I've been gift-ticketed into a performance of Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner's The History Boys this evening, so I guess I won't be seeing the PBS documentary John Ford/John Wayne: The Filmmaker and the Legend that airs tonight at 9 pm. It'll screen during Cannes, however, and will be included, as previously announced, in the big fat Ford-Wayne DVD box set that Warner Home Video is releasing on 6.6. Here's Brian Lowry's review in Variety.

The fearless Ross Johnson on the parallels (or lack of them) between Hollywood's own accused wiretapper and alleged hit contractor Anthony Pellicano and (a) Pablo Escobar, (b) Charles Bronson (and particularly Bronson's character in Breakout), (c) Sonny Barger, (d) Suge Knight, (e) Alphonse Capone and (f) Shelley Winters.

Congratulations to Kevin Smith and the Clerks II gang for their film having been chosen to show at the Cannes Film Festival as an Official Out-of-Competitioner. It'll show at midnight towards the end of the festival. (Smith's p.r. guy Tony Angellotti has told me that Clerks II will have an earlier-in-the-day press screening for poopheads like myself who hate staying up until 2:30 or 3 a.m.)

The news came down around May 5th (I don't know why the Cannes programmers took so long to come to their decision) and the plan was to hold until...Read More

Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd (Universal, 12.22), a drama about the evolution-devolution of a CIA superspook (Eric Roth's script is based on the life of James Jesus Angleton), has gotten a mixed response from a couple of AICN correspondents. The responses to perfs by Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie are fine, but the film has otehrwise been described (and obviously it's early in the game for December '06 release) as long (around three hours), "boringly filmed" and that it "needs a lot of work." It costars Alec Baldwin, Joe Pesci, Keir Dulleau and De Niro.

The Tom Cruise pile-on is getting merciless. I know he brought all this upon himself, but still...whew. Here are some pals who expect to do business with Cruise down the road -- Paramount honcho Brad Grey, Universal chief Ron Meyer, C/W partner Paula Wagner -- looking to take some of the sting out of that USA Today/Gallup poll that showed Cruise's favorability rating has dropped 23 points since last summer.

We've been culturally "disaster"-ing for the past couple of weeks -- new Poseidon out Friday, old Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno just out on DVD, two 9/11 disaster movies in theatres (one now, the second in August). And nobody ever seems to mention or remember in articles about '70s disaster flicks that only one, Richard Lester's Juggernaut (1974), was truly satisfying. This modestly proportioned British-produced film was ten times the film that The Poseidon Adventure tried to be. The irony is that the producers thought they were paying for just another piece of schlock (or so I read somewhere), but...Read More

The premise of Used Guys is fairly clever, with honest-to-God social observation and metaphor behind it. Set in a matriarchal society in which male clones are bought and sold like used cars...wait a minute, this sounds like The Island. The story revolves around two guys (Ben Stiller, Jim Carrey) who somehow cut themselves loose from the assemby line and try to sort out what being a man has come down to. Emily Mortimer will costar as Stiller's love interest. (Carrey is going stag?) The only cautionary -- okay, disappointing -- note in this 20th Century Fox pic, which stars shooting in June, is...Read More

"Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon is a ruthlessly stripped-down update [of the 1972 original]...a slice of delicious cheese, it's also a brutally efficient machine . Keeping only the original film's immortal setup -- a luxury liner topples over one New Year's Eve -- Petersen sends a ragtag band of outsiders scurrying onward and upward toward the hull. Only this time there's the added incentive that the ship happens to be sinking at an alarming speed, so every second counts. In recent years we've grown accustomed to endless, bloated back-stories and pointless subplots in big-budget movies of this size, so it's downright jarring when a rogue...Read More

Objective: relying on a tried-and-true tone of smirky pseudo- sophistication, inject a note of contemporary cultural resonance into the selling of a forthcoming cable broadcast of 34 year-old disaster film. Solution: Link to a movie (and more particularly the public persona of a certain movie star) that is not only here-and-now but, in a manner of speaking, somewhere between gasping for breath and sinking beneath the waves. Watch this AMC promo spot for a Thursday night (5.11) airing and you'll see what I mean.

Funny, but the most visually arresting aspects of Poseidon in IMAX are the early dialogue-exposition scenes. They're the most fully lighted and therefore the most detailed and pleasing to the eye. I have never seen blue eyes that look more liquid Technicolor than Josh Lucas 's -- they're so vivid in the IMAX print they almost look like some kind of CG visual effect.

