BilmBlog500

One of the other pieces of news from Borders was that an additional # of stores would be closing besides the 16ish that had been announced and which have been having their clearance sales in recent weeks. Borders spokesman told Publishers Lunch those numbers would not be commented on, publisher sources say another 10-17. If you are a retailer, and you are in a cash bind, the very first and most important person you need to pay is your landlord. Your landlord is the one person in the world who can change your locks. And if the landlord changes the locks, you lose access to all of the assets including inventory and fixtures that might have liquidation or sales value for you. The second person, the electric company, because you need the lights on and the cash registers working. Publishers, employees, all of those people need to get paid after you pay the landlord. If I'm a publisher or possible lendor, a question I might ask is "so how many stores with a lease up from July...

I'm going to follow up yesterday's Borders post mortem with some numbers. For the year ending Jan. 30 2010, Borders had 508 superstores at year-end, with average sales of 4.5M at each of those superstores. Jan 2008, same # of stores, average sales more like $5.6M. B&N thru early May 2010, average store $6M in sales, more like $6.5 three years earlier. So, Borders had a 20% loss in average per store sales over two years, and dropping from being 15% off your average competitor's average store to being 25% off the pace of the competition. We go back far enough, we will find a day when sales Borders vs B&N were near parity for the average superstore. To achieve this, Borders has invested considerable sums in remodels. I have been in some that have gone through each of these three rounds:. 1. 2000/2001, the ones where the diagonal lines were taken out and Kohls-like central "racetrack" aisles added to make the stores more shoppable. Not a big expense, m...

At this point, it's hard to see that Borders isn't on the verge of a bankruptcy filing, the best case scenario would be a Chapter 11 that would reorganize into a much smaller company that might have a go if focusing on stores that actually make money, but even that, I can't be real optimistic because same store sales are dropping so fast that a store which makes money today might not in two years. Though we live in a country that does allow companies to spend lots of time going bankrupt and doing it on multiple occasions, witness the airline industry. So what happened? OK, mid 1980s, Borders is one of the best stores around and starting to spread out in Michigan a little and lend out its inventory system. It's a good system. It lets stock sell down, then reorders. One day you might have 0 copies of The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers on the shelf, the next day they'll get 3 in. So everytime you go to Borders, even if it's once a week, you might see a slightly di...

I was surprised just how much I enjoyed DCU Legacies #8. This one dealt with some crazy things I'd tried to forget, like the aftermath of Superman's death at the hands of Doomsday when the Superman books split up to show 4 different of them doing their thing. Maybe I'd forgotten because we're starting to get into comics from 1994 and 1995 when my post-JABberwocky hiatus from reading comic books began due to time constraints. Even now, I read only a third or a quarter of the # of books I was reading in 1993, so the forthcoming issues of the series will cover a lot of stuff that I've skipped over these past many years. Like the whole Hal Jordan not being Green Lantern thing. After covering the death of Batman (he died then, too, wow!), we get into Parallax, introed from 1994, all new to me. I know Len Wein is doing good scripts, and Jerry Ordway and Dan Jurgens excellent art for this issue, but will this all be more or less interesting as we move forward? Teen T...

Yesterday I spoke about my Next to Normal trip on Sunday. Now to talk about the 2nd part of my theatre day. With the blizzard on hand, the offerings at the TKTS discount booth were more robust for the Sunday evening shows than might be expected, but I stuck to my game plan and got a seat for the play Time Stands Still, in part because I didn't think it fair to ask another musical to compete with my fresh memories of Next to Normal.  Time Stands Still is a drama with a strong pedigree. Playwright Donald Margulies has a half dozen Tony and Drama Desk nominations, I recollect him best for Collected Stories, an All About Eve protege drama set in the publishing world. Director Daniel Sullivan has been directing high gloss dramas for a long time, my first of his I'm Not Rappaport with Cleavon Little (Blazing Saddles, Tony for Pippin) and Taxi's Judd Hirsch some 25 years ago. It had opened in a limited engagement on Broadway earlier in the year, closed, they decided it was so go...

