He's changin' thar lahfes

Oh, Twitter, bringing people together one child-like missive at a time. So late Christmas night, A/V Club critic Scott Tobias sent out a fairly innocuous tweet, saying “Explaining to relatives why I hate THE HELP precisely as awkward as explaining why I hated THE BLIND SIDE.” (I had a similar experience, but that’s another story). A few hours later, Tobias was met with a response Tweet from Leigh Anne Tuohy, the actual person who Sandra Bullock’s Blind Side character was based on, who apparently sits around Googling “The Blind Side” when she’s not busy running pass-blocking clinics.

@scott_tobias Dont b a hater But if u must then hate cancer, homelessness, war, poverty, child abuse, animal cruelty but a movie. #sadforyou

Ugh. Matt Ufford had a nice piece about “#FirstWorldProblems” people a while back, who are a close cousin to “SHOULDN’T YOU BE MORE CONCERNED ABOUT CANCER?!” people. Yeah, that’s the easy way to get out of criticism, just bring up muscular dystrophy and Darfur. If it were up to these people, Twitter would be 10 million people tweeting “u kno wat i h8? animal cruelty and war!” and another 10 million @ replying “u go gurl!” So, basically, an exchange between P Diddy and his followers.

Tobias responded:

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TorrentFreak recently released their list of the top-ten most downloaded movies of all time:

The list below is based on statistics is gathered from public BitTorrent trackers, dating back to early 2006. As BitTorrent’s usage was only a fraction of what it is today in the years before, we expect the list below to cover all the most downloaded movies on BitTorrent.

Interesting, but not the most surprising list. All of them big-budget blockbusters that did well in theaters, except for poor Kick-Ass, which suffers the indignity of being the seventh most-pirated movie of all time despite getting beat out by Date Night in its second week in theaters. Also, probably my favorite movie on this list (I like pre-pubescent girls in wigs, sue me).

All in all, you can tell this list skews towards the tastes of the tech-savvy, 18-40 year old dudes computer-literate enough to know how to torrent. It’s an interesting comparison with Netflix’s all-time most rented, which, as of last year, were led by Crash (the crappy, white-guilt one, not the awesome Cronenberg movie where James Spader screws a chick’s leg scar). Crash has since been dropped down to number two, by… wait for it… The Blind Side. Oh, Sandra Bullock, is there anything you can’t teach black people to do? White folks sure are generous. You can see that list after the jump.

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I watched the Blind Side over the weekend, and what I learned was that Michael Oher always sucked at football for at least three quarters of a game until his new white mom could trick him into thinking he was protecting his family.  Because his test scores indicated he was in the 98th percentile in “protective instincts,” you see.  It only follows that someone would try to recreate that magic.  And the only obvious choice to bring a similarly heartwarming story to the world of basketball is… Danny Trejo.  Wow, really?  This sounds like a bad joke I would write.

Danny Trejo thinks he has found [the next Blind Side] in Utah Jazz player Paul Millsap and his uncle/sports agent DeAngelo Simmons. Trejo, star of Heat and the upcoming film Machete, has acquired rights to the player and agent. Trejo and his ITN partner Gil Medina are turning the story into Ambition, a film they’ll shoot later this year. Just as Simmons’ own jock dreams were ending, his sister moved back to Louisiana with four sons she needed to keep away from the streets. She asked Simmons to teach them basketball, and when Paul Millsap grew into a 6’8”, 250 pound rebounding machine, Simmons learned to become a sports agent and brokered a four-year, $32 million deal for his power forward nephew. Trejo met Simmons when the latter played a small role in Vengeance, an action film that Trejo starred in and financed. Trejo plans to self-finance Ambition. [Deadline]

Let this be a lesson to you, young athletes: always hire an uncle or cousin to be your business manager.  How else are they going to break into the business without training or experience?  As of yet, Trejo has no plans to star, but… a boy can dream.  Dream of the kind of pep talks Danny Trejo the basketball mentor might provide:

Oye, ju lookeen soft out there, ése!  Eet’s time to start playeen pinche prison rules like I chowed ju!  Ju see that basket, homes?  That basket ees jur heina’s culo now, cabrone.  Ju gonna let some pendejo put sus huevos een jur heina’s culo?  Not even, ése, not even. So get back out there, and pull up your pinche socks, jour legs are chowing a like a maricón. Mira, here, take my shank.

"Very funny, motherf*ckers."

In a shocking turn of events, The Blind Side author Michael Lewis said in a recent interview that Michael Oher, the subject of his book, wasn’t entirely thrilled with his portrayal in the movie as a noble, helpless slum ogre.  From Bloomberg (via Movieline):

Bloomberg: Have you kept up with Oher, the football player at the center of “The Blind Side.”

Lewis: Yes, but very loosely. Michael liked the book, but when the movie came out he was just starting his rookie year, and I think he was hazed constantly in the trenches. So he refused to go see it, he didn’t go to any of the premieres, he didn’t come to the Oscars — he didn’t identify himself with it.

Since the movie came out, the one thing I’ve heard from him is, “It’s not true that I was that idiotic when I started.” They took surprisingly few liberties, but the few they took really bothered him.

“Look, baby, we know you’re good at protecting the quarterback.  Baby, you’re the g*ddamned Albert Einstein of knocking people down.  What our movie presupposes is, maybe that’s because Sandra Bullock told you to pretend he was your new white family?  This is Hollywood, baby, don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of everything.”

(From left: Pete Hammond, Sandra Bullock, Retard Pig…)

If you don’t know who Pete Hammond is, he’s the film critic whose talent for sloppy hyperbole would rival Aunt Sylvia after a few Chardonnays, and who spent the early part of this year calling The Proposal “the year’s best comedy” (an eagle stole her Blackberry lol!).  He disappeared for a while, but now he’s back like a diabetic phoenix to take credit for Sandra Bullock’s Best Actress nomination for Blind Side. From Hollywood Elsewhere:

Here’s how it went down, according to an e-mail he sent around this morning:
“I first saw The Blind Side on the WB lot on October 15th. I called WB the next day and asked them afterwards if they knew what they had, that this was Bullock’s Erin Brockovich, and said she can get an Oscar nomination if they campaign it. They weren’t even planning to do that at this stage.
“I held off writing about it and predicting the Oscar nomination until Nov 4th — the first time I talked it up. [...]
“On November 23rd I wrote about it again after the opening weekend’s boxoffice report and put out a public plea for someone, ANYONE to join me on buzzmeter in predicting Bullock. Again I was still alone.”
“That article was used by Santa Barbara Film Festival chief Roger Durling in convincing Sandra’s reps to commit to a tribute and award at the SBIFF when a Best Actress nomination seemed still like a longshot. He first contacted them after the first article on November 4th. He hadn’t even seen the movie at that point.”

Way to go, Pete.  Because, as we all know, getting a movie star’s publicist to agree to an embarrassing tribute at a minor film festival is job #1 for any professional film critic.  Here’s to you, buddy.  *tries to break champagne bottle over Pete’s fat belly, fails, drinks champagne*