Hollywood has done its fair share of preaching to the political electorate this season, so Moviefone polled 1.1 million of its users to return the favor by electing their favorite screen presidents. They rose to the occasion by selecting Harrison Ford, Morgan Freeman, and several tremendous idiots. The list, after the jump:
Harvey Weinstein today passed along the not-so-surprising word that four Weinstein Company films slated for release this fall — Crossing Over, Fanboys, Shanghai and Killshot — will in fact be pushed back to 2009. Harvey's Friday News-Dump Massacre came by way of a phone call to Patrick Goldstein, to whom the schmogul spilled the details with all the crystalline logic we've come to expect — none of which, of course, has anything to do with the fact that he's broke. Find Defamer's handy Weinstein Excuse-to-English Guide™ for your convenience after the jump.· Fanboys: Harvey says the movie has been moved to January "so we can do a major promotion with Comcast, who's arranging for a big advertising tie-in for us on the film." (TRANSLATION: "Bob's a little behind burning DVD's, so we're letting Comcast customers rip their own for a limited time only.") · Crossing Over: "We're moving it to January. The market is just too crowded. Every week there are five more movies coming out. It's too crazy. Spring is much better—there are a lot more wide-open dates. The most important thing is to do well by the movie. Having it out in January gives us the opportunity to play the film at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals, which will be a big help to the movie." (TRANSLATION: "We're gonna try a pay-per-view premiere for festival guests at the Park City Marriott. Fresh ideas, Patrick! Hello?") · Killshot: "Everyone has said that Mickey Rourke is amazing in The Wrestler and will be up for all sorts of awards, so we decided to move Killshot to a date a few weeks before the Oscars. That way we can capitalize on all the heat that's going to be around Mickey." (TRANSLATION: "Do you know anyone who might wanna buy a Mickey Rourke movie? Never been opened.") · Shanghai: "It just couldn't be ready in time. The movie wasn't finished shooting until August and the director, Mikael Hafstrom, doesn't even deliver his cut until early November. He doesn't want it out now and neither do we. He needs time to make it as great as possible." (TRANSLATION: "Holy fucking shit, this sucks.") Meanwhile, Goldstein also quotes an anonymous industry heckler who said, "Whenever I'm tempted to take a project to Harvey, I lie down and take a nap and hope that when I wake up, I'm sober again." It's probably safe at this point to cross that "Weinstein-resurgence" prediction off our list for the season.
Hooray — another zero-day patch! The financial sky is falling! The only good news is I'm used to hedge fund managers throwing themselves out the windows. If you're as familiar with zero-day patches as collateralized debt obligations, let me explain the difference to an IT guy. A CDO means I'm fired. A zero-day patch means I'm working. All weekend.A zero-day patch is a security alert that's been issued for some major, Internet-threatening bug, one that's so serious that they give people zero days of warning. It means the bad guys know about it. It's so bad that it needs to be fixed right away, I get that. But do you think IT departments are staffed for one zero-day patch over another? Of course not. Your infrastructure doesn't scale, but who cares? And why pay for all that automation? We have people here. Or in Bangalore, or somewhere. But when an operation takes 10 minutes per machine, multiplied by hundreds of servers and thousands of workstations for millions of customers ... well, I'll get complaints about the overtime charges, but my managers already told me they didn't want to pay to configure the automated solution. See? I can't win, even if Arista replaces every Cisco box on the network. The bright side: This morning, I worried I'd be out of a job by noon. Thanks to Microsoft, I now have another life-or-death upgrade to install. I'll do it this weekend. I may not have a family life, but I have a job.
Click to viewBoomp3.com A London woman attempted to take advantage of a “hall pass” given to her by her husband and tried to put the moves on The Day The Earth Stood Still star Keanu Reeves. Reeves was rather high up on the woman’s list of male celebrities she’s allowed to sleep with with total immunity. The woman propositioned Reeves, but the actor politely declined despite being extremely flattered. [Photo Credit: Bauer-Griffin] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.
Google's changes in the seclusion and segregation of its workers tempt us to invoke Godwin's Law — or at least Martin Niemöller's. Will cutting perks and benefits and firing people help push Googlers to wake up in Larry and Sergey's geek playland? Today's featured commenter is random_play, who waxes poetic about the pain of Google's cost-cutting:
Welcome back to the Friday night television wasteland. If you make the mistake of foregoing the ArcLight's Synecdoche, New York showings, then toast up some Hot Pockets and hit the sofa. WATCH Curb Your Enthusiasm [11 PM, HBO] - Celebrate the 7th season pickup with one of the best episodes from last season. In it, everyone in the house is pissed off over a slow toaster and Larry insults a woman's rodent-looking dog and eventually invites his exterminator to a middle school production of Grease. If only our fully improvised lives were this full of comical annoyances.
