Two types of bad taste

First, David Edelstein at Slate. He's sponsoring a contest for films that will help educate Judith Miller during her time in the slammer. As you may recall, Miller is a New York Times reporter who could soon be spending some time in stir for refusing to give up a source. Normally this would get her the undying respect of a liberal like Edelstein, but because she's involved in l'affaire Plame and, worse, mistakenly reported WMD had been found in Iraq (which ended up helping those against the war in the long run, as far as I can see), Edelstein and many readers are lining up to mock a real woman who's about to serve time in a real prison.

Now we can't expect too much from Edelstein. He knows movies, but not much else. He actually believes, for instance, that Plame's husband Joseph Wilson is a truth-teller, and not a proven liar (as anyone who reads, say, the Washington Post knows).

Yet, when he was reminded by a reader this whole thing is in bad taste, his response (I'm not making this up) was that bad taste is irrelevant when people were dying in Iraq every day.

I have a suggestion for his next contest. Since (as I've recently been informed) there's serious malnourishment in Africa, let's have people suggest films, like Big Night and Babette's Feast, that we can send them to show how delectable food can be. It might be in bad taste, but since people are starving to death, there's no reason to worry about that.

Meanwhile, over at Reason's Hit & Run blog, Tim Cavanaugh (scroll down to the bottom--it's from July 1) is thrilled by George Romero's latest, Land Of The Dead. I saw it on opening night with a packed crowd of fanboys--and it died a miserable death. If Cavanaugh wants to argue this is a classic, good luck.

But then he makes the amateur's mistake of claiming it's underperforming because the bigwigs at the studio screwed up. Considering its budget and names, this film opened wide enough and got plenty of coverage. It even got decent (in fact, way too kind) reviews. If it had connected as a moviegoing experience, it would have gone through the roof.

The sad truth that Cavanaugh won't face up to is the audience rejected this film. Horror addicts were drooling, and their cult came out in force, but there was no word-of-mouth to get the crossover crowd. That the film did a belly flop into an empty pool in its second weekend, dropping an awful 74% in a Friday-Sunday comparison, pretty much proves this. That's the sound of an audience shouting NO!

Maybe--though I doubt it--the film will gain stature over time. And since the budget was reasonable, it'll eventually show a profit. But don't whine it didn't get a chance. It was weighed and found wanting.