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The ex-wife of Avatar director James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow, won last night’s big Directors Guild award for The Hurt Locker. As such, the Explosive Exes Oscar Deathmatch is basically on. Who “should” win? Who will win? And what’re bookies saying?

Story

Hurt Locker: Guys from the military who defuse bombs planted by insurgencies they set out to bring “peace” to.
Avatar: Guy who takes on alien life form via computer to betray and then fight privatized-military presence with terrorist tactics while becoming one of the tribe he’d originally set out to destroy.

Advantage: Hurt Locker, by an inch. We don’t really give a shit about Cameron’s alien tribe because they’re blue.

Performances

Hurt Locker: Actors most people maybe knew but weren’t really familiar with did a great job making us believe they were defusing big, scary fucking bombs.
Avatar: Actors most people maybe knew but forgot about (because Sam Worthington’s never been memorable in anything) did a great job making us believe they were blue people.

Advantage: Hurt Locker, because there’s not one remarkable performance by a human while they’re human, and if you want to know what an emotionally compelling performance using an image that isn’t flesh and blood is, all you had to do was watch the first ten minutes of Up.

Technical Achievements

Hurt Locker: Made the most hair-raising, suspenseful movie of the year, about bombs, for $11M. Resourceful!
Avatar: Took $237M and reinvented visual effects. For $14 you could get a 3D alien dicktail in your face, and for $20, you could see said alien dicktail on an IMAX.

Advantage: Avatar, because even if you thought it sucked, you still felt like you were 12 again at one point.

Financial Achievements

Hurt Locker: Again: Made the most hair-raising, suspenseful movie of the year, about bombs, for $11M. Resourceful! But so far, has only taken in $16M. An Oscar win could easily boost its box office revenue, especially considering it was a film given a limited release, about Iraq, that’s not a melodrama with too many existential questions about war.
Avatar: Took those 3D alien dicktails and pounded box office records previously set by James Cameron’s last movie, Titanic, until they drowned in Avatar’s blue 3D glory.

Advantage: Avatar, because even though Hollywood likes the prospect of money, they like the idea of patting themselves on the back for making a shitton of it even more.

Message:

Hurt Locker: War sucks, and especially waging wars against terrorist tactics, but for some people, this is their life.
Avatar: War sucks, and especially waging wars using terrorist tactics, but some wars are worth fighting, like the war defending your home, and nature..

Advantage: Avatar, because Hollywood’s rife with treehuggers and liberals and people who want to empathize with Iraq. Not that Avatar has anything to do with Iraq!…

Actual Message:

Hurt Locker: All wars are pointless, and they all result in death, and a compulsion/trauma tied to it that some people can never escape, no matter how far from it they may or may not try to get. Also, men are selfish, irresponsible assholes who can’t control their most base impulses for the sake of their families.
Avatar: If an imperialist regime shows up at your door to make a mess of your native culture, you should kill them before they kill you. Also, no matter how awesome your native culture is, there will always be an Awesome White Man around to join it, infiltrate it, become part of it, and become superior to everyone in its native, non-adopted citizenry.

Advantage: Hurt Locker, because (A) the last thing Hollywood has ever done is take a risk with a message they believe might go against the grain of Real America (see: Brokeback Mountain), and (B) because anybody intelligent enough to see the not-at-all-subtle Awesome White Man angle of Avatar is reasonably both disgusted and tired of it.

The Directors

Hurt Locker: Not just a woman, but an ex-wife, and James Cameron’s ex-wife, doing something women in Hollywood don’t do: direct movies. Also, two kinds of people mostly shafted by Hollywood’s ever-stagnant dominant male paradigm, unless they’re being patronized by other women (The Starter Wife, The First Wives Club, etc, etc. Just read the now-famous Manohla Dargis NYT interview if you want to know exactly how bad women in Hollywood have it).
Avatar: James Cameron, The Ex-Husband, a rich white guy with big dick money, big dick explosions, and a bunch of Oscar awards and box office records. Also, terribly memorable acceptance speech to back him. Which goes without mentioning his patronizing Golden Globes acceptance speech of recent:

Advantage: Push. Hollywood also enjoys bucking trends, and the aforementioned Dargis interview was, while nothing shocking, definitely a bucket of very public cold water to their faces. On the other hand, Cameron made them all a bunch of money, and it’s called and kept a “dominant paradigm” for a reason: the men of Hollywood could want to assert their power in a caveman-esque show of solidarity against the ladies. Wouldn’t be shocking.

