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, which...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...positively gloating that the film has bad buzz (never mind the fact...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.

A clearly eccentric middle-aged guy was in Tower Video's Sunset Strip store yesterday ranting about what a piece of shit it was (he'd seen a Wednesday noon show) and that the '78 Donner version was far superior. Older guys are always saying...Read More

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 hogging all the attention. ("All these numbers may look very different once...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...blurring around the edges, ghosting, headaches. Alberge doesn't say what she specifically means by "latest 3-D technology" but if she's referring to the the process of creating 3D images out of flat images (the...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 and Shiloh Jolie-Pitt at the baby shower in Namibia. But his camera broke soon after and when he returned to Los Angeles he took it to a Best Buy outlet (where be bought it)...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 Mark Protosevich's script three or four...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, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) about this,...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 (7.14) has a sluggish 68% general awareness, a 25% definite interest, a 20% definitely not interested and 4% first choice. Universal's You,...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. Tom's selection process only addressed "those of...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," Masters writes. If things turn out badly for the film, "Disney will have the last laugh [and] Warners will not be laughing at all," she adds. "Shyamalan...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." The film...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 so painful, they're so stressful, they use up so much capital and they tie up...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 -- and you can never quite figure out if it's good crazy or bad crazy. She's a great reporter and a fun writer, and God knows I wouldn't want to be on her bad side."...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 will most likely come out sometime in early '07, and also that a showing at September's Toronto Film Festival isn't necessarily in the cards. Kelly and his editor are "re-ordering" some...Read More

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.

Bill Nighy as Davy Jones -- the greatest movie villain to come along in years, and a landmark CG...

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.) The...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, three of the biggest stars in the world. And they were selling out games at 77,000 seat Giants Stadium. And stars like Mick Jagger...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 for another round of whatever happens? (I was going to type the words "deeply loathed" before...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 hasn't reported the news of Plouhar's death...unless they're hiding it somewhere. I don't think is good form on Moore's part.

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.

Crime-novel author James Ellroy, who's shaved his moustache and lost a few...

"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 DVD, which I presume will street sometime in November? The only other...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."

I hear what Scott's saying. For...Read More

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

As I was doing this, however, I was indulging in my usual-usual -- i.e. having second thoughts...Read More

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, to get into the network. Sultan's password "was given to...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...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 (Sanchez Prods. is starting a first-look deal with Paramount Vantage) I've read...

"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, most people would be stuck naming many more of his films." That's because Gable generally made run-of-the-mill programmers. I have a better...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 David Ansen (who says "from the start of...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. Where once the superhero flew up, up and away, he now flies down, down, down, sent from above to save mankind from its sins...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.

Hill calls it "an old-school Allen comedy -- a murder mystery solved by an aging magician (guess who) and a naïve young blonde...Read More

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 being brought in to run the whole Paramount/DreamWorks shebang. (I was told about this very scenario this morning before reading Young's piece. I was told, in fact, that (a) "it's gonna happen" and (b) "if it weren't an embarassment [for Tom Freston], they'd be gone already.") Young quotes "a top talent manager" calling this scenario "a reverse acquisition", adding...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....Gould actually...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...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, because he's gone for a period of time, and then he returns. For me to say that those messianic images don't exist in the movie...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." On top of which critic #1 said it's an adventure fantasy "on steroids." I know what "steroids" means and it doesn't mean seductive or...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, Prince of the...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 and Jerry Bruckheimer because...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?)

The cut ran just over three...Read More

"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...

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 , is an engaging, very successful...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 $12.5 million weekend haul. It might wind up...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 the original meta-movie maestro, the first director as D.J. He is also an accomplished film critic,...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; (e) One...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. "The report from the National Research Council also concluded that 'human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.' Coupled with a report last month from the Bush administration's Climate Change Science Program that found "clear evidence of human...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 of a big-star movie over concerns about back-end gross participation. Go, ballsy studio...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 who turns on everybody at the drop of a hat, who cheats to succeed, who brutalizes his children, who screams at his wife, and who looks to be a pretty mediocre architect in...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] Grey's decision to trim the film's budget to $150 million and adjust gross-participation deals proved to be one of his savviest moves as studio chief." Nonetheless, somebody needs to...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.

It was the usual mob scene before the show...Read More

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 Click." Wait a minute...either you puke over something...Read 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 by Hollywood Wiretap's Stephen Saito.

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 (Warner...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 Bruckheimer I would add an overture, an intermission, and entr'acte and exit music.

