To make Jessica feel better about Doom. If that's possible.

Jessica -- if you're a Rock fangirl -- still untenable?

I watched a bit of TMC last night and they had a biography on Bette Davis and I caught the part where she fought against the studio system and went to England and I guess either was sued or sued over the contract. There were other things about the studio system and how much control Jack Warner had over the final cuts of movies, etc. I don't know much about the studio system, but I was wondering when and how the studio system changed and ended.

To make Jessica feel better about Doom. If that's possible.

I still feel pretty bad. Better show me some more.

Jessica -- if you're a Rock fangirl -- still untenable?

I adore the Rock, but he really needs to be allowed to be funny, and this movie takes itself SO seriously. In the scenes that don't take place in near-total darkness, his arms are almost spectacular enough to distract from the script. Almost. (It's a really bad script, and he gets handed the biggest clunkers of all)

Oh dear. I had been going to see it.

Doom no more.

So, I was watching my Batman Begins dvd (why no commentary?) when my cat Tanuki jumps up on the sofa and suddenly there is Willy Wonka in my Batman Begins!

I have NO idea what button on my remote she stepped on. . . but apparently the scene does run okay. It was that scene where College Boy Bruce comes home and Alfred tells him he's concerned about his future. . . boom Willy Wonka! It was . . . odd.

So, I was watching my Batman Begins dvd (why no commentary?)

I can't believe there isn't one. I was just watching the commercial and thinking how cool it would be to hear all the behind the scenes stuff and hear them talk about it.

Maybe they are waiting to put out some kind of special edition?

I just don't get current movies not having some kind of commentary, it's part of the joys of dvds.

The Onion AV Club's A Decade Of Underrated Movies

Yay! They included Office Space, Starship Troopers and Dead Man.

I saw Good Night and Good Luck last night. It was really very good, and I LOVE the way they used real footage of McCarthy. It's a more intimate movies than I expected, but once I got used to its scale, I dug it a lot. Strathairn has long been one of my favorite actors and he give a terrific performanc3e here--not showy but he really inhabits this man and gives him a complex interior life without seeming to "act" at all.

I'll always have Strathairn in my head as Eddie Cicotte, from Eight Men Out. He sits on the bed of this tenement apartment, his wife massaging his arm, and they're so hard up for money -- suddenly I was like, You absolutely ought to rook the owner for all you can get. Go Black Sox!

when and how the studio system changed and ended.

It was a process, I think, started by a court case where it was decided that a studio may not own movie theatres, because it acts as a monopoly. As the studios began to have to really compete with each other, and compete with television (which cut into their profits), actors realized they could go to the highest bidder per picture rather than for a long contract.

(I read a great biography of Burt Lancaster 4 years ago, in which I learned that Lancaster was a pretty powerful and successful producer. He got the producing gig basically by leveraging his power as a star in the 50s, and eventually was able to make films where he didn't even appear. I think he stayed within the system for a long time, but that's basically a step along the way towards actor-independence.)

I think it started happening in the 1950s, but as late as the late-60s "studio contracts" still did happen. Sometimes when they do retrospectives of Harrison Ford, they'll show footage of him from when he was a contract player for a major studio -- they had him playing bellhops. Not really a surprise that he took up with the independent George Lucas, rather than stick with that kind of boredom.

I saw A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE - I really liked it a lot. The climax of the movie felt a bit too conventional, but I thought the actual last scene of the movie was nice and quietly ambiguous.

I thought all the actor's were amazing. I even liked William Hurt, but, then, I've liked him a lot of things. However here he was playing a character like I've never seen him play before. Plus, he got one of my favorite lines in the movie: "How could you fuck that up???!???!?" - you could practically SEE the interrobang.

The theater was almost empty (4 pm show on a Tuesday), but there was a loud group in the back. Luckily, they didn't talk during the movie and, apart some hugely inappropriate laughter (I thought) during the "angry sex" scene, it was interesting seeing it with them because the movie worked like gangbusters on them. There were audible gasps at several points - usually in the shots of the aftermath of the violence, but also a HUGE one when Viggo said "I should have killed you back in Philly" to Ed Harris.