Precedent

Guess how many women have won the Best Director honor? Yeah, none, exactly. Then again, a woman’s never won the DGA honor before last night, and only six DGA winners haven’t taken home Best Director at the Oscars. They aren’t exactly small names: Anthony Harvey, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, Ang Lee, and Roman Polanski. Besides being all men, they all have way more to do with Cameron than they do with Bigelow. Also, the only movie in the last five years to win a Golden Globe and a Best Picture? Slumdog Millionaire. Stupid Hollywood Foreign Press. You guys are stupid.

Advantage: Hurt Locker/Bigelow. Time for a gamechanger, Hollywood.

Bookies: Online betting site Bodog, before the DGAs:

Avatar: 31/4
The Hurt Locker: 7/2

But Bodog Bookies know Hollywood precedent, and betting lines rely heavily on this kind of thing especially for bets that aren’t on sports. New lines haven’t been released yet, but at this point, it’s safe to assume this line’s going to change to favor Bigelow, which means Cameron would get the profit bet, while Bigelow would be the “safe” bet. As it is, those are pretty decent odds in Bigelow’s favor, anyway.

Advantage: Hurt Locker/Bigelow. The money people don’t fuck around, but I might put a $150 on Cameron if I were a betting man looking to score some dinner money.

Calling It

The split. What’s more American? A movie about the soldiers in Iraq, or a movie that made an inconceivable amount of money?Best Director’s gonna go to Kathryn Bigelow, and Best Picture’s gonna go to Cameron and Avatar. Best Picture typically represents the achievement Hollywood wants to tout as the one they’re most “proud” of, rather than the one that’s actually the best thing out there, which they’ll give out for Best Director. 59 out of the 80 films to win Best Director won Best Picture, while 21 went home sans Big Prize. Everyone supposedly wins in this situation, even though it’s just more of the same bullshit, and in twenty years, Avatar’s gonna look like fucking Pong. The end.

Also, here’s the beginning of The Hurt Locker. It’s better than Avatar.

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Don’t fight commitment. Don’t fight biological clocks, and don’t fight the NYT’s Weddings & Celebrations, who always win the battle over your inferiority complex. Don’t fight Gawker Weddings Expert Phyllis Nefler, either. But what happens when Vows fights The Law?

According to Slate’s Mickey Kaus, one “iron law” of journalism is that “anytime a reporter says a person is funny and gives an example, the example won’t be funny.” He calls this the “Law of Curated Humor.” And I got to thinking about it because: today? Vows fought the law and the law won.

Witness this happy tale of the inception of a marriage:

Ms. Weinstein and Mr. Goldich met in June 2006 at a Manhattan bar in which he was performing [stand up comedy]. That night, he tossed out a rhetorical question to the women in the audience.

“It was something like, ‘You girls know what it’s like when you go out with a guy and he doesn’t call you afterward,’ ” Mr. Goldich recalled. Rather than nod her head, as other women in the audience had, Ms. Weinstein, a comedy club newbie who was sitting in the second row, blurted out: “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Ms. Weinstein explained, “I meant it to mean that what he was talking about had never happened to me.”

Mr. Goldich was a bit rattled by her outburst, but also admitted to being impressed. “Generally, when you’re on stage, you don’t want people interjecting and ruining the moment,” he said. “But I thought that Robyn’s response was a funny and astute comment.”

Jesus, what!? It will not shock you to know that the announcement’s kicker is “…and he has been making me laugh ever since.” No. I’ll cut Matt Goldich a lil slack cause he’s a staff writer for Letterman and I love me some Letterman, but anyway, the point is that now that you know about the Law of Curated Humor you will never be able to un-know it.

Goldich went to Brown, as did fellow groom David Stern, who met Sondra Goldschein through some wedding planning emails in advance of the nuptials of her cousin to his buddy. The emails grew increasingly saucy until finally Stern asked her out on Valentine’s Day, obis.

The article then goes on about how they kept the relationship a deep dark secret, yada yada, and how finally they had to “lift the veil” (groan) because she was the Maid of Honor and he was a groomsman in the wedding and “questions mounted about whether they would bring a date to the event.” And I could not for the life of me figure out why so secretive and then finally it hit me when I noticed two sentences:

“Ms. Goldschein, 36, is keeping her name.”
“Mr. Stern, 28, is in his fourth year of medical school.”

Ah. Whatever, mazel!

