderwall--a name Berman insisted on using because "it's the point of the whole thing," she says--was to draw people in with eye candy and attitude, and then keep them interested.

"Wonderwall is not like TV, a destination medium," Braun says. "Engagement is terrible on websites. The web portals didn't have a deep well of experience in programmed content. They're closely focused on technology or search algorithms. On the converse side, traditional media companies are only now beginning to understand digital. Now we have the rare opportunity of understanding both."

Wonderwall provides "something MSN hasn't been able to do," says Braun. "Through the technology behind the site, we're taking information and presenting it to the consumer, with a POV and spin. It's a content management system with a horizontal presentation, an experiment with engagement."

The partnership with MSN was key. "It allowed us to build this in a way that we would never have been able to on our own," says Berman. "It's important as the site grows to make its point-of-view clear for people. It's fun, not just photos, but design and voice."

Part of the fun, beyond writing clever celebrity photo captions, is to respond swiftly to the day's breaking news. Like improvisational comedy, "We're doing this in real time," says Braun.

When Mickey Rourke's dog died, for example, Wonderwall's five editors (four in L.A., one in NYC, who starts the day early) compiled Famous Celeb Pets. Traffic skyrocketed. On St. Patrick's Day they mounted Favorite Irish Celebrities. Led by managing editor Alex Blagg, the edit team boast experience at Radar, People, Us Weekly, People, Best Week Ever, The New York Post, and Alloy.

While it got the worst reviews of the trio leading the weekend boxoffice, sci-fi actioner Knowing is looking at a strong $25 million weekend--and will beat bromantic comedy I Love You, Man and romantic thriller Duplicity. UPDATE: Here's Variety's Sunday weekend b.o. report.

All three of these pics are crowd-pleasers appealing to different demos. Knowing plays to geeky males, while I Love You, Man has a younger appeal to both sexes; it makes sense that Universal would want to build an audience for Duplicity, which tilts toward smart adults.

Word-of-mouth will eventually tell the tale with these pics. Which ones will hold? With more people going to the movies, playability and b.o. legs are key.

Duplicity's Julia Roberts gets up close and personal on MTV News. Part One. Part Two.

With more pressure on newspapers to figure out how to survive the transition from print to digital, editors are starting to deal--often awkwardly--with new realities:

The Wall Street Journal alerts its writers that breaking news is good news. The WSJ wants to compete with A.P. and Reuters, which are wired for speed in a way the unwieldy newspapers, with layers of editorial bureaucracy, are not. The WSJ can get swifter, but it shouldn't lose sight of the reason everyone reads the thing--perspective, context. Everyone wants to break news because that's where traffic is. But traffic isn't everything. The big established media should not lose track of their prime asset: authority.

The venerable New York Times has issued guidelines for bloggers. And in case you missed it, the paper's own media columnist David Carr presents a modest proposal. Are his editors listening?

Facebook and Twitter are changing the rules for everyone.

My old EW colleague Chris Willman posted a long detailed account on Facebook of a night at the Aero in Santa Monica with Bound for Glory cinematographer Haskell Wexler and stars David Carradine and Ronny Cox. The Depression era movie marks one of Carradine's best performances, as Woody Guthrie; he appears to have been quite feisty at the Q & A session, to say the least.

And here's a snippet:

There’s a moment of calm. Since the presumptive moderator is just sitting there, smirking and stunned, an audience member takes it upon himself to shout out a question about the cinematography. Who knew this would be a more dangerous subject than unions? Wexler talks about color desaturation (“You’ll notice the movie gets more colorful when we get to California”) and gives some technical specs. Carradine breaks in and starts talking about crane shots and suitcase cameras. Wexler, visibly irritated, goes back to the specs. And this is the point at which Carradine really kind of goes off the rails, albeit it in a subdued, passive-aggressive kind of way. He uses the line—which he repeats at least two or three more times—about how Wexler “got an Academy Award for ruining my movie.” You can feel the audience sort of collectively holding its breath as Carradine says the film “looks like it was shot through a glass of milk.” When he explains what he wished the look of the film had been, which is grittier, again, it’s a lucid point, but the way he’s making it is either tone-deaf or just evil.