"I'm beginning to wonder if Pirates is not only going to blow everything out of the water this year, but if it's going to take the three-day record from Spiderman. I didn't go to the screening last night, but I sent my girlfriend and she reported that it's not only incredible, but that it had the junket audience applauding as well. If Jerry Bruckheimer, Gore Verbinksi and Johnny Depp can do that to the hard-core critics and cynics, think what it's going to do for the civilians." -- Journalist colleague. Wells reply: You're probably right about Pirates blowing everything out of the water,...Read More

The point of this David Poland piece seems to be that the traction-penetration effects of marketing campaigns aren't showing up in surveys until...what?...two weeks before the nationwide release date (or is it one week?), so anyone who runs tracking data on a film three weeks out is misunderstanding the way things work and creating unfair havoc in the process. I certainly experienced the downside of this when I ran those negative early-bird numbers on The Break-Up, and I'd like to think I've learned something from this. But of course, Poland has to get ugly by referring to a wave of "journalists"...Read More

Nobody ever seems to destroy anything in low-budget films, but expensive stuff often gets blown up and inferno'ed in big-budget franchise pics. Is there anyone in the world who finds these spectacles exciting in any way, shape or form? Is there a metaphor I'm missing that action fans have understood all along? That beautiful yellow whatever-it-was sports car that was blown off the ground inside the gates of Vatican City in Mission: Impossible III...an absolute flat-liner. Like all explosions. Filmmakers keep using them, I assume, because they're a kind of visual punctuation. This would be fine if fireballs were the equivalent of...Read More

Billy Wilder was born 100 years ago today in a village now known as Sucha Beskidzka, Poland. He left us four years and three months ago, or roughly seven months after the best book about him -- Cameron Crowe's "Conversations with Wilder" -- hit the book stores.

You could argue that the last "real" Billy Wilder film -- The Fortune Cookie -- came out 40 years ago, and that the guy's a relic by 2006 measurings. But all that goes away when you sit down and watch his better films. Not the stodgy ones...not...Read More

Former N.Y. Daily news critic Jami Bernard's "Incredible Shrinking Critic" blog (which I really shouldn't be linking to, given her alliance with a certain hammerhead), and a video piece she's recently thrown together about how life feels now without a portfolio.

When you flip through the 32-page newsprint program for the L.A. Film Festival, everything suddenly comes into focus. Compared to the chore of finding your way through the ruts and ravines of the online site, the paper program is clearer, simpler and much easier to sort through.

That said, I've been half-persuaded to check out Ian McCrudden's Islander, about a lobster fisherman (Thomas Hildreth) going through a crisis. (It plays on 6.25 at 7 pm at the Mann Festival -- check out the site for the other two showings.) "A really solid piece of work," a somewhat interested party claims. "Hildreth is a find, as are Amy Jo Johnson and Judy Prescott as two women he becomes involved with in the film. Costar Philip Baker Hall is his usual outstanding self. Definitely worth a look if you can catch it."

Former Boston Herald freelance film reviewer Paul Sherman has dynamited his career over the crime of selling approximately 117 feature film screeners to online pirate distributors (known as "warez" groups) from 1999 to June 2005. He may not do time because he's cooperating with the FBI, but he deserves whatever punishment he gets. The ethical-moral breaches are thoughtless enough, but he's also a small-timer. As Sir Thomas Moore says to Richard Rich in A Man For All Seasons, "Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the entire world...but for Wales?"

The L.A. Film Festival kicks off tomorrow night, and is it me (a definite possibility) or am I detecting an extra measure of vitality...some kind of exceptional on-it factor? The special events, parties, discussions and film selections feel almost Seattle-ish....perhaps even better than that. Here are 19 initial picks, and I'm sure there are five or ten other films and events I shouldn't be overlooking: (1) Julie Anderson's Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater (6.24, 2 pm, Majestic Crest -- 6.30, 7 pm, UCLA James Bridges -- 7.2, 5:30, Laemmle's Sunset); (2) Jauretsi Saizarbitoria and Emilia Menocal's East of Havana (6.25, 9:45 pm, Mann...Read More

Harry Knowles chit-chatting with Brandon Routh...keep it light, keep it fanboyish, keep it friendly.