These little girls (the middle one is clearly writing out “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” in Crayon on her placemat) are at the basement potluck wedding reception of Ming-Yi Chuang and Alan McIntyre, who met through an oddly compelling-sounding performance movie thing in which audience members get to shout out strings of words that become movie titles and then one of them is randomly drawn out of a hat to star in said film.

And so it came to be: Alan McIntyre directed Ming-Yi Chuang in a movie in which she breaks up with a kumquat.

I don’t know either.

Chuang’s parents initially disapproved of McIntyre and his freelance income (smart) but the couple managed to win them over with their love; early last year “he proposed on Victoria Peak in Hong Kong.”

Oh, and the couple made a sequel, and I am officially deeming “Kumquat II: Avocado” to be a top-3 movie sequel title right up there with “The Squeakquel” and “Electric Boogaloo.” And OH MY GOD IT’S ON YOUTUBE.

All kidding aside, these people are weird and wonderful and their video on the Times website is, as they always are, adorbs.

Elsewhere, this bride works at “Home Box Office in New York.” I mean, that’s … HBO, right? Who even calls it “Home Box Office” anymore? Weird. Amusingly, she is a “director of media relations” there. Moving on, I feel like if I were a spinal neurosurgeon it would be hard for me to marry a plastic surgeon because I would constantly be making condescending jokes about it. “Oh, you have an eye lift today? Yeah, I am performing an anterior cervical fusion the side effects of which could lead to paralysis. What time’s dinner?”

Anyway, while a number of grooms today went to Brown, Mark Bartkiewicz raised the alternative stakes “and received a master’s degree in sociology with a concentration in gender and sexuality studies from the University of Amsterdam. And finally, I’m sorry to all you Southern ladies, because I know you love your bride-only photos, but they kind of make me feel uneasy particularly when “the bride’s previous marriage ended in divorce, as did the bridegroom’s.”

Emily Scharfman, David Menchel

• The bride graduated cum laude from Yale and the groom magna cum laude from Penn: +11
• The couple met at law firm Latham & Watkins after having both received their law degrees from NYU: +3
• “The bridegroom’s mother teaches Judaic studies at the Stella K. Abraham High School for Girls … a part of the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach. His father is the principal of Yeshiva Har Torah, a private elementary school.”: +3
• The bride’s mother is an endocrinologist and her late father was a psychiatrist: +2
• The groom appears to be unemployed: -2

TOTAL: 17

Michelle Ko and Tony Wong

• The bride is a lawyer and the groom works in leveraged finance: +2
• The bride graduated magna cum laude from Brown: +6
• The groom received a law degree and an MBA from Columbia; the bride merely studied law there: +10
• The brides parents are a research scientist and a lab assistant for the Mayo Clinic: +2
• The groom is from Australia, so I am imagining a hot Asian dude in a suit yelling into a phone about DEBT RATIOS with a sexy accent: +3

TOTAL: 23

Just goes to show: the law—be it of Mickey Kaus’ Curated Humor or Hot Ivy League Lawyer couples—always wins. Always.

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Winner of the Massachusetts’ Senate Deathrace™ Scott Brown pimped out his daughters on election night after he won. Now, he’s using the press from his political win to try to get his daughter Ayla Brown back on American Idol.

It’s now well-documented that Scott Brown’s daughter Ayla was an eliminated contestant on American Idol, as she tried to use the show, like many aspiring singers, as a launching pad to the stahs. Ayla Brown’s singing looks something like this:

Not bad! But, you know? “Aspiring.” Simon Cowell apparently called her “robotic and empty.” I mean, I didn’t see the performance, but this isn’t “robotic and empty,” just kind of not great. Anyway, she got to Hollywood and received the Simon Cowell deathaxe. So, in an interview with Barbara Walters, given the opportunity, Brown seized the moment and made an appeal to Cowell to let her back on the show. Also, kissed his mean, assy, freak-show exploiting British anus.

Observations:

1. If you were a Dad, you would do this too! And he was totally fed the question so people like me would pick up this clip.

2. Could he have laughed off the question and told Barbara Walters to spend time talking about more important issues? Sure.

3. Maybe we have to accept that some people do take wonderful experiences from American Idol, despite the numerous tragedies of the criminal stripe and otherwise that befall former American Idol contestants.

4. Between his daughter on American Idol and his wife appearing in music videos advocating eigtch-jays, he sure does have a talented family.