I ventured into Manhattan on a blizzardy day to see some Broadway shows that are closing in the coming weeks. January is always full of closings as shows attempt to cash in on the big Christmas week crowds and then get out of Dodge before the winter doldrums.  I quite liked the number from Next to Normal on the June 2009 Tony Awards show and decided I needed to see, it took only 18 months and a closing notice to get around to do it. In the end, instructive to see in the same week a show that won a Pulitzer Prize and lasted 700 performances with Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson , which lasted maybe 17 weeks. There are reasons.  For one, an emotional component. Next to Normal is about a family trying to deal with a mother's mental illness. She can't let go of the memories of a son who died young, to the extent that she has a hard time dealing with her daughter. The daughter is struggling to have a relationship with a boy she met at school within the context of a crazy mother who isn...

The most recent shows I saw were Mojo, a play from the late 1990s finally getting a full DC production at the Studio's 2nd Stage, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, an unsuccessful transfer from LA's Center Stage/Kirk Douglas and NYC's Public, which closes this weekend. Mojo was an energetic and well-acted production of a play that isn't so hot, you ask me. Some seedy club, some two-bit singer who might be signing with another club, a dead body of one of the club owners. Important unanswered questions hang over the stage. Lime, how will staying in the club overnight and not reporting the body help the current manager to keep the club Why is this two-bit singer important? All ending on a very strange note of drift. Well, it's worlds better than the inert Parlour Song , also written by Jez Butterworth, but still not good. Butterworth also co-wrote with his brother the rather more successful script for the movie Fair Game , and a newer play of his Jerusalem opens on ...

Haven't spoken about theatre much on the blog, other than discussing Pinter a week or so ago.  And have to say, a good play seems much harder to fund than a good book, a good movie, a good comic book.  There was A Life in the Theatre, an old David Mamet play revived as a vehicle for the wonderful Patrick Stewart (sf community knows him best as Captain Picard of STTNG) and TR Knight of Grey's Anatomy who is not familiar to me. Yikes!  What was this doing on Broadway?  The two play an old actor and a younger doing rep theatre in a small way in a backwards place, no surprise that the younger actor will end up overtaking the older. It is very small. The bad theatre jokes -- think props that don't work or flash back to Miss Piggy in Veterinarian's Hospital -- are wan. It's beneath great acting. Its limited Broadway run ended early as audiences steered clear. No surprise there, that some critics gave mixed or even favorable reviews does.  Mamet's newer and better play...

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is out on video this week. Saw it, never reviewed, honestly how much energy does one want to spend on it? Michael Douglas is good, but if he gets an Academy Award nomination this year it should be for the underseen Solitary Man , where he gives one of his very best performances. To be sure, he is surrounded in WSMNS by lots of good acting from the likes of Josh Brolin and Frank Langella and Shia LaBeouf and Susan Sarandon, who's also in Solitary Man. From a dinner scene in the gorgeous interior of Shun Lee West to a fundraiser at the Metropolitan Museum the movie has a genuinely right Wall Street/NYC feel to it. But it doesn't have the same quality of screenplay as the first movie. It's a story about whether a leopard can change its spots, and a tad prosaic and unsurprising in ticking off the beats, some of which require the characters to do things that just seem a little bit off. And so even though it has Wall Street characters doing Wall ...

You know you're in trouble with a DCU Holiday Special when the best story in it is the Jonah Hex Hanukkah story. The problem here is that even within the confines of holiday themes there ought to be more room to maneuver than to decree that every story has to be some sappy attempt at jerking tears from the holiday season. And is it an improvement or not that now we get to have sappy stories for multiple denominations, not just Christmas and not just Hanukkah but the Spectre in a Persian New Year story. The Spectre in a Persian New Year story?? And Anthro in a non-denominational solstice story. Anthro? The weird juxtaposition of holiday sentiment and Jonah Hex worked for me, and the Superman story -- well, Superman lends himself to this kind of stuff and the art was nice. But let's just say this was as quick read. I wasn't sure from a quick scan that Detective Comics Annual #12 would be for me, but I hadn't read a Batman book in so long that I decided to give it a...