Once the upside-down, swimming-around stuff begins the light levels go down and there's less to feast on because it's all water and shadows and source lighting and flashlight beams. It's startling how brisk...Read More

"Interesting to read about Scientologists buying tickets in bulk for Mission: Impossible III. I spoke to a theater manager in Three Rivers, Michigan -- the kind of town where something like M:I:3 should be doing solid business -- and he said he and his staff couldn't believe how poorly the film did last weekend. 'I don't know where they made that 48 million,' he said, 'because we never had more than 30 or so people at any one show.' He said the movie made 'maybe' $3000 for the weekend. Although everyone he talked to who saw it enjoyed it, he had also...Read More

Being a fan of director Roger Michel and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, who last collaborated on The Mother (2003), I'm quite interested in seeing their latest, Venus. It costars Peter O'Toole (who's said to give an elegant and spirited performance in it), Leslie Phillips, Richard Griffiths, Vanessa Redgrave and Jodie Whittaker . Miramax has the U.S. distrib rights for the London-based drama, which is being described as "a wry, affectionate coming of very-old-age story." (It's partly about active libidos among the over-70 set.) Venus is being test-screened in Manhattan Thursday night but I'm going to have trouble making that one, so I wrote...Read More

The strangest news of the day is that of all people, F.X. Feeney, easily one of the most brightest and most insightful film critics of our time (as well as a top-grade screenwriter and all-around human being), has provided feature-length audio commentary on the just-out DVD of The Towering Inferno. I love many aspects of this film (I'm especially fond of Steve McQueen's performance as "the fireman," as well as the scene when Jennifer Jones falls to her death) but it's odd for a guy of Feeney's depth and cinematic compassion to be doing this. Why is he talking on a...Read More

The view on the street -- my temporary street in Brooklyn, I mean, where men and women of proletariat substance hang out and shoot the shit -- is that David Blaine is a man of honor and astounding bravery, even though he technically failed in his breath-holding stunt yesterday. Blaine is said to be upset that he let his audience down; he didn't.

A piece by Jacques Steinberg in the N.Y. Times about the mostly subtle alterations that have been made to The Sopranos for its upcoming basic cable run on A&E. But who in their right mind would prefer to watch this classic series on A& E rather than simply rent or buy past seasons on DVD and watch them at will? I don't get it.

"The miniature work" in Ronald Neame and Irwin Allen's The Poseidon Adventure (1972) "as the ship is overturned by a 50-foot tidal wave is magnificent," says N.Y. Times columnist Dave Kehr in his review of the just-released double-disc DVD. Magnificent isn't the word for the footage of a slow-mo, Nixon-era bullshit "wave" as it engulfs a an obviously modest-sized ocean liner that was about 21 feet long in actuality. (I wonder if Kehr believes that footage of this rowboat-sized craft puttering along the surface of a studio tank during the opening credits is magnificent also? If you don't believe me,...Read More

There's a significant comment in this Indiewire piece about Polly Cohen's stepping into Mark Gill's recently-vacated job as president of Warner Independent. It comes from WB production chief Jeff Robinov when he says that "the unit will pursue genre films, which it hasn't released in the past." Does Robinov mean genre films by way of Dimension or lionsgate or Screen Gems, which is to say schlock fantasy-horror with teenagers getting eaten or stabbed or chain-sawed to death? I don't think Robinov means smarty-pants genre films...I think he means he wants Warner Independent to make some money by pandering to the repressed...Read More

I don't feel good about copying anything from WENN, but Audrey Tautou's (alleged) comments about her playing opposite Tom Hanks in The DaVinci Code were precisely what I was thinking when I first heard of her casting. The piece says she was on holiday in Mexico when she was first contacted by director Ron Howard to play the part of Sophie, and that she "refused to go to LA and screen test opposite Hanks, as she felt too young to play the part." But Howard "was determined to have her in the film. WENN quotes Tatou as saying, "I didn't refuse to...Read More

With today's hurried theatrical-to-DVD transitions, it's interesting to consider a situation that may affect Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette, which will open in France and Belgium on 5.24.06 -- 15 days from now -- but not until 10.13 in the U.S. It's entirely possible, you see, that the film will be out on DVD in France before it opens in the States. (I don't know that this will happen for sure, but DVD releases usually occur within four to five months of a theatrical debut.) The historical drama-with-New Order-music-on-the-soundtrack will open in England on 9.8.06.

Oh, and...Read More

Nikki Finke has filed a follow-up about Mark Ebner's report about Scientologists allegedly buying up Mission: Impossible III tickets by the barrel-load at Hollywood's Arclight theatre. Finke has written that "an ArcLight employee did confirm to me just now that 'people have been buying dozens of tickets at a time' for M:I:3, which is definitely an extraordinary sales pattern for the movie theater (or any theater, for that matter)." Ebner's first report came from "a reliable industry dude" who eyewitnessed the massive Scientology ticket purchase at the ArcLight last Friday. He wasn't able to get an Arclight spokesperson to comment one...Read More

The last time Barry Levinson and Robin Williams made something good together, it was Good Morning, Vietnam back in '87. The last truly high-grade film Levinson directed was Wag the Dog in '97. The last really good film Williams acted in was Insomnia in '01. I mention all this because I've been told by a friend that a new Levinson-Williams collaboration has turned out quite well. It's called Man of the Year, a political comedy-drama produced by Morgan Creek. It's about the host of a late-night political talk show (Williams) who decides to run for President, and wins, and then has to sort...Read More