4. I don’t really think he’s using their young WASP-y beauty for political, populist gain intentionally, though that perception occurring to one wouldn’t necessarily put one in the wrong.

Honestly, Scott Brown’s political views don’t exactly align with mine, he’s probably a Red Sox fan, and he’s a pretty “wacky” dad (when he’s not being totally normal), but whose Dad isn’t wacky? And he obviously loves his daughters very much, which is better than abusing them or exploiting their talent for political gain intentionally. You know? I guess, if anything, I’d put this in column of things that are kind of gross in general in the Joe Jackson School of Parenting, but for Scott Brown, he could do way worse. At the very least, he’s no Joe Simpson, at least until the Arcade Fire write a song about him.

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I mean, at what point does anybody think getting drunk and then breaking into banks is a good idea? Once Rip Torn sobers up, he might be able to tell us. Because he got arrested after doing so last night.

State police responded to an alarm at the Litchfield Bancorp building in Salisbury, CT at 9:40 PM last night. Police say they found Torn “with a loaded revolver” and he was “highly intoxicated.” Law enforcement sources tell us Torn gained access through a broken window, which they believe Torn broke himself. Torn was taken to the Troop B barracks in North Canaan and is being held on $100,000 bond. Cops say Torn was charged with carrying a pistol without a permit, carrying a firearm while intoxicated, first-degree burglary, first-degree criminal trespass and third-degree criminal mischief.

Via TMZ, this kind of actually sounds like a movie the 78 year-old Rip Torn would be in. Except he’d play the cop who’d show up and be like, “Rip Torn? What the fuck are you doing?” Also, I enjoy that TMZ took the time to note Rip Torn’s previous mugshot (pictured above) as The Greatest Mugshot in the History of Mankind. In fact, as we know, this isn’t Rip’s first drunk brush with the law: he’s been arrested for refusing a breathalyzer after crashing into a taxi in Manhattan, another DUI in North Salem, New York, and another suspicion of drunk driving charge in Salisbury, Connecticut, where he left a bar with a Christmas Tree tied to the top of his car. Which isn’t at all suspicious late at night, when you’re swerving. And probably drunk.

This is the same guy who famously hit Norman Mailer in the head with a hammer and got Dennis Hopper to pull a knife on him (and then sued him twice for it).

Torn may never have won that coveted Oscar, but don’t count him out yet. This is the kind of complete, absolute fuckup that is at the worst, totally, completely, precedent-setting stupid drunkenness, and at best, totally belligerent, insane, and somehow, endearing.

Originally posted here

I mean, at what point does anybody think getting drunk and then breaking into banks is a good idea? Once Rip Torn sobers up, he might be able to tell us. Because he got arrested after doing so last night.

State police responded to an alarm at the Litchfield Bancorp building in Salisbury, CT at 9:40 PM last night. Police say they found Torn “with a loaded revolver” and he was “highly intoxicated.” Law enforcement sources tell us Torn gained access through a broken window, which they believe Torn broke himself. Torn was taken to the Troop B barracks in North Canaan and is being held on $100,000 bond. Cops say Torn was charged with carrying a pistol without a permit, carrying a firearm while intoxicated, first-degree burglary, first-degree criminal trespass and third-degree criminal mischief.

Via TMZ, this kind of actually sounds like a movie the 78 year-old Rip Torn would be in. Except he’d play the cop who’d show up and be like, “Rip Torn? What the fuck are you doing?” Also, I enjoy that TMZ took the time to note Rip Torn’s previous mugshot (pictured above) as The Greatest Mugshot in the History of Mankind. In fact, as we know, this isn’t Rip’s first drunk brush with the law: he’s been arrested for refusing a breathalyzer after crashing into a taxi in Manhattan, another DUI in North Salem, New York, and another suspicion of drunk driving charge in Salisbury, Connecticut, where he left a bar with a Christmas Tree tied to the top of his car. Which isn’t at all suspicious late at night, when you’re swerving. And probably drunk.

This is the same guy who famously hit Norman Mailer in the head with a hammer and got Dennis Hopper to pull a knife on him (and then sued him twice for it).

Torn may never have won that coveted Oscar, but don’t count him out yet. This is the kind of complete, absolute fuckup that is at the worst, totally, completely, precedent-setting stupid drunkenness, and at best, totally belligerent, insane, and somehow, endearing.

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The Teabuggers, those pesky kids charged with a federal felony for getting into Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu’s office under false pretences, see themselves as avant-garde Republican activist/humorists. So why aren’t they, or any other right-wingers really, funny?