Then he tells the story of how Ashby, the director, hated the look of the film, too, and was insisting on firing Wexler during the making of the film. I’m pretty sure I hear gasps go up at this point. Carradine says he talked Ashby out of firing him, “because if you fire somebody, they just go out in the parking lot and steal your hubcaps.” I’m pretty sure that’s a metaphor, but the audience doesn’t know what to do with this image other than to nervously titter. There will be a lot more of that—oh, yes, there will.

Here are two sound files:

Trumpeter/singer Chet Baker sings the Umberto Bindi song Arrivederci in the 1960 Italian movie Urlatori alla sbarra. I first discovered Baker via Bruce Weber's superb 1988 Oscar-nominated documentary Let's Get Lost, which showcased his looks and talent as well as his decline due to heroin addiction. In 1988, at age 58, he fell out of an Amsterdam hotel window to his death.

[Hat Tip: Amos Poe]

There's been a good deal of speculation and spin surrounding why Catherine Hardwicke--who by any measure delivered the goods on Twilight, the first installment of Stephenie Meyer's bestselling vampire series--did not return for the sequel, New Moon. Summit hired Chris Weitz (Golden Compass) instead. The truth is, Hardwicke's reps were negotiating a deal with Summit. The deal fell apart over the return of Hardwicke's first assistant director boyfriend to the picture. Summit wasn't willing to commit to him. That, coupled with other issues having to do with time and money--Hardwicke was burned out and wanted more time to prep the script and the movie--dive-bombed her shot at directing the sequel. (Hardwicke was not available to comment on this.) Nonetheless, Summit is making nice with Hardwicke, confirming that she's directing another young femme-targeted book adaptation, Gayle Forman's If I Stay, set to be published this spring.

In this UCLA podcast with the Twilight cinematographer and editor, I am reminded how much Hardwicke brought to Twilight--insisting on a page-one rewrite of the script that had been developed at Paramount that hewed closer to Meyer's book. She complains about a lack of consistency in the producing of Twilight--she'd rather praise the producers of 13. One producer went off to make Marley and Me, she said. (That would be Karen Rosenfelt.) "Once the film was successful they thought, 'we need to hit the November 21 date next year, too.' Vampires are not supposed to age, a lot reasons. For me, I didn't have a script ready to go. Summit offered me another book, I think I'm going to do that," she told the crowd.

SXSW fest producer Janet Pierson delivered a smooth festival, with just one glitch when one filmmaker didn't show up for a Q & A. Not bad. At the awards ceremony where Made in China (pictured) won the narrative jury prize, Pierson thanked the people she leaned on. But she led those troops. Here's Kim Voynar's profile of a woman coming into her own.

Alexander the Last was one of the SXSW indie standouts: co-star Amy Seimetz stands in line for St. Nick at the Alamo Drafthouse with Australian actor-director Matthew Newton of Three Blind Mice, which along with Alexander the Last was one of four IFC Films premiering on VOD concurrent with their March 14 showings at SXSW. IFC is now going to give Alexander the Last a run at the IFC Center to boost its post-fest profile. The NYT's David Carr uses Alexander the Last to lay out the digital distribution scene. The NYT review of that movie sets a precedent for covering movies not tied to a theatrical opening. Most major newspaper critics can't deal with the volume of direct-to-dvd or VOD releases.

I stayed at the moderne Omni Hotel, where I posted into the wee hours after screenings and panels and very few parties--they tended to be crowded, with flowing margaritas and no food. Austin's famed 6th Street came to hideous life late at night--I wish I could have stayed for the intoxicating music scene.

Adam Yauch (pictured with 42West's Cynthia Swartz) came to SXSW not so much for music as for Oscilloscope Laboratories (o-scope), his indie distribution label. Here's my Flip Cam interview. And he announced the acquisition of two new films: Nati Baratz's Tibet-set mystery doc Unmistaken Child and Gabriel Medina's Argentine debut The Paranoids.

It was great fun listening to all the interactive people talk. They showed off their gadgets and gizmos and ultra-thin red Dells with all the latest bells and whistles. They talked about Boxee and Foursquare; fliers for Mint.com were everywhere. Twittering away, interactive and movie peer groups walked and talked alike, keeping each other apprised of every panel, party, must-to-avoid and hot ticket (Todd Haynes' unreleased Barbie doll movie Superstar!). They tended to get impatient when journalists complained about their dying industry, because the solution was so obvious: "All the news that fit to link." Next time, I'd like to spend more time on that side. I learned a lot.

