This week's Mickey Rourke Award for the crazy man on the comeback trail goes to David Carradine, though in Carradine's case, the emphasis is a lot stronger on the "crazy man" part. Last Wednesday, Carradine was at the American Cinematheque for a screening of the 1976 Hal Ashby film Bound for Glory, in which he played Woody Guthrie. Carradine kept up a running commentary throughout much of the film, then jumped up on stage, guitar at the ready, to participate in a Q & A with film critic Kevin Thomas. They were joined by Carradine'ss co-star Ronny Cox and the movie's legendary, 87-year-old cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, who Thomas spotted in the audience. The movie was showing as part of series of personal favorites hand-picked by Thomas, but as Carradine got wound up, it became clear that he and Cox were just along for the ride.

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Did you hear the one about the film blogger who couldn’t get a wifi connection? Last week, Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells reported the following: “I arrived in Oxford around 5:30 pm and checked into the Oxford Downtown Inn, courtesy of the Oxford Film Festival. And then the wireless issues began. It's now just before 6 am and the issues haven't stopped, and I've decided to cut bait as a result. That's right -- I'm outta here, flying back to NYC. Or maybe I'll drive south a bit and cruise around, find an adventure, something. Any place with decent wifi I call home…I can't do this. I won't do this. This is not 1997, and if a regional film festival is unable to provide easy, high-speed wifi to its journalist guests then no offense but it just shouldn't invite them down in the first place.”

The reaction from other participants in the Oxford Film Festival was swift and to the point. Eric D. Snider’s Blog puts it succinctly: Jeff Wells should be ashamed of himself.

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Over at Defamer, Stu VanAirsdale has received an anonymous tip about graceless behavior in the screening room. The subject: a "well-known but little respected TV critic whose son is also a well-known but little respected TV critic, trash-talking highly respected older critic who was replaced by his son." This, the site and commenters agree, can point in no other direction than Jeffrey Lyons and his spawn Ben, who — along with Ben Mankiewicz — makes up the tag-team that's replaced Roeper & Ebert on "At The Movies." Apparently Lyons senior went on to label Ebert a "pathetic old putz" and was cackling over the fact that no one wants to watch "two geeky guys."

Now, frankly, Roeper's departure from the air is no great loss; he was just a place-holder with guests of varying quality until Ebert could talk again, and who knows when that'll happen. People talk shit about Ebert and his extremely generous standards these days, and the two thumbs up/down system surely did no favors for serious criticism in the public eye. (Anthony Lane once made a sarcastic crack about "the rotation of a chubby thumb through 180 degrees." On the Brazil commentary track, Terry Gilliam more succinctly announced that Siskel and Ebert could go fuck themselves.) But Ebert did a lot of important work in the '70s, championing Herzog as fervently as anyone and generally doing a lot to expand the general public's understanding of film. He gets a lifetime pass. His successors display none of his commitment, fervor or knowledge.

But, for all their graceless, hacky evaluations and banal pronouncements, people seem to have missed Lyons and Mankiewicz's biggest blunder so far: they think 12 million died in the Holocaust.

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As Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood still awaits its full-on nationwide release, the buzz for the film has become practically deafening. It's appeared on a raft of critics' top 10 lists, and has raked in heaps of awards for Anderson, star Daniel Day-Lewis, and the score by Jonny Greenwood. But while critical accolades have a definite appeal to a certain portion of the moviegoing audience, it's going to take more than that for the film to break through to the general populace.

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