Friday · Eliza Gilkyson plays McCabe's, Frank Stallone (yes, Frank Stallone!) is at the Whisky A Go Go, and Foreigner (yes, Foreigner!) is at the House of Blues. · David Sedaris will appear at the Long Beach Terrace Theater, and will be available after the reading for haircuts. · Nightspot at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion is a Miami City Ballet collaboration between Twyla Tharp and Elvis Costello.Saturday · Mountain Goats and Kaki King are at the Troubadour, Civet is at the Knitting Factory, and Flogging Molly are at the Palladium. · The 11th annual Monster Massive dance music festival is at the LA Sports Arena, with sets by Paul Van Dyk, Felix Da Housecat, Judge Jules, Steve Lawler, Markus Schulz, DJ Reza, and LTJ Bukem. · The Louise Bourgeois retrospective at MOCA is having its members' opening party. Sunday · The Death Set play The Echo, and "maverick organist" Cameron Carpenter plays Royce Hall. · "America's $1 Funnyman" Neil Hamburger brings his show to Spaceland. · We'll see you at Synecdoche.
An anonymous eBayer spoke out on the auction website's user forums recently, irate over seeing penis-enlargement ads on the eBay homepage. Within seconds, a horde of other outspoken eBayers chimed in with over 600 replies to share their shock and dismay of seeing the same penis-envy ads. One grandmother was extremely offended at having her little grandson wonder whether his manhood is up to par. But it turned out eBay wasn't actually at fault — malware on the computers of people seeing the ads had replaced eBay's G-rated come-ons with racier fare. Maybe those offended should just pick up some discounted antivirus software on eBay? That seems easier. Here's another malware-placed ad:
It's time for Comments of the Week, and boy, do we have a prize for our five finest wits. We've managed to secure an intimate evening for each of you with Gary Busey's dog! We warn you, though: while Snowball doesn't eat much, he likes to stay up late and bark a lot about nothing in particular. Now, on to the comments! · scroll_lock on CAA's Bryan Lourd to Carrie Fisher: 'Your Codeine Made Me Gay': "This is just like the time I OD'ed on St. Joseph's Baby Aspirin and woke up as Rip Taylor. Confetti is a bitch to vacuum up." · Old No.7 on Samuel L. Jackson on Obama: 'Nobody Wants to See an Angry Black Man': "Nobody wants to see an angry black man? Then explain why Whoopi is so popular on The View."· NoWireHangers on Lesbian Starlet Supply Tainted By Roosevelt's Corpse-Water Pool: "Oh please, a corpse is no worse than what's usually in that pool." · OldTowneTavern on Toronto 30 Rock Ad Interrupted By Porn: "Nancy Cottenden [said], 'We acted very fast to get it off.' My, my but those Canadians are some truth telling people." · Scrumptrulescent on Watch Joe Biden Dunk Elaine On America's #1 Married-Lesbian Talk Show: "We all know Ellen would have hit it on the first throw." Congratulations to this week's top five!
What was Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis doing in the weeks running up to this company's layoffs? Traveling around the world, to destinations like the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, Korea. In his how-to-lay-people-off memo, Calacanis also promised to cut back on his travel budget — which struck me as an admission that his trips to speak at conferences, often on subjects unrelated to his work at his Sequoia-funded Web directory, were being paid for by his investors. Can you think of a better caption? Leave it in the comments. The best one will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: Ted Dziuba, for "Traffic is the new profit." (Photo by JoopDorresteijn)
20 CCs Of Cuteness Stat. Because today has been an incredibly depressing Friday, we thought we'd offer a much needed injection of induced happiness, in the form of these photos of a baby deer and baby panda. We hope they help. (But please don't rush out and adopt a deerpie. They get really big really fast and crap all over the house.) [vainglorious, Daily Mail]
When Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted funding from Sequoia Capital in 1999, they had no problem finding its Sand Hill Road offices. A decade later, Google Maps doesn't seem to know where 3000 Sand Hill Road is, the swanky-office-park Mecca of venture capital firms, including Sequoia, which funded Cisco, Apple, and Yahoo, in addition to Google. Typing in Sequoia's address takes you to a highway surrounded by brown fields. The real location of the Sand Hill conclave is actually a few minutes northeast, surrounded by a lush golf course watered every day with the sweat and tears of entrepreneurs. So what?Okay, okay — there's an error on the Internet! But far more boring than thinking this is a glitch in Google's database is making up a conspiracy theory that this has something to do with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who maneuvered to get Sequoia partner Michael Moritz off Google's board last year.
