Here she is, giving a tour of her famous make-up kit. Dedicated Tammy Faye fans should also be sure to check out the World of Wonder blog, where Bailey and Barbato (who are also producers of Messner's son's reality show, One Punk Under God, as well as half of the guilty pleasures currently on cable TV) have launched a touching tribute to their friend.

Man, Nathan Lee is ON FIRE. My new critical hero, who previously wowed with his gaga reviews of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry and Black Snake Moan (sample quote: "[Christina Ricci's] the white-hot focal point of Brewer’s loud, brash, encompassing vision of the soul’s dark night survived, peering into the dawn. That’s right, haters, I said 'vision.') hit another home run this weekend, with this New York Times op-ed on spoilers. It's so good that it's hard to pick just one section to blockquote, so here's an attempt to condense some of the best stuff:

I wouldn’t dare unmask the secrets in the movie A History of Violence out of respect for the artistry of David Cronenberg and the integrity of his booby-trapped plot, but there isn’t a single frame of The Number 23 I wouldn’t mock in great, guiltless detail for the simple reason that I find it extremely silly. A spoiler requires something to spoil and someone to take offense at the spoiling, and I’m confident that my readership does not include humorless scholars of the Joel Schumacher oeuvre.

Our obsession with spoilers has a diminishing effect, reducing popular criticism to a kind of glorified consumer reporting and the audience to babies. People outraged by spoilers should avoid all reviews before going to the movies or reading the book they’ve waited so long for, because the fact is all criticism spoils, no matter how scrupulous.

My stance on spoilers is similar to Lee's, but that's been documented sufficiently. So let's do something else. Everyone's talking about Lee's op-ed, up to and including Brian Lehrer, my local NPR morning talk host, who invited Slate's Dana Stevens on the show this morning to chew over Lee's piece (Lee, apparently, didn't return Lehrer's calls). At one point on this morning's segment, Lehrer asked Stevens if critics in ye olden days had taken care not to spoil major plot twists, such as those within Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Stevens said she didn't know. I then spent 45 minutes on the internet attempting to answer that question.

I could only find three reviews of the original Psycho on the internet, but I think they represent a decent cross-section of methods, opinions and outlets. Of note: two out of the three reviews note that critics have been asked not to reveal the film's ending. One of these the reveals the kinds of plot details that could get a contemporary critic scalped. The third review, by Bosley Crowthers of the New York Times, is at once the most respectful of the film's secrets (he reveals the identity of the killer as Norman's mother, but refrains from revealing the identity of the mother, and the least impressed ("his denouement falls quite flat for us," sniffs the master of the royal first-person plural.)

Variety and the San Francisco Chronicle were less careful. A review attributed to Paine Knickerbocker spends several paragraphs detailing plot points (Marion meets with her lover, Marion steals the money, Marion buys a used car) before exercising restraint: "No more of the action may be disclosed here. But violence follows, and then a skillfully paced interrogation by Martin Balsam as an affable but determined private eye." Is it less of a crime to tick off each menial plot pint than to reveal the really good stuff?

Finally, Variety. A review attributed only to "Variety Staff" pledges not to expose spoilers, and then totally does anyway:

Hitchcock uses the old plea that nobody give out the ending -- "It's the only one we have." This will be abided by here, but it must be said that the central force throughout the feature is a mother who is a homicidal maniac. This is unusual because she happens to be physically defunct, has been for some years. But she lives on in the person of her son.

I've always hated spoiler alerts with a passion. But jesus christ -- to say you're *not* going to reveal a plot secret, and then immediately reveal the plot secret? That's just dirty play.

And now, here's the spin: Jeff Wells, LAist and the New York Times think Mr. Potter's 58% weekend-to-weekend decline may have been the result of Harry Potter overload. LAist has the better quip: "My guess is that the release of Deathly Hallows cost Order of the Phoenix a second consecutive weekend crown (I still can't believe that Voldermort turned out to be Harry's father!)." I honestly can't tell if Nikki Finke is being sarcastic when she writes, "There'd been speculation whether the new Harry Potter book would cut into the franchise's movie ticket sales. Nah!" I can tell you that she definitely loses points for using the term "fivequel."