On the surface it makes no sense. Why should political ideology affect humor when it doesn’t affect earnings potential or charity-giving or most anything else? 

But there is no good right-slanted Onion, or Daily Show or Bill Maher and no right-wing satirist who can nail liberals like Stephen Colbert nails conservatives. In 2007 Fox tried to launch a show to take on Comedy Central (despite Jon Stewart, in particular, sniping across political lines). The 1/2 Hour News Hour, marked by canned laughter, was described as “so heavy handed that it seems almost like self-parody,” and was quickly cancelled.

If the Teabuggers, whose idea of hilarity is at the ‘dress up funny’ level of high-school skits, are the cutting edge, the new generation, then prospects are not looking good for the future either. 

Maybe it’s because absurdity and hypocrisy — staples of political humor — are far more prevalent on the right. If a family-values conservative gets caught with a wide-stance in an airport bathroom stall, or claims to be “hiking the Appalachian trail” when he’s in fact schtupping the Argentinian woman, that is amusing. When liberals cheat or lie it tends to be far more mundane.

Or it might be that comedy, like journalism, is best when it comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. It’s certainly partly built of empathy. ACORN, for all of its flaws, mainly works to give voice to the disenfranchised. Sure, you can trick them and sneakily edit your reporting and make them look silly, like O’Keefe did. But comforting the comfortable, and afflicting the afflicted just comes off as mean and nasty and smug. See: Dennis Miller and Ann Coulter. 

Coulter and Miller were a sorority girl and and frat boy  — Delta Gamma and Sigma Tau Gamma respectively. Which stands in contrast to the depressed, substance-abusing end of society that spawns many funny people. Richard Pryor made jokes about his cock looking like a foot from all the STDs he’d caught, and about setting himself on fire while smoking crack. We fear he would not be at all Sigma Tau Gamma material.

O’Keefe, from all we know about him, is more their stuff. He has grown up in a wealthy bubble, in slacks and blazers from the cradle up. That bubble is almost a prerequisite of conservatism — it’s hard to be poor, or experience poverty, and still think poor people are just lazy. That is not to say privilege is a bar to humor or empathy, but if the toughest experience you’ve had is Juanita ironing an inadequate crease into your golf pants even though you’ve told her about this before, you may struggle to wield the comedy of universal experience. 

Even if they have done some dumb, amusing things with their lives, conservatives are not given to self-deprecation, another shortcut to laughs. If Rush Limbaugh joked about Oxycontin, or Bill O’Reilly made falafel gags in the same way Letterman referenced his cheating, they might be more likeable. 

Perhaps in the end it’s just because, in the words of Stephen Colbert, “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” Reality is funny. The rest is just wearing silly costumes for Andrew Breitbart.

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So: Visa and Mastercard—who’ve helped ensure that your brokeass stays broke after buying things that leave you broke—waived fees on Haiti donation transactions. Wells Fargo didn’t. Somebody on the internet bitched about it. Wells Fargo’s response is hysterical:

Michael Klosterman, a spokesman for Wells Fargo, defended the bank’s response to the Haiti disaster, saying the money it donated to Haiti more than makes up for their transaction fees.

“We have given $100,000 to the American Red Cross, and on January 19 we pledged an additional $250,000 to support the non-profits in Florida that are mobilizing the relief efforts,” Klosterman said. “We decided that donating a sum of money would be quicker and more beneficial than waiving transaction fees because the funds would get to the people quicker. It would take the equivalent of $35 million in transactions to raise the amount of money we actually donated.“

Get why this is funny?

1. Because the amount Wells Fargo has given is so small! $350,000 is, um, nothing. That’s a house. A small house. That’s not even a studio in Manhattan. Is that even a college education?

2. There probably won’t be $35M in transactions, which is the slimy inherent reasoning Wells Fargo uses to justify not waiving the fee, widely missing the point that transaction fees are the banking customer’s bane of existence, and thus, might get in the way of getting money to Haiti. Also, they put out a press line that also subtly tries to advertise their low banking fees, which is as insensitive as it is stupid.

3. Bank of America donated $1M, waived fees, and are matching employee contributions, and they’re just the worst. What’s that make Wells Fargo? Seeing as how their stock price is thirteen points ahead of Bank of America’s, for one thing, the more valued stock of the two companies for a reason, but for another, fucking cheap.