"I read the World Trade Center script a few weeks ago, and Andrea Berloff's comment -- 'it's a boy down the well saga with no politics' -- is pretty much the entire film in a nutshell. The guys (Nic Cage, Michael Pena) are buried under the rubble by the end of the first act, and remain there for over an hour of the film. In many ways, the structure is like that of Apollo 13, cutting away from the guys and their fear of losing their families and wives, and then to wives on the outside, freaking out and not getting any answers....Read More

I didn't mean to misunderstand, but Josh Lucas is not going to get his head cut off (and some FX prosthetics guy down the road is not going to have to create a severed Lucas head) for a movie about murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl , which will be based on the Bernard-Henri Levy book "Who Killed Daniel Pearl?" Lucas will play a guy investigating Pearl's killing. Kip Williams (The Door in the Floor) will direct for Beacon Pictures next fall, working from a script by Peter Landesman that uses a fictionalized Pearl character. (Beacon reportedly doesn't want to...Read More

"Let's be honest: There is no theatrical movie business any more, and there hasn't been for a long time. Except for the biggest Hollywood movies and sleeper independent films, theatrical is a loss leader. You get reviews and publicity and generally lose money or break even if you're lucky. It's all about DVDs and the other so-called ancillaries." -- publicist, public speaker and streetcorner provocateur Reid Rosefelt responding to Robert Cort's "Straight to DVD" op-ed piece in Saturday's New York Times.

Let no one suggest that the new website for Paramount's World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9) isn't extremely tasteful. You gotta figure that Oliver Stone's movie will be in this groove also. That piano music on the site's soundtrack seems to be promising this. And God help us. Allah, make it not so. "Delicacy" is not what anyone wants from Stone. You go to a Stone film, you're looking for probing, provocation and the jangling of nerves. I'm still flinching over screenwriter Andrea Berloff 's comment that the film -- the story of a couple of firemen, John McLoughlin (Nicolas...Read More

A DaVinci dispatch from a journalist friend called "Deep Pope," to wit: "I have a pet theory that The Da Vinci Code may be in some kind of trouble. At the very least, Sony seems to be worried about it.

The studio is shopping around an inordinate number of advance interviews for the film, it seems to me. Paul Bettany, Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina and Akiva Goldsman are being offered to journalists for interviews, but the catch is, you can't see the movie yet. So you have to ask questions based on knowledge of the book and...Read More

I spoke to Heath Ledger after Universal's post-Golden Globes party at the Beverly Hilton last January, and he said that the plan -- his and Michelle Williams', that is -- was to take a year off (huddle-down time with the baby) and possibly move to Amsterdam. Now comes news that Ledger will replace Colin Farrell in the lead role in Todd Haynes' I'm Not There , a movie about Bob Dylan that'll start filming this summer . There goes Ledger's vacation, right? Six actors will play Dylan in the film -- Ledger, Richard Gere and Christian Bale are but three of...

The trade reviews of Poseidon -- Brian Lowry's in Variety and Sheri Linden's in the Hollywood Reporter -- both complain about the lack of character shading and/or revelation and the generally streamlined approach. They don't seem to get it. It's a good thing that Poseidon cuts to the chase and is over in 100 minutes or so. Nobody wants emotionalism or depth of character slowing things down or gumming things up.

I was sufficiently engaged, aroused, riveted by Poseidon when I saw it on a modest-sized screen on the Warner Bros. lot a while back, so I'm figuring (okay, hoping) I'll be extra-charged when I see on an IMAX screen on Tuesday, 5.9, at the AMC Leows Lincoln Square.

"The more troubling conclusion" regarding the disappointing Mission: Impossible II weekend earnings "could well be the much-discussed cultural shift in the way we see movies," says MCN box-office analyst Len Klady. "The 20% theatrical decline may find itself shifting into ancillary revenue arenas, and if that's the case what can be expected for upcoming summer releases and future production plans by the majors?"

Fair warning: I'm coming out with a piece a week from today about the Death System in disaster films (i.e., who dies in these movies, and why?), with a particular focus on a possible reason for two significant departures-expirations in Poseidon. The article will run Sunday evening, 5.14. I'm saying this now because it'll involve a spoiler (two of them, actually), and I don't want to hear any complaints.

"And pity the poor actors [in Poseidon] who suffered from vertigo as they had to navigate their way across a narrow plank high above the ground with flames licking their heels. 'It was not for the faint of heart,' [a production associate] says. Instead of having nets below, the actors were attached from above to safety cables, which won't be visible on film." -- from Robert Welkos's L.A. Times piece (5.7) on the making of Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon , which opens Friday (5.12). "Pity the poor actors"? It's apparently time once again to repeat something that Werner Herzog has been saying for...Read More

In what is being called "the latest Vatican broadside" upon Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code (Columbia, 5.19), Cardinal Francis Arinze, a Nigerian who was apparently a leading candidate for pope last year, has said in a new documentary that Christians should sue the filmmakers and Columbia Pictures as well as Dan Brown and the original "DaVinci Code" book publisher because these parties offend...zzzzz. The anti-DaVinci doc, due to be screened in Rome just before the 5.16 debut of The DaVinci Code in Cannes and elsewhere, is called The Da Vinci Code -- A Masterful Deception. Howard has said...Read More

I just got into Manhattan a couple of hours ago, and I went right to the local bodega and picked up a copy of Sunday's New York Post, and I saw this on the lower-left portion of the front page...