Meanwhile, Box Office Mojo couldn't really care less about gay marriage vs. boy wizardry--for these datamasters, it's all about Hairspray. Brandon Gray devotes the opening four paragraphs of a 7-graph writeup to the musical, which broke records for its genre. Gray notes that even adjusting for inflation, Hairspray's $28 million opening easily beat the record for the best musical opening weekend ever previously held by The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. And it's not just good news for song-and-dance lovers--New Line needed this hit. "It marks New Line's first $20 million-plus launch since Wedding Crashers two years ago and breaks the distributor's losing streak that had persisted since Final Destination 3 in February 2006."

More spin:

Transformers is still doing okay -- Comics2Film
A victory for homophobia? -- Lou Lemenick
...or one for Jessica Biel's butt? --Obsessed with Film

***Netflix is lowering the price of their two most popular subscription plans by $1 each, in an attempt to beat out Blockbuster once and for all. It's the second price slash from Netflix this year, and it could cost the company millions of dollars.

***Disney has found a director for their remake of the kiddie classic Escape to Witch Mountain. Also, if you were wondering what happened to Ike Eisenmann, in 2002 he wrote, directed and starred in a Witch Mountain/Blair Witch spoof called -- wait for it -- The Blair Witch Mountain.

Filmmaker A.J. Schnack, who usually blogs here, has launched a new blog devoted to his upcoming Kurt Cobain documentary, Kurt Cobain: About a Son. I found the above clip from the film on the new blog, but it's apparently been on YouTube for a while -- behold the 78 comments it's earned, which include such insights as "Courtney love is bitch. I hope she burns in hell." and "Kurt Cobain is alive, Gods never dies.."

It's frustrating to see that there's still so much anger and speculation surrounding interest Cobain's manner of death, because Schnack's film (which, in tone and content, is well represented by this clip) really has no interest in any of the conspiracy theories. Based on audio interviews conducted by journalist Michael Azerad for a circa 1993 book about Nirvana, it's a poetic and introspective portrait that does a lot to puncture the "Cobain was a God brought down by a harpie devil" myth that I'm sure most reasonable people grew tired of about ten years ago.

For their latest Photoshop contest, Something Awful invited amateur image editing masters to revamp movie posters, to replace the title of the movie with an appropriate song title. My favorite is this take on Raiders of the Lost Ark. Imagine if George Lucas and Steven Spielberg actually adopted influences from DEVO. If Indy 4 was going to be anything like the Whip It video, I might actually care.

[Via BoingBoing]

Rumors are swirling that artist Jeremy Blake has gone missing, a week after his girlfriend, filmmaker/blogger Theresa Duncan, committed suicide. Kate Coe alerted me to the news, which she's rounded up from several sources at FishbowlLA.

Duncan, a former videogame creator, was known in the blogosphere for her sometimes eccentric but often fascinating ruminations on art, imagery, culture and perfume. Her blog The Wit of the Staircase had its second anniversary on July 4th; she last updated July 10. She was apparently in New York, directing an adaptation of a Francesca Lia Block novel for Fox Searchlight. There is no IMDB entry for the film, or for Duncan; I don't know how far along production had progressed, but it was her first feature film and it she had apparently hit a bump in the road.

The news of Duncan's suicide and Blake's disappearance stems from this perfume message board, which was then picked up by L.A. Observed. Blake, in apparent reaction to Duncan's death, disappeared earlier this week. According to a posting on this modern art blog, Blake's passport and clothes were found on Rockaway Beach here in New York shortly after a 911 call was placed reporting a sighting of a man swimming out to sea.

