That people are even bringing this topic up and exploring it with a straight face is ridiculous. I'm repeating myself, but remember that 1978 SNL skit about Klaus Kent in Germany? Said it all.

N.Y. Times contributor Stephen Farber on the difficulty of getting Hollywood distributors to wake up to older moviegoers, and the resulting struggles that have occupied the makers of Boynton Beach Club Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont and Ladies in Lavender. The best quote is from Richard Zanuck, producer of the hugely suiccessful older-folks flm Driving Miss Daisy. "After the movie succeeded,"Zanuck tells Farber, "one executive told me that Driving Miss Daisy was a 'nonrecurring phenomenon.' Millions of people went to the theater to see it. Why is that nonrecurring?"

"In several interviews, sounding variously weary, wounded and either self-deprecating or defensive", Oliver Stone recently told N.Y. Times reporter David Halbfinger that "his days of deliberate provocation were behind him." As Stone simply puts it, "I stopped...I stopped."

World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9), which Stone has directed, is "not a political film. That's the mantra they handed me. Why can't I stay on message for once in a while? Why do I have to take detours all the time?" Halbfinger brings up Paul Haggis's adapation of Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies...Read More

Bilge Ebiri has read Michael Bamberger's "The Man Who Heard Voices", which everyone knows as the M. Night Shyamalan book in which the famed director bashes Disney (i.e., production prexy Nina Jacobson in particular) for not loving his Lady in the Water script enough. "I don't understand why the critical world seems so eager to pounce on a guy who's actually taking some artistic risks at a point in his career when he could coast pretty easily," Ebiri says. "Lady isn't opening for three weeks, and here's Slate 's Kim Masters...Read More

Has the fate of Superman Returns been decided already? Or are the judges still evaluating the boxing match of emotion and opinion that's happening in the ring as we speak? There's a lot of love out there, a lot of passion...but the naysayers keep nipping away. I can't quite tell what's happening, but it feels iffy.

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Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson credits Fox 2000 president Elizabeth Gabler for helping to steer The Devil Wears Prada away from the usual-usual, away from being "over the top or silly" (as screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna puts it), away from the turf of a typical "broad romantic comedy, where the plucky young heroine not only lands the guy in the end, but gets back at her wicked, evil boss." And amen to that. I mean, at least Prada went in a slightly more urbane and grown-up directon.

That qualifying statement I threw in with those tracking figures that ran yesterday (i.e., that they only reflect the impact of theatrical trailers, and that the numbers might uptick once TV advertising kicks in) wasn't enough, I'm being told. One, statistical analysis has shown that people focus on super blockbusters. By extension, numbers for movies that follow are naturally suppressed so films like You, Me and Dupree or Clerks 2 or Lady in the Water aren't going to register that heavily with here-and-now behemoths like Pirates 2 and Superman Returns...Read More

In her story about a theoretical economic revival that could happen if Hollywood invests big-time in 3D features, London Times reporter Dalya Alberge writes that "the latest 3-D technology boasts an unsurpassed clarity, making audiences feel that they are in the picture." That's blather. 3D is more developed these days than it was in the '50s, but I've never seen 3D footage that wasn't marred by some glitch aspect...Read More

TMZ.com reported exclusively yesterday that Angeline Jolie's brother James Haven was the unwitting source of those Brangelina-Shiloh baby shower pics that were stolen. Reading about this made me feel better about my own absent-mindedness because at least I can say, "I've never done anything as dumb as what Lurch did."

Haven took pictures of his sister, Brad Pitt...Read More

Superman Returns did about $11 million on Thursday (6.29).

Whether or not this rumor about Johnny Depp joining I Am Legend turns out to be true, I've never been able to muster a shard of interest in this upcoming Warner Bros. sci-fier, which will shot in September with Will Smith toplining. The basic rundown -- the last non-toxic guy in L.A. following a biological war has to fight off hordes of nocturnal mutants -- indicates another bleak-ass, the-world-has-gone-to-shit zombie movie with this or that variation. The fact that Legend is being directed by Constantine's Francis Lawrence ony makes it sound grimmer. I started to read Read More

So Keith Richards has definitely agreed to do a walk-on in the third Pirates movie...break out the Dom Perignon. This completes the circle in that Johnny Depp has always said Richards was his inspiration in portraying Cpt. Jack Sparrow. Richards will almost certainly play Captain Jack's dad or eccentric uncle...a mentor of some kind.

The trailer for David Leaf and John Scheinfeld 's The U.S. vs. John Lennon (Lionsgate, 9.06).

Speaking of which, I wonder when Jarett Schaeffer's Chapter 27, a drama about the activities of Lennon murderer Mark David Chapman just before the 12.8.80 shooting. No distributor attached -- the IMDB says it's in post. Leto looks correctly creepy with his bulked-up weight and dyed Chapman hair.

