In this morning’s roundup of movie news ‘n’ notes from around the web, the Facebook movie might be friends with awards season, but is any actor worthy of playing LeBron James?
Now that LeBron James has taken self-aggrandizement to a new level (which, let’s be honest, is quite an accomplishment for a professional athlete), the next step is all but inevitable: a biopic! So Kevin Mahadeo tackles the big question of who’s worthy of stepping into King James’ Nikes. He offers five possibilities: Anthony Mackie from “The Hurt Locker,” actor/rapper Common, “Serenity” star Chiwetel Ejiofor, onetime fighter Quinton “Rampage” Jackson (“The A-Team”) and NFL player-turned-Old Spice pitchman Isaiah Mustafa. I’d put my money on James insisting that he can do it himself. (MTV.com)
“It’s probably too early to start handicapping fall awards movies,” says Steven Zeitchik, who proceeds to do exactly that. Actually, he just handicaps one fall movie, David Fincher’s “The Social Network” (right)– but his headline asks a substantial question, “’The Social Network’ as this fall’s ‘Hurt Locker’?” It turns out, though, that he’s not predicting that the Aaron Sorkin-scripted movie will be the Best Picture winner quite yet; instead, he’s thinking the story about Facebook’s founders will be “the kind of movie that migrates to the news pages and gets people talking about film outside its fictional context, the way ‘The Hurt Locker,’ ‘Frost/Nixon’ and ‘Syrianna’ did for their respective topics.” (24 Frames)
David Poland, who pretty much announced after Monday’s first batch of “Inception” reviews that he was suspicious of all that positivity, sees the movie and writes his own review. And it’s positive. Not as rapturously, gushingly positive as some of his predecessors, but positive. (The Hot Blog)
The New York Press writes four paragraphs in defense of its controversial critic Armond White, who’s been the subject of lots of attention (and one awfully persuasive takedown) since slamming “Toy Story 3” and gushing about “Grown Ups” and “Jonah Hex.” The unsigned piece, which is attributed simply to “editors,” tries to ignore what it calls “blogging attacks from afar” and focus on the one recent piece that interviews White – though even then, it takes a sudden detour into strange shot at a critic who doesn’t like White’s work. But at least they changed the headline, which initially used the word Candians when it meant to say Canadians. (New York Press)
Melena Ryzik looks at the indie-film financing operation Kickstarter on the occasion of its Kickstarter Film Festival, which on Friday will screen as part of New York’s Rooftop Films series. The company, which helps aspiring filmmakers “crowd-source” their movies by connecting them with large groups of backers who’ll chip in small amounts of money, is promising but has its limitations: many of the films don’t have and won’t get any kind of theatrical distribution, and financial returns for the backers are essentially nonexistent.