Again, I can't confirm that this is how it all went down (no mainstream non-blog* outlet has yet reported on either Duncan's death or Blake's disappearance), but if it turns out to be true ... man, what a sad story. Fans of Punch Drunk Love will know Blake's work: he designed the film's psychedelic transitions. He and Duncan also collaborated on a short called The History of Glamour, which L.A. Observer describes as "animated mockumentary about an art scene similar to Andy Warhol's Factory." Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be on YouTube but another of their collaborations, an animated short made for the Oxygen channel, is:

**Wording changed after learning via an email from Tyler Green that he and Modern Art Notes are "as mainstream as it gets."

Denby certainly makes some preposterous statements in the piece--the idea that Vince Vaughn is some kind of second coming of Cary Grant who "has displayed a dazzling motormouth velocity, but" has never found "an actress who can keep up with him" was my personal favorite--but I don't really have a problem with his methods. A lot of other people do. Of the commentary I've read, Emdashes is home to the most interesting/infuriating. The self-professed reader of "The New Yorker between the lines" laments that Denby "doesn’t seem to have faced what’s happened to dating":

Throw in comics, MTV, Sex and the City, reality shows, Neil Strauss, Seinfeld, porn, online dating, and social networking sites, and you’ve got part of a picture of how fucking romantic (to quote Stephin Merritt) the world seems to be. I’m not saying no one ever had a sleazy thought before or failed to come through for their sweetheart. What I’m saying is that just as screwball comedies were shiny fairy tales for the eras of disappointing early marriages, stock-market crashes, and limited opportunity for personal expression, There’s Something About Mary is a shiny fairy tale for ours.

All well and good, but then Emdashes lets her argument lapse by posting "an email conversation a (female) film-minded friend." You've seen this kind of thing on blogs before, surely, and as usual, what should probably have remained a joke amongst friends takes on a whole new life of its own once posted on the blog. Here's the part that really rankled me: Emdashes and her friend conclude that Denby has failed to acknowledge the real-world state of contemporary romance. Emdashes' friend cracks, "Also, if a woman had made Knocked Up, it would have been called Abort It, and it would have been a very short film." Emdashes responds: "Ha! So true. Especially with Seth Rogen, who is no one’s idea of a catch. I laughed often during Knocked Up, but that’s a premise I couldn’t get over no matter how hard I tried."

When I hear that kind of argument coming from women, I honestly wonder what kind of lives they lead--as if every 20-something woman in America just has loads of abortions, no big deal. Beyond the cringe factor of the joke, it seems like they're confining this Abort It fantasy to a realm in which all women who unexpectedly become pregnant are easily able to have abortions--"able" both in the sense that a) they live in a major city where they have easy access to a clinic or doctor that will actually perform the procedure safely and without incident, and b) that they could face the decision to terminate a pregnancy without experiencing any kind of personal moral qualm or emotional trauma. That all seems to me to be more unrealistic than anything Apatow put on screen.

Stepping away from Denby and Emdashes for a moment, this brings us back to the elephant that's always in the room when talking Knocked Up: the idea that Katherine Heigl's character is poorly written, because someone like that would never get involved with someone like the character played by Seth Rogen. I know it's a stretch to ask anyone whose natural analysis of character stops at "Pretty" or "Fat" to think this way, but do you think it's maybe possible that the Katherine Heigl character was written that way for a reason? Is it so hard to imagine that a woman whose chief asset is her body, whose greatest aspiration is to follow in the footsteps of Giuliana DePandi (no offense to Giuliani), who is clearly lonely as hell (her only friend is apparently her shrewish older sister, who's clearly occupied with her own pre-midlife crisis) would be lacking in self-confidence and self-worth, and for all of the reasons above, would be attracted to the unconditional love that a baby would represent?

It's like there some kind of post-feminist block that won't allow some female critics/viewers to admit that some real-world women are less than total braniacs, and/or that *most* women make decisions from time to time that don't make total sense, and/or that in real life, attractive-but-dim women often date down the social ladder, picking men who they feel they can control without worrying that they'll get dumped. At least Seth Rogen's character showed promising glimpses, signs that he was capable of being genuinely caring, witty and kind. This puts him miles ahead of the average 23-year-old boy.