A moment of mourning for Fabiane Bielinsky, the 47 year-old Argentine director of Nine Queens and The Aura, who died today in Sao Paolo, reportedly while working on a TV commercial. We were friendly acquaintances. We first met in Toronto in September 2000 during a Nine Queens interview, and we kept in touch from time to time, exchanging information on this and that. When I travelled to Buenos Aires in early '05 Bielinsky recommended a good steak restaurant in Old Town, and it turned out to be superb. I called screewnriter Guillermo Ariagga (Babel, ...Read More

Early tracking numbers on Miami Vice and Snakes on a Plane won't be surfacing for a while, but some of the mid-July attractions are going to make exhibitors "moan and moan loud," I was told earlier today. Things could always bump up once the TV ads for the following films kick in (current figures are basically about the impact of theatrical trailers), but right now July isn't looking that great aside from Pirates 2 business. Columbia's Little Man ...Read More

Most descriptions of gallery art sound like pretentious bullshit, but this is funny besides: "The screenplay is never an end in itself; rather it is a vehicle for further creative exploration. By making the screenplay, the object and the end product of the artwork, screenwriter Tom Benedek (Cocoon) has corrected the internal contradiction inherent to the process.

"Tom's artwork stars the screenplay, and that within it lives a movie, is just one aspect of the whole. By 'shooting the script' what he is really doing is liberating the word...Read More

Slate's Kim Masters is also saying that the Los Angeles Times "left out the punch line" in its story about M. Night Shyamalan's book that tears into Disney production chief Nina Jacobson for failing to applaud and support his Lady in the Water screenplay, which he later took over to Warner Bros. "The buzz on the movie -- about an apartment-building superintendent who finds a sea nymph in a swimming pool -- is not good...Read More

It's hard to understand what it was about about Dawn C. Chmielewski's Snakes on a Plane article that that Calendar editors at the L.A. Times thought was fresh in any way, shape or form. Her article is a total regurgitation of facts and observations that other journalists have been writing about the grass-roots marketing of Snakes since last March. It's like someone said, "Guys, we need to run a Snakes marketing piece that's aimed at the 60-and-older crowd that hasn't been keeping up."

What...another story about Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way hitting the gas on a Timothy Leary biopic? (Playwright Craig Lucas and Leary archivist Michael Horowitz have been hired to write a script.) As I've been noting all along, Leo's been half-heartedly stirring the Leary pot for the last few years and nothing's happened.

A trustworthy source told me a few months ago that "there's not a lot of focus" at Appian Way. "Leo is all over the map...he wants to work with Marty on this and that...[Appian Way] doesn't exactly have a center-of-gravity thing going on...Read More

"Superman Returns was supposed to be the sure thing. But considering the expense of making the picture, it has to do huge numbers just to come out okay. And it needs to do more than come out okay. An event film like Superman is supposed to make up for the other movies that fail. "If what you can say at the end of it all is, 'We broke even,' that's awful," says a top executive at another studio. "It's not why you mount this type of movie. They're ...Read More

Here's Marketwatch columnist Jon Friedman 's interview with L.A. Weekly columnist-blogger Nikki Finke, which ran yesterday (6.28). I don't know Nikki but I've dealt with her from time to time (yeesh), and it didn't surprise me to read that she's lost it over a quote from Gawker co-editor Jesse Oxfeld that Friedman included in his piece. Oxfeld said that Finke is "at least a bit crazy...Read More

I heard from Southland Tales director Richard Kelly, his friend-producer Sean McKittrick and another producer, Persistent Entertainment's Matthew Rhodes, earlier today about Sony having acquired Tales for theatrical and home video distribution. No one's saying which theatrical distrib branch -- Columbia, Screen Gems, Sony Classics -- will put it out there, but it would be really weird if it was Screen Gems. The first piece of news I learned is that Tales...Read More

The Big Empty

For a brief period in the early '80s I was seriously flirting with an idea of launching a glossy culture magazine called Nothing. Of course, a series of snide, lighthearted riffs on what was then an emerging new current -- a notion that glib irony and an increasing absence of sincerity or "meaning" in the arts had virused into a kind of existential fast-food that everyone was consuming -- was doomed to fail. It was too uptown, too dry.

But if Nothing had succeeded and was still publishing today (and I were still the editor), ...Read More

The content obviously isn't news, but the brevity and simplicity of this e-mail, received this morning at 8:50 am, is striking: "As of Friday, June 30th, the DreamWorks Pictures New York and Los Angeles publicity offices will be closing. Please direct any press inquiries about future DreamWorks Pictures releases to Paramount Pictures Publicity at ([phone number]."

I've been told that MCN's estimate on Superman Returns numbers -- between $3 million and $4 million late Tuesday night and just under $10 million on Wednesday -- is wrong. I'm told SR took in a bit more on Tuesday (between $4 and $5 million), and that yesterday's take was around $14.7 million for a so-far total of just under $20 million.