Dear Flash Fans: We heard Warner Bros. and DC Comics are preparing your favorite comic book for a live-action adaptation to be released in 2010. Congratulations! Until then, why not leave the filmmaking to the professionals and quit trying to set off the Web with dorm-room exercises masquerading as official teasers? Your mastery of Windows MovieMaker is impressive, but seriously, enough. This goes for you and you in particular, but maybe not so much you, with your adorable "HEROE" [sic] typo and TV outtakes. Thanks! xo, Defamer (PS: On the off chance that Warners/DC actually does have anything to do with this, viral marketing only works when the movie looks good. Demand helps as well. Toodles!)
This is the worst Friday we can remember since the last terrible one. Darnell Hudson, mother to almost universally loved Oscar-winner and American Idol contestant Jennifer Hudson, was murdered in Chicago today. "Investigators said two shooting victims were discovered inside a home belonging to Hudson's mother just before 3:00 this afternoon," local TV reports. The other victim: her brother Jason. Police are releasing no details except to say it was "domestic," which means... not a robbery, we suppose. Just sad.
The Bilerico Project, a gay-issues blog, has been running ads in support of California's Proposition 8, a ban on gay marriage. Why? Because Google's AdSense servers have been placing them on several gay websites, based on what their code outputs as appropriate targeting. (They have all the right keywords, after all.) Bilerico editor Bil Browning raised a stink about the ads with a Google PR rep, who agrees they might violate Google's own rules, which allow political ads but forbid ads which target particular groups. He'd like to see Google, which has publicly opposed Proposition 8, to donate any money it's made from the ads to the No on 8 campaign. But that's not why Google should drop the ads.Could there be better proof that Google's vaunted algorithms aren't any good at matching ads to a website's audience and content? It's hard to imagine anyone who reads gay blogs clicking on the antigay ads. Google makes most of its money on ads where it charges per click, not per view. What's embarrassing about this isn't politics — it's Google's performance. (Ironic disclosure: the writer of this item is a gay man who got married last month, on a website which runs some Google's AdSense ads. For all I know, Valleywag also ran some of these same laughably mistargeted ads.)
Tragedy In Chicago. Jennifer Hudson's mother was found shot to death just hours ago in her Chicago home along with another man, which TMZ is identifying as her brother Jason, in what authorities are calling a "domestic" shooting. UPDATE: Now a 7-year-old nephew is reportedly missing, and police are searching for someone named William Balfour, who had lived in Hudson's mother's house in the past year. [CBS2Chicago]
Michael Arrington is a has-been, and he knows it. When the smoke clears after the crash and burn of the money machine behind today's tech startups, there's one word no one will ever write into a business plan again: Web 2.0. For Arrington, whose TechCrunch blog was born with the mission of tracking what he called "Web 2.0" startups, that's a problem.He's made Web 2.0 as much as Web 2.0 made him. Now, Arrington needs to cut his name loose before he becomes just another has-been journalist with a trade magazine. There's only one way to do that: Quit TechCrunch. Back away slowly. Keep coming into work now and then — preferably to a real office, rather than commuting from his bedroom to his living room, as he still does today. Post some of the biggest scoops. Talk up the next conference, party, or other cobranded event with Calacanis and Om. I don't do predictions. I'm always wrong. But Mike, this is true: I used to get tips all the time that "Michael Arrington is doing some vaguely dishonest thing. I know, because I know someone. Run with it, Valleywag! Keep digging! Follow the money!" Today, Friday October 24, 2008, with everyone freaking out over money, with tech employees looking for the truth behind the phony all-Is-well messages coming from their leaders, Valleywag gets more tips than ever. I've noticed one undeniable trend: The number of rumors about TechCrunch I get has peaked. It's over. Michael Arrington may end up on Charlie Rose again. Michael Arrington may get called "kingmaker" again. Michael Arrington, kingmaker! But TechCrunch? Mike, that's so Web 2.0. (Photo by Joi Ito)
Click to viewBoomp3.com Eastern Promises director David Cronenberg disappointed a few fans at the Rom Film Festival on Friday afternoon. The group of film fanatics have been following Cronenberg’s career since Scanners, and were expecting more out of the Canadian legend. One fan said, “I thought he was going to be a lot weirder, but he seems like a normal guy.” Another fan added, “We knew we wouldn’t see any exploding heads or people turning into bugs, but maybe a lil’ fake blood spray?” [Photo Credit: Splash Pic] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.
Earlier this week, we asked for suggestions for current events-related Halloween costumes that wouldn't make your day editor want to slap you. (i.e. NO SARAH PALIN) Good thing we never revisited this topic until the end of the week, because the world's best costume didn't present itself until yesterday, when Ashley "Ol' B-Face" Todd carved a backwards "B" into her own face and called the cops and said Barack Obama and William Ayers robbed and molested and gently whittled her. Yes, Ashley Todd, American Hero, is your easy and cheap Halloween choice for Change. You guys had some other good ones too, let's look at them!
