Movie Cricket

The Boston Herald's MediaBiz column reported that GateHouse Media, which owns dozens of smaller New England papers, recently cut about 30 jobs in Massachusetts.

One of those was of senior arts writer and longtime movie critic Ed Symkus (pictured).

"With the state of this business, I'm probably going to explore the world of freelance," Symkus told Jessica Heslam, who writes the MediaBiz column.

On her blog last week, Heslam reported that GateHouse was cutting salaries - on average, 7.75 percent - at its papers. (The Boston Globe's Steven Syre wrote this analysis of GateHouse's money troubles.)

Symkus is now the 56th print-publication movie critic to lose his job - through layoffs, buyouts, reassignment or the paper folding - since January 2006. He's also the 12th this year. Here's the full list: 

• 1. Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times, buyout, 2006
• 2. Steve Ramos, Cincinnati CityBeat, position eliminated, April 2006
• 3. Margaret A. McGurk, Cincinnati Enquirer, reassigned, spring 2006
• 4. Jami Bernard, New York Daily News, contract not renewed, May 2006
• 5. Philip Wuntch, Dallas Morning News, buyout, fall 2006
• 6. Bonnie Britton, Indianapolis Star, reassigned, fall 2006
• 7. Dennis Lim, Village Voice, laid off, October 2006
• 8. Michael Atkinson, Village Voice, laid off, October 2006
• 9. Mark Burger, Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal, laid off, November 2006

• 10. Barbara Lester, CityLink (Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.), position eliminated, early 2007
• 11. Bob Ross, Tampa Tribune, laid off, April 2007
• 12. Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News, buyout, May 2007
• 13. Phoebe Flowers, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, reassigned, May 2007
• 14. Dave Gathman, Elgin (Ill.) Courier-News, staff reorganization, May 2007
• 15. Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, buyout, summer 2007
• 16. Jack Garner, Rochester (N.Y.) Democrat and Chronicle, retired, June 2007
• 17. Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune, quit, July 2007
• 18. Rob Nelson, City Pages (Minneapolis-St. Paul), position eliminated, August 2007
• 19. Matt Soergel, Florida Times-Union, reassigned, October 2007
• 20. Bruce Westbrook, Houston Chronicle, buyout, October 2007
• 21. Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press, buyout, December 2007
• 22. Jack Mathews, New York Daily News, retired, December 2007
• 23. Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader, retired, December 2007

• 24. Ed Bradley, Flint (Mich.) Journal, buyout, January 2008
• 25. David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune, laid off, January 2008
• 26. Jan Stuart, Newsday, buyout, March 2008
• 27. Gene Seymour, Newsday, buyout, March 2008
• 28. Bruce Newman, San Jose Mercury News, reassigned, March 2008
• 29. Mary F. Pols, Contra Costa Times/Oakland Tribune, buyout, March 2008
• 30. Nathan Lee, Village Voice, laid off, March 2008
• 31. David Ansen, Newsweek, buyout, March 2008
• 32. Kevin Crust, The Los Angeles Times, buyout, March 2008
• 33. Glenn Kenny, Premiere, terminated, May 2008
• 34. Stephen Hunter, The Washington Post, buyout, May 2008
• 35. Desson Thomson, The Washington Post, buyout, May 2008
• 36. Hap Erstein, The Palm Beach Post, buyout, July 2008
• 37. Lance Goldenberg, Creative Loafing (Tampa Bay), laid off, August 2008
• 38. Bruce Bennett, New York Sun, paper ceases publication, October 2008
• 39. S. James Snyder, New York Sun, paper ceases publication, October 2008
• 40. Craig Outhier, East Valley Tribune (Mesa, Ariz.), laid off, October 2008 (effective January 2009)
• 41. Eric Harrison, Houston Chronicle, buyout, October 2008
• 42. Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times, laid off, October 2008
• 43. Betsy Pickle, Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel, laid off, November 2008
• 44: Glenn Whipp, Los Angeles Daily News, laid off, December 2008

• 45: Ella Taylor, LA Weekly, laid off, January 2009
• 46: Andy Klein, LA CityBeat, laid off, January 2009
• 47: Melissa Anderson, Time Out New York, laid off, January 2009
• 48: Larry Ratliff, San Antonio Express-News, laid off, January 2009
• 49: Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News, reassigned, February 2009
• 50: William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, laid off (paper folded to online only), March 2009
• 51: Soren Andersen, The News-Tribune (Tacoma, Wash.), buyout, March 2009
• 52: Daniel Neman, Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, laid off, April 2009
• 53: Lawrence Toppman, Charlotte Observer, reassigned, April 2009
• 54: Ruthe Stein, San Francisco Chronicle, buyout, April 2009
• 55: Phil Villareal, Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), reassigned, May 2009
• 56: Ed Symkus, GateHouse Media (New England papers), laid off, May 2009

 

"Twilight" took the top honors at last night's MTV Movie Awards - taking five golden popcorn buckets, for best movie, best female performance (Kristen Stewart), breakthrough male performance (Robert Pattinson), best kiss (Pattinson and Stewart), and best fight (Pattinson and Cam Gigandet).

