Notable film and media links--July 16, 2009

---Newest sign of the apocalypse--the Royal Family has just joined Twitter.

---Alicia Silverstone and Alanis Morissette's new weepy road movie mock trailer--My Mother's Red Hat.

---The Elegant Variation interviews Joseph O'Neill, the author of perhaps the best novel of 2008--Netherland.

---For The Guardian, director Steven Soderbergh discusses how he's happy he's not still shooting Che.

---Movieman0283 of The Dancing Image compiles all of the influential film books of his Reading the Movies meme.

---Scott Macauley of Filmmaker Magazine looks carefully at the prospects of making a living as a film journalist:

"It's hard to know what to say to people who are intent on making film journalism their means of employment right now simply because most forms of journalism, particularly niche-content ones, are difficult to make a living at right now! In a time marked by increasing disintermediation in the content industry, the perhaps neurobiological lure of non-print forms of delivery, and expanded content offerings (games, social media, etc.) competing for a reader's finite amount of free time, anyone hoping to make a living by writing about things must figure out new ways of working and getting paid for that work. Like I said, this isn't just the province of niche-content creators. (Here's a list of some two dozen articles dealing with journalism and monetization just from the last three weeks.) But it seems to be hitting many niche-content creators the hardest because their audiences were smaller to begin with and their institutions less able to survive a sustained economic downturn."

---Meanwhile, Pradnya Joshi of NYT explores the ambiguities of bloggers sponsoring products for money:

". . . in many ways, the hypercommercialism of the Web is changing too quickly for consumers and regulators to keep up. Product placements are landing on so-called status updates on Facebook, companies are sponsoring messages on Twitter and bloggers are defining their own parameters of what constitutes independent work versus advertising."

---T.S. of Screen Savour takes on Fritz Lang's classic Metropolis (1927).

---The One-Line Review presents "The 50 Greatest Films," and Culture Snob finds it a bit "ossified" and "ordinary" (although he also made suggestions for the list).

---The Pipeline shows how to get shot by Scott Schuman for the influential Sartorialist.

---Check out Mary Ellen Mark's photographs of movie stars behind the scenes for Vanity Fair.

---Lastly, the Film Doctor' s instant trailer reactions: Under the Mountain looks terrible; An Education juxtaposes a life of scholarship with hedonism in Paris; we should all live like No Impact Man, but that doesn't stop the movie from appearing smug; and Drew Barrymore directs Ellen Page in Whip It.