"If you're going to run anonymous criticism of someone's story" -- i.e, the one written last Monday by L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein -- "[by] saying 'these articles never interview black execs, even in confidence -- they always go after high-level talent to comment...' you could at least call me or email me and ask if that was actually true in my case," Goldstein has written Deadline Hollywood columnist Nikki Finke in an e-mail. "If you had called, I would have told you this: Of course, I interviewed plenty of black executives. What this person doesn't seem to realize is that...Read More

This isn't going to make that much of a difference. The die is cast, the digital fix is in, and Old Media is on a slippery-ass slope. The decision by L.A. Times management to hire away longtime Hollywood Reporter veteran Lynne Segall to try and turn things around paints a pretty clear picture of what's been going down and how scared they all are.

HE's who-gives-a-shit? scanner is officially switched on this afternoon regarding Ed Zwick's Blood Diamond (Warner Bros., probably Nov./Dec.). It feels to me like an on-the-nose moral outrage piece...a sticky-wicket neg-head thing.

Do you want to see a dramatically grandiose Ed Zwick melodrama about a mercenary (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a fisherman (Djimon Hounsou) mucking about during the Sierra Leone civil wars of the '90s? An era when rebels seized mines to sell "blood diamonds" to buy arms as they murdered and mutilated thousands of innocent men, women and children? (You do?) I'm not following the thread but...Read More

Late to Wordplay

I'd been hearing good things about Patrick Creadon's Wordplay since it played at last January's Sundance Film Festival, but missing the subsequent screenings. So I leapt at the chance to see it last night (i.e., Tuesday) at Santa Monica's Aero as part of Pete Hammond's KCET screening series.

I expected something smart, engaging, amusing (Jon Stewart being one of the talking heads), but I wasn't expecting a Mensa-style "heart" movie about an extended family. That's what Wordplay is, and why it ought to keep playing and playing in urban blue-state areas, and -- who knows? -- maybe all over....Read More

Superman Returns director Bryan Singer was "thrilled" with the IMAX 3D version at a screening last Friday, says a 6.20 L.A. Times story by Geoff Boucher. He adds, however, that "others attending the screening were put off by a distracting blurring effect that crops up when the action crosses the screen at high speed." Bullshit -- I noticed a very slight blurring around the edges, but that's par for the course with IMAX 3D. (I won't see the final version until next Tuesday.) Boucher admits that "some sequences -- such as that plummeting plane -- have an undeniable gee-whiz factor." After the...Read More

There's a doc by Jon Fauer called Cinematographer Style showing at the Academy next Tuesday (6.27) that, according to the copy on the invitation, "takes audiences into the hearts and minds of 110 renowned cinematographers, offering a rare glimpse into the art of visual storytelling and the universal language of cinematography." In other words, it covers the same turf as Todd McCarthy and Arnold Glassman's Vision of Light, which is generally regarded as the definitive (so far) doc about the art of cinematography. Has anyone seen the Fauer doc? I'm suspicious of anything or anyone intending to explore the art of cinematography...Read More

Variety critic Robert Koehler swears that Randy Walker and Jennifer Shainin's Apart From That, which played at Cinevegas and the Seattle Film Festival, is "the best American film I've seen this year." Here's his review, "which gets in some but hardly all of my thoughts," Koehler says. "If you like Richard Ford's and Raymond Carver's fiction and what I'm now sensing is a new radical American cinema characterized by films like Old Joy, then you'll probably like Apart From That. Then again, you may not. It would have done very well in competition in either Un Certain Regard or the Quinzaine, but...Read More

The late composer Bernard Herrmann "made life easier for good films," says David Thomson in a recent Guardian piece. Many Alfred Hitchcock films in particular -- Vertigo, Psycho, North by Northwest (the final act of this film is nearly a Hermann symphony in itself), The Man Who Knew Too Much -- as well as Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver, The Day The Earth Stood Still, et. al. This may sound insignificant, but I feel Hermann's most delicious accomplishments are his incidental mood pieces in thrillers, in particular the ones that seem to say "be careful...bad stuff could quite easily happen to...Read More

This is a good Nikki Finke satire piece because it's grounded in fact. Hollywood is Slacker Town. Almost everyone works long hours -- twelve-hour days are fairly standard -- but too many in the upper echelons overcompensate by taking extended vacations ("working" or otherwise) that eat up huge chunks of the calendar. Finke's piece was triggered by news that "some Hollywood types [are] already leaving town for the July 4th holiday." I'm guessing that the big vacation-takers are those with school-age or younger kids, and I can relate to that. But at the end of the day (especially these days) I subscribe...Read More