And one of the first messages I got after turning on the computer was from a friend of the film at Paramount, who reminded me that (a) M:I:3 is "Cruise's third highest domestic opening, and that (b) the "worldwide opening weekend number is $118 million, which is up from MI2."

Hollywood Interrupted's Mark Ebner is, of course, a well-known Scientology "watcher" (i.e., a euphemism for an ardent disliker), which means he probably hears from others who feel as he does, which in itself casts doubt upon this second-hand observation, posted today: "Hollywood, Interrupted just received an eyewitness report from a moviegoer who, while purchasing tickets for a Mission: Imposssible II show on Friday, May 5th, saw a woman in front of him in the ticket line purchase 900 tickets at a cost of just shy of $9,000 -- all for the Church of Scientology. An ArcLight guest services rep would...Read More

Hollywood Elsewhere is taking the Fung-Wah bus from Boston to New York today, so nothing will post between now and 7 pm or 8 pm eastern.

Upside of Taps

From Risky Business to Mission: Impossible III, Tom Cruise had a good 23 year run...and now it's over.

Not his career, obviously, or the power that comes from being a big star with a huge fan base -- Cruise is still fairly secure in these realms. But something fundamental changed this weekend with the somewhat disappointing earnings of Mission: Impossible III. What's over and finished now is Cruise's rep as a nearly invincible box-office powerhouse.

He may rebound in a year or two -- not financially, but perhaps with a really good film...Read More

I can't read another article about Ron Howard, Tom Hanks and the gang shooting The DaVinci Code at the Louvre. I'm sorry, but they have to stop. I think we were all under the impression that the critique pieces about Hanks' too long-and-too-greasy-hair (not my opinion...theirs) signified the end of the Louvre visitation articles, but no. Once my eyes locked onto the latest, written by Alan Riding for N.Y. Times, the lids began to droop. This may have been the 437th time I have looked at the photo of Hanks and costar Audrey Tatou come upon the naked bald guy lying...Read More

French director Laurent Cantet (Going South, Time Out) has always "pursued the same obsession , which is that his characters are looking for their place in society and unable to find it," says Cantet's producer Caroline Benjo, speaking on the phone to N.Y. Times writer Leslie Camhi . "At the same time, he's always questioning the horror of an economic system in which, if you don't perform, whether it's financially, sexually or affectively, you're seen as subhuman ."

Team Elsewhere has finally gotten a "comments" thing installed, so from here on in it's no-holds-barred and everyone gets heard in terms of any comments/arguments/exceptions and fuckyou-isms you may want to post following each and every posting I put up. We are truly in a new Hollywood Elsewhere era as of this evening, and I have only the great Jon Rahoi to thank for installing this and making it work. He's one of the best creative human beings I've ever known in my life.

From the computer of Harry Knowles on the post- Superman Returns negative-review-of-a-script-but-not-a-movie shakedown: "Nobody from the studio contacted me in regards to damage control. When the negative alleged film review came out, I decided to contact the filmmakers to see if it was a real review, and it wasn't. Many of the scenes this person claimed to be watching were in fact never filmed and cut out of the script months before shooting. I also felt it wasn't an honest criticism because I had had the discussion with a film professional from a non-WB tied company that is not profiting from this...Read More

Quite obviously, N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman bonded -- related to, got down with, felt a certain emotional comfort with -- with Little Miss Sunshine costar Toni Collette, who may have gotten over being ignored by the Academy for a Best Actress nomination for In Her Shoes but I sure as shit haven't. The most significant part of Waxman's piece, for me, is her reference to Collette having e-mailed a follow-up response to a question. Remember the days in which interviews were conducted solely in person, over a period of two or three meetings and sometimes even over drinks?

A tribute-to-Paul Giamatti piece by N.Y. Times guy David Carr, formerly known as "the Bagger."

I can't say who saw Superman Returns recently, but somebody I know did, and he says that the first pedal-to-the-metal action sequence (involving an attack on a sports stadium) doesn't happen for a good 45 minutes or so into the film, and when it finally happened he said to himself, "Jeez...took you guys long enough."

