The whole brouhaha about the on-line leak of an unfinished copy of Wolverine is continuing to mess with minds and inspire bloviation in both the real world and the Internet community, and now it's started denting careers. In the wake of Fox News entertainment blogger Roger Friedman's posting a "review" of the version of the movie that appeared online, News Corp, which is the parent company of both Fox News and 20th Century Fox (which is releasing the movie), has announced that Friedman has been "terminated" as an employee. In his review, which appeared last Thursday (and which included a testimonial to how fast and easily he'd been able to download the contraband entertainment), Friedman wrote that "I am, in fact, amazed about how great Wolverine turned out. It exceeds expectations at every turn." 20th Century Fox was quick to release a statement indicating that they couldn't have cared less whether he'd liked it or not: "We've just been made aware that Roger Friedman, a freelance columnist who writes Fox 411 on Foxnews.com -- an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox -- watched on the Internet and reviewed a stolen and unfinished version of X-Men Organs: Wolverine. This behavior is reprehensible and we condemn this act categorically -- whether the review is good or bad." (Please note: the full title of the movie is X-Men Origins: Wolverine. That "X-Men Organs" is, for once, not our typo: that's how it appeared in the press release as it was reprinted in Variety. We didn't have the heart to fix it because it seems like a pretty appropriate title anyway.) As Variety pointed out, "Calling Foxnews.com an entirely separate company from 20th Century Fox was an interesting choice of words, given that they're sibling companies."

Friedman seems to have fallen victim to one of the perils of being a cog in a modern multi-media conglomerate, where everyone is connected somehow but nobody is sending out hourly memos to make sure that everyone has the synergy strategy straight.

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As you’ve probably heard by now, an early rough cut of Fox’s big tentpole movie Wolverine leaked onto the intertubes. “In a case of piracy that some analysts called unprecedented, untold thousands of people watched a version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine online Wednesday, a full month before its scheduled theater release,” The New York Times reported. According to the New York Daily News, many top film sites took a stand, refusing to review the leaked version of the movie. “‘You're doing yourself a disservice if you see the film this way,’ said Jeremy ‘Mr. Beaks’ Smith, West Coast editor for Ain't It Cool News.’[The fans that download it] are going to make their judgment on what they see, and that's not how the director ever intended for the movie to be screened.’”

A CNN report on this story, however, has drawn some unwanted attention to a worthy but lesser-known movie site.

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In the last couple of days, we've seen a lot of memorial tributes to Charlton Heston (starting with our own Paul Clark's fine obituary for the Screengrab), but so far, our favorite may be this short animated personal essay by Korey Coleman of Spill.com, which deftly balances its appreciation of Heston's accomplishments as a movie star with the most honest, sanest reaction yet expressed to his impassionaed public espousal of his late-life politics: "Even if you didn't agree with him, you were like...damn!" It's convincingly loving and funny as hell, too. I imagine Heston grimly nodding in approval.

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Newspapers have been shedding personnel at an alarming rate in recent months, and those of us who earn our beer money writing about movies are no exception. As the Hollywood Reporter notes in a piece about small independent films being overlooked by major newspapers, “Critics have recently been laid off, bought out of their contracts or left and were not replaced at the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, New York Newsday and more than 15 papers around the country.”

This presents a problem for you, the film consumer. Where to go for a diverse array of informed opinion on the motion pictures of the day? Well, once you’ve read all the latest news and reviews at the Screengrab, you might want to click on over to YouTube, where the time-honored Siskel & Ebert format lives on in two very different web series.

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