Richard Lester's Petulia "is essentially about two lonely and bored people desperate to find passion in an increasingly dispassionate world," writes DVD Savant. "The '60s-drenched setting is tapped to add shadings of meaning, but it nevertheless remains a backdrop. Indeed, much of Petulia's genius stems from such shadings, particularly stylistic flourishes that result in a work of stunning freshness -- even nearly 40 years after its theatrical release. This keenly observed art film finds the counterculture of that era being swallowed up and taken over by a nation of overwhelming wealth, commercialism and consumerism. Lester might not have known it at...Read More

Shane Black, director-writer of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, has written "against type by skewering the conventions of noir fiction in a movie that wouldn't make sense without a comprehensive awareness and palpable appreciation of each and every one of them," says MCN's Gary Dretzka. "As such, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang favorably recalls Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye." Get outta town! If Black's film had one-fifth of the funky, bumbling neo-noir charm of The Long Goodbye, it would have been far more intoxicating. If nothing else, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang seems totally stoned on how wise-ass clever it is, especially the dialogue. The...Read More

Didn't make it to Monday's all-media screening of Adam Sandler's Click, but a knowledgable industry friend did, and here's his verdict: "It's okay but not that great. I don't know what to make of the audience reaction because these screenings are so heavily recruited with people off the street, but there wasn't overwhelming laughter in the press section. It's a typical downmarket Sandler movie, the kind he does when he's not being directed by Paul Thomas Anderson or Mike Binder or James L. Brooks. He's got complete control and his team putting it all together -- director Frank Coraci, producer Jack...Read More

"[Disney distribution execs] originally expected that Cars would only start to fade once Adam Sandler's Click opened in theaters this coming Friday. That teens and young adults would favor that film over ours. But that was okay because we'd still pretty much have the family audience all to ourselves until Superman Returns opened five days later. But to have ticket sales fall off by 43% in our second weekend and to almost lose the top spot to a Jack Black wrestling comedy ...nobody here ever saw that coming. This was a film that was initially projected to do over $300 million domestic....Read More

For those who've happened across that Roger Friedman item that passes along bad reports about Michael Mann's Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28), I have two responses. One, Mann is absolutely incapable -- strategically, emotionally, psychologically, physiologically, technologically -- of making a bad film. Even if Vice turns out to be one of his lesser efforts, by Mann's Olympian standards that will still make it an exceptional ride. And two, keep in mind what F.X. Feeney, who's seen a cut of the film, had to say last week. The film, Feeney claims, "draws on wellsprings of romantic passion that haven't surfaced this vividly...Read More

The non-white Hollywood-suit head count is "pretty dismal," reports L.A. Times industry columnist Patrick Goldstein . "A survey of African American or Latino production executives at a vice president level or higher found one executive at 20th Century Fox, New Line and Paramount, none at Universal, Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures. After three days of trying, I couldn't get an answer out of Disney's corporate publicity staff, so I'm guessing they're at zero too. Whenever I would ask studio chiefs for an explanation, there was usually a long, awkward silence."

Six Months In

We're just about at the '06 halfway mark, and it's time for a basic sum-up.

By this site's yardstick there have been 10 A-listers, 15 honorable B-listers, and 9 half-decents. A total of 34 films -- a bit more than one per week since the year began -- that were either excellent or very good or respectable, or at the very least mildly pleasing.

An Inconvenient Truth

My choice for the best film of the year so far, no question, is Paul Greengrass's United 93 -- a film that many, many people still...Read More

"Earlier versions of Superman stressed the hero's humanity: his attachment to his Earth parents, his country-boy clumsiness around Lois," writes Time's Richard Corliss. But Bryan Singer's Superman Returns "emphasizes his divinity. He is not a super man; he is a god (named Kal-El), sent by his heavenly father (Jor-El) to protect Earth. That is a mission that takes more than muscles ; it requires sacrifice, perhaps of his own life. So he is no simple comic-book hunk. He is Earth's savior: Jesus Christ Superman ."

Romantic movies with happy blue-sky endings don't resonate. The ones that sink into people's souls are about love lost at such a cost. That's the enduring thing, the special alchemy. If, say, J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson had been forced apart by fate, you'd have a movie. But they were close and pretty much inseparable their entire lives...flatline.

You'd think that somewhere in Borys Kit's Hollywood Reporter story somebody would have mentioned this, and perhaps commented on what I suspect is a reluctance to buy into the sad-is-better idea on the part of...Read More

The Spokesman-Review's Frank Sennett writes about formerly print-influenced news and opinion sites -- this one included -- morphing into blog streams.