In other words, director-writer Bryan Singer waits too long and does too much "set-up, set-up, set-up"...in this guy's opinion. The analogy, obviously, is with King Kong, which waited a very long 70 minutes to kick into gear. (To be absolutely candid,...Read More

Hold on...I may have jumped the gun in projecting that Mission: Impossible III's weekend tally will top $50 million. I'm being reminded that sequels (almost) always have their peak day on Friday, and that the more likely weekend figure will therefore be around $46 million. The most telling comparison is with John Woo's Mission: Impossible II, which opened six years ago to $70,816,215 over a long Memorial Day weekend, and $57 million for the Friday-to-Sunday period. And that's without factoring in a 15% inflation in movie-ticket prices since then. So the comparison is not even $57 vs. $46 million , which...Read More

How disappointing is the $51 or $52 or $53 million that Mission: Impossible III is likely to earn on this, its opening weekend? I'm not sure that "disappointment" is the right pocket-drop word since the expectation from the get-go was that the Cruise negatives might keep it from soaring into the stratosphere, but that it would probably do respectable blockbuster business. Yesterday M:I:3 did $17 million on 4054 screens (although I've read there are something like 8000 prints out there). $51 or $52 million is about what Van Helsing, a repellent piece of shit, did on its opening weekend in '04. (If...Read More

Referring to Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim 's An Inconvenient Truth , MCN's David Poland has snidely dismissed Paramount Classics' "breathlessly ambitious hopes" for this global-warming doc "that no one really wants to see." Apart from the fact that Truth is extremely well-made and in no way boring or uninvolving, you'd think that even Poland might be swayed by the fact that however interested or uninterested people might be in wanting to see this film, it represents the best chance of rallying people everywere to wake up and grasp that we're all standing on the precipice of...I'm sorry if this sounds a...Read More

Here is a sprawling, heartfelt, quite beautiful speech that was given by Tilda Swinton in front of a full house at the Kabuki Theatre on 4.29.06, during the just-wrapped San Francisco International Film Festival. My favorite passage: "Filmmaking has always been an act of faith. Not only in the sense in which one needs a certain amount of conviction to get the films made in the first place...

"But also in the more amorphous sense in which one takes one's faith to the cinema as to the confessional: the last resort of the determined inarticulate, the unmediated,...Read More

Rico Kassman wrote from Berlin response to my question about whether there are actual electricity-generating windmill fields outside of Berlin with the possibility of sheep grazing nearby, as is depicted in Mission: Impossible III . "M:I:3 was not shot in Berlin but there are fields of windmill generators outside the city," he said, "and I do not exclude the possibility that there could be sheep grazing around them. However, sheep are not very typical over here. You would more likely see cows."

C.K., a friend of Jean-Francois Allaire (a.k.a. "Deadpool"), wrote last night and said, in part, "I'm not convinced that AICN review of Superman Returns you linked to is legit. Moriarty reviewed the script and panned it, that was then mysteriously pulled and this 'review' was put up the next day. It all smells like Knowles is trying damage control so as not to fracture whatever relationship he has with WB/Singer." I don't assume C.K. is correct in his assumption, but his words indicate that the anti-Superman Returns contingent is looking to smell and identify a rat on this one, no matter...Read More

A spoiler-loaded Ain't It Cool review of Superman Reborn, and if you're expecting a pan, forget it. Fanboy buzz has been running against this film for a long time, and this guy (who says he saw it "two months ago in South L.A. but didn't bother to write a review") is looking to turn the tide and set everyone straight. It runs two and half hours and is "a very good film," he writes. It's "big and fun but it has a heart." And yet "this is not Batman Begins , despite what you might [have been] be led to believe...the overall...Read More

And the bitchslapping of Tom Cruise continues, here in a Josh Rottenberg EW piece about whether he deserves the really big fees, given his growing negatives.

Hollywood Elsewhere's shoot-from-the-hip evaluations regarding current superstar salaries (figures based on Christina Spines'EW piece): (1) Tom Hanks, $25 million -- deserves it unless he makes something like The Green Mile, in which case he needs to be disciplined; (2) Will Smith, $25 million -- deserves it (grunt, snort) but negatives for the black Matthew McConaughey are very high among formula-averse persons like myself; (3) Brad Pitt, $20 million -- deserves it only if his overseas earnings stay at Troy levels; (4) Will Ferrell, $20 million -- deserves it if he's in a blue-collar comedy like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky...Read More

A day-early (5.4) summation by Hollywood Wiretap's Stephen Saito of Christina Spines' Entertainment Weekly piece about super-sized star salaries being re-considered and re-calculated. Will Ferrell is worth $20 million? When he did his out-of-the-shadows walk-on in The Wedding Crashers last summer, I could feel the audience deflate...seriously. I could almost hear them groan.

Hollywood Wiretap's Tom Tapp on the real reason(s) why Warner Independent Pictures honcho Mark Gill was let go. In a nutshell: a mandate within Warner bros. to cut costs and use other people's money. This didn't square with Gill's wanting to nurture and produce his own projects with Warner production chief Jeff Robinov wanting to put the emphasis on acquiring films.

