In a move sure to inspire more film-geek loin-warming than Monica Bellucci, Disney has fired the unbelievably horrible Ben Lyons, who pronounced I Am Legend "one of the greatest movies ever made," and Ben Mankiewicz, as At the Movies co-hosts.
• NBC is pulling out all the stops to promote Jay Leno's new show. Don't believe it? Try this out for size: "In early September, NBC will even adopt a portion of Interstate 10 in California to reiterate Mr. Leno's time slot." [NYT]
• Notwithstanding the Leno blitz, NBC is still looking to cut its budget. [NYT]
• No one cares about CNBC these days, in case you haven't noticed. [Slate]
• More on troubles at Condé Nast (revenues may fall by as much as $350 million this year), and the recent round of receptionist-purging. [NYP, NYO]
• The lobbyist scandal goes on. A couple of days after it was revealed that MSNBC's Richard Wolffe is now working for a lobbying firm comes the news that CNN's Bill Schneider has signed up with a D.C. think tank. [HuffPo]
• Related: Wolffe has another Obama-related book in the works. [TNR]
• Experts say the prognosis for BusinessWeek is not good. [DailyFinance]
• As you might expect, the mood has been very upbeat at CurrentTV today now that Laura Ling and Euna Lee have returned from North Korea. [NYT]
Today on The View, Ebert usurper Ben Lyons took his place next to Elisabeth Hasselbeck in what could only have felt more like a Defamer-targeted Last Supper if Joaquin Phoenix had crashed it, rapping.
At perhaps the worst time in years for new movies, and with little advance fanfare from their Disney benefactors, the Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz era of At the Movies officially began over the weekend. If you happened to miss it (who are we kidding, of course you did), never fear: We attempted some of the heavy lifting for you in clips you'll find after the jump. Seeing as it's almost too easy to pile on a critic who actually issues praise like, "It's Don Cheadle's uncanny ability to create a complete character — and not just an archetype — that saves [Traitor]" aloud, and our minds haven't changed much since the pair was named co-hosts in July, for now we defer to the expert jury at EW's PopWatch blog, where the consensus hovers between general ambivalence and "Ben Lyons is about as much of an expert about films as Heidi Montag is about the art of sound":
Monday's news that Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper officially ended their eponymous film-review show might have presaged a dark, thumbless era of criticism, but we're learning today that all is not lost. The higher-ups at Disney are reportedly set to relaunch At the Movies with unique incestuous flava for a new generation, inviting E! fluffer Ben Lyons and ex-Young Turk/current TCM host Ben Mankiewicz aboard for all the middlebrow, multiplex-ready chatter America can stand. And to hear the guys tell it after the jump, they can't wait to get started:
