Since late October, @avary has been tweeting regularly about prison life, referring to himself as #34 and regaling his followers with tales that will probably turn into a mindfuck prison thriller screenplay someday, because some people are so irrepressibly hip that even imprisonment for a tragic crime turns all cool and A Clockwork Orange-y in their hands.

The Los Angeles Times' Mark Milian wrote about the wayward Pulp Fiction and Beowulf scribe's stream-of-consciousness Twitter early last week.

But then: Plot twist! Milian's blog post led authorities to realize that Roger Avary wasn't in prison at all. Rather, he had somehow ended up on a work furlough program, which allowed him to hold a day job and merely bunk up at night with fellow furloughees. This is both not the hardscrabble prison life everyone thought @avary was describing, nor the prison sentence Roger Avary was supposed to be serving. So guy got nabbed and they sent him to real prison, prompting @avary to tweet:

LAT is preoccupied with how Avary ended up in furlough instead of jail, but what I want to know is, (1) Was @avary faking his prison badassery, since he was never in prison in the first place? (2) If so, was it a ploy to make us think he is irrepressibly hip and A Clockwork Orange-y? Because that would be pretty lame. (3) Alternately: Is the jailhouse equivalent of a work-study program actually as disgusting and terrifying as I always imagined real prison to be? Meaning @avary wasn't trying to deceive, it's just that we soft-bottomed media folks foolishly assumed that his scary tweets were from the belly of the beast, when in fact they represent a relatively pleasant penal existence, and when @avary gets to real prison it's going to get really crazy.

[LAT] [LAT] [LAT]

As the New York Observer notes, Artley follows in the footsteps of our own Richard Rushfield, who was LATimes.com entertainment editor up through July, and in the wake of the head of the Times' online advertising, Juliana Jaoudi, and the head of online entertainment advertising, Jennifer Van Hook, both let go in the past week.

Formerly editor of IHT.com, Artley was part of a team of outsiders general manager Rob Barrett brought in after he was hired in 2005 to remake the site. Her departure, then, could lead to greater control by the newspaper's print side of the heretofore relatively independent website.

Replacing Lyons and Mankiewicz as hosts of the long-running show, formerly hosted by Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, will be A.O. Scott of the New York Times and Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, two men widely respected in the world of film criticism who have both served as fill-ins on the show in the past.

As the LA Times Patrick Goldstein notes, Ben Mankiewicz wasn't all that bad, but it appears as though he was brought down by the tremendous weight of Lyons' Herculean suckage.

To be fair, Mankiewicz, the scion of a fabled Hollywood family who hosts Turner Classic Movies presentations, was clearly more knowledgeable than his counterpart. As my colleague Chris Lee reported last December, Lyons, son of film critic Jeffrey Lyons, was held in such low esteem in the critical fraternity that others in the profession were lining up, happy to be quoted by name ridiculing his work, with Chicago-based film critic Erik Childress saying of Lyons: "He has no taste. Everyone thinks he's a joke."

So how awful was Ben Lyons? This awful:

You know what hurts a movie like Max Payne is the success of the Batman franchise. That obviously is about story and character so they think for all films of the genre it's gotta be about story and character and this whole backstory of him losing his wife. I don't care about that. I wanna see Max Payne shoot people. That's all I want from a movie like this.

Film lovers of the America rejoice — your own personal long national nightmare is finally over! But what will now become of the "Stop Ben Lyons" blog?

Chocano, whom we've admired since her days at Salon, broke the news in a brief note to FishbowlLA; her departure leaves veteran Kenneth Turan as the lone full-timer among a growing pool of freelancers (including Kevin Thomas, whose own contract the paper bought out in 2006). Fittingly or not, Chocano's final feature for the Times addressed the portrayal of hard economic times in the movies: "The pendulum seems to be swinging again from the decadent mainstream art of fat times to the scrappy countercultural art of lean times. For a while, at least, anger and unadorned reality may stage a cathartic comeback." We'd like that, too, Carina — just not like this.

• Among the OUsted at the LAT: Carina Chocano [FishbowlLA via MCN]

The criteria alone defy rationality: only one film per director, lest "City of Angels specialists such as Michael Mann, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson" overrun the seminal work of, ahem, Michael Ritchie and F. Gary Gray. But even taking the list on its own terms, we just don't get it — Crash? Jackie Brown? Really, LAT? Find our quick, admittedly incomplete corrective after the jump.

1. Jackie Brown. Come on.

Let's just keep it short: Jackie Brown is not a better film than Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs. No point in fighting or meritocratic debate, like the author wants. It's not debatable — there is nothing to see here but an inaccuracy.

2. Collateral owes its life to Heat.

Two things: 1) Stuart Beattie's original script for Collateral was set in New York, hence the cab driving protagonist and subway. It's an LA film by convenience, which is to say, not at all. 2) Michael Mann conceived and executed Heat a "Los Angeles crime saga," and its use of locations — over 100, interwoven on-screen like the geography itself — predated and provoked Collateral's more nocturnal survey by almost 10 years. Heat's superiority here isn't really debatable either.

