What we’ve been reading over the past week or so.

• Paranormal Activity Will Not Save American Horror
  Paranormal Activity isn’t the beginning of a horror revolution, it’s the first financially positive after-effect from the ‘revolution’ 10 years ago. That’s a long time for a good idea to pay off just once. So studios will continue to play it safe, file this away as a fluke (which it is), make the sequel, and continue on with their lives.
• Best & Worst: Movie Star Websites
  These days, all the chatter online seems to be about social networking – your Twitters, your Facebooks and such. But cinema stars are still maintaining websites hoping to entice fans to follow their work/buy crap with their name or face on it and pimp their latest musings. We decided to trawl the depths of the magical intarwebs to take a look at some of the cream of the crop – and some that are just rotten.
• Why The Hell Was “Christmas Carol” Released Now?!?!
  Doesn’t it make more sense for Disney’s “A Christmas Carol” to be released closer to the more appropriate holiday?
• Mainstream Media attention to new doc COLLAPSE is attention-worthy itself
  What’s incontrovertible is that we’re right now living through the giddiest age of apocalyptic cultural ferment that any of us have ever experienced. I think it’s safe to say that it tops the ones that accompanied the turn of the 20th century, and the advent of World Wars I and II, and the Depression era, and the social and cultural upheavals and meltdowns of the sixties and seventies, and the turn of the 21st century.
• Artistic Childrens Films Are Getting Darker these days
  …where the regressive infantilism of grown-up comedies and action pictures is answered by a grave precocity. A movie like “Where the Wild Things Are” or “Fantastic Mr. Fox” play a kind of reverse dress-up, disguising adult anxieties in the costumes of innocent make-believe and fanciful spectacle. [...] The impulse to protect children from these kinds of stories is understandable. Like adults, they experience plenty of hard feelings in their daily lives and they may want, as we do, to use movies and books as a form of escape. Bright colors, easy lessons and thrilling rides that end safely and predictably on terra firma have their place. But so, surely, do representations of the grimmer, thornier thickets of experience. That’s what art is, and surely our children deserve some of that too. Which includes movies that elicit displeasure and argument along with rapture.
• Michael Haneke Uncut
  Talking shop, theory, and practice with the director of The White Ribbon, Cache, Time of The Wolf, Code Unknown, Funny Games and Benny’s Video.
• Fight Club @ 10
  The secret to the enduring allure of “Fight Club” may be that it is, as Mr. Norton put it, quoting Mr. Fincher, “a serious film made by deeply unserious people.” In other words, a film as willing to take on profound questions as it is to laugh at and contradict itself: what is “Fight Club” if not the most fashionable commercial imaginable for anti-materialism? A movie of big ideas and abundant ambiguities, it can be read and reread in many ways.
• Zhang says ‘Blood Simple’ has shades of [Stephen] Chow
  Zhang said his new film has shades of Chow’s signature nonsensical humor, but doesn’t go as far as the Hong Kong comedian known for “Shaolin Soccer” and “Kung Fu Hustle.” “There are some parts where we go crazy like Stephen Chow, but we don’t go as crazy,” he said..
• Top 10 Cameron Crowe Moments
  Personally I’d put the “Tiny Dancer” scene from “Almost Famous” in my top ten scenes of all time, period. But here is CNN’s picks for best Cameron Crowe scenes.