Warner Bros. will probably report a figure of just over $20 million, which obviously sounds flusher. (Since I wrote this earlier today, Variety's Ben Fritz went with a WB-supplied figure of $21 million...Read More

Slate asked a bunch of filmmakers to name the one film they've watched the most. Their special teddy-bear comfort film. I gotta hand it to Jake Kasdan for having the balls to admit that his teddy-bear film is Ghostbusters. I can't decide on just one, but the list starts with Paths of Glory, closely followed by Lolita, Dr. Strangelove ...you get the drift. Early Stanley Kubrick soothes like valium.

Douglas McGrath's Infamous, the "other" Truman Capote movie that Warner Independent is releasing on 10.13, is going to open the 63rd Venice International Film Festival on 8.31. But it'll have to play Toronto too...right? It costars Toby Jones (Truman Capote), Sandra Bullock (Harper Lee), Daniel Craig (Perry Smith...really?), Lee Pace (Dick Hickock), Peter Bogdanovich, Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, Gwyneth Paltrow, Isabella Rossellini, Juliet Stevenson and Sigourney Weaver.

"The World Cup probably isn't even on your radar, but on July 7th, two days before the final, Miramax is opening Once In A Lifetime , an incredibly entertaining documentary about the astonishing rise and fall of the New York Cosmos soccer team in the 1970s and '80s. Founded on a whim by Time-Warner chairman Steve Ross and the Ertegun brothers, the Cosmos, for a too-brief period, boasted the talents of Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto...Read More

Good God...of course, of course! Rachel McAdams should have played Lois Lane in Superman Returns. Maybe Bryan Singer offered her the part and she passed or something got in the way. Given the reaction to Kate Bosworth so far, one imagines that Singer is probably wishing deep down he'd somehow gotten McAdams. Nothing on Google about this. Was she ever approached? She's the friggin' "it" girl. How could Singer not have wanted her?

The '06 Toronto Film Festival, which kicks off two and a half months from now, is going to be a kind of old-home week for anyone who went to Cannes. Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu's widely-praised Babel will be screened there...great. Ditto Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne, Ken Loach's Palme d'Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Andrea Arnold 's Red Road and Aki Kaurismaki's Lights in the Dusk. Hey...what about giving Richard Kelly another shot with a new cut of Southland Tales? And what about showing Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette...Read More

Sincere regrets over the death of Marine Staff Sergeant Raymond Plouhar, who was featured in a sequence in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 as he and another Marine went around Flint, Michigan, trying to recruit local youths. Plouhar, 30, was killed by a roadside bombing on Monday "while conducting combat operations in Iraq's Anbar province", the Defense Department said Tuesday. HE's condolences to Plouhar's family and friends. I'm sorry to report that as of 4:42 L.A. time, Michael Moore's site...

Sorry...bunnies not funny. Blah, blah, blah...I got as far as the third paragraph. And you can't read this unless you have a Wall Street Journal subscription.

Every online go-getter has been publishing that nude Britney Spears photo that will adorn the August issue of Harper's Bazaar. I'm hours behind the pack (blame Superman Returns and James Ellroy) but no harm in following suit.

I'm guessing that sometime tomorrow morning an e-mail from an attorney for the magazine will arrive telling me to take it down or else...but maybe not. Remember when Spears was hot and thin? She's obviously pregnant now, but during her recovery period from the last baby she was a sea lion.

Ellroy's De-Solve

I should have asked hard-boiled crime writer James Ellroy ("L.A. Confidential," "My Dark Places") the obvious question during his L.A. Film Festival appearance on Monday night at the Italian Cultural Center -- what is his view of alleged wiretapper and hard-guy Anthony Pellicano, and particularly Pellicano's declaration that he'll never rat out his clients?

Knowing Ellroy as I do (i.e., only slightly), he probably would have called Pellicano a punk and a poseur, but I won't know for sure until the next time.

"Isn't it odd that Superman is here to save the world, but the things that end up threatening the world are elements he brought with him to earth? Isn't it strange that a guy who could, perhaps, save the world, spends eight hours a day sitting around in an office where everyone is obsessed with celebrating him, and then a few hours performing a few random acts of rescue instead of addressing the world's fundamental problems?" -- excerpted from a response to the "Superman Again" feature, written by Looking Closer's Jeffrey Overstreet

A very curious decision has been made by the people at Taschen, at the request of Miami Vice director Michael Mann , to delay the release of what that big Taschen book about Mann's career until sometime in the fall, instead of releasing it concurrent with Miami Vice's 7.28 opening, which is what the plan apparently was a few weeks ago.

