REPOST: Critical mass: 'Pompeii' doesn't exactly blow the critics away

The Kit Harington starrer is getting mixed reviews about its treatment of gladiator movies. Read the article below to know if Pompeii is worth every film goer’s box office bucks.

Image Source: insidemovies.ew.com

The thing I find most surprising about Pompeii is that there aren’t two rival Pompeii movies. The Paul W.S. Anderson movie has the look and feel of Deep Impact/Armageddon and Volcano/Dante’s Peak (though, believe it or not, Roman Polanski was once attached to direct).

Alas, Pompeii has the field to itself, a big-budget 3-D disaster epic that lands smack in the box-office dead zone of February. It’s just crazy enough to work!

Game of Thrones‘ Kit Harington plays Milo, a Roman slave-turned-gladiator who catches the eye of an upper-class beauty (Emily Browning) who in turn is promised to the corrupt Roman politician (Kiefer Sutherland) who butchered his family. Conflict! Harrington sculpted his body to look the part of a gladiator, but EW’s Owen Gleiberman thinks Russell Crowe’s Maximus from Gladiator isn’t in danger of being surpassed anytime soon, writing, “Harington knows how to handle a broadsword, but mostly he comes off as the British Taylor Kitsch, a glorified fashion model striking Blue Steel poses that smolder, boringly.”

There also happens to be the looming destruction bubbling up from Mount Vesuvius, the Italian volcano that annihilated Pompeii in 79 A.D. The critics are mixed on whether the volcano is the film’s villain or hero. Click below to see what they’re saying about Pompeii before heading to the theaters this weekend.

Owen Gleiberman (Entertainment Weekly) ▼
“The volcano spews an endless shower of fiery asteroids trailed by smoky plumes — an apocalyptic fireworks show that takes down the city. … Bodies get frozen into sculptures of ash that will last forever. It’s supposed to make this love story timeless, but by the end of Pompeii, you’ll be grateful that the movie only lasts 104 minutes.”

Peter Debruge (Variety)
“Taking a page from Titanic, the film invents a rich-girl/poor-boy romance, puts a powerful suitor in their way and then besets their star-crossed love story with CG lava showers, rendered all the more spectacular in stereoscopic 3-D. In short, Pompeii is a blast, at least by guilty-pleasure standards…”

Mick LaSalle (San Francisco Chronicle) ▼
“As for the fact that there’s no reason to care whom the fireballs hit, or who gets covered in lava, or whose house caves, or whose ship blows up – well, that’s unfortunate. Although, if you think of Pompeii as a ride, a conveyance for special effects, and not anything resembling an emotional experience, indifference can almost be a good thing.”

Jordan Mintzer (Hollywood Reporter) ▼
“The lava flows by the ton, as does the cheese, in Pompeii, a kitschy apocalyptic peplum whose visual epiphanies — of which there are definitely a few — cannot outdo a B- (or C- or D-) grade scenario that will have lots of eyes rolling by the time the big stack finally blows.”

Claudia Puig (USA Today)
“Besides Gladiator and Titanic, the film borrows from 300, Troy, Spartacus, Clash of the Titans, and even The Princess Bride. The result is a generic saga with a cast of forgettable one-dimensional characters.”

Gary Goldstein (Los Angeles Times)
“Sure, it’s not the brainiest of outings, but director Paul W.S. Anderson (the man behind four of the Resident Evilfilms) keeps the action apace and the lava a-flowing with workmanlike energy and sufficient visual dazzle.”

Miriam Bale (New York Times)
“Anderson displays his mastery as a director in the sword-fighting scenes. The camera glides and tilts in exact counterpoint to the thrusts of the knives, as if a bloody ballet. These scenes recall the elegance and deftness of great car chases from films like Bullitt.”

Liam Lacey (Toronto Globe and Mail)
“No doubt the audiences in the Coliseum would offer a thumbs-up to the scale of the destruction, though even they might have had some quibbles about the special effects, which, too often, resemble a very large pile of melting crayons.”

Rene Rodriguez (Miami Herald)
“The dialogue is often pleasantly leaden (“I’ve never seen you look at any man the way you looked at that slave!” one of Cassia’s friends says as she ogles the buff Milo), but the sound effects are way cool, and the 3-D is spectacular, with glowing ashes that seem to float off the screen and onto your lap.”

Stephanie Merry (Washington Post) ▼
“Harington’s star is on the rise. … Yet his first starring role doesn’t showcase what he can do from an acting standpoint. Harington transformed his body for the role, but here’s the real disaster: His startlingly defined six-pack abs are the most memorable part of his character.”

Wesley Morris (Grantland) ▼
“Browning often looks like a woman on the brink of an orgasm. It’s as if she’s trying to out-act the volcano. The eruption starts early and lasts most of the movie. (It’s tantric that way.)”