Back from SXSW, I've been playing catch-up. For much of the news media, Natasha Richardson was the sad, sad story of the week.

Dade Hayes details some of the comings, goings and speculation behind the scenes in the turbulent New York film fest scene, from Tribeca under ex-Sundance chief Geoff Gilmore to Film Society of Lincoln Center honcho Mara Manus, who is giving the musty old place a thorough overhaul.

Kim Masters unveils DreamWorks’ Animation czar Jeffrey Katzenberg’s bad dream.

Business Insider reports Cisco’s acquisition of Flip Cam maker Pure Digital for $590 million. That’s my flip cam! And Business Insider also uses the flip cam in its reporting, grabbing Time EVP John Squires to talk about experimenting with mixing paid and free content. Meanwhile outgoing Time editor Jim Kelly has another POV.

Movie lovers unite! Not only is David Chase bringing a new mini-series to HBO about the early days of Hollywood, A Ribbon of Dreams, but TCM documentaries has greenlit an exhaustive history of Hollywood from the point of the view of the big personalities who built it: Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood, produced by John Wilkman with backing from CAA agent-turned-Broadway-impresario Bill Haber.

Knowing is an intense, smart sci-fi thriller that stops just short of being great. Australian director Alex Proyas, the mind behind The Crow, Dark City and I, Robot , makes several questionable choices--among them ominous Jim Jarmusch lookalike lurkers and and a derivative ending-- but they don't derail the movie. If anything they might enhance its mainstream playability.

Producer Jason Blumenthal developed the project for ten years, and Proyas was on board for six; distrib Summit should make a mint on this smart sci-fi doomsday thriller with elements of Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow, Steven Spielberg's The War of the Worlds and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Danny Boyle's Sunshine. Shot with the new Red digital camera, the movie looks swell, changing its pallette as it moves from the saturated 1959 Boston-area prologue, when a Boston-area school places pictures and one little girl's series of numbers in a time capsule to be opened 50 years later, through the aftermath of what happens when the son of an MIT professor (Nic Cage) brings the same piece of paper home in 2009. The astrophysicist discerns an alarming pattern in the numbers sequences.

The numbers predict disasters that occurred over the 50 years and two more that Cage witnesses with horror, as a jet crashes right next to a local freeway, killing 81--as predicted-- and in New York, a subway derails with horrific consequences. Both sequences are masterfully executed (VFX were mainly handled by Weta Digital and Animal Logic). Cage wanders through the wreckage of the plane in a single take--there wasn't time to do another.

At Wednesday night's Australians in Film screening, Rose Byrne confessed that it was a challenge to return home to Melbourne, where much of the film was shot, and still have to muster an American accent. "I was surrounded by Aussies," said the actress, who during her Damages hiatus squeezed in the role of a woman whose mother and daughter hear whispers telling them what to do. Cage was also happy to be back in Australia, where Ghost Rider was filmed, Byrne said. Proyas and his d.p. Simon Duggan took a trip to Wellywood to get advice from Peter Jackson on how to get the most out of the digital cameras. The results should encourage other filmmakers to follow Jackson, Proyas and Steven Soderbergh's lead.

Here's my interview with Proyas at Comic-Con, Todd McCarthy's review, and the trailer:

From the LAT:

Actress Natasha Richardson is dead

A spokesman for the family of Natasha Richardson says she has died. Richardson, 45, part of the Redgrave dynasty of British actors and the wife of Liam Neeson, was flown from Montreal to New York on Tuesday after a skiing accident.

Here's A.P.

A.P. knows how to handle stories like this. So does Variety, which posted at 5:06 PM PT. After the LAT sent me a news alert, I followed the link which led me to the front page of latimes.com and a breaking news banner: "A spokesman for Natasha Richardson's family says she has died," with no live links to any story, old or new. I did a search on the site for "Natasha Richardson" and got nothing at all on her accident. That is inexcusable. Their job is to service their readers with online breaking news.