"I went to see M:I:3 [Thursday] night at the local AMC 20 plex, expecting at least a sizeable crowd. I pulled up to the theatre and there wasn't a single person at the box-office window . I thought that they had cancelled the screening, or that maybe I had misread the time in the paper. Nope. I walked up, bought a ticket and walked inside. There wasn't a single person in line at the concession stand either.

And this was the only theatre in town showing the midnight showing of M:I:3. I walked into the theatre and...Read More

I've read the copy about guys in the L.A. gay community expecting Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (Warner Bros., 6.30) to play, in a certain sense, "for them", and that it may be even more gay-accentuated than Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin. But I don't see the faintest stirrings of gay attitude in the trailer. Brandon Routh, who plays Superman/Clark Kent, is extremely good looking -- okay, cute -- but he could be Chris Reeve's son or nephew, and his manner and line readings seem to be almost modelled on Reeve's in the original 1978 Richard Donner Superman film. I've watched the...Read More

I've read and heard about several possible dramatic features about Jimi Henrix over the years, and they've all been shot down over rights issues, which is a euphemism for the fact that Experience Hendrix, the company run by Hendrix's sister Janie Hendrix, are very conservative-minded and very nickle-and-dimey in their thinking. The latest no-go is a biopic of some sort that Dragonslayer Films' John Hillman wanted to make. He thought he'd secured likeness rights to Hendrix, along with music and live footage, but nope. Nobody is going to make a Jimi Hendrix feature as long as those Seattle small-timers have anything to...Read More

Here's a good, concise, and yet very thorough piece by Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson about the selling of Al Gore, Laurie David, Lawrence Bender and David Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth.

Davis Guggenhiem (left, horn-rimmed glasses) and Al Gore plugging An Inconvenient Truth at last January's Sundance Film Festival. (mpRm publicist Michael Lawson stands at far right)

I mentioned this earlier, but it would obviously be more synergistic if the Paramount Classics website had a strongly visual, easy-to-spot link to An Inconvenient Truth's home page, which is the same www.climatecrisis.net site that has been there all along (and which is plugged in the film).

You'd never know it by looking at the boring-blah photos for X-Men: The Last Stand on Rotten Tomatoes, but something kinda bad...well, "bad" is a relative term, so let's say "bad" in an engineering sense...happens to the Golden Gate bridge in this film.

Here's a promotional video about David Fincher and his Zodiac editor Angus Wall using Apple's Final Cut Pro...a good piece. The Paramount release (11.10) was shot with HD Viper cameras (i.e., the same used for Michael Mann's Collateral and Miami Vice). Nothing mu8ch about the film, although it shows stills of costar Brian Cox wearing his long, silvery Melvin Belli wig. It also shows that Fincher's team have created complex digital cityscapes to portray San Francisco at it was in the late '60s, when the Zodiac killings were (mostly) happening.

"I went to see Mission: Impossible III at one of the sneaks last night (i.e., Thursday, 5.4). I enjoyed it very much, and think it's the best of the three films. And yet last night there were maybe 20 other people in the theatre besides my party of five. The theatre I went to see it in is a 10-plex that is opening the film today on five of their screens. They were apparently prepared to show the film on all five screens at 10 pm to accomodate crowds, but the need didn't materialize. I think it’s gonna do well this weekend (I...Read More

Mission: Impossible III "is almost a video nerd's spoof of a whole genre of loud, cold, exhaustingly extreme thrill-ride films , Cruisified into extravagant pulp," writes the San Diego Union-Tribune's David Elliott. That's a pretty vivid sentence, but this one is even better: "[It's] about as much fun as somebody dipping into your brain with a motorized ice cream scooper."

"I have to echo what you and others had said about Cruise being damaged goods, especially when my girlfriend declared 'no interest whatsoever in seeing another Tom Cruise movie,' including ones where things explode and the early word is strong. Do you think it's a gender thing? Are guys more forgiving of a star's very public 'private' life as long as they deliver the goods on screen, while women can't shake the fact that the guy they're supposed to be cheering for on screen is something of a nutter in real life?" -- Brad Abraham

MSNBC's Eric Lundegaard is calling Mission: Impossible III a "fun movie, the best of the series," in part because "it gets rid of that awful, floppy Hong Kong hipster haircut Ethan Hunt sported in the [John Woo] film." If you read his article, you should know in advance that a fairly significant M:I:3 plot spoiler is contained within.

And yet Lundergaard has written it and it's out there...whaddaya gonna do? Kids in Mumbai and Fairbanks and Panama City are mulling it over as we speak. SPOILER ALERT: What is Lundergaard's Big Spill? A traitor-mole...Read More

"It would be a stretch to say that Tom Cruise needs a hit..what this guy needs is an intervention," writes N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in her review of Mission: impossible III. "[He needs] someone who can help the star once known as Tom Terrific return to the glory days, when the only things most of us really knew about him came from the boilerplate continually recycled in glossy magazines, sealing him in a bubble of blandness and mystery. In those days, we didn't know that inside the world's biggest movie draw lurked a reckless couch-jumper and heartless amateur pharmacologist . [You]...Read More

Brandimensions, a firm that tries to eyeball movie sentiments of the 25 to 49 year-old demo by examining internet commentary and chat rooms, is saying that the early summer's big four -- X-Men 3: The Last Stand , Mission: Impossible III, The Da Vinci Code and Poseidon -- are benefitting from good buzz and are will almost certainly be gretted with vigorous ticket sales. This is...oh, I'd say somewhere between 50% and 75% accurate prediction, but why quibble over fractions? If NRG tracking is wrong and Wolfgang Petersen's Posedion makes out despite all the dire predctions, fine. I'll be glad to see...