See it in IMAX...that's the all of it. The last feature shown in IMAX that really played with legs was Robert Zemeckis and Tom Hanks' The Polar Express.

As things stand now (at 8:58 am), my luggage is in Los Angeles and I'm still in Seattle, at a Days Inn near the airport. I missed my flight back to LA last night, and it was definitely Alaska Airline's fault. When I got to the check-in counter around 6:55 pm both the check-in computer and the Alaska Airlines rep said the flight would be delayed until 9:30 pm, and that boarding would happen around 9 pm. No prob...I went to the gate area, hooked up my computer in a cafe and did some work. Two hours later I went over to the...Read More

New Yorker critic David Denby on some of the curious and/or incomplete aspects of The Road to Guantanamo.

Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes (SenArt) is an Iraq War documentary composed of footage shot by National Guard guys doing their service. Here's a description of a "deft little turn" in the film in David Carr's 6.19 N.Y. Times column, to wit: "Specialist Mike Moriarty is filming his squad leader, Staff Sgt. Kevin Shangraw, as they bounce along in a Humvee. He asks his leader for his take on the broader mission, and Sergeant Shangraw comes straight off the dome with a government-issue rationale. 'Well, I think it's a fantastic opportunity for the Iraqis to establish a new history in the country...Read More

Variety's Peter Bart on how the tea-leaf readers misunderstood the fate of The Break-Up.

In honor (once again) of John Scheinfeld's Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everybody Talkin' About Him)?, which just played to enthused auds at the Seattle Film but has been snubbed by the L.A. Film Festival for some curious reason, three of Harry's songs -- "You're Breakin' My Heart", "Maybe" and "Gotta Get Up".

For those of you who never saw that 1978 "Saturday Night Live" skit that asked what might have happened if Superman/Clark Kent's Krypton meteor had landed in a village in Germany in the 1930s instead of the Kent farm in Smallville...here's a transcript. The idea was that Superman's gullibly nationalistic philosophy (i.e., equating "truth" and "justice" with "the American way") would have conformed to the realities of Nazi Germany, and he therefore would have been Uberman/Klaus Kent, and he would have been able to easily identify Jews-in-hiding with his x-ray vision, etc. I wonder if this bit is viewable on one...Read More

It was that silver nitrate black-and-white noir thing...right? The Hollywood Reporter's 35th annual Key Art Awards ceremony last Friday night gave Dimension Films' Sin City four trophies -- for best action adventure trailer, best teaser trailer, best home entertainment-consumer audiovisual, and some kind of special recognition for "character banners designed for the film"...whatever that means.

"'Why the World Doesn't Need Superman' reads the title of a piece that wins Lois Lane the Pulitzer Prize in Superman Returns, the latest bigscreen revival of comicdom's strongest and fastest hero. Not only is she wrong in the context of the story (not to mention real life), but she'll be wrong in the court of public opinion once the world gets a look at this most grandly conceived and sensitively drawn Superman saga. Sure to rate with aficionados alongside Spider-Man 2 and, for many, Batman Begins on the short list of best superhero spectaculars, pic more than justifies director Bryan Singer's decision...Read More

Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson (l.) interviewing "I Wake Up Screening" co-authors Laura Kim and John Anderson at a Seattle Film Festival panel discussion -- Sunday, 6.18, 2:25 pm

(a) Lobby of Seattle's W Hotel; (b) Good old early '60s/Elvis Presley icon; (c) Snapped from confines of space needle restaurant where Golden Needles were passed out early this afternoon Sunday, 6.18, 1:35 pm; (d) Old poster image promising tour of Seattle's shady district; (e) Mexican restaurant near Pike Street.

"Top-tier stars...stay on top by being true to their personas. We pay $10 to see Will Smith or Julia Roberts precisely because they don't surprise us. It's not that they're playing themselves. It's just that the force of their personalities swamps everything else. They're more than actors -- they're brands. And yet Johnny Depp, 43, is almost pathologically unpredictable. He can be bizarre, hilarious, unsettling -- even annoying. But he is never the same. He's the anti-Tom Cruise. 'Nothing against Tom, but Johnny may be a bigger star now,' says director John Waters, who cast Depp in 1990's Cry-Baby. ' Nobody is...Read More

Winners of the 32nd annual Seattle Film Festival awards (called the "Golden Needles") were announced about 90 minutes ago, and the audience award winner for Best Film went to Michel Hazanavicius' OSS 117: Nest of Spies , the French-made espionage spoof that's been a big hit in France since opening there in early May. The audience award for Best Documentary went to Rickie Stern and Annie Sundberg's The Trials of Darryl Hunt.

