Screening Gotham: Premiere is Dead. Long Live Premiere!

Some of today's movies news of note from around New York:

--How slow a news day is it in New York? So slow, in fact, that a pair of the most noteworthy news items I could locate come from a publication that no longer exists. Well, sort of: Premiere Magazine, the first issue of which I vividly remember reading during the summer of my 11th birthday (front cover: Dan Aykroyd and Tom Hanks pushing Dragnet; first ad on page 1: the Tavianis' Good Morning, Babylon; the month's Shot-by-Shot feature: the Odessa Steps homage from The Untouchables; don't get me started about issue #2 with Diane Keaton on the cover, or the film school article in issue #3), has its last issue on newsstands 20 years later. Publisher Hachette Filipacchi pulled the plug Monday in exchange for an online-only edition; the print staff has been let go effective pretty much immediately.

--Speaking of online only, the magazine's film critic and blogging latecomer Glenn Kenny is not taking Zack Snyder and Frank Miller's 300-as-apolitical-action-film denials at face value. "[Y]ou'd have to be mighty dense not to see 300 as an exemplary example of fascist aesthetics," Kenny noted yesterday. Having finally viewed the film last night, I think the most "exemplary example" exemplified was that of a wonderfully over-the-top homoeroticism, which is far more likely to make neocons squirm than its surrounding ethnocentric fantasia is likely to make them tingle. But anyway, Persia's got the bomb these days, promising a sequel that even the mavens at Warner Bros. might have a tough time spinning.

--And finally, because you asked, yes: Will Smith is going to pull through.

Posted at March 6, 2007 8:19 AM