The decision to screen Ron Howard's The DaVinci Code at the Cannes Film Festival's Debussy theatre at 8:30 pm on Tuesday, 5.16 -- the night before the festival's de facto launch on Wednesday morning -- is, one presumes, in line with Columbia's decision to simultaneously screen it to the world's film critics at more or less the same time. This means...what? That Opie's Dae will screen for New York critics in the mid-afternoon of Tuesday the 16th, and for L.A. critics sometime in the late morning of the same day?

Readers who live in Berlin who plan to see Mission: Impossible III this weekend are urgently requested to write in after they've seen it and tell me if there's a massive installation of windmill generators just outside the city (you know, like the one just outside Palm Springs) and, if there is such an area near Berlin, whether sheep have been known to graze nearby. And if both of these milieus are in fact "real", can you send JPEGs?

Wednesday night's (5.206) tracking figures were released today, and the news is again not good for Poseidon, which opens 8 days from now: 77% general awareness, 30% definite interest and 3% first choice. I'm sorry to be the bearer (especially regarding a film I had a really good time with), but the 3% figure basically means it's as good as dead. Mission: Impossible III (opening tomorrow) has a 98% general awareness, 43% definite interest and 13% first choice. That's fairly good, but not stratospheric. The DaVinci Code (opening 5.19) has a 95% general awareness, 60% definite interest and 29% first choice. Brett Ratner's...Read More

"I don't know if this is going to happen in other countries, but Mission: Impossible III opened in France yesterday (Wednesday, 5.3) and compared to the first Mission films the numbers were alarming: 120,000 admissions in Paris for M:I:3 vs. 244,000 for the DePalma on opening day, and 338,000 for the John Woo. Was the weather too bright and shiny in Paris yesterday, or is a tired-of-Cruise effect starting to kick in?" -- Mathieu Carratier , journalist, Paris, France

And now I have to blow things off again in order to see my son Jett run in a track meet in Wellesley, Massachucetts. I was just getting my groove back, but sometimes there's more to life -- my life, I mean -- than pounding out stories and items. Okay, okay...I'll jump in again this evening.

Myself and a few other online know-it-alls -- Defamer's Mark Lisanti, MCN's David Poland, Tom O'Neill, MSN's Gregory Ellwood, Oscar Watch's Sasha Stone -- share predictions with L.A.Times writer Deborah Netburn about the summer films most likely to be the biggest hit, the biggest flop and the biggest sleeper. My calls (in that order): The DaVinci Code, Poseidon and Snakes on a Plane.

One of the reasons I wasn't able to put very much up yesterday (Wednesday, 5.3) was that I was doing an early pre-Cannes interview with Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (21 Grams, Amores perros) out at Studio City Radford, where he and his team are working on the final sound mix before delivering a finished print to the Cannes Film Festival, where it will screen on or about 5.23.06.

Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu on Wednesday, 5.3, 1:15 pm, outside mixing studio in Sherman Oaks

A tightly sprung, hauntingly composed drama on the page (I've read Guillermo Ariagga's...Read More

Another reason I was behind the grind on Wednesday is that I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off as part of my preparation for flying last night to Boston. My Jet Blue flight left Burbank around 8:50 pm. I got into Kennedy around 5 ayem, took a shuttle flight to Boston's Logan airport and MTA'ed out to Brookline around 7:45 am. I worked a bit, piddled around and then crashed on the couch for three hours.

Aspinwall near Harvard Ave. in Brookline -- Thursday, 5.4.06, 12:25 pm.

When I woke up the...Read More

It's taken him years, but George Lucas has finally capitulated to the middle-aged Star Wars purists (i.e., fans who were tweeners or teeners in May 1977, when the installment later known as A New Hope first opened) who hated the "Greedo shoots first" revision and some of the other add-ons.

"Going somewhere, Solo?"

