The News: All-Positive Friday!

By S.T. VanAirsdale

As per tradition, some of today's more upbeat movie news of note from around New York:

--Congratulations to Meryl Streep, the Bernardsville, N.J., native who was the only living film figure to make the inaugural cut for the New Jersey Hall of Fame. You're damn right: the New Jersey Hall of Fame, which opens next May (not long after Streep is honored at Lincoln Center's annual gala tribute) and also counts Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Clara Barton, Frank Sinatra and Bruce Springsteen among its founding class. Lame-asses including Abbott and Costello, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Walt Whitman will have to wait for '08. Streep and co. will be inducted at a ceremony set for May 4 in East Rutherford. Hooray, I guess.

--The L Magazine gets it pretty much right with this week's tutorial on how to drink like a New York film critic: "Time for a screening in Midtown: your editor is having you sit through two hours of Mongolian nature footage so he can run a 75-word capsule to placate the film’s publicist. Better pack your flask." Or, in the harsh Catch-22 of bloggers without such archaic space constrictions, pack the entire bottle.

--This has nothing to do with New York, but when the author of such drab, austere sludge as "Did Colour Ruin the Movies?", "Is Cinema Dead?" and "Ridley Scott is Right, Modern Cinema is Stupid" busts out with a long piece praising the once-in-a-lifetime diversity of film festivals (even saying their founder should be "canonized"!), then that's world news.

--For those of you who groaned in offense when I'm Not There's Cate Blanchett/David Cross interlude was "leaked" to the Internet, the same YouTube user has now intercut and "leaked" authentic Joy Division concert footage with Sam Riley's performance as Ian Curtis in Control. If you doubted me before about the Weinstein inside job, apology accepted. (H/T: Eugonline)

Posted at October 26, 2007 7:50 AM