3. This list is in no particular order, right?

Because we know nobody listed Charles Burnett's To Sleep With Anger (#21) as sort of a bottom-rung afterthought to everything from Clueless (#7) to L.A. Story (#20). And Mulholland Drive (#11) is beneath Beverly Hills Cop (#5).

4. If you have to include Fletch, you need to condense the list.

Or expand it — a 30-year list would have at least featured the added benefit of Blade Runner, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Decline of Western Civilization and E.T. But a 20-year list would have probably been just fine — and you still would been able to keep Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

5. The least obvious omission is the most obvious.

Thom Andersen's three-hour 2004 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself remains an exhaustive, fascinating exploration of LA's history and uses as a big-screen location. As such, considering these selections, we're not surprised it's not included here.

So what did we miss?

• The top 25 of the last 25 [LAT]

From: Stanton, Russ
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2008 2:05 PM
To: yyeditall
Subject: Newsroom job cuts

Colleagues:

You all know the paradox we find ourselves in: Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money. Add to that a poor economy, particularly for us in the California housing market, and you quickly see why a wave of cutbacks has swept through newsrooms this year from New York to Santa Ana.

We are not immune. As David Hiller mentioned in his memo last week we are embarking on another round of cost cutting. I deeply regret to report we will be reducing the size of our editorial staff, both print and Web, by a total of 150 positions, and reducing the number of pages we publish each week, by about 15%.

These moves will be difficult and painful. But it is absolutely crucial that as we move through this process, we must maintain our ambition and our determination to produce the highest-quality journalism in print and online, every day.

Through all of our changes, we continue to give readers terrific coverage, whether it's the continuing collapse of the housing market, public pools that have been taken over by gangs, or the controversy surrounding liver transplants at one of our most prestigious hospitals. We've provided insight into the historic presidential campaign, and we've delivered exclusive, on-the-scene looks at the brutal repression in Zimbabwe and the continuing war in Iraq. The future of The Times, in print and on the Web, depends on that kind of journalism — exclusive, original, excellent. We will not retreat from that commitment.

I don't yet have all the details on the reductions to come, but we expect to complete these moves by Labor Day. We'll provide more information, including the severance terms, as soon as we can. As part of this process, we will be combining the print and Web staffs into a single operation with a unified budget.

I appreciate your patience, understanding and cooperation during this difficult time. John, Davan and I, and the rest of the senior editing team, will be available to answer your questions. With more than 700 people, we will remain one of the largest and best newsrooms in the country. And we will continue to be a strong and formidable presence in the business we so dearly love.


Russ Stanton
Editor
Los Angeles Times

Some little birds at the LAT tell us that venerated entertainment journalist Patrick Goldstein will expand his Big Picture column with the launch of a new blog Tuesday morning.

The LAT hopes to put Goldstein's knowledge and sources to work in a blog that brings responsible journalism to the faster-than-pulp pace of 24/7 online entertainment reporting.

Terrific — except those little birds at the LAT must have missed the part where Goldstein has already been blogging for weeks now (to be fair, it takes about that long to navigate the LAT website). Still, thank goodness we've got Goldstein on the "faster-than-pulp" blogging beat; his edgy, current musings like "Wal-Mart rocks" and "The National Anthem needs to be sung this way, not that way," will surely leave Hollywood insiders quaking in their Prada boots.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• BREAKING: Patrick Goldstein Goes from Journo to Blogger [FishbowlLA]

In case you haven't been paying attention (and the gist if these pieces is that you haven't, but you really, really should), it goes like this:

1. Longtime critics are being bought or forced out of their print institutions.

2. Studios don't need critics, but independent film distributors are upset because they need the word of mouth.

3. The dissemination of film news, reviews and rumors online has supplanted their print analogues.

4. The Internet both diffuses and democratizes criticism — and the market that sustains it.

5. Rinse and repeat in The New York Times, Variety, New York Post, Salt Lake Tribune, Movie City News and finally (we pray) the Los Angeles Times.

Are we oversimplifying? No more so than Goldstein, who ambitiously invokes everyone from Pauline Kael to Matt Drudge en route to the same sorta-thinky semi-conclusion at which the last 100 writers who tackled this issue arrived:

Whether critics are irritants or masters of elucidation, opinions still matter. But no one is respected simply because of the authority of the institution they write for. The Web isn't the enemy of critical thinking. The land of a million blogs is a medium brimming with opinion. What's different is the reader gets to decide whose opinion matters the most. It's a big adjustment, but maybe it's time critics, like many artists, realize they should pay more attention to their audience.

So should Goldstein, the ultimate latecomer to a dance that really got going back in 2006 when everybody and his mother (including David Carr and Anne Thompson, who've eagerly revisited the meme in the last seven days) was writing about the phenomenon of the "critic-proof" film. Readers didn't care then, and two years of distance and 27 critical casualties later, they still don't seem to be reacting — unless, that is, you count our eyes rolling back in our heads at the first glance of Goldstein's "analysis." We don't.

Not coincidentally, all this overkill dovetails with The New York Times's recent "Blogging Will Kill You" fret-piece; it's not just Web writers inflating demand in a voracious 24/7 news cycle. Goldstein et. al. prove that a slow news week is slow everywhere. It just feels that much slower when we can sense what's coming from a mile away.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• The end of the critic? [LAT]