Here, I'm in agreement with Emdashes--"Spend a few hours reading Craigslist Casual Encounters, Nerve Personals, the multiple choices on social networking sites (what’s the difference between “random play” and “whatever I can get,” by the way?), Maxim, Gawker, ad nauseam, and suddenly Knocked Up is going to look real, real romantic to you"--and so, so glad that I'm not going to have to return to the world of dating anytime soon.

***Why is it okay to consistently, pejoratively use words like "doughy" to describe Seth Rogan? Would a casting item about Renee Zellweger refer to her as "the bony, squinty-eyed thesp"? Whatever--the guy's gonna write and star in The Green Hornet.

***Gavin Hood, who won a Best Foreign Film Oscar two years ago for Tsotsi, has been hired to direct the X-men spin-off Wolverine. Variety describes the pic as an action-loaded "origin story about how Logan emerged from a barbaric experiment as an indestructible mutant with retractable razor-sharp claws."

***Anthony Kaufman has the news that Errol Morris is blogging for the New York Times. Kaufman interprets Morris' first entry--a long consideration of photography, truth, interpretation and meaning--as "a sneak peak into what I expect are the theoretical underpinnings" of Morris' upcoming Abu Ghraib doc, Standard Operating Procedure.

***This is not a TV blog, so we won't waste time making obscene hand gestures about most of the Emmy nominations. However, it's worth noting that Spike Lee's Hurricane Katrina doc When the Levees Broke picked up several nods, as did two recent festival hits: Rory Kennedy's Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, and Stanley Nelson's Jonestown: The Life and Death of the People's Temple. A.J. Schnack has further details.

***John Anderson has a review of Your Mommy Kills Animals, a doc on the animal protection debate which begins a one-week Oscar qualifying run today. Calling it "a miraculously evenhanded treatment of a snarlingly divisive debate," Anderson also notes that the film also makes "it pretty clear that blinkered self-righteousness and unwavering belief in one's cause don't much differ, whether you're a member of the Animal Liberation Front or Al Qaeda. The corollary question is whether anything less than the most militant action will move corporations away from committing cruelty to animals."

"Fox pulling out of Comic Con seems like another indication of a guarded, bordering-on-frosty attitude by Fox towards online journos and the film-geek community...A major distributor with almost nothing but supermall popcorn geek movies to promote ... yanks a personal-appearance panel out of the biggest movie-geek convention on the planet seven days before it opens? This is business as usual? Do the math." -- Jeff Wells

"Fox has become a major player when it comes to fighting movie piracy (they're one of the studios who wanted to ban advanced screenings in Canada), and so perhaps it's not a question of whether their footage is ready -- but, instead, has to do with them being afraid that same footage will be on YouTube within the hour." -- Erik Davis, Cinematical

"What I've been told is that after last year's Borat presentation, which had that scene of Borat and friend fighting in the nude, relations between San Diego Comic Con and Fox were strained...they said the cost of a couple hundred grand just wasn't worth it when they could just release all the stuff on the internet." -- Devin Feraci, CHUD

Even though CHUD claims to be getting their info from a "Fox insider", I personally think their explanation makes the least sense. The studio's going to have to produce clean trailers at some point; it's unfathomable to me that they'd scrap a long-planned presentation at the last minute because they can't get them together in time. Meanwhile, Wells is pissed that he's having trouble with a Fox publicist; it's probable that the studio has it out for bloggers and online critics, but they've got to be smart enough to know that probably 75% of the typical ComicCon panel aud is under 18, and therefore both extremely valuable demographically and not at all threatening in terms of bad press. And piracy/video sharing is definitely a concern...but of all the studios set to present at the Con, why would Fox be the only one concerned enough to bail?

I think the truth probably lies somewhere near the CHUD tipster's final point: for whatever reason, Fox has probably decided that a ComicCon presentation is just not a cost effective way to promote their content. And if that's the case, and any of the films they were set to promote next weekend end up hitting big without the ComicCon push, you have to wonder if the studio would bother going back. Could this be the beginning of the end of ComicCon as a major shill-case for studio product?

I knew very little about either film going in, but it turned out be an accidentally appropriate double feature. Both are anthropological documents in a way, speaking to the idea that subcultures need to be documented before the disappear; both films offer a scrapbook-like vision of scene that no longer exists. Fish Kill Flea is a more literal document, a quietly stylized portrait of the final days of flea market in upstate New York. Half-Cocked, though nominally a fiction film about a gang of kids who steal a van and pretend to be a band on tour in order to mask their getaway, clearly functions as a symbolic gesture of self-preservation on the part of the filmmakers, who were themselves touring indie rockers in the mid-90s.

At their core, both films are ultimately about a ragtag group of outsiders who try and fail to live outside the real-world realities of contemporary capitalism. Fish Kill Flea is an elegy, not just for this one flea market, but for the almost-completely-dead American phenomenon of small, self-contained economic systems. The era of small business, mom and pop, one-to-one transactions, independent salesmen leaving their fingerprints on their products and, by extension, their community--that's all vanishing, to be replaced by homogenous big box superstores. In a series of man-on-the-street interviews in Fish Kill Flea, visitors to the soon-to-vanish flea market seem universally confused to hear what's set to replace it. Even if the march of mainstream culture is a foregone conclusion, the question of why the community might need "another Home Depot" seems honestly bewildering.

When it comes to the inevitability of mass culture takeover, both films feel like wistful attempts to stop time. Fish Kill is strongest texturally in its montages of still images, in which the film literally functions as a scrapbook. The fact that these stills, in terms of sheer beauty and oddness, eclipse most of the moving imagery in film is fitting: the subject's glory days exist only in still frames. The images could hardly be more evocative--I could imagine a whole film sprouting out of that one shot of the kid cowering from the monkey with the shotgun--but their relationship to the flea market's current fix isn't spelled out. The past is a pastiche, the present is a muddle, and we're able to fill in the blanks with our own lived experience of late capitalism.

These are films about doomed micro-economies. Neither the DIY indie rocker nor the flea market vendor needs a lot of money to keep going, but that's part of the problem: neither is able to produce or consume on a scale large enough to fit into contemporary capitalism. And the films themselves circulate within their own micro-economies: produced on shoestrings, exhibited largely at sub-mainstream venues, they're endeavors entered into without hope of profit. As an audience member, I'm of course conscious of the fact that I'm only able to make these connections between the two films because I seek out the kinds of alternative economies--film festivals, suburban indie video stores--that both films both celebrate and exist within. (The fact that I'm fortunate enough to be able make a living making these connections is also amazing, and in fact part of the reason why I'm only writing about this now is that I was working for what is essentially the Home Depot of internet content at the time I saw these films, but that's neither here nor there.)

At the end of the day, I'm really a capitalist: I like money, but I also passionately believe in free markets, to the extent that I want to see economies of every scale succeed. If you're in the same boat and you're in New York, do your part by going to see Fish Kill Flea this Saturday at Rooftop Films. For more information, check out the Fish Kill Flea website.

Bard is using his website to solicit collaborations from around the world. He's posted every scene from the film, as well as thumbnails representing each scene's beginning, middle and end. The basic idea is to have volunteers pick a scene from the original to re-interpret by creating their own footage. Within those parameters, Bard is encouraging experimentation:

Use what you have at your disposal. If you don’t have a video camera, a succession of still images will work. Text is also o.k. The database will reflect the shape of the wired world on the 21st century stage...Vertov’s footage was shot in the industrial landscape of the 20’s. What images translate the world today? e.g. instead of the mining scene if you’re living in Silicon Valley you might film inside Apple headquarters, etc.

This approach makes a lot of sense. Not only was the original Movie Camera a love letter of sorts to collaborative labor, but as a one-man movie studio using a prosumer technology to document his vision of the world, Vertov sort of prefigured the YouTube generation by about 85 years.

If you'd like to participate, all the relevant info can be found here. Bard says he'll start accepting submissions in August, but you're advised to keep it clean--he reserves the right to "eliminate inappropriate material."

[Via Michael Z. Newman on Twitter]