What could Mann's motive possibly be? Does he want the Taschen book coming out at the same time as the Miami Vice...Read More

Now Playing's Scott Collura had some problems with the IMAX 3-D portions of Superman Returns, and here's a summary: "The technology still leaves something to be desired...there was some blurriness and darkness... folks sitting near me had the same take... perhaps the theater we were in was not calibrated correctly? Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that we were sitting on the side of the theater and not directly in the middle? But at other times one could garner an idea of what the technology can offer."

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Superman Again

A whole lotta people were lined up at the Universal Studios 18-plex last night to get into three screenings of Superman Returns, the big draw being the IMAX 3D presentation at 10:30 pm. I saw the throngs as I came out of a Supie-3D 7 pm show, and I stopped and took a few blurry-ass photos. The after-effect was such that I forgot to set the camera to auto-focus.

Outside Universal Citywalk plex -- Tuesday, 6.27.06, 9:42 pm

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All those thoughtful HE readers in denial about global warming (this site is teeming with right-wing libertarian types who love their profligate lifestyles) are asked to look at this. It's obviously crap propaganda put forward by a bunch of liberal distortion dweebs -- people who refuse to accept that each and every American is entitled to do whatever he/she wants, and the atmosphere can go fuck itself -- but if you're not doing anything and you want a laugh...here you go.

I'm not quite convinced that I want to hang with these people for 80 or 90 minutes. There's something touching and yet profoundly underwhelming about being a background extra (and maybe a wee bit sad), but here's the trailer regardless. The doc's called Strictly Background and I'm told it's "about to make the festival rounds." I trust I don't have to explain what that probably means.

"When was the last time we had a great fantasy film to watch? M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water is the best film of its kind since The Princess Bride, another fantasy movie that also begins with a bedtime story and deals with many of the same themes."-- Mike Sampson on JoBlo.com. In the Shyamalan annals, Sampson also claims it's "one of his best." That's a little vague, no? It's not as if Night has made 12 or 15 films. "One of his best" means...what?...that it's better than Unbreakable or...?

According to this questionaire, I'm a Timothy Dalton type of guy when it comes to the 007 realm. Just as long as I'm not George Lazenby.

Greed, lies, avarice: Former Us Weekly editor Jill Ishkanian, a former Us editor who quit in '05 to help launch a paparazzi agency called Sunset Photo and News , is being pressed by the FBI about whether she illegally tapped into Us's e-mail system to steal scoops and get the jump on everyone, including Us. Ishkanian's attorney Glenn Feldman has told L.A. Times reporters Richard Winton and Chris lee that Ishkanian continued to work as a freelancer for the magazine and used the password of an Us reporter, Amy Sultan...Read More

If you were about to sit down and watch a critically-admired documentary about Michelangelo, how would you feel upon discovering that it's largely about a group of artist-admirers who've done tribute renderings -- i.e., knockoffs -- of his finest work? Think you might feel a tiny bit flim-flammed?

Leonard Cohen, Lian Lunson, Bono

That's how I felt when I finally saw Lian Lunson's Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man. Take out the shards of Cohen interview footage that Lunson inserts at regular intervals, and Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man is basically footage of a Cohen tribute concert...Read More

More Dreamamount whackings. All the things we most dread in life -- traumatic change, an economic weakening, the shock of the new and hurtful -- contained in a single act of corporate brutality.

No shit, Sherlock? "Unlike the X-Men films [Bryan] Singer directed, which easily lent themselves to queer parallels, Superman is fairly straightforward and...straight." -- Out.com's Jeffrey Epstein.

If you had to decide which script to read first -- Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men or Charles Leavitt, Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick's Blood Diamond...forget it, I've just decided. The Coen's, of course.

Okay, okay....finally seeing Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest tomorrow night. (I didn't mean to put it that way. I meant to say "oh, wow!!") And finally seeing Superman Returns in 3D IMAX this evening.

Gary Sanchez, a former NFL football player from Paraguay, is the financial backer and "spiritual leader" of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's new production company...what? McKay has told Variety 's Chris Gardner that Sanchez "provides moral support and finances outside entertainment." Meaning what..that Sanchez conducts spiritual counselling sessions with candles and incense burning? He sends expensive prostitutes to Ferrell and McKay's homes on occasion? He makes them feel better about themselves by playing touch football with them on his back lawn? This is easily the strangest Variety production-shingle story...

"Is it possible to be a great star without appearing in very many great movies?," asks N.Y. Times DVD guy David Kehr in a brief riff on Clark Gable before getting into the subject of Warner Home Video's new Gable box set. Gable, says Kehr, "is one of the few major box office stars of the 1930's who might produce a glimmer of recognition from a contemporary audience, but after Gone With the Wind and perhaps It Happened One Night...Read More

Several fashion industry veterans appraise and praise The Devil Wears Prada in this byline-free piece in last Sunday's (6/25) Guardian's Sunday Observer. Includes a statement about the film from a spokesperson for Vogue editor Anna Wintour (the real-life Miranda Priestly) that I hadn't seen before: "She thought it was very entertaining. It was satire. What's not to like?'