There were several other awards I don't have time to mention, but the jury bestowed a "special mention" upon Linas Phillips' Walking to...Read More

Carl Colapert's G.I. Jesus, which I described last week as "the first truly exceptional Cinevegas film I've seen", has been handed the Cinevegas Grand Jury Prize. The hander-outers were director Mark Pellington (Mothman Prophecies ) and film critics Jean Oppenheimer and F.X. Feeney. The negligible Park won the Audience Award, 5 Up 2 Down won a Special Award for Cinematography, and two films were given Homrable Mention status -- The Favor (a pretty good ABC After-School Special film) and The 4th Dimension (missed it, heard pretty good things, would have watched if on DVD it Cinevegas (a) had DVDs to loan to...Read More

Positively 4th Street and Seneca -- Sunday, 6.18, 7:55 am

(a) Following yesterday afternoon's Capitol Hill-area screening of Eric Byler's Americanese and a q & a session moderated by N.Y. Times industry reporter Sharon Waxman, which didn't make time for audience questions and left a few people grumbling as a result -- Saturday, 6.17.06, 6:45 pm; (b) Looking eastward toward Bellevue , snapped from rear deck of a tres ritzy home belonging to a University of Washington supporter who hosted an early evening party for Americanese and Seattle-based author Shawn Wong,...Read More

Forbes has reported that Adam Sandler made $29 million between June '05 and June '06. But a new year has begun, so to speak, and Adam needs to start working on the next $29 million . That's where the fans fit in. We need to go out and support Sandler's Click (Columbia, 6.23) to keep the bandwagon rolling.

Obviously we aren't obliged to do this, but shouldn't we? Don't we owe it to the guy? Sandler needs to keep rolling in clover, and he isn't going to be pulling down the monster bucks forever...Read More

I'm not saying Superman Returns is Son of Poseidon, far from it, but last Thursday's (6.15) NRG numbers are indicating a fairly good but less-than-phenomenal July 4th holiday opening. Definite interest was at 38%, but two weeks before opening a tentpole movie of this size should be closer to 50% at this stage. (Pirates of the Caribbean's definite interest was at 67%, and that's three weeks out.) Superman Returns had a first-choice rating of 9%, but at this stage of the game that number should be in the high teens. Warner Bros. has a nine-day window -- Wednesday, 6.28 to Thursday...Read More

I missed this when I linked to the Forbes Celebrity 100 list a couple of days ago, but according to what Cinematical is posting, here's what the following Hollywood heavyweights made...you know, earned...between June '05 and June '06: (1) Steven Spielberg -- $332 million, (2) George Lucas -- $235 million; (3) Jerry Seinfeld -- $100 million (for doing what?); (4) Jerry Bruckheimer -- $84 million; (5) Tom Cruise -- $67 million; (6) The Olsen Twins -- $40 million (....what?); (7) Peter Jackson -- $39 million; (8) Denzel Washington -- $38 million; (9) Adam Sandler, Johnny Depp and Tom...Read More

Quinceanera co-directors and co-writers Richard Glatzer (left) and Wash Westmoreland (right) flanking star Emily Rios after yesterday's Seattle Film Festival screening -- 6.16.06, 8:35 pm.

(a) At a Capitol Hill club called Chapel, Cinematical's Kim Voynar, Americanese director-writer Eric Byler, Byler's Taiwanese ally-partner(I'm bad with names...sorry) who worked on the film, and Americanese star Allison Sie -- Friday, 6.16.06, 11:40 pm; (b) Americanese star Allison Sie, director-writer Eric Byler -- Friday, 6.16, 6:20 pm; (c) Seattle skies are still blue and on the bright side at 9:40 pm, obviously...Read More

I've explained this a couple of times in years past, but let's go over it again: it's a total recipe for disaster to call any film [Fill in the blank]'s War. There have been films with titles like this before (The Private War of Major Benson, Murphy's War, etc.), and any such title always seems to imply that the main character will be manipulative, obsessive and egoistic...and who wants to spend two hours with an asshole?. The latest is Charlie Wilson's War , which will costar Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Mike Nichols will direct starting in October from...Read More

The guy below will be 64 as tomorrow (i.e., Sunday, 6.18)...great.

