Who's Uwe Boll? German movie director, responsible for really horrid low-budget videogame-derived stinkers like "House of the Dead," "Alone in the Dark," and "Bloodrayne." Even fans of schlock horror can't stand his stuff, to which the director tends to respond with upraised middle finger or an invitation to a boxing match.

Now there's an online petition to get him to stop making movies. Period. It had 100,000 signatures as of the other day. If it gets to one million, Boll has vowed he will quit filmmaking.

Either this is the most brilliant publicity stunt I've ever heard of or it's mercy-killing by mass ballot. Feel free to cast your vote, but if you do, play fair -- suffer through one of Boll's movies first.

For those of you keeping score, it turns out that "Nim's Island" actually made more at the box-office this weekend than "Leatherheads." The Hollywood Reporter has the details about the gap between estimates and actuals.

To me it's interesting only because the movie studios have always relied on star power as the one, true coin of value in their tinseled realm, and if George Clooney can't put a movie over in 2008, who can? (If you say Miley Cyrus, I'll scream.)

Filed under: Paramount, Celebrities and Controversy, Obits

Noted in Dave Kehr's blog: commenting on the death of the great Heston, the long-memoried expert on pre Star Wars film writes "one of Heston's most influential roles remains one of his least known: that of Harry Steele. Dashing though cynical adventurer who wears a fedora and a leather jacket, as he searches for Incan treasure in a manner that distinctly suggests a certain later day hero created by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. The film is Jerry Hopper's 1954 Secret of the Incas and Paramount has been strangely reluctant to release it to TV or DVD ... reportedly, Spielberg and Lucas screened it for members of the production team planning Raiders of the Lost Ark."

One Raiders of the Lost Ark fansite, theraider.net. has already commented: "the atmosphere of the story is so similar that any Indiana Jones fan will be smitten with this film."
Why doesn't Paramount fess up and re-release this? It'd be worth $20 to see Heston as Steele, searching for a jeweled relic in the Inca Temple of the Sun among real life locations in Machu Picchu (as visible above, but here's a better look at the poster). He's up against a first-rate villain (Thomas Mitchell, of Gone With the Wind, Stagecoach, and many other classics). And then there's the matter of the film's discovery, the debuting "bird girl of the Andes" Yma Sumac. Seen here at YouTube demonstrating her world-famous 5 octave pipes in one of her numbers from the film. Don't believe the horrible lie that Yma Sumac is really Amy Camus from Brooklyn!

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Don't know how you feel about the annual bestowal of the Pulitzer prizes, but if you work in newspapers, they're the equivalent of an Oscar and then some -- a recognition of true worth in an industry that doesn't like to pat itself on the back (or be caught patting itself on the back, which is a little different).

Boston Globe arts writer and occasional movie section editor Mark Feeney won a Pulitzer for criticism today. It's so deserved it almost came as a shock: his writing, generally on themes of photography and visual culture but branching out into all areas of the arts, is so erudite, so well thought out, so gently and allusively persuasive that you wonder if enough readers recognize how good it is.

Adding to the in-house satisfaction here is that Mark's a great guy -- a gentleman in the rare, active sense and the kind of person who looks for and promotes the best in the people around him. Having him for an editor is being asked to raise your professional game, but only in the interests of clarity and the well-turned phrase. (He does the occasional celebrity impression as well.) When the champagne popped today at 3 p.m., after the award news came over the wires, Mark uncorked a funny and heartfelt speech that, true to form, first praised colleague and Pulitzer finalist Beth Daley, then made what could have been a trite point -- I didn't win this thing, we all won this thing -- into the closest thing to a group hug that working journalists would dare get. It felt great.

No congrats necessary. Just read the man.

Filed under: Celebrities and Controversy, Fandom, Home Entertainment

Here's a good question: How many times have you been out renting a movie with your significant other when a fight between the two of you over which movie to rent breaks out? Okay, maybe not a full-on fight, but more like one of those annoying arguments ... in public? Over at The Movie Blog, they have up a pretty funny post called How To (And Not To) Pick A DVD With Your Girlfriend. Of course, the title kinda leaves out boyfriends, husbands and wives -- but that's not the point. The point is that this has become one of the hardest tasks for a couple -- and if you've never argued with your significant other over a rental choice, then congrats: You're in the perfect relationship!

I can't even count the number of times I've been in Blockbuster with my wife (used to be girlfriend), and she'd pick up a movie like Underdog (simply because she wanted to see how our dog would react to the other dogs talking), and I'd sort of grumble back a "Really? Do we have to get that?" Then, most (if not all) of the time, she'd say something like, "Ugh -- you think you know everything because you write for a stupid movie site. Why can't I ever pick something!?" People look, the guy putting away movies smiles all-knowingly and I wind up watching Underdog while she holds our dog's head toward the screen, whispering "Who's that doggie? Is that doggie talking? Look at that doggie flying!"

Continue reading Discuss: Renting DVDs with Your Significant Other

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By the way, my Q&A with Martin Scorsese ran in yesterday's Sunday Movies section, but the online-only version is about four times as long. I link to it here only because you get to read weird, fecund details about Marty's youth in Little Italy. Curious about what effect the music of Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith had on the future director of "Goodfellas"? Read on.