Pompeii
Overall Metacritic rating (1-100): 41
Rotten Tomatoes: 31 percent

Rated: PG-13
Length: 104 minutes
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Starring Kit Harington, Emily Browning, Jared Harris, Carrie-Anne Moss, Adewale Akkinnuoye-Agbaje, Jessica Lucas, Kiefer Sutherland
Distributor: TriStar

Visit this Jamie Squillare blog to read about the latest in Hollywood, media, and entertainment.

REPOST: Charter CEO Tom Rutledge Reveals His Dealmaking Chops

This article from Bloomberg discusses Tom Rutledge’s career in cable business and his $61 billion takeover strategy for Time Warner Cable.

Image Source: www.bloomberg.com

For Tom Rutledge, the man orchestrating a $61 billion takeover battle for Time Warner Cable Inc. (TWC), the role of dealmaker came late in his career.

In his almost four decades in the cable business, Rutledge has been seen as an operational expert, someone who could manage millions of customers while hammering out agreements with TV networks. In late 2011, when he joined Charter Communications Inc. (CHTR), Rutledge set his sights higher. It was then that he hatched a plan to use a series of deals to transform Charter, the fourth-largest cable provider, into something much bigger.

While billionaire cable veteran John Malone is seen as the top proponent of industrywide mergers, Rutledge has been quietly plotting a takeover strategy for more than two years, according to two people familiar with the matter. After teaming up with Malone, Rutledge completed a $1.63 billion purchase of Cablevision Systems Corp. (CVC)’s Optimum West division last July. The “second step” is a Time Warner Cable deal, though he’s weighing other options as well, Rutledge said.

“Optimum West was the first for us,” Rutledge, Charter’s president and chief executive officer, said in an interview this week. “Time Warner Cable is a great asset. Obviously there are other opportunities out there.”

The 60-year-old executive was thrust into the spotlight this week during public sparring between his company and Time Warner Cable, which has rejected Charter’s bid. After Time Warner Cable CEO Rob Marcus called the $132.50-a-share price “a lowball offer,” Charter fired back that the takeover target’s management was ruining the company with a “failed operational strategy.”

Investor Pitch

Rutledge is now taking his case directly to shareholders. Pushing through a deal would mean acquiring a much larger company: Time Warner Cable is the second-biggest U.S. cable provider, with more than twice as many subscribers. And investors are seeking an offer of $140 to $150 a share, according to surveys compiled by Bloomberg.

“We are not going to let Charter steal the company,” Time Warner Cable, based in New York, said in a statement this week.

Rutledge’s merger strategy got a jump-start last year, when Malone’s holding company Liberty Media Corp. agreed to acquire 27 percent of Charter for about $2.6 billion. Malone, who was on an airplane when he came up with the notion of investing in Charter, called Rutledge out of the blue to suggest the idea, according to people with knowledge of the situation, who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t public.

‘Acquisition Machine’

Since then, Malone has become the highest-profile advocate for cable deals, referring to Charter as a potential “acquisition machine.” Still, Rutledge was a driving force in pursuing Time Warner Cable, one of the people said.

While Rutledge publicly stresses that Charter doesn’t need to buy other operators to grow, Time Warner Cable is a very attractive target, he said.

“This acquisition is an opportunity for us to create enormous value for shareholders,” Rutledge said in the interview. “That’s why we want to do it.”

Rutledge has spent almost his entire adult life in the cable business. He got his start at a local cable operator -- American Television & Communications, which was later acquired by Time Warner Cable -- after getting an economics degree at California University in Pennsylvania. Rutledge went on to work for several of the industry’s biggest providers, including the company he’s now trying to acquire.

Triple-Play Pioneer

As chief operating officer of Cablevision, a company he joined in 2002, Rutledge devised a plan to reduce prices for consumers who bought a bundle of services. This idea of packaging video, Internet and phone into a so-called triple play is now an industry standard.

Less well known is the role he played in helping Cablevision acquire Bresnan Communications Co. for $1.37 billion in 2010. He convinced Cablevision that buying Bresnan would be an efficient way to add subscribers, as well as giving it more leverage when negotiating with TV programmers over licensing fees, according to a person familiar with the deal.

Bresnan was eventually renamed Optimum West, which Rutledge then acquired again in last year’s transaction -- this time for Charter.

“While I don’t think of Tom as a deals guy -- just because he hasn’t routinely done transactions throughout his career -- he’s definitely gotten the better part of the ones he’s done,” Craig Moffett, an analyst at MoffettNathanson LLC in New York, said in an interview.

Industry Trends

Rutledge, a hard-nosed operator, also has a clear command of the industry’s direction, Moffett said.