Frustrated, I Googled "Natasha Richardson" and clicked on what looked at first like A.P.'s old story, but was an updated one. They were ready to go with the new news as soon as it arrived. The LAT.com story was posted on their front page at 5:28 PM PT. It's not a question of how quickly they filed the story (the writer, John Horn, used to write for A.P.); they should have had links in place.

On Tuesday, the changing of the guard began, as SXSW film people ramped up for awards night, interactive people started to leave town and music people trickled in. Screenings will continue through the weekend. But the film fest proper culminates tonight.

I had a schizophrenic festival, catching Alexander the Last before I left LA, and watching a combo of competition documentaries and solid studio entries such as opener I Love You, Man, Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell and Observe and Report, starring Seth Rogen. I caught a few panels, several of them well-attended by the interactive side. The digital future is front and center now: all of our futures depend on it. And I saw one SXSW micro-indie narrative feature, David Lowery's deliberately mysterious St. Nick. "It's an art film," somebody warned me ahead of time. That it is. At the Q & A, the filmmaker basically said: I did it my way. Explaining it all to you is not the point.

Festivals like this exist for filmmakers to connect with their audience directly, without intermediaries. I will be interested to see how IFC's Alexander the Last day-and-date VOD experiment turns out. Were they able to drum up much interest outside the fest environment? UPDATE: At the awards ceremony, Joe Swanberg admitted that he was on tenterhooks waiting to hear the opening week results. So far I have not been able to extricate any numbers.

The high point of the fest was watching the midnight show of Drag Me to Hell at the Paramount Theatre as everyone yelped and gulped and laughed and had a raucous good time. I couldn't have seen it with a better crowd. We got it, enjoyed it, participated gleefully. I'll be back.

This years SXSW award winners are listed on the jump:

Monday morning I interviewed Observe and Report writer-director Jody Hill (The Foot Fist Way) and star Seth Rogen. The movie played well on Monday night at the Paramount. It's a very dark reality-based comedy about fantasy and self-delusion, basically. The flipcam interview is broken into two parts:

Part One:

Part Two:

New Weinstein Co. honcho Tom Ortenberg has scored his first big buy, Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy, a UK feature about the early days of Beatle John Lennon. The picture has been filming for about two weeks; Ortenberg and Harvey Weinstein targeted the pic for a pre-buy in Berlin. They see the film as a possible year-end awards contender. Kristin Scott Thomas plays Lennon's Aunt Mimi, who helped raise him along with his mother Julia. The movie also details young Lennon's close relationship with Quarrymen bandmate Paul McCartney and ends when the early Beatles leave Liverpool for Hamburg, Germany to conquer the world. (I love Malcolm Gladwell's story in The Outliers about how the Beatles put in their 10,000 hours playing long sets in Hamburg.)

"It starts with the script," says Ortenberg, who describes the pic as a "relatable Beatles coming-of-age story about a young boy finding his place in the world, finding his passion, as his mother Julia introduces him to music and guitar when he's 15. There's something in it for everyone."

TWC acquired all rights, U.S., Germany, Latin America. They are planning a year end awards season release with an expansion January. Maple Pictures will release in Canada.

Press release on the jump:

Two or three things you should know about Tony Gilroy's new film Duplicity, which opens March 20:

While this film isn't as good as Michael Clayton, you can tell that it comes from the mind of Tony Gilroy, who is profiled by The New Yorker as a man who likes to surprise. Gilroy reminds me of Steven Soderbergh: he's trying to outsmart audience expectations so much that he sometimes outsmarts himself. (It makes sense that he wrote the Bourne series.) Clayton was warmed up by the charisma of George Clooney, as well as the whip-cracking brilliance of British actor Tom Wilkinson, who goes up against the great Paul Giamatti in Duplicity. The plot of this gorgeous and sexy character-based heist thriller twists and turns--revealing new information via two time-frames-- at a globe-trotting clip. This film is colder, brainier, and more schematic than Clayton, and less than romantic, which may disappoint women starved for mature relationship movies. Here's Variety's review.

Clive Owen is at the top of his game: virile, vulnerable, sexy, yearning, distrustful, clearly in love with fellow spy Julia Roberts. But like Trouble in Paradise or Prizzi's Honor, there is no honor among thieves.