Despite the understandably relieved announcement by Superman Returns naysayer David Poland that five big-name critics have joined him in panning Bryan Singer's film (the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle makes six), the Rotten Tomatoes ratings are a bit more than 75% positive -- 72% cream-of-the-crop, 77% overall -- so there's no turning of the tide. You just have seven sourpusses standing off in the corner along with the seven dwarves, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and the seven deadly sins...no biggie. Enthusiastic thumbs-uppers include N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Matthews, Newsweek's ...Read More

So the word is out among the wicked-wordsmith film critics to rip into Superman Returns...right? Anthony Lane doesn't exactly kill it, but he basically dismisses it the way Manohla did with his typical snide flavorings.

"Jesus of Nazareth spent 40 days in the desert. By comparison, Superman of Hollywood languished almost 20 years in development hell. Those years apparently raised the bar fearsomely high. Last seen larking about on the big screen in the 1987 dud Superman IV, the Man of Steel has been resurrected in a leaden new film not only to fight for truth, justice and the American way, but also to give Mel Gibson's passion a run for his box-office money...Read More

"If a movie is good, consumers will go see it. Otherwise, they'll choose to save gas and money and stay home and watch video-on-demand, cable or satellite, or a DVD. Or maybe they'll just play a video game or listen to Ipods because most new movies suck big-time." -- a Nikki Finke summary in today's Deadline Hollywood Daily of Nielsen Analytics' and The Movie Advisory Board's 100-page "Modern Movie Experience" study, described as "a report on moviegoer behavior today, possibilities for tomorrow, and the impact of digital technologies on the movie-value chain."

A guy sent me a script this afternoon of Michael Cahill 's The King of California, a Michael Douglas-Evan Rachel Wood movie that Michael London and Alexander Payne are producing along with about ten others. The IMDB says it's about "an unstable dad (Douglas) who after getting out of a mental institution tries to convince his daughter (Wood) that there's Spanish gold buried somewhere under suburbia." Under a Costco store, actually.

Michael Douglas

The guy who e-mailed it to me reads scripts all the time and claims "it's one of the best I've have read...Read More

Four Billy Wilder Screenwriting Tips: (a) The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer; (b) If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act; (c) Let the audience add up two plus two -- they'll love you forever; and (d) The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.

A friend who's seen Woody Allen's Scoop...naaah, let it go. But his comments weren't entirely in synch with those of New York magazine writer Logan Hill, who declares in the new issue that Allen's two films with Scarlett Johansson -- not just Match Point but also his forthcoming Scoop (Focus Features, 7.28) -- "have been his best in years."

Woody Allen, Scarlett Johansson in posed shot for New York magazine.

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Here's a reasonable-sounding analysis piece by Hollywood Wiretap's Josh Young that explains the Paramount/ DreamWorks "trojan horse" scenario, which boils down to Paramount chairman Brad Grey and president Gail Berman getting capped not too far down the road and DreamWorks chief Stacey Snider...Read More

The Islander guys -- i.e., the creators and cast of Ian McCrudden and Thomas Hildreth's Maine-based drama prior to its L.A. Film Festival showing on Sunday evening, 6.25 (l. to r.): composer Billy Mallory, star-producer Hildreth, producer Forrest Murray, director-cowriter McCrudden, co-producer Melissa Davis, costar Amy Jo Johnson

(a) I met the great Eliott Gould, the greatest Phillip Marlowe of all time, at a SAG party in Westwood last night, and I was struck by how amazingly thin he's become since I last saw him as Reuben Tishkoff in Ocean's 12...Read More

Stanley Nelson's Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple may seem like a provocative L.A. Film Festival film to catch this evening. (It's at the Majestic Crest at 7:15 pm, and tomorrow night at 9:30 pm at the Laemmle Sunset 5.) But having seen this well-meaning doc at the Seattle Film Festival, I can tell you it pulls too many punches.

A story of a warped predatory looney who persuaded over 900 people to kill themselves with cyanide Kool-Aid should not be afraid to look at the horror straight in the face. Jim Jones...Read More

Is the Tomkat structure cracking at the foundations? Roger Friedman has a story about how the bidding for photos of Suri Cruise didn't go anywhere with the celebrity magazines (i.e., the pics didn't attract a high-enough bid, or "not more than $3 million"). If this is more or less true, it's interesting as a kind of roadside zeitgeist indicator. "If you think you're still the Tom Cruise of the mid-to-late '80s and '90s"...."with your power and money and popularity all at peak levels"..."ask not for whom the bell tolls"..."it tolls for thee"..."Burma Shave."

