Know where you’ll find a considerable lack of integrity, dignity, etiquette, and a work ethic? At Hollywood press events. Call me old-fashioned (or just smart), but when a journalist covers an event, they should probably have prepared some inquires to ask the people either going up to the podium and/or walking the red gauntlet (carpet); that are prepared to answer the obvious and obscure. Or at the very least, know who the bloody hell they are! I believe that’s called doing your job – or a good job. Recently, I attended a major press junket & red-carpeted event for the DVD release of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part…

Trust the critic with the blood-shot eyes. You know…the ones who stare at movie screens for countless hours a week. Not the ones who may have partaken in Harold & Kumar related activities. Although some could do both if they have the stamina. Starting now, is when a critic/movie reviewer’s mettle is put to the test. Award season is upon us and that means the twenty-something critic associations – with an array of members (print, online, radio, TV) – are about to get an eye-full from studios via a number of parcel handlers. It’s the time of year where we (reviewers) begin our morning with answering a knock on the…

Title: Tabloid Director: Errol Morris Featuring: Joyce McKinney, Jackson Shaw, Peter Tory, Troy Williams, Kent Gavin There are true stories that make good movies and then true stories that are so rife with implausibility that they make terrible movies, and in Tabloid, masterful, Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris has taken the latter and made an incredibly entertaining nonfiction film with all the wily narrative surprise of a tawdry B-movie run amok. A jaw-dropping, wonderfully bonkers look back at one of the stranger gossip-rag human interest tales of the 1970s, Tabloid is a streamlined treat that offers up a crafty, academic case-study overview of both romantic obsession and journalistic overreach, all without sacrificing for a moment any of…

Watch the latest promo trailer from the MTV’s new series “The Paper” featuring Dan Surgan. Plot: A look at how students with an interest in journalism and how they prepare their high school newspaper.