“I’m always struck by how enormously insightful an economist he is when he thinks about the business,” he said.

Rutledge spearheaded the cable business’s push toward adding Wi-Fi hot spots in major cities and updated Cablevision’s hardware and software, allowing the company to roll out new products at a faster pace than peers, according to Shahid Khan, chairman of MediaMorph Inc., a software company that caters to the media industry.

Since joining Stamford, Connecticut-based Charter, Rutledge has introduced a digital version of its cable service, aiming to catch up to rivals. He also has narrowed losses at the formerly bankrupt cable provider and added broadband subscribers.

Occasionally, Rutledge’s vision puts him at odds with other executives. He abruptly left Cablevision in 2011 amid disagreements over the direction of the company, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Cablevision was a shrinking family-run business, and Rutledge wanted to be somewhere that was expanding, the people said. That drive was part of the reason he bought the Bresnan business twice, according to the people.

CEO Job

Rutledge parted ways with Time Warner Cable in 2001 after he was passed over for CEO, a job that went to Glenn Britt. Marcus, 48, took the helm at the beginning of this year following Britt’s retirement.

If Charter is successful with its takeover attempt, Rutledge would run the combined company, according to people familiar with the plan. That would put him in the job he sought more than a decade ago. Marcus, meanwhile, has said he’s willing to step aside if an attractive enough offer emerges. The two men also have a personal connection: Their wives are friends, Marcus said in an interview last month.

In Charter’s conference call with investors this week, Rutledge outlined the operational challenges facing Time Warner Cable, which is losing TV subscribers at a faster rate than its competitors. The prospect of putting Rutledge in the driver’s seat is one of the deal’s selling points, Moffett said.

“There’s no question Tom is the guy investors would love to see returning to Time Warner Cable and managing it with a new level of intensity,” he said. “I don’t think that should be taken in any way as a knock on Rob Marcus. It should be taken as an acknowledgment of the extraordinary success that Tom has had throughout his career.”

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REPOST: California publisher plans to start a new paper

The newspaper industry is far from becoming a dead medium, despite the industry's difficulties owing to the recent economic climate. Christine Haughney of the New York Times writes about one California publisher's goal to publish a new newspaper.

Image source: NYTimes.com

Newspapers may be staggering under the weight of financial pressures and digital competition. But don’t tell that to Aaron Kushner.

Mr. Kushner, who bought The Orange County Register with a group of investors last year, announced that he was expanding into the Los Angeles market with a new daily newspaper focused on hyper-local reporting.

Mr. Kushner said that the new paper, to be called The Los Angeles Register, would rely on the 200 new editorial employees he recently hired and would grow as hiring continued. In a phone interview on Friday, he said his paper would offer a new voice for readers, espousing a more conservative philosophy built around the concept of individual liberties.

“We certainly will be focused on local news and on bringing our very different political perspective to the market,” Mr. Kushner said. “On a fiscal basis, we very much believe in free markets and on the personal liberties side. We believe firmly that people should be able to live their lives.”

His plan could potentially ignite an old-fashioned newspaper war in the nation’s second-largest city, featuring Mr. Kushner’s new entry and the two established papers, The Los Angeles Times and The Los Angeles Daily News.

Since buying The Register, Mr. Kushner has hired 440 new employees, including 200 in the newsroom, and started more than 20 sections, according to a spokesman, Eric Morgan.

In November, Mr. Kushner’s company also bought The Press-Enterprise, of Riverside, Calif., for $27.25 million.

Through his purchases and expansion, Mr. Kushner has continued to express interest in buying The Los Angeles Times, which is part of the Tribune Company portfolio. After Tribune emerged from bankruptcy earlier this year, several potential buyers expressed interest in buying its newspapers. But in July, when Tribune announced it planned to spin off its newspapers into a separate publishing company, some bidders backed away.

Mr. Kushner said on Friday that “our interest in the Tribune papers has not changed.”

Mr. Kushner also has run into some financial bumps and has yet to gain the profits he wanted at The Orange County Register. According to an article that ran in The Register newspaper on Friday, Mr. Kushner told employees at a town-hall meeting that the paper did not meet its revenue expectations for this year, but that he expected revenue to increase in 2014. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, The Orange County Register’s circulation has declined since its purchase.

Alan D. Mutter, a newspaper consultant who writes on a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur, said that Mr. Kushner would benefit from the fact that the Tribune Company is currently devoting fewer resources to The Los Angeles Times.

But he noted that Mr. Kushner was taking a costly risk when factoring in the “paper, ink, trucks, marketing, everything that goes into making a newspaper.”

He added, “It’s going to take a lot of people and a lot of money and a lot of time to break even.”

The Register also has to try to build up its circulation to compete with its new rivals, which have combined circulations of about 700,000. According to the latest data tracked by the Alliance for Audited Media, The Times’s daily circulation is 628,471 while The Daily News’s is 69,583.

As of last March, the daily circulation of The Orange County Register was 356,163.

When asked about potential competition from The Register, Nancy Sullivan, the vice president of communications at The Times, said in an email: “The LA Times’s first and foremost mission is serving Southern California, as we have for 132 years.”

John Paton, chief executive of Digital First, which owns The Los Angeles Daily News, said in an email, “I continue to be amused by Mr. Kushner’s ambitions,” adding, “He will have to create a newspaper that readers and advertisers want more than Tribune’s Los Angeles Times and all of our daily titles combined.”

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REPOST: Can Twitter save TV? (And can TV save Twitter?)

Media convergence can be a funny thing: media formats that were long thought to be antithetical or adversarial may prove to be each other's greatest allies.  Jeff Bercovici of  Forbes looks into the possible alliance between Web giant Twitter and television networks.

Image source: Forbes.com

It’s Emmys night at the Nokia Theatre in Los Angeles, and as showtime approaches, a mosh pit of blue-chip television stars jostles backstage. Conan O’Brien and Robin Williams, Alyson Hannigan and Jim Parsons, Jon Hamm and Sarah Silverman, all spiffed-up and squeezing past each other and a few score of other celebrities in the narrow corridor between the producers’ station and the green room. “This can’t be fire safe,” grumbles Hamm, the Mad Men heartthrob, as he shoulders through the throng.

Maybe not, but a team from Twitter faces a more immediate problem. They spent months negotiating with CBS and Emmy executives for access that resulted in a “Twitter Mirror” stationed just outside the green room entrance, steps from the stage. A tricked-out looking glass with an iPad embedded in its surface, it lets honorees and presenters coming offstage snap and broadcast casual self-portraits — “selfies” — to the 246,000 followers of the @cbs and @primetimeemmys accounts.

It’s supposed to, anyway. With 15 minutes left before the 5 p.m. Pacific start time, a full house of iPhone-toting actors and producers has overloaded the Wifi network. Andrew Adashek, the boyish 36-year-old ex-producer who manages Twitter’s television partnerships, speed-walks through the crowd, trying to find a solution. “Do you know a guy named Kevin? Curly hair, tattoos?” he asks one stagehand, who doesn’t.

Just as it’s looking hopeless, one of Adashek’s lieutenants scrounges a portable wireless hotspot. Bingo. Moments later, the Deschanel sisters — “New Girl” star Zooey and “Bones” star Emily — wander through, fresh from the red carpet. “Hey, let’s take a picture in the Twitter mirror!” Zooey says.

Time check: 4:59 PST.

To its 200 million-plus active users, Twitter is many things: a social network, a short-form messaging service, a news wire, a tool for self-expression — even, some believe, a force for global political change. But the company itself seems far more keen to position itself among its users — and even better, potential users – as a TV companion, an indispensable tool to keep up with, discuss and even influence the outcomes of shows and live events like sporting contests and political debates. This “second screen experience” turns TV into a participatory activity, allowing Twitter users to broadcast wisecracks, critiques and theories in real-time; the networks, in turn, share the behind-the-scenes worlds of writers’ rooms and dressing rooms, 140 characters at a time.

“As we’ve grown, it’s become more and more clear to us that the characteristics that make up Twitter – public, real-time and conversational – make it a perfect complement to television,” says CEO Dick Costolo. “TV has always been social and conversation-driven. It’s just that in the past, the reach of that conversation was limited by the number of people in a room or who you could talk to on the phone or the next day at the watercooler. Broadcasters have come to understand that Twitter is a force multiplier for the media they’ve created.”

And a force multiplier is exactly what Twitter itself needs. While its recent S-1 filing contains the rapid revenue growth analysts were expecting, it appears to be nearing a wall. The average price of an ad has been plummeting, down 46% in the most recent quarter. To offset that, Twitter needs more eyeballs – but in the U.S., where it makes the vast majority of its money, user acquisition has stalled out, with just a 2% gain in the last quarter. Americans now comprise just one-fourth of Twitter’s participants. “People have a popular awareness of Twitter, but they don’t always know how to use it,” says eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson. “It’s a very difficult language to learn for the average user.”

As revenues threaten to plateau, red ink pools. Numerous reports that Twitter was already profitable proved to be off base. Wildly. Net losses, driven by heavy capital expenditures and R&D costs, totaled nearly $70 million in the first half of the year. Facebook, by contrast, was clocking annual profits of $1 billion when it went public in 2012. For money-losing Twitter to sell itself to the public at a $10 billion-plus valuation, as it intends, it needs to sell a new business model. TV is Twitter’s panacea.

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