Tron: Legacy is... well, it's interesting. Kind of like I'd say the first movie was interesting. There's something about it which endures even though I saw it decades and decades ago and never looked back at it. Certainly the thing of interest here is the look and feel of it. Not terribly original. Borrows from the first film, obviously. But well beyond that. There are lots of things that look like clear references to 2001, like the white room where Jeff Bridges holes up, or that long thing ship of the mind that's a clearly updated version of the Discovery. Other ships wouldn't be out of place subbing for Tie Fighters in a Star Wars movie. However all of the borrowing is presented through a prism that is so clearly Tron that the look of the film is entirely on it's own. It's those glow-in-the-dark lines and the shimmering colors. 2001 has this hardware fixation going, metal as beauty object, Star Wars like a grown up version of a kid playing with his model...

And now, Blake Edwards. I would say Edwards had a career somewhat like Scorcese's. Big ups, big downs, all sorts of things in between. I didn't like Breakfast at Tiffany's but it's enduring. Several mid-range masterpieces. Some outright duds, many of them even. I think his legacy isn't in any one or two films the way Scorcese's would rest on Raging Bull and Goodfellas but rather in the way Edwards defined film comedy for a generation or two with the Pink Panther movies, 10, and Victor/Victoria.  I would say VV is my own favorite because it blends the best elements of Edwards' work.  Take farce. There is a lot of classic farce in the Pink Panther movies. However, the earlier ones are a little too quiet and debonair for someone of my age and certainly younger who grew up in a louder age. My introduction to Edwards was in the Dyan Cannon Pink Panther movie, and I think if I saw that today I wouldn't like it as much as an adult because it is mostly about th...

Forgot to mention Morning Glory. This is certainly a better movie than Burlesque , and pleasant enough way to spend the time. Very good chance will be at second run theatres over Xmas!  Yet I don't know if I enjoyed it as much as Burlesque.  Certainly this is better cast. Harrison Ford can still chew on a line and does plenty of it. Diane Keaton, I wouldn't say she chews, but whatever she does she usually does well. And Rachel McAdams is pleasantly right for her role as a fired TV producer who talks her way to a gig running the distant 4th morning network show and sets out to save it by putting a no-way-do-I-want-to-be-here Ford with an I-don't-need-this Keaton together as anchors. Jeff Goldblum is also on hand as the network exec who gives her the job and isn't so sure of the call. All good in their roles, though Harrison Ford has been directed to sound so gruff in some scenes you'd think he either had a tracheotomy right before going on or throat cancer.  Lots of ...

The King's Speech is certainly one of the leading contenders in the Oscar sweepstakes, and it's a very very good movie. At the same time, it should be recognized for being what it is, which is essentially a kind of high brow sports movie. Rocky for the literati. Underdog with trainer struggling against the odds with help of a trainer to get ready for the big bout. In this case the underdog is named Bertie, which is the family's name for Prince Albert, the Duke of York, the stammerer who is going to become King George VI when his brother Edward abdicates on the eve of WWII, and who can't by any means deliver a rousing speech without sounding like me when I was a teenager in front of a crowd, not unless an uncredentialled Aussie emigre speech therapist named Lionel Logue can cure him.  To be elevated, a movie like this needs good acting, which we have here in spades. Colin Firth shows remarkable range from last year's deserved Oscar nomination for A Single Man . Very ...

This didn't look so good from the coming attraction, and I kind of sat down and said if it wasn't good I would leave. And the odd thing was, I didn't think it was very good, and I couldn't get up out of my chair because there was a certain fascination to watching it unfold. Christina Aguilera plays some hick from Oklahoma or something whom we're shown for a moment or two at the beginning leaving for the big city. She ends up at Club Burlesque, with Cher and Stanley Tucci running the place kind of like you had Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci running the magazine in The Devil Wore Prada, or doing Julia Child. A real estate developer wants to buy the club from Cher and Peter Gallagher. Cher has a mortgage not due she has no hope of paying, but won't sell. There's this bartender played by Cam Gigandet, and Christina Aguilera ends up on his couch, but he's engaged to an actress conveniently doing a play on the East Coast. Can you write this script? You ...

Blue Valentine won a screenplay award in 2006, and the director Derek Cianfrance who also collaborated on the script has been trying with the support of his leads Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams to get the film made for several years of course. It will be released at the end of the month, and I was able to see at the largest screen #7 at Clearview's Chelsea as part of the Variety Screening Series. I'm not its biggest fan. It's one of those back-and-forth in time films showing the rise and fall of a marriage, not the first time this has been done. In his generous review in Variety, Todd McCarthy mentions "it's difficult to pinpoint what went wrong or if there were roads not taken that could have prevented the sorry outcome," and that to me is the problem. It doesn't seem like there's an arc to the movie, the early in time seems a lot to me like the later in time. When we get to the end, suddenly the marriage isn't working any more and I ca...