Anyway, the point is that a liquidated bank could turn Haiti from a Third World Country into a First World Country sometime by the middle of February, but because banks are institutions predicated on nothing more than trying to grow money when they’re not separating their customers from their money and making it theirs, they’ll simply throw a few bucks Haiti’s way because they think it creates good will amongst The People and that it makes The People want to bank with them, and for the dumbest ones, it does! So really it’s a choice between evil and really evil, and in this case, Wells Fargo won The “Really Evil” Trophy while Bank of America wins The “Bullshit Good Graces” Ribbon. If anything, it certainly makes choosing between buying the two stocks easier.

Update: A reader corrects my embarrassingly bad misreading of Google Finance. “Probably a better way to compare the value of the two companies is to look at the total value of their stock, which would be the price of one share times the number of shares they’ve issued. On Google Finance it’s listed as Mkt Cap (market capitalization), and BAC’s is 131.31B (8.65B shares x $15.18 per share), while WFC is 147.23B (5.18B shares x $28.43 per share). So WFC is worth, as a company, more than BAC, but only about 12% more. They just haven’t issued as many shares (5.1 billion vs. 8.6 billion), so each share is more valuable because it represents a larger piece of the company. Google, for instance, has a market cap of 168B (about 12% more than WFC) but has only issued 317 million shares, which is why a single share costs $530.” And we learn something new every day!

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Nick McDonell was 17 when he wrote 2002’s Twelve, about New York’s richkids experimenting with new superdrugs. Now it’s a Sundance movie, by Joel Schumacher, starring Chace Crawford, Emma Roberts, Keifer Sutherland, and 50 Cent. And it sucks. Terribly.

Via Page Six this morning:

Post critic Kyle Smith reports from Sundance that audiences were giggling at the film’s woefully earnest depiction of rich-kid depravity.

Now, “sucks,” is, of course, a subjective assessment, and also, this is Kyle Smith we’re talking about, so it’s an especially subjective assessment, because as far as critics go, Kyle Smith isn’t exactly Manohla Dargis. That said, a few reports from Sundance on this begin to form a small consensus. From a tracking board I’m on, where assistants share industry tips, someone put out a call for Sundance screeners. One response:

TWELVE is not worth chasing down, take it from someone who has seen it…

Another one:

I wish I had it to share so you could experience the suffering as well. I saw it in a small screening and I had to resist laughing/walking out it was so bad.

Of course, these are just industry assistants, but it’s worth remembering that nobody in the industry wants to badmouth a big movie with important talent and major attachments, because they might need those things in a date to come. Reminder: this is why nobody who works in the film industry really “hates” anything openly.

Really though, these are just three voices, and they’re by no means an indication of a shitty movie. That said, there’s almost no way this movie can’t be bad. How can it not?

When Twelve hit shelves in 2002, McDonnell’s book was a publicist’s dream:

There was Nick McDonnell, the handsome young wunderkind.
There was Nick McDonnell, the handsome young wunderkind, who knew what the fucked up kids were like.
There was Nick McDonnell, the young author who—when he wasn’t being compared to Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney—was being interestingly blurbed by everyone from Hunter S. Thompson to Richard Price and Joan Didion.
There was Nick McDonnell, who’s Jennifer Egan-penned New York Times book review of his coming-of-age story about Upper East Side kids getting fucked up on a mysterious new superdrug called “Twelve” that’s a cross between MDMA, heroin, and speed called McDonnell’s writing an “authentic voice.”

This was a few years after Cruel Intentions,
right around the time the adaptation of The Rules of Attraction came out,
when The OC was gearing up to make a bi-curious teenage lesbian out of Mischa Barton, though long after Kids showed Manhattan’s unsupervised huffing balloons and getting AIDS.
And then there’s Less Than Zero, which is almost the exact same book, but in LA, which Bret Easton Ellis wrote when he was in college.

See, teenagers being rebellious and fucked up is a universal theme that continues to do well! Especially when you’re talking about specific subsets of teens en masse, and especially when you’re talking about the children of the rich and privileged, to see how “the other half” gets fucked up.

But the sub-genre of really rich kids getting fucked up among some of the stuffiest people alive—Upper East Side royalty—hadn’t been thoroughly shaken up in a while in 2003, certainly not by one of them, in a book that won the praises of New York’s literary elite.

I read Twelve when I was 18. And of course, like every other 18 year-old aspiring writer, I wanted to punch McDonnell in the face. Mostly because he got the chance to write the book, but mostly because it’s a pretty decent story, and holds up as an okay modern literature book, but at the very least, an excellent YA novel.