Roberts is at an interesting career juncture. She's aging. At 41 she's gorgeous, skinny, with a full head of long red hair, still a magnetic movie star. But her cheeks are hollower. She's morphing into a mature woman who is more than a sex object: she holds her own with Owen, even dominates him, in a way that we are not used to seeing in movies (strong women are a staple on television). Her mature authority is slightly strident. Having taken five years off to raise her three kids, people are asking, is Roberts still a movie star? I object to Newsweek's suggestion that Roberts should be out playing the celebrity game.

I'd love to see Duplicity open huge just to prove that maintaining some distance, that elusive star mystery--which has worked for another 40ish mom, Jodie Foster, barring her misstep as a gun-toting vigilante in The Brave One-- is an effective strategy. Simply put, audiences will welcome Roberts in a role that they want to see her play. Whether this movie delivers that is another question.

It's tricky. A patently fake studio concoction which makes no pretense at portraying the real world, Duplicity probes not only ruthless business competition at any price (part of what got us into our current mess) but male/female power dynamics. It's a smart, entertaining movie that doesn't entirely satisfy.

[Tony Gilroy photo courtesy The New Yorker]

Paramount has acquired this Wired diamond heist story which is online, still not on stands. Variety comfirms that J.J. Abrams will produce.

Bob Berney is chasing financing for a planned new distrib outfit--still unnamed. He did try to retrieve his Picturehouse name, but it was impossible. Here at SXSW, he's tracking possible later acquisitions. Here's what Berney told John Pierson at the SXSW Q & A, reports Indiewire in its report on indie distribution:

“I definitely feel like my heart is in independent distribution,” Berney said, when asked to talk a bit about his intentions. In other conversations he’s said his new company would distribute on multiple platforms and on Saturday he only added that the company will be “very different than Picturehouse.” And concluding the thought, Berney said, “Hopefully in a few months we will be back.”

The Wrap profiles SnagFilm CEO Rick Allen, who threw out some provocative stuff on Monday's digital distribution panel (well-moderated by Scott Kirsner); the room was packed. Note to fest organizers: always ask Morgan Spurlock to be on your panel; he's money. The reason that folks like Cinetic Media's Matt Dentler can't reveal numbers on streaming revenue during this transitional period is that "the numbers are pathetic," Spurlock told the room. "When they're ready to crow about their numbers, they will. If you're looking to pay rent, not so much. Phone bill? You got a good chance."

The panel agreed that the split between DVD sales and digital downloads and streaming was 90 to 10%. But digital is growing and will get bigger, even as it steers more customers to buy DVDS online. "It's at an infantile stage," said Snagfilm CEO Rick Allen, who stunned the room with his reveal that Snagfilm's widget/players are embedded on 20,000 sites and are on 300 million web pages. "It's the way things go. The traditional business model is by definition broken."

At Monday's Q & A by IndieWire's Eugene Hernandez, UK-based IMDb founder Col Needham said that a "play button on every page" was his long-term goal. Click and ye shall stream, for free, the movie of your choice. That movie data site, owned by Amazon, is huge and growing by leaps and bounds, mostly into foreign countries, like Germany.

Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys fits right in at SXSW. He's performed here countless times, but this year he's taking a break from the recording studio to hunt for new acquisitions for his indie label Oscilloscope, which released Wendy and Lucy the old-fashioned way: slow. The pic might actually make it to $1 million, says his partner David Fenkel, who brings his marketing experience from ThinkFilm to the ever-evolving universe of indie film.

Oscilloscope released about seven features in the last year, not bad for a start-up, and has about five more lined up for take-off. Last year the distrib acquired two films at SXSW, docs Frontrunners and Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie. They picked up Dear Zachary from Slamdance and played it at SXSW last year. Recent pick-ups include the well-received Sundance doc Burma VJ and doc Unmistaken Child, a Tibetan reincarnation mystery. Yauch feels strongly about keeping things small --in fact, he agrees with Magnolia's Eamonn Bowles, who spoke on a Saturday distribution panel, that many indie distribs got into trouble with too much overhead and too-pricey movies. Yauch saw his own record label, Grand Royal, get too top-heavy and go down, he said.

