Come back from where? How the 'Brave is/must be Pixar's comeback' meme plays into the horse-race mentality of pop-culture.

It's no secret that America loves a comeback narrative.  The only thing mass-media (and its audience) loves more than taking celebrities down a peg is watching them theoretically rise up from the ashes.  I'd argue that the media intentionally creates 'great falls' for allegedly important people purely for the purpose of trumpeting their would-be comeback.  We especially see this in the coverage of political elections where a non-stop horse-race mentality keeps candidates who have no plausible shot of victory making imaginary strides so that the inevitable front-runner can make a 'comeback' victory in this-or-that primary.  We see this in an entertainment journalism arena which declared Christina Aguilera's career in dire straights after a single month of crappy occurrences.  It wasn't just "she's having a bad month" but rather "she's hit rock bottom but she's going to have a grand comeback!" which tied into her joining NBC's The Voice.  Point being, a comeback, at least an artistic one, is predicated on a series of professional disappointments and/or a prolonged period of unwilling under-employment.  John Travolta's star-turn in Pulp Fiction and his several years of peak-stardom was a 'comeback'.  Senator Hillary Clinton winning the New Hampshire presidential primary in January 2008 after losing a single primary a week prior in Iowa was not a comeback.  As such, can we please stop referring to Brave as 'Pixar's comeback film' and/or implying that Pixar really needs to knock it out of the park with Brave lest their entire artistic reputation be undone?

The 24 Hour News Cycle of Movie-News part II: Obsessing on the Unknown.

In a continuing feature of sorts on how the 24-hour news cycle hurts the world of film news (part I), we'll be briefly (I hope) discussing the weird phenomenon whereby countless column inches are spent dissecting and analyzing that which is either not-yet known or painfully obvious. Would you have guessed that Warner Bros. wanted a young male heartthrob to play Clark Kent in Zack Snyder's Superman picture? Most of us would have, yet Nikki Finke reported this obvious fact as some kind of shocking new development. I don't mean to pick on Finke (her main sins come in the realm of box office analysis... come back next week), and the real problem is that every other blogger to just repeats the rumor/speculation/lie, complete with their own personal casting list or counter-point commentary ("Why Taylor Lautner shouldn't play Spider-Man!").

The 24 Hour News Cycle of Movie-News part I: Reporting the Rumor as Fact.

For the second time in just under a week, film studios basically revealed that they had duped the entire Internet for a period of several months. The first blow came last Friday, when Fox announced that Ridley Scott's Alien prequel was being dumped and reconfigured into an original project entitled Prometheus. It was revealed that Scott and writer Damon Lindelof had been constructing this original story for at least the last couple months. That means that movie news sites spend the last two months breathlessly speculating about the project that did not exist. But the biggest con was still to come... Did you hear that rumor about Tom Hardy playing Dr. Hugo Strange in the next Batman picture?