Seven years later, the adaptation is released. And reports come out that it sucks. Possible reasons:

1. Because this is after Gossip Girl, NYC Prep, The City, and of course The Hills and Laguna Beach were released. McDonnell’s book was interesting five years ago, but to say we’ve overdosed on this thing over the last few years would be a bad play on words and an even worse understatement. Especially when Bret Easton Ellis has already given The Hills his endorsement.

2. Because Chace Crawford’s on Gossip Girl, and comparisons are inevitable.

3. And comparisons to Gossip Girl will kill it, because Gossip Girl is a self-aware, meta show that constantly makes fun of its own melodrama (a Josh Schwartz trademark he started with The O.C.). There’s no hint of irony in Twelve, the book, so can you really expect the movie not to follow suit?

4. No. Also, book adaptations almost always suck.

5. Finally: Joel Schumacher. What’s the guy who directed Batman & Robin, Phone Booth, and other campy aughts’ action “classics” doing at Sundance?

Apparently, trying to secure distribution for what was his indie labor of love. Which he did:

The film and video division of independent book publisher Hannover House ponied up about $2 million for “Twelve,” director Joel Schumacher’s look at drug-dealing among privileged Manhattan teens that will play Friday as the fest’s closing feature. Roeg Sutherland, who co-heads CAA’s film finance group with Micah Green, shepherded the deal.

That’s right: CAA—that CAA, the one-stop shop Death Star of Talent Agencies—packaged this deal with their talent, and sold it, the same way one would sell a really shiny, pretty, custom car. Film packaging is nothing new and packages are basically how agencies are making the big bucks these days, but film packaging for such a low price, with such name talent, and selling their movie at Sundance, a place where independent cinema once thrived, is pretty fucking craven. Even worse is that it’s entirely unsurprising.

Way worse movies have premiered at Sundance, surely. And Twelve isn’t the worst movie at Sundance because people say it’s bad—which they do—or because it might actually be bad, which it probably is. No.

Twelve is the worst movie at Sundance because it represents in every way possible the consistent squandering of opportunities for up-and-coming authors, actors, screenwriters, and directors who aren’t already established. Emma Roberts, Julia Roberts’ niece. Keifer Sutherland, son of Donald, who (as a commenter pointed out) has another son, Keifer’s half-brother Roeg, who worked the deal from CAA’s end. Even the book was born out of well-documented nepotism as Nick McDonnell’s parents were writers and editors and friends with Important Manhattan Writing People, which explains the aforementioned blurbs his book got seven years ago from Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Richard Price when it first arrived. Gross.

Sundance is by few if any means an independent film festival any more, but this? The problem with Twelve is that you don’t even have to see it to know that it makes a boldfaced joke not just out of Sundance’s former reputation as a place where independent art once thrived, but of the word “independent,” as well, because Twelve is a total fucking reach-around vanity project that represents nepotism and interests who are, as always, trying to capitalize on overwrought subject material and reinforce the status quo. Besides which, it apparently sucks.

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This morning, New York editor Adam Moss lost deputy editor Hugo Lindgren to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. He’s certainly not the only magazine-world EIC to have a trusted confidante on staff. But they’re a dying breed.

Used to be, if you hitched your wagon to the right star when you were an assistant, you were pretty much set for life—or at least as long as you could take working in magazines. When your boss got a new job, you came with, often with a promotion. Eventually, it was implied, you’d end up high on the masthead. The mark of a true consigliere is that he (or she) doesn’t actually want to be the editor-in-chief; the consigliere is happy in his or her role as trusted confidante and advisor, without having to deal with the responsibilities (and bullshit) that come with being top dog.

But at least in the magazine world, the model is crumbling. With fewer jobs to go around, everyone’s looking out for number one—not necessarily number two. And so some consiglieri get stuck in the wilderness. I asked an ex-consigliere why he thought the breed was dying out. “If there are no great editors, there are no consiglieres,” he said. Too true.

In any case, they’re not completely dead. Here are some of the most prominent ones. Got other suggestions? Let me know.

Anna Wintour’s got creative director Grace Coddington, who’s been by her side since the day Wintour started at American Vogue. Prior to that, Coddington was at British Vogue. Before that, she was a model. As anyone who’s seen The September Issue knows, Vogue as we know it wouldn’t be the same without Coddington.