I don't get Harold Pinter. And I don't get Mike Leigh. With Pinter, I'm not sure there's anything to get. Long long ago I remember sitting through every miserable minute of the film version of Betrayal, and I've never come across anything to make me think I'm missing anything. My most recent experience was with a twin-bill at the Atlantic Theater (playing at Classic Stage Company) of his The Collection & A Kind of Alaska. The Collection is a play about a tryst that may or may not have taken place. The costume design was wonderful. The characters were non-entities, so who really cares if there was an affair, or if that one was cuckolded or if this one was cheating. The only drama comes from the fact that it's Pinter, so that the characters are all speaking in a most stentorian way full of portent and meaning. But there is no meaning. A Kind of Alaska is inspired by the work of Oliver Sachs. Someone wakes up after being out of it for 29 years wit...

Quick Note #1: With I Love You Phillip Morris now opening in the US and playing in select cities, you can find my earlier review from the spring when I saw during its UK release here . Quick Note #2: Have reviewed around 50 movies on Brillig this year, 45 or so current releases. That leaves at least a couple dozen I didn't get to, and if I can I'm going to try and mention all even if briefly by the end of the year. Quick Note #3: I saw The Social Network for a second time a few weeks ago. Just the fact that I decided to see again makes it one of my lead choice favorites for a Best Picture nomination, and perhaps even for the win. That said, while I enjoyed it the second time, I don't see it becoming one of those movies like The Shining or The Muppet Movie, Stepmom or Jerry Maguire, The Empire Strikes Back or Goodfellas, that I might happily see again and again and again. A very good movie, just not going to enter my pantheon. So on Friday I was a somewhat bad boy. I...

Two major agency efforts that reached fruition last week. The first I discussed here , was getting on line with our first e-book publication. The second was hammering out new boilerplate with Macmillan, the German-owned publishing conglomerate that owns Farrar Straus, Tor, St. Martin's, Holt and various other US publishing operations. Historically, Macmillan had kept separate publishing contracts for each of its many imprints, though certain corporate paragraphs were over time implanted into the separate agreements. In Fall 2009, they announced to the world that they had decided to have one contract form for everyone, which was politely attached to the e-mail. I gave thanks that all of our Macmillan authors ( Tobias Buckell and Brandon Sanderson at Tor, Jeri Westerson at St. Martin's Minotaur) were under contracts that had a book or two or four to go, said "tomorrow is another day," filed away the attachment, and was content to let others be the guinea pig. Bec...

Here's a Washington Post article from this Saturday where Attorney General Eric Holder is defending the legality of sting operations that are finding terrorist plots emanating from radicalized Muslims in the United States. It's a difficult question. My client Tobias Buckell mentioned another Washington Post article describing how one informant the FBI was using so upset a lot of the people in a mosque that they called the FBI to report him. You read enough of these stories, and it's very clear that the people the FBI is arresting are radicalized, do have intentions on harming us. And at the same time, a lot of their particular plots might not have advanced if the FBI didn't find and encourage and help them. From the legal definition of entrapment, I don't think the entrapment defense works because the intention is there with or without the FBI. At the same time, I don't know if we're doing ourselves a service by having the FBI informers essentially run ...

Two things not entirely unrelated. I don't spend as much time in bookstores as I did five years ago, but I still spend a good chunk, and am well aware of which chains are carrying which books at which proportion of their stores. I've long thought it would be a good idea to put this information on the website, so that if somebody wants to buy Elizabeth Moon's Heris Serrano they don't go dashing off to the local B&N that is guaranteed not to have, and vice versa doesn't go dashing off to the local Borders for Elizabeth Moon's Serrano Succession, which only B&N stocks. This is finally done, and you can find here , just in time for your last minute holiday shopping. Let us know if you think it's a good idea, please. We'll also check the page view stats over time. But we need to decide if we keep and update the page, maybe snazzy it up a bit, or if eventually it will go the way of the dodo. There are some things on the website that we keep becau...