SUNDANCE WRAP-UP: HOW'D MYSTERIES DO?
Sunday, January 27, 2008, 10:50 AM ET
Source: Various

It didn't win any awards, and the early reviews are mixed to bad.

That's the final word on Mysteries of Pittsburgh following last week's Sundance Film Festival. Bloggers had long attacked the movie for not following the book close enough.

The Hollywood Reporter calls Mysteries a "reverential and smart distillation" of Chabon's novel. But the Reporter takes some hits at the film too, saying the performances of Jon Foster and Peter Sarsgaard are what help invigorate the film and "keenly flesh-out its emotional dimensions."

FirstShowing.Net's reviewer also liked the film. "What I discovered was not particularly funny, but rather a very endearing drama with a wonderful score and great characters. It's not anything close to a masterpiece, but Mysteries of Pittsburgh is still a great film."

Then there's the mixed reviews, like Buzz Sugar's. "It's not a bad movie, by any means. The music is fantastic, for example. Many of the directorial choices (the way shots are set up, the use of voiceover narration, etc.) are superb. Several of the performances are arresting. But the dialog is stilted and the action feels extremely rushed."

And then there's the haters. A review posted on Ain't It Cool News say while the film was "competently directed, the story was unengaging. Keep the faith in Thurber and most of the actors, but check this flick out only if you're hardcore for any of 'em."

And The Advocate slams the film as well. "Thurber's changes have made The Mysteries of Pittsburgh flatter, more generic, and more like umpteen Sundance films that have come before it."

A parting shot, from Chud: "Here's the big mystery of Pittsburgh: How did this movie manage to be so completely terrible?"

LA TIMES PROFILES THURBER
Sunday, January 20, 2008, 10:50 AM ET
Source: Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times profiled Rawson Marshall Thurber in the run-up to today's premier of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

A large part of the article focuses on the odd risk Thurber is taking professionally making Mysteries his follow-up to Dodgeball. The paper reports that Thurber's friends and agent tried to convince him not to do it.

"I probably actively dissuaded him four times," said John August (screenwriter for "Go" and "Charlies Angeles"). "A script is a year of your life, and there's no guarantee it will become a movie.

"Rawson has always come to me for advice and rarely taken it. He understood the risk but was completely undeterred. That's how somebody gets a career in this business."

Over on his blog, though, August suggests he's happy Thurber ignored him.

"I’ve seen the movie five times, and am ridiculously proud of Mr. Thurber," he wrote.

MYSTERIES CLIP ONLINE
Sunday, January 20, 2008, 8:20 AM ET
Source: Spike TV

For those of you who couldn't make it to the Sundance Film Festival this week to see Mysteries of Pittsburgh premier, Spike TV is hosting online an interview with Rawson Marshall Thurber that features a clip from the film.

And never fear -- while in the past some Sundance films have found themselves abandoned without a home and never to be seen in wide distribution, odds are good that Mysteries will get purchased thanks to the writer's strike. The New York Times on Thursday profiled Groundswell Productions, the house behind Mysteries and two other competitors at the festival.

YIDDISH NOMINATED FOR EDGAR
Sunday, January 20, 2008, 8:20 AM ET
Source: The Houston Chronicle

The Houston Chronicle reports that The Yiddish Policemen's Union has been nomined for the Edgar Award for "Best Novel."

The Edgars recognize outstanding mystery writing fiction. Other nominees in the novel category include Christine Falls by Benjamin Black; Priest by Ken Bruen; Soul Patch by Reed Farrel Coleman; and Down River by John Hart.

For the full list of nominees, head here. Awards are presented May 1.

CHABON: LEAVE BARACK ALONE
Tuesday, January 15, 2008, 11:30 PM ET
Source: The Huffington Post

Michael Chabon came to the defense of Barack Obama in a blog post Tuesday, arguing Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen was trying to scare readers into thinking Obama was anti-semite.

"Barack Obama knows that black people and Jews need to come together to fight for all the important issues and values they share," Chabon wrote in a blog posting at The Huffington Post. "He knows that we need to start talking from the center of our communities, and stop whispering or shouting at the extremes."

In Cohen's column, also published Tuesday, the op-ed writer castigated Obama for not speaking out against an award presented to Louis Farrakhan by a magazine affiliated with the Democratic presidential candidate's church in Chicago. Farrakhan, Cohen says, "epitomizes racism, particularly in the form of anti-Semitism. Over the years, he has compiled an awesome record of offensive statements, even denigrating the Holocaust by falsely attributing it to Jewish cooperation with Hitler."

Chabon criticizes the column, and says Cohen is working to wrongly create fear among readers. "Let's all choose, Jews and African-Americans, to set fear aside, and work for a return to the days, whose memory Cohen's fear-mongering so grievously tarnishes, when we set aside everything that separated us to join together in the service of our common American good," he says.

CHABON DISCUSSES LONE RANGER
Tuesday, January 15, 2008, 11:30 PM ET
Source: NPR

Michael Chabon was featured Monday in a piece about the Lone Ranger on Monday's "All Things Considered" on NPR.

"There's something about the mask and the hat and the horse and the silver bullets and the faithful Indian friend — there's something really powerful there in that character," Chabon says. "There's some reason why the Lone Ranger continues to endure, even though he's far less visible now than he was."

AYELET TACKLES BRITNEY
Sunday, January 13, 2008, 11:30 PM ET
Source: New York Magazine

Ayelet Waldman has a piece in this issue of New York Magazine bashing Britney Spears and other bad mommies.

"Lately, Britney Spears has stepped up as our reigning bogeymama—her rap sheet long and varied and featuring, most recently, a standoff with the police and a stay in the psych ward," Waldman writes. "She’s a Bad Mother; no worse, perhaps, than her own mother, whose publisher wisely shelved plans for her parenting memoir after 16-year-old Jamie Lynn announced that she’d just been jumped into the Bad Mother gang."

THURBER DEFENDS MYSTERY CHANGES
Saturday, January 12, 2008, 10:20 AM ET
Source: The Advocate

Rawson Marshall Thurber, the director behind the up-coming screen adaptation of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, defended changes he made in the story in a new interview with The Advocate.

"My real goal was to make a film that felt like the novel did to me, and I think I’ve done that," he said.

Thurber took significant liberties with the book, eliminating the character of Arthur, making Cleveland bisexual and romantically linked to the main character, Art, and cutting the role of Phlox to that of a minor character. Online, many fans of the book have bashed the changes, and anti-Mysteries MySpace pages are easy to find. But Thurber says he made the changes with Michael Chabon's blessing.

"I knew what I wanted to do, and I told him, 'I’ve got a pretty radical take on it, and if you’re at all interested, let me do a five-or six-page treatment. If you’re interested in that, let’s go do it, and if you’re not, please say so, and I’m a big fan and I can’t wait to read the next thing,'" Thurber said. "I wrote it up and sent if off, and I never thought he would say yes, actually, but then he read it and he sent me an e-mail back saying, 'It’s great -- let’s do it.'"

For more, check out the interview. Mysteries of Pittsburgh premiers at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 20.