Chris Tennant is now the editor of Fashion Week Daily. But for years, he was former Radar founder/editor Maer Roshan’s right-hand man. They first met when Roshan was briefly at New York Magazine following the fall of Tina Brown’s Talk. When Roshan founded the first iteration of Radar in 2003, Tennant was right there with him, and came back for Radar 2.0, which launched in 2005 and had folded by the end of that year. Tennant came back for most of Radar 3.0, which launched in 2007, but left quietly about seven months in.

Which brings us back to Tina Brown. She’s had a long history with Roshan—he worked for her at Talk—but her true consigliera is Gabé Doppelt, whom Brown lured to The Daily Beast in August as West Coast Bureau Chief, the same title she’d held at W magazine (where she was Gabriel’s boss!). Doppelt and Brown go way back; Doppelt was Brown’s assistant at Tatler when Brown was its editor from 1979 to 1983.

Then there’s Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter, who’s got plenty of longtime staffers hanging around—but none, perhaps, as loyal as deputy editor Aimée Bell, who first worked for Carter at Spy and has been at VF in various roles (Vanities editor, Books editor, etc.) since 1992, when Carter started the job. (”Special Correspondent” Matt Tyrnauer also falls in this category; in Toby Young’s 2001 book How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, a whiny memoir of his experience working at VF, Young says that Bell and Tyrnauer were so close that people at the magazine just referred to them as “mattandaimée”.)

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my former boss, ex-New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan, and his number one consigliere and right-hand man, ex-executive editor Peter Stevenson. Stevenson was originally Kaplan’s assistant when Kaplan was executive editor of Manhattan Inc., the business magazine founded by New York Magazine founder Clay Felker. When Kaplan became editor of The New York Observer in 1992—following Graydon Carter’s tenure—Stevenson came too. In a cruel twist of fate, Stevenson was laid off by Kaplan’s left-hand man, Tom McGeveran, after Kaplan left the paper in June to become creative director of Condé Nast Traveler and McGeveran became interim editor of the NYO.

Here is the original

Rich Uncle Bloomberg does not want terrorist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed tried in Federal court in lower Manhattan. And so now it will probably not happen. Not because of fear of terror, but because of fear of real estate prices dropping.

Back when the opposition to trying KSK in Lower Manhattan was made up of Republicans who wanted military tribunals (or just indefinite detention with no sort of trial at all!), protesters who were afraid that KSM would re-blow up the WTC with his mind, and congressmen who pretended to be concerned about New York suddenly becoming a terror target, the Justice Department could safely ignore them and proceed with the trial. But Mr. Bloomberg is not worried about the security threat posed by a terror trial. He is worried that it might hurt the real estate market, and the finance industry, somehow! This is opposition that the administration cannot stand up to, apparently, as a New York trial now looks off the table. (And Californian Dianne Feinstein is involved, somehow?)

Two month ago, Mayor Mike said, “It is fitting that 9/11 suspects face justice near the World Trade Center site, where so many New Yorkers were murdered.” Since then, though, he’s heard from the Real Estate Board of New York, who are pretty sure a high-profile trial will not be good for getting rid of those TriBeCa units at a reasonable price.

So now Bloomberg is complaining that securing the area for the trial will cost too much money, even though the feds are “expected” to pick up most of the tab.

But do you know what? Mayor Mike of two months ago is completely right!

In terms of principle, all that matters is that it is an actual legal criminal trial. So, yes, moving it is not a victory for the psychos who think the act of giving an accused terrorist an attorney will somehow also give them superhuman strength, the power of flight, and heat vision.

But KSM was going to be tried in lower Manhattan instead of Nebraska for the symbolism of it. Contrary to popular national belief, 9/11 happened in New York, to New Yorkers. And so New Yorkers should get the privilege of seeing that sonuvabitch brought before a judge and forced to account for his crimes, a couple blocks away from the scene of the crime. He should have to see both the vitality and the righteous fucking anger of the city he did this to. He should not be shuttled in a goddamn school bus to a military base because we are afraid of him, and we definitely should not move the whole thing upstate because justice is bad for business.

The people who don’t want Mohammed to have the “platform” of a civilian trial are afraid of what, exactly? That people will hear his testimony and become convinced that murdering thousands of New Yorkers was the right thing to do? They let Son of Sam have a trial and the dogs of New York did not rise up as one to tell the populace to murder young women.

It is weird to be aligned with November 2009-issue Mike Bloomberg and Antony Weiner, but there you have it!

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