Amber Tamblyn was awfully good in Hilary Brougher's Stephanie Daley, an unsettling but definitely-better-than-decent melodrama that played at last January's Sundance Film Festival. Nobody expects that (or Tamblyn's performance in it) will attract anything like the press interest in her starring role in Takashi Shimizu's forthcoming The Grudge 2, but according to the IMDB Daley doesn't even have a distributor lined up. So it's going to...what?...turn up some day on DVD and that's all? Small indie-type dramas with provocative subjects used to get at least some attention. Now, it seems, they're not even managing that.

I'm not understanding Kevin Spacey's declaration that he based his Lex Luthor portrayal in Superman Returns on convicted Enron ogre Kenneth Lay. Read any of Lay's statements during the Enron trial or watch him in Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and it's all who-me? and equivocations and various modes of shoulder-shrugging. There's no rage in the man...nothing but a calculated front. Spacey's Luthor is nothing at all like Lay. If you ask me, he seems to have based his performance on John McEnroe.

"For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." -- T.S. Eliot

It appears that Superman Returns is being marketed to Christians after all. Here's a Bryan Singer interview in today's Christianity Today, written by Mark Moring. Singer's money quote: "I think that [Superman as a Christ figure] is kind of a natural evolution, because he began as kind of a Moses figure, of the child sent by the parents down the river to fulfill a destiny. Superman's a savior. And even more so in my film...Read More

I talked to a critic friend yesterday who said he had a great time with the new Pirates, although he admitted it's a bit of slog during the first act or hour (whichever comes first). And now here's David Poland saying that "like Superman Returns, Pirates 2 is too long by about 30 minutes, and the script tends to bog down every time the story gets a bit complex for its own good....it gets too confusing...Read More

Warner Bros. marketers have been too classy (or clueless) to try and sell Bryan Singer's Superman Reborns to Christian righties as a kind of Jesus-metaphor movie, the way Disney sold Narnia, etc. But maybe they should have? When those righties come out for a movie, they come out in force.

The marketing execs of Fox Home Video are just as determined to sell Sidney Lumet's Find Me Guilty as a dopey-ass lightweight mob comedy as its theatrical distributor, Yari Film Group Releasing, was during its brief theatrical release last March. These guys won't quit until everyone in DVD-ville is convinced this film is a second-tier wash and probably not worth the rental fee. It is worth it...trust me.

Broadly played at times but meticulous and flavorful and dramatically solid, Guilty is Lumet's best film since Q & A and before that, ...Read More

Another global warming story from the L.A. Times, and scarier than the last one. Would the Times have run these stories on the front page at this particular juncture even if An Inconvenient Truth weren't in theatres? You tell me.

To judge by news of her casting in Woody Allen 's next film (which will costar Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor), British actress Haley Atwell is doing fairly well. But Google her and you get this, and put her name on the IMDB and all you get are some TV credits, her height (5 foot, 6 1/2 inches) and a statement that she went to England's Guildhall School from '02 to '05.

Reading about someone's obsessive dislike of a film they haven't seen is pretty damn tedious, I realize, but pieces about Johnny Depp plugging Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest are much, much worse. Depp is mugging and prancing around in tall boots and a loose-flowing shirt and a three-cornered hat so he can get paid....end of story. If I could wave a magic wand that would make all the arts editors at all the big syndicates and big-city newspapers totally ignore this film, I would do so. Beware the commercial gleam in the eyes of Gore Verbinski...Read More

Ridley Scott's developing biopic about the famed Gucci family, on which World Trade Center screenwriter Andrea Berloff is now working, will not be any kind of chick flick. To judge by the melodramatic soap-opera basics of the family's history, it's going to be Visconti's The Damned.

Last Thursday night (6.22) as the L.A. Film Festival was unveiling The Devil Wears Prada in Westwood, a quiet research screening of David Fincher's Zodiac happened at the Chinese 6 on Hollywood Blvd. (where an all-media showing of Bryan Singer's Superman Returns was unspooling as well). The Fincher was shown under the title of The Chronicles (oh, God... we're back to that one again...don't ask), and three guys have posted reactions on Ain't It Cool.

Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo in David Fincher's Zodiac (or is it The Chronicles?)

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"I will now retire to the green room and the fortification of a drink in order to cope with the inevitable moral pneumonia that always follows a blizzard of praise." -- Leonard Cohen to a live audience at Hollywood's John Ford Anson theatre on Saturday night (6.24), prior to an L.A. Film Festival screening of Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man.

Fashion Abrasion

To the already-formed consensus on The Devil Wears Prada (20th Century Fox, 6.30), I have nothing new or startling to add.

Without Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci's performances, this very carefully measured girl movie set in the never-jangled world of a big-time fashion magazine -- a tale of a young woman getting bruised, and then wising up and finding her way through a very tough racket -- would be okay but only that. But with them -- because of them -- it's savory as hell at times.