Yauch got tired of going to film fests and seeing how well people responded to movies, only to have distribs say they were unmarketable. The indie companies had become "more stiff and businesslike," he says. "I wanted to take some of what many indie labels do and apply that to making a little indie film distributor." He started out taking a shot with a movie of his own, the basketball documentary Gunnin' for That #1 Spot, so that he wouldn't mess up somebody else's film. "One of my big objectives," he said, "is to keep it pretty streamlined."

In a way, the recession is helping--not only is theatrical business booming, but with some of the bigger companies out of the fray, it leaves more low-hanging fruit for Oscilloscope, which is also taking a new approach to DVD packaging, using eight-panel gatefolds and 80% consumer-recycled paper, "more like LPs," Yauch says. "It's easy to go for movies that are marketable but not very good. Others are good but not very marketable. We ended up going that route."

Universal staged a double-header Sunday night, first screening 22 minutes of Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno to two raucous SXSW/Fantastic Fest screenings at the Alamo Drafthouse on Lamar in Austin. Then the studio debuted Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell at the Paramount. They scored a promo bullseye on both. UPDATE: The buzz spread instantly via twitter. Here's Indiewire's wrap.

Cohen introduced the Bruno footage via video, sitting at his editing bay, pumping up his British accent. Bruno is an Austrian fashion reporter who leaves Milan fashion week to move to America to become "the biggest Austrian celebrity since Hitler." To generate publicity, Bruno tries to bring peace to the Middle East. He adopts a black baby, Madonna-style. In the footage, the fey Austrian-accented Bruno auditions a series of (real) parents. One after another agrees without flinching to let him do terrible, dangerous things to their children--from extreme dieting and liposuction to letting them pose as Jesus on the cross--just to land the acting gig. Bruno takes his baby on a talk show with a majority of African Americans in the audience. It doesn't take much to outrage them. It's hilarious.

Bruno takes a turn playing a raging heterosexual who stages a wrestling contest: this time a redneck audience is gob-smacked when a gay man climbs into the pen with "Straight Dave." The crowd at the Alamo roared. Cohen plays with real people, testing to see how they will respond to his triggers. He is "pushing the limits," as Bruno puts it. "If you want to see any more of my film," Cohen says at the end of the video,"you can buy a fucking ticket."

Universal opens Bruno July 10.

Universal debuted Sam Raimi's fantastic horror-fest Drag Me to Hell on Sunday night at a packed midnight show at the Paramount Theatre; I caught up with the director earlier in the day. "I feel the need to deliver no matter what the budget," confessed Raimi, who showed up in scruffy Austin wearing a suit and tie. "The audience has to laugh or it's a failure, jump or it's a failure, cheer or it's a failure. It's like a circus act, as opposed to showing fine art. It's the high art of entertaining an audience."

The director, who wrote Drag Me to Hell with his brother Ivan, has nothing to worry about. The audience was roaring with pleasurable disgust as various incarnations of a wicked-witch gyspy crone with evil eyes disgorged all sorts of mean nasty ugly things all over sweet ambitious loan agent Alison Lohman. While the movie is silly and over the top, the audience is in on the joke. (An invitation to a cabin the in the woods yields knowing groans.) It's great fun. It will make a mint.

A student of classic horror, Raimi pays homage to Robert Wise's The Haunting, not to mention Roman Polanski's Repulsion, as houses bulge and rumble, wind ominously ruffles leaves, and freaked out young Lohman (constantly left alone when she is in dire need of psychiatric care) whips out a butcher knife to sacrifice her "little kitty" in order to stave off a nasty bitch of a curse. I was slightly puzzled as to why Justin Long wasted his time playing Lohman's remarkably dull boyfriend; the answer eventually became clear.

What Raimi did, while he fussed over this movie in the editing room, was play with the sound. The music and sound effects manipulate us expertly; time and again the audience screeched with delight as bodies rose up from the road--accompanied by swells of wrenching violins--or popped up in the back seat.

"Sound is 50% of a movie," Raimi says. "The audience is not aware of how much they're affected by sound. A rough cut is so much worse than a finished film, after fine-tuning the editing and sound effects: dimensionality, continuation of characters, how dialogue is communicated through space. You step into a big close-up, start in the center speaker quietly with some echo in it, move left and right with a little sound, you're then filling the theater with a statement as the music swells. You have a moment!"