On 9.12.06, the original theatrical versions of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi will be released as part of a new DVD package that will also include the 2004 digitally remastered versions. Only an insulated...Read More

I've called around for some backstory on why Warner Independent chief Mark Gill has been relieved of his duties....zip. All we know for sure is that March of the Penguins weren't enough to make things right. David Poland says that WIP's business model amounts to "fiscal folly." Variety says it's because Gill's style "was said to clash with that of Warner production prexy Jeff Robinov, [who] said in a statement that Gill "has done a very good job of establishing Warner Independent." The inference (it's always what's left unsaid that tells the true tale) seems to be that Robinov doesn't think Gill has...Read More

A brilliant move on the part of the ad guys who put together the new Casino Royale trailer: they start it off in black and white, thus signifying this 007 flick won't be following the usual pattern. And yet the snippets of high-octane action and sex scenes that follow suggest that it will be, more or less, the same old thing...so who knows? Daniel Craig's James Bond, described by Judi Dench in the trailer a "a blunt instrument," seems like the most Sean Connery -like of all the Bonds because he has within him (and particularly in his boxer's face and buff...Read More

If this Screen Daily review is indicative of general critical reaction, poor Ed Burns has struck out again as a director-writer with his latest film, The Groomsmen. Apparently a kind of I Vitteloni-ish, stag-party psychological meltdown drama, it costars Burns, John Leguizamo, Britanny Murphy, Jay Mohr, Matthew Lillard and
Donal Logue. Burns' continuing failure to re-generate or improve upon the dramatic gravity in his debut film, 1995's The Brothers McMullen, has become a cliche, as these final two lines from reviewer Dan Fainaru suggests: "A decade or so ago [Burns] was regarded as a possible suburban answer to Woody Allen, albeit...Read More

As I did in my review, Variety's Todd McCarthy has remarked how under-utilized Phillip Seymour Hoffman is as the big baddie in Mission: Impossible III. "Hoffman's involvement hasn't been fully exploited [as] this picture denies Hoffman a chance to fully express his character's personality, to show a little nuance, a mentality behind the evil, some humor or self-awareness behind the malevolence, or to toy with Ethan beyond the simple threat...if you have an actor like Hoffman on board, you'd think it would behoove the writers to cook up at least one big scene to let the man loose to really do his...Read More

I guess there must be a lot of Southland Tales to tell because, as the official Cannes Film Festival website proclaims, Richard Kelly 's apocalyptic drama-supplemented-with-music-by-Mobey runs two hours and 40 minutes. That in itself implies sweep, longing, ambition. Ron Howard's The DaVinci Code, which is showing out of competition at the beachside festival, runs eight minutes shorter, or 152 minutes.

Merissa Marr's Wall Street Journal piece about how Tom Cruise has lost his footing with women fans (and what his people are doing to tryin and get some of it back) echoes what the Toronto Star's Peter Howell told me a while back, which is that women went cold on Cruise last summer, which was perhaps due more to his attack on Brooke Shields over post-partum depression issues. "At that moment, he moved from the realm of acceptable eccentricity to something scary and cruel," comments Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center, in Marr's piece. "It's easier to forgive his joking...Read More

Stephen Colbert's Bush-lacerating address before the recent White House Correspondents' Association dinner -- an extremely dry riff on the power and persistence of denial -- is worth a looksee.

Thanks for the supportive, encouraging comments about the newly designed main page, which is simultaneously a default home page as well as a kind of parallel-universe home page, since "Elsewhere Classic" -- or the good old Hollywood Elsewhere -- is alive and kicking and just a click away. The next move is to create a click-thru "comments" template that would link to each item. In fact, I'm trying to figure how to set this up right now.

The biggest flop of the summer? I liked Poseidon and all, but financial prospects for this Warner Bros. release (5.12) are not good. It cost $160 million to make. To be regarded as a seriously performing hit, a movie of this sort needs to bring in $35 or $40 million on opening weekend. Right now, 10 days from opening day, tracking indicates perhaps a $15 million opening weekend at best. Having decided against a nationwide sneak last weekend, Warner Bros. is now trying to jack up interest with big ad buys. A 90-second trailer ran last night on NBC's...Read More

The latest NRG numbers on The DaVinci Code are huge -- 94% general awareness, 58% definite interest and 25% first choice. Ron Howard's film (and I have to say that David Poland's nickname for this film -- Opie's Dae -- is inspired) may be the biggest film of the summer because it seems to have the broadest advance interest among the four quadrants. It doesn't appear to be as big with under-25s as, say, Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest or Brett Ratner's X-Men: The Last Stand but still...

This morning marks the launch of what I'm calling "Elsewhere Now", which is the new default version of Hollywood Elsewhere. From here on, the front page of the column will be a series of items all running the same length, most of them WIRED-type quickies (which can be read in their entirety on the main page or, if they're longer than 105 words, will require a jump) with a thrice-weekly feature story thrown in with a little clapboard icon signifying this. For those of you who hate change in any form, this isn't as big a shake-up as it might seem. If you...Read More

I for one (and I know I'm not the only one) thoroughly respect Universal honcho Ron Meyer's decision in late December 2004 to drive out to a prison in Taft, California, in order to visit wiretapper Anthony Pellicano, who was incarcerated there. Nobody loves you when you're down and out, and you can double or triple that if you're behind bars. So in my view guys who visit you in the slammer (especially during the Chistmas holidays) are good hombres . Obviously Meyer's visits implies this or that, but let's take a second and acknowledge what loyalty is all about .