Anne Hathaway, Meryl Streep in David Frankel's The Devil Wears Prada

Just after the 2 pm Saturday showing of Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater -- Majestic Crest, Westwood Blvd. south of Wilshire

(a) Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater producers C.C. Goldwater (l.) and Tani Cohen during brief q & a session -- Saturday, 6.24.06, 4:10 pm; (b) Mr. Conservative director Julie Anderson -- Saturday, 6.24.06, 4:08 pm; (c) poster in Crest lobby.

I always respected the late Barry Goldwater, the conservative Arizona Senator and 1964 Republican Presidential candidate, for being a helluva lot more candid than most politicians and especially for sticking to his philosophical guns at all times. But after seeing Julie Anderson 's Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater, an L.A. Film Festival selection that'll have its nationwide debut on HBO on 9.18, I've come to realize he was a man of even greater substance than I knew.

The movie, produced by C.C. Goldwater (the senator's granddaughter) and Tani Cohen ...Read More

"The voice and spirit" behind Kevin Smith's Clerks II "are as brash and unmistakable as ever," says Caryn James in the N.Y. Times , although she includes a tough assessment earlier in the piece: "In the six films Mr. Smith has made since, his gifts have become clearer: he is terrific at irreverence, as in the Clerks movies and the underrated Dogma; he can be awful at emotional sincerity, as in Jersey Girl and the weaker parts of Chasing Amy."

I still say August 18th is too long a wait for Snakes on a Plane to finally show up in theatres. It'll do pretty dynamic business, I expect, but it should be opening during one of the weak weekends in July. My son Jett is leaving for college only a few days after August 18th, and thousands of other freshmen, I presume, are looking at same or similar schedules. Won't this interfere with the usual word-of-mouth cycles and possible repeat business?

Those estimates of Click reaching the mid '40s may turn out to be optimistic. I'm hearing $39 million and change for the weekend, and that doesn't factor in any Friday-to-Saturday dropoff due to the possibility that some out there might agree with Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern and tell their friends that this latest Adam Sandler comedy is "an abomination." Cars is looking at $30 million for the weekend with an estimated Sunday night cume of $155 mill. Jared Hess's Nacho Libre is down 55% from last Friday's opening and looking at a ...Read More

Jean Luc Godard's "influence is immeasurable, yet his popular reputation stems from only a small fraction of his output," remarks a Sunday (6.25) N.Y. Times piece by Nathan Lee. "From 1960 to 1967 [Godard] became immensely famous for a series of radical entertainments that fused youth-quake insouciance and jazzy improvisation to genre deconstruction and high-culture formalism. They were genre movies with a twist: pseudo gangster films (Breathless), thrillers (Le Petit Soldat), war movies (Les Carabiniers) musicals (A Woman Is a Woman), science fiction (Alphaville). He is ...Read More

Bring me the head of the Phillip K. Dick android. When you find it, I mean. Gotta be somewhere.

Critic Joe Leydon on Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth -- exceptionally well-written.

L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan (l.) and director-writer Neil LaBute during L.A. Film festival-sponsored discussion at Westwood's Armand Hammer Museum -- Friday, 6.23, 7:15 pm.

(a) Woman about to order a beer at Farmer's Market -- Thursday, 6.22.06, 5:35 pm; (b) L.A. Film Festival outdoor screening of West Side Story in Westwood Village (but showing it at wrong aspect ratio...horizontally squeezed...fire the projectionist!) -- Friday, 6.23.06, 8:45 pm; (c) Pages of old TV Guide from Friday, November 22, 1963, full of programs that never aired; (d) ditto...Read More

I said I'd get to my Prada review, but now I have to go see Kenny Turan and Neil Labute rip it up at the Hammer. In the meantime, the Hollywood Reporter's Kirk Honeycutt has given it (and Meryl Streep in particular) a thumbs-up, Variety 's Todd McCarthy was mezzo-mezzo, and MCN's David Poland has slammed it.

You get told stuff (like, say, Karen Fried becoming the new Oscar consultant for Focus Features or Michelle Robertson becoming the Warner Bros. Oscar consultant) but on the condition that you wait, and what happens? Somebody else breaks it. Happens every time.

"After a comprehensive review of climate change data, the nation's preeminent scientific body found that average temperatures on Earth had risen by about 1 degree over the last century, a development that 'is unprecedented for the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia'," L.A. Times reporters Thomas H. Maugh II and Karen Kaplan wrote in a story out today...Read More

Missed last night's news about the plug being pulled on James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma, which was going to star Tom Cruise earlier this year and then lost Cruise and got Russell Crowe to step into his shoes. Nicole Laporte's Variety story quoted "sources" as saying that "part of Sony's concern was the back-end gross of Crowe, a $20 million star [on top of} another concern that Westerns don't typically travel abroad." Mangold says Yuma isn't a typical ponderous western, etc., but obviously this is yet another shutdown...Read More

These ass-whoopings of Adam Sandler's Click are loads of fun to read, mainly because they're so damn personal. These critics don't just hate Sandler's latest -- they hate him through and through. "What's wrong with this movie isn't the movie, it's Sandler himself," says the Washington Post's Stephen Hunter. "His sensibility and sense of humor are aggressively hostile, [and his character] is a selfish, self-absorbed, smug little weenie ...Read More

Anne Thompson and Tatiana Siegel's Hollywood Reporter profile of Paramount president Gail Berman makes some fair points, but the graph about Mission: Impossible 3 recalled a conversation I had last night with a trade-paper guy about whether or not the Tom Cruise actioner made any kind of real profit. "M:I:3...has earned more than $334 million worldwide [but] did fall short domestically, grossing $130 million," the Thompson-Siegel story reports. "In retrospect, [studio chairman Brad...Read More

The L.A. Film Festival kicked off last night with a screening of The Devil Wears Prada at Westwood's Village theatre. It seemed to go down pretty well with people I spoke to at the after-party, including the tough critics. A tidy, not-quite-pat, cool-mannered studio flick about a tough job and a tough environment. Everyone seemed to love Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci's performance, and felt that lead Anne Hathaway and Adrien Grenier held their own.

Waiting in the third-class "peon" rush line alongside the Village theatre last night.

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David Edelstein's 6.19.06 review of Nicholas Jarecki's The Outsider , a facinating and (to me) touching doc about maverick filmmaker James Toback (Black and White, Fingers), has the following comment: "Jarecki doesn't get into Toback's considerable inheritance, which does make maverickdom easier." I've always seen Toback as a jocular existential wise guy flying by his wit and his balls and his ability to charm and seduce. But family money...?

Most of the critics are indicting Adam Sandler's Click on charges of ruthless sentimentality in the latter stages. Will this matter to the fan base? Never! But how can any fair-minded person not be moved or at least struck by these damning words from Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, one of the biggest bend-over quote whores in world history? "I have a soft spot for [Sandler's] low-comic high jinks, including Happy Gilmore and even the unfairly maligned Waterboy," says Travers. "But Sandler has a sappy side that makes me puke. I damn near choked on ClickRead More

The fact that director Bryan Singer said on "Sunday Morning Shootout" a while back that the cost for Superman Returns is over $250 million makes the $263 million estimate calculated by Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Jensen seem more reliable than the $209 million estimated provided by the Wall Street Journal's Kate Kelly. A big chunk is due to costs run up by previous would-be Superman directors Tim Burton ($25 to $30 million), Brett Ratner (between $12 and $20 million), and McG (between $12 and $20 million).It's all in a pretty good sum-up...

I got 11 right in this Ann Coulter-Adolf Hitler similar-quote quiz. Coulter's prose style is a little simpler and less turgid than Hitler's, and she doesn't go for antiquated debating-society political terms like "bourgeoisie".

There was a slight rigamarole in late April (or was it early May?) when Variety reported that Woody Allen's Scoop would be released in the late summer and one of my Focus Features pallies kept saying, "That's news to us." Anyway, it's official: Allen's comedy, a London-based runaround about a young reporter (Scarlett Johansson) and an older, somewhat suspicious man of wealth and schwing (Hugh Jackman), will open on 7.28 in the top 100 markets, at a running time of 96 minutes.

L.A. air-hockey fools will probably want to jot this down: Eric Anderson's The Way of the Puck, which I wrote about with affection and enthusiasm a little over two months ago, is being screened at the Speakeasy on Sunday, 6.25, at 7 pm and 9 pm. The address is 4607 Prospect Avenue in Los Feliz. (What exactly is a "Mt. Hollywood Underground"?) The admission is $7 general, $5 for members.

Two late-inning observations should be be kept in mind as you're reading Claudia Eller's summary of "The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale," which appears in today's (6.23) L.A. Times.

The book, which Gotham will be putting in stores on 7.20, is Night's traumatic first-hand memoir (as told to Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger) about how his longtime relationship with Disney execs and particuarly production president Nina Jacobson went south last year over Jacobson's blunt criticisms of Shyamalan's script of Lady in the Water...Read More

There's a relatively new introduction piece on the official WB Superman Returns site...funny.

The Devil Wears Prada costars Stanley Tucci to Anne Hathaway: "What do you expect? You're flinging those melons around like it's harvest season." Flinging! A couple more items like this and "Page Six" is out of the doghouse.

Whoa, whoa...Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest runs two hours and 35 minutes, give or take? A cartwheeling fluffball mascara-and-attitude romp should run a minimum of three hours, I should think. If I were Jerry Bruckheime