Raimi isn't done tinkering; he was mixing until late Saturday night and he's back on a plane at 7 AM Monday morning to return to the editing room, he says: "I'm hoping I'm in good shape for that mix."

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I am fascinated by Jon Favreau's energy, stamina and instinct for self-promotion: he posted this shot from his lunch break at the I Love You, Man L.A. international junket. Some actors have an instinct for pleasing their fans. And some are happy to grow their fanbase and grab attention. There's even a competitive aspect to Facebook and Twitter in terms of how many friends and followers you have.

But Favreau strikes me as one of those actor-directors, like Clint Eastwood, George Clooney or Mel Gibson, who seem to want to get as much accomplished as possible while they have the chance. So Favreau is always writing, acting, directing or promoting. Hey, nothing wrong with workaholism. Go for it.

Twitter is partly about self-promotion, obviously. At SXSW, though, I am enjoying the twitter community here. I see who's at what party, screening, or panel, who skipped late night ramblings to see something instead. What club am I a member of? Mostly the doc jury member who must blog.

Many of us discovered Jess Weixler in the Sundance horror comedy Teeth. Now the Juilliard-trained actress shows more of what she can do in Joe Swanberg's latest SXSW offering, the up-close-and-personal relationship flick Alexander the Last. Like other actresses at her level, Weixler is being championed by casting directors who recognize how good she is and directors like Swanberg who don't pay much for micro-budget movies. Financeers of indie movies don't consider her bankable. Yet. (She lost momentum after Teeth by doing a play.) But Alexander the Last may bring her more attention.

Here's my flipcam interview Saturday with Weixler and Swanberg, the morning before their world premiere. It's in three parts: in parts one and two they talk about how they made the movie in an unusually collaborative improvisational way, with Swanberg operating one light digital camera, shooting what Mike Leigh would call rehearsal workshops. In part three, they address VOD (the movie is now available on IFC On Demand) and the mumblecore movement Swanberg helped to spawn out of SXSW. The filmmakers themselves seem to prefer old stand-by DIY.

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

At the Q & A afterward, the questioners seemed most interested in the mechanics of Paul Rudd's projectile vomiting (gallons of Italian wedding soup shot from a cannon) and Jason Segel's Muppet future. Segel (who staged a muppet vampire opera in Forgetting Sarah Marshall) plans to cast his already scripted "early 80s, late 70s"-style Muppet sequel with many of his co-stars, he said. (Nick Stoller directs.) It wasn't hard for Jon Favreau (he's twittering) to play a crank in I Love You, Man; during filming he was writing the Peter Billingsley comedy Couples Retreat, starring himself, Vince Vaughn and Jason Bateman, as well as promoting the launch of Iron Man.

While I Love You, Man is a reasonably slick 35 mm studio-scale comedy, it's dealing in a more accessibly commercial way with some of the same concerns as such intimate relationship movies as Lynn Shelton's Humpday and Joe Swanberg's latest SXSW entry Alexander the Last: marriage, commitment, friendship, loyalty, sexual anxiety, fidelity.

Earlier in the day at noon, SXSW hosted its first ever Filmmaker Retreat at Robert Rodriguez and Elizabeth Avellan's Troublemaker Studos. Some 160 short and long-form filmmakers attended the event--no press--including Avellan, Rodriguez, Richard Linklater, Catherine Hardwicke, Tim McCanlies, Sarah Green, Jackie Malick, Morgan Spurlock and Mike Judge. "The idea was to give the filmmakers a moment to meet each other," said Pierson.

At the jammed opening party at Buffalo Billiards, Pierson, Spurlock, Jeff Dowd, IMDb's Col Needham, indie distributor Bob Berney, Gerald Peary and fellow critics Aaron Hillis, Alison Wilmore, Karina Longworth, Kim Voynar and James Rocchi compared notes. Word is, St. Nick is one to see.

Here are SXSW reports from Cinematical and Indiewire.

Former SXSW producer Matt Dentler made the announcement today (via Facebook), that mega video site Hulu would be streaming a trio of last year's SXSW competitors. Mary Bronstein's quirky drama, Yeast, Josh Koury's doc about Harry Potter fans, We Are Wizards, and Gabriel Fleming's drama, The Lost Coast.

Here's We Are Wizards. Enjoy!

Roger Ebert takes a tour through erotica.