To add to the "Twilight" vibe, MTV also debuted the trailer for "New Moon," the second in the "Twilight" series:

The trailer shows "New Moon" may have one thing "Twilight" didn't have - good special effects. (You were hoping the answer was "decent dialogue" or "real actors." Sorry, can't promise that.)

Speaking of a new moon, the real star of the MTV Movie Awards was Sacha Baron Cohen, for giving the unamused Eminem a faceful of buttocks when he descended from the ceiling in his "Bruno" guise.

 

In 1953, when President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Charles Erwin Wilson, then the president of General Motors, to be his Secretary of Defense, Wilson made the famous (and often misquoted) comment that "for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa."

One has to hope that today's news of General Motors, once the world's largest automaker, filing for bankruptcy protection will ultimately be good news for GM and for us - who now own 60 percent of it.

Filmmaker Michael Moore, who made his name lampooning and lamenting GM's practices 20 years ago in "Roger & Me," marked the event on his web site - and recommended ways that the taxpayer-owned GM could rebound and rebuild, like manufacturing bullet trains, clean-running buses and other "new modes of 21st century transportation."

On this historic moment, the Cricket considers the legacy that GM has given the movie world. Some of the greatest cars in movie history were made by GM. Take a spin with some of these (courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes):

1977 Pontiac Trans Am, driven by Burt Reynolds in "Smokey and the Bandit."

The Ecto-1, a converted 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor, from "Ghostbusters."

Buck's P---- Wagon, a 1997 Chevrolet C-2500 Silverado Fleetside, from "Kill Bill, Vol. 1."

 

Cole Trickle's race car, a NASCAR-modified 1990 Chevrolet Lumina, from "Days of Thunder."

1964 Cadillac DeVille convertible, driven by Nick Nolte in "48 Hrs."

 

The Cricket's list of "The Departed" has always stuck to movie critics who worked in print - because the point was to monitor the deteriorating state of the newspaper industry, using the movie-critic jobs at papers as an example of lost jobs all over.

But today's news that WNBC's syndicated "Reel Talk" (which sometimes airs Saturday mornings on KSL, ch. 5) has been canceled - and its critics, veteran Jeffrey Lyons and the lovely Alison Bailes, fired - still merits a mention, since it does eliminate one source of gushing pull-quotes for vanilla studio releases.

Lyons holds a unique position in modern movie criticism - as part of a two-generation effort to be a lackluster replacement for Roger Ebert.

In 1982, Lyons paired with film scholar Neal Gabler (and, later, with conservative-blowhard-to-be Michael Medved) on PBS' "Sneak Previews," taking the slots left behind by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert when they took their act to a syndicator. Lyons' son, Ben, last year took over (with TCM's Ben Mankiewicz) the Disney-syndicated "At the Movies" after Ebert and Richard Roeper vacated the premises.

 

What an embarrassment of riches - six movies opening in Utah today, all of them good, some of them brilliant.

The two best movies are, by coincidence, computer-animated stories that involve love lost.

One is "Up," the latest from Disney/Pixar, a charming and colorful gem about a 78-year-old widower (voiced by Ed Asner) who chucks civilization by tying balloons to his house and taking it airborne. The movie, directed by Pete Docter ("Monsters, Inc.") is witty and funny and touching — which is getting to be standard practice at Pixar.

The other brilliant animated work is "Sita Sings the Blues," a one-woman show by animator Nina Paley - who wrote, directed, designed, produced and edited this movie all by herself, much of it on her laptop computer. It's a vibrant telling of the Indian legend of The Ramayana, from the perspective of Sita, the faithful but put-upon wife of the heroic Rama. Paley incorporates a variety of animation styles, intercuts the music of '20s torch singer Annette Hanshaw, and telling Paley's own story of her marital break-up. The combination is inspired and wholly original.

(Read The Cricket's interviews with Docter and Paley here.)

But the other movies opening this week are also worth seeing.

"The Brothers Bloom" is Rian Johnson's follow-up to his high-school noir "Brick," and his baroque touch with dialogue and plotting is strong here, too. The brothers are con artists — scheming Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and brooding Bloom (Adrien Brody) — who find a gorgeous mark, a reclusive heiress (Rachel Weisz), who becomes a willing part of their con. The casting (including "Babel's" Rinko Kikuchi as a mute demolitions expert) is perfect, and the script always surprising.

"Drag Me to Hell" brings Sam Raimi back to the horror genre, and he brings a lot of haunted-house shocks and gallows humor to the exercise. The story revolves around a young bank officer (Alison Lohman) who falls victim to a gypsy curse in which a demon taunts her and will, unless she can stop it, destroy her. The movie is wicked cool fun.

"The Garden" is a documentary, an Oscar nominee in fact, that plays like a thriller. Director Scott Hamilton Kennedy follows the fight over an urban community farm in south-central Los Angeles, as the Latinos who farm the land fight to keep it when a developer wants to tear it down for warehouses. The film moves at a rapid clip, and leaves the viewer energized and angry by the end.

 

"Anvil! The Story of Anvil" is a fun documentary about a Canadian metal band that should have made it big in the '80s, but didn't. Still, the band's core members - singer/guitarist Steve "Lips" Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner - grind it out on weekends, hoping for a big break. Director Sacha Gervasi finds a real-life "Spinal Tap," and tells the band's story with humor and heart.