Variety

In a recent New Yorker essay on the subject of theodicy, James Wood wrote:

Theologians and philosophers talk about 'the problem of evil,' and the hygienic phrase itself bespeaks a certain distance from extreme suffering, the view from a life inside the charmed circle. They mean the classic difficulty of how we justify the existence of suffering and iniquity with belief in a God who created us, who loves us, and who providentially manages the world.

With this philosophical framework in mind, let's look at some of the reviews of Mike Myers' The Love Guru.

"A whole new vocabulary seems to be required. To say that the movie is not funny is merely to affirm the obvious.

Nikki Finke, The Observer's 2007 Media Mensch of the Year, has a bone to pick with Defamer.  read more »

Reed Elsevier, the UK company that owns Publisher's Weekly and Variety, is selling off its magazine division, according to trade site The Bookseller.

The Bookseller reports:

The company's LexisNexis business posted adjusted operating profits of £406m, an increase of 7% on 2006's £380m, while Elsevier posted a 3% increase in adjusted operating profit, from £465m to £477m.

Reed Elsevier's chief executive, Sir Crispin Davis, said: "We have made good progress over the last year. Investment against our online growth and workflow solutions strategy is paying off with good revenue momentum. Together with our cost initiatives, this is driving underlying margin improvement and a strong earnings performance. The decline of the US dollar takes some shine off the earnings performance expressed in sterling and euros, but the strength of the underlying growth is very encouraging with 2007 representing the highest constant currency earnings growth of the last ten years."

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Move over Facebook, there’s a new social networking site in town! Only this one’s geared exclusively towards entertainment professionals. Yesterday, the industry trade pub Dailey Variety unveiled “The Biz” (variety.com/thebiz), which it’s billing as the first social networking Web site for the entertainment business.  read more »

Italy's screenwriters, acting in solidarity with their American counterparts, are threatening to strike, according to Variety...

"Prompted by their overseas WGA colleagues, Italy's screenwriters are rattling sabers and threatening strike action over new media residuals," the magazine reports. "TV scribe Andrea Purgatori, who is the screenwriters' rep within Italian artistic copyright association SIAE is sounding a call to action, lamenting a lack of royalties pertaining to Italian film and TV drama product sold for web and mobile phone use."

Insert your own, aren't-Italians-on-permanent-work-stoppage-anyway? joke here.

In the days leading up to the writers’ strike, Guild members took to blogs to blow off steam about those hard-bitten studio heads—and also, to complain about what they saw as unbalanced coverage in Variety.  read more »