"The movie industry I’ve known for the past 30 years... is reconstituting itself in my mind this week like pieces of a broken mirror being glued back in place..."

"... the cracks now forever visible," writes Dana Stevens (at Slate), who's been writing about movies for something like a decade, yet claims she "truly didn't" know "any of the more sordid Weinstein rumors." (Did she know any of the less sordid rumors? She does "guiltily question" whether she should have picked up some clues and could have dug into them.)

In this metaphorical reglued broken mirror in her mind, Stevens sees:

Gwyneth Paltrow holding her Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, standing beaming next to the man whose hotel suite she had to escape from a few years earlier after he invited her to the bedroom for a massage.... Or Mira Sorvino getting her Oscar for Mighty Aphrodite and then mysteriously—or perhaps not so mysteriously anymore—fading from the screen. Or Rosanna Arquette never going on to the career she deserved....

But the linked column doesn't go where I would take it. When I saw the headline at Slate — "The Harvey Weinstein Scandal Is Changing How I Look at the Movies" — I thought it going to say what I've been saying: Because movies are shot through with human exploitation, we should withhold our patronage. These big expensive projects create immense power that is used to grind up young women, and we should not want to expose our mind to this material. If you need stories about human beings, read. A writer of books works alone (mostly) and uses words to create images of beautiful women and other human beings who do and say interesting, meaningful things. No actors needed.

But Stevens has no plan to redirect her consumption of stories. Well, her job is movie critic, so she can't just say no, can she?

"Boohoo, I Bonked an Illiterate Nazi."

Dana Stevens retitles "The Reader" in her comments on the Oscar nominations.

On "Slumdog Millionaire":

Slumdog Millionaire... seems positioned to Hoover up every award in sight by virtue of being the cute, inoffensive crowd pleaser that no one hates (me included—I walked out with a warm glow that only gradually congealed into faint annoyance). Slumdog, and I mean this kindly, is the grandma movie in the lineup, and a lot of Academy members vote the grandma ticket.

This is a movie that begins with a graphic torture scene and contains a plunge into a shit pool and various gruesome maimings and murders. This is what passes for feelgood these days somehow.

Pixies we're sick of.

Dana Stevens trashes Natalie Portman's Golden Globe acceptance speech:

At the extreme unprofessional end of the spectrum last night was Natalie Portman, whose slip-of-a-girl adorableness has reached such thermonuclear levels that she all but ascended the stage in a cloud of pixie dust when she took the Best Supporting Actress award for Closer. Portman seemed overjoyed by her surprise win (and why shouldn't she be, going up against Meryl Streep, Laura Linney, Cate Blanchett, and Virginia Madsen?), but her complete inability to string together two sentences was off-putting. Sure, she's only 23, but the woman has been in show business for over a decade—couldn't she have prepared some remarks, however unlikely it was that she'd beat out the likes of Streep (whose character in The Manchurian Candidate could have crunched Portman like a piece of ice)?

Oh, let me just pile on by reminding people that Natalie Portman went to Harvard. Either Harvard has some explaining to do, Portman has suffered some catastrophic mental decline, or Portman is playing dumb.

"Real Time."

I hope you got the chance to see this week's "Real Time," the Bill Maher show on HBO. Not only did Andrew Sullivan passionately revile Noam Chomsky, but former Senator Alan Simpson went all Zell Miller on Bill Maher. And why didn't the "Real Time" producers edit out Sullivan very conspicuously and embarrassingly scratching himself? (It happens during the closing credits sequence.) I can only conclude that they deliberately decided to humiliate him!

UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has an extended recount of the show. He makes fun of Susan Sarandon, who really was awful.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Slate's Dana Stevens can't say enough about Sullivan's scratching himself. Sullivan is duly irked. Stevens manages to completely miss what Simpson and Sullivan were arguing with Maher about.