A friend who enjoys a degree of familiarity with the Zodiac team tells me that the recently-revealed January '07 release date "seems to be the wide release date" and that the current talk is about doing "a late fall campaign for the Oscars. The January release date was determined before anybody at the studios even saw the film." (To which I would ask, determined by whom? And why?) "I have the feeling that this film will play major for the Oscars," the friend continues. "It runs just under three hours, is very '70s-style and way out of Fincher world... nothing like Seven and...Read More

Once again, the tracking guys have underestimated: two of the three services predicted a Nacho Libre take somewhere in the low to mid 20s, and a third estimated earnings in the high teens. And yet Friday's $10.9 million figure indicates a weekend haul around $28 or $29 million....right?

"What if your flash drive [i.e., USB drive] also stored your programs, your settings -- your entire computing universe? That's the idea behind the Lexar PowerToGo software, which is itself a licensed version of something called Ceedo Personal. It's designed to turn a flash drive into a portable Windows XP ecosystem, meaning that you can jack into anybody's PC anywhere and find yourself -- and your software tools -- right at home." -- from David Pogue's 6.15 N.Y. Times column. It's only 11:02 am and I know for sure this is the most exciting news of the day.

Former N.Y. Times fashion columnist Ginia Bellafante , whose writing is delicious and razor-sharp, has given what sounds like a profound stamp of approval to David Frankel's The Devil Wears Prada (20th Century Fox, 6.30):

"The fashion beat affords...plenty of time spent in the company of fashion people, something variously dreadful and exhilarating," Bellafante says early on. "Disciples of the fashion tribe will surely say The Devil Wears Prada exaggerates their manners and proclivities. It doesn't. The movie is easily the truest portrayal of fashion culture since Unzipped, the 1995 documentary about Isaac...Read More

Somebody told me during the Cannes Film Festival that OSS 117: Nest of Spies is funny and that I should try and catch it in Paris (it opened in France in early May), but it's French-made and was therefore playing sans English subtititles so there wouldn't have been much point in my going. It played three times at the Seattle Film Festival, but too late for me. (There's some talk about a DVD loaner kicking around.) The trailer tells you it's a somewhat dryer Austin Powers, and that Michel Hazanavincius, the director, is good at reanimating the look...

Hollywood Wiretap's assessments of reactions to Kim Masters' Los Angeles piece about the continuing or gathering threats (all being a matter of public relations perception) to Paramount studio president Gail Berman. I'm so on top of this situation...not. The implication in the piece seems pretty obvious, but I'd love to dig up something of my own. That's a hint.

The trailer for David Leaf and John Scheinfeld's The U.S. vs. John Lennon (Lionsgate, 9.15) looks pretty good. Maybe the interest levels and/or perceived impact of this film will up the chances of Scheinfeld's Who is Harry Nilsson? landing the right distributor.

Zodiac director David Fincher and casting director Laray Mayfield are looking to hire an African American actress to play a bus driver in a new scene that will shoot in late June/early July. "Unnerved by the Zodiac's threat against children on school buses, this African-American woman asks the police what they are doing to stop the killer...1 speech & 2 lines, 1 scene," the breakdown reads. Big deal...extra stuff is shot all the time. I still don't see why the Zodiac release date has to be bumped to January '07. And it doesn't necessarily mean anything that Anthony and Joe Russo's You, Me...Read More

I caught John Scheinfeld's Who is Harry Nilsson (And Why Is Everbody Talkin' About Him)? for the second time last night, having first seen it last February at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. My reaction back then was one of admiration mixed with personal anger at Nilsson's high-octane self-destructiveness, which is pretty much the focus of the film's final third. (In real life it kicked in right after the success of his landmark 1971 album "Nilsson Schmilsson".) But for some reason this aspect didn't bother me nearly as much last night, and I was able to better appreciate (I think) how finely...Read More

"It's happening all over Hollywood...the studios have finally started to just say no," writes Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson. "Ambitious big-budget movies with A-list directors and stars that might have gotten an enthusiastic green light a year or two ago are sitting in limbo. The studios that were once eager to land top talent aren't as willing to sign on the dotted line. And agents and managers are sitting up and taking notice." It's a wave...a movement. I really do believe that this show of cojones and fiscal resolve is analagous to the toppling of one European communist government after another...

Film critic and "I Wake Up Screening" author Jon Anderson (second from left), Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson and daughter Nora Thompson-Chute at a "Filmmaker's Diner" at Cutter's (2001 Western Avenue) -- Thursday, 6.15.06, 7:05 pm.

(a) Westward view from Seattle's Western Avenue -- Thursday, 6.15.06, 5:45 pm; (b) The Seattle Film Festival has it all over Cinevegas in at least one respect, which is that the W Hotel rooms offer a DVD player and widescreen TV and the festival staff lets you borrow festival films on DVD; (c) (l. to r.)...Read More

The tracking guys are in disagreement about this weekend, but Nacho Libre has apparently picked up a bit and may -- I say "may" -- edge out The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift by a nosehair. Both are expected to come in somewhere in the low to mid 20s. Oh, and it's looking like Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties will edge out The Lake House with projected earnings of roughly $14 million and $12 million, respectively.

My 6.11 paraphrasings based on my having run into critic, author, screenwriter and Cinevegas juror F.X. Feeney last weekend in Las Vegas weren't good enough, or so Feeney has told me. I'm not saying he's wrong, and I'm very glad that he's written in to correct what I wrote and elaborate about what he meant. The topics are Michael Mann and Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28), which Feeney knows something about as he's seen a cut of the film and has written an exploratory essay for an upcoming Taschen coffee-table book about Mann. Anyway, here's a Feeney quote that sums up...Read More

"In his endearingly ridiculous new film, Nacho Libre, [Jack Black] plays a crusader of sorts in mask and cape, working his daft magic well enough to suggest that he just might be the missing comic link between a smarmy-pants like Vince Vaughn and a 'what-me-worry' naif like Will Ferrell ." -- from Manohla Dargis's N.Y. Times review.

Forbes magazine puts Tom Cruise at the top of their "Celebrity 100" money-power-clout list...so effing what? What does that prove? Who cares?

Nikki Finke doesn't get into why Orlando Bloom has decided not to follow former ICM agent Chris Andrews in his move to CAA, focusing instead on this and that backroom agency intrigue. Bloom didn't stick with Andrews because '05 was a tremdously crappy year for him, as this Sharon Waxman article that ran last January pointed out, and he had to try something different just to shake up the karma...right? What other explanation could there be?

I said last weekend that Steven Spielberg's "Sunday Morning Shootout" riff about wanting to direct a modest Capote -sized flick was the equivalent of creative crocodile tears, and here's the proof in the pudding....or at least a noteworthy indication of same.

Where to start on David Poland's review of Superman Returns? Well, let's see...it's not "terribly cast". Brandon Routh does the sad-and- lonely thing fine by me. Kate Bosworth...okay, her Lois Lane feels a tad insubstantial, but she's far from "terrible". Kevin Spacey doesn't ace out Gene Hackman, but he's moderately amusing as Luthor. Parker Posey isn't given enough to say or do, but she brings a bit more feeling and gravitas to her girlfriend-of-Lex part than Valerine Perrine did to hers. Frank Langella shows more wit and finesse than Jackie Cooper did as Perry White...casting is not a problem, trust me. And...Read More

The differences between Las Vegas and Seattle (where I've been since about 1:45 pm) are immediately apparent. There's a wonderful sense of moisture everywhere here, and the cab drivers are mellower. (Last weekend I tipped a Vegas cab driver a buck off a $5.60 fare, and the driver glared at me and snapped, "That's not a tip!")

And I haven't run into any Seattle women with oversized fake breasts , and it's like, "Oh, right...women as they actually are without the Vegas gene." It's an enormous relief to be here. Until today I'd never been to Seattle...Read More

For what it's worth, I caught a shorts program at 3 pm yesterday and the best of the bunch was Natasha Schull's Buffet: All You Can Eat Las Vegas. (No -- I didn't forget to include the word "in" -- that's how the title reads.) Schull's doc is about the morphing process -- i.e., human beings devolving into pigs -- that happens whenever upstanding middle-class people are presented with a well-stocked buffet. Buffet starts out in a deceptively bland, matter-of-fact way, then gradually becomes one of the most withering critiques of the Land of Gluttony I've ever sat through. I felt...Read More

Catching a plane to Seattle and the Seattle Film Festival later this morning. Thanks to the Cinevegas staffers for their 24-7 helpfulness and graciousness. A temporary farewell to festival jurors F.X. Feeney and Mark Pellington (director of Arlington Road and the exceptional The Mothman Prophecies). A final thanks to honcho Trevor Groth, and a very special thanks to BWR's Chris Libby, who saw to every last thing like a total pro.

Southern section of Vegas, taken from Cinevegas party on roof of Rio hotel -- Wednesday, 6.14.06, 11:10 pm.

Finally, at long last, Warner Home Video is releasing a DVD