This nifty Los Angeles magazine article on Oscar bloggers reminds me I'm not Oscar blogging enough. Gotta look into that. Maybe.
I do love it when the piece's two main subjects, Jeff Wells and David Poland, fight. They're like the Jack Benny and Fred Allen of cyberspace movie guys...
UPDATE: David Poland doesn't like the Los Angeles piece, and writes to Romanesko to say so, and more. I should mention that, unlike Benny and Allen, Poland and Wells don't get along for real, y'all.
When I first saw Blazing Saddles at age 13, I was too young (and, more to the point, too pig-ignorant of Westerns) to get the exquisite, affectionate joke of having Frankie Laine sing the theme song. Eventually I learned. The New York Times has a good, reasonably thorough, and appreciative obit of Laine, who died yesterday at age 93.
One of my very favorite books of the last six months is Joseph McBride's myth-debunking Whatever Happened to Orson Welles: A Portrait of an Independent Career , which tells the story of Welles' creative triumphs and travails during the wilderness years after the demolition of The Magnificent Ambersons, with a special emphasis on the '70s, during which time the author himself participated in Welles' unfinished picture The Other Side of the Wind. Along the way McBride punctures a few pompous Welles-bashers so definitively that one would hope they'd never pipe up again. The online journal Bright Lights has a fantastic interview with McBride and Peter Bogdanovich about Welles, the book, and Wind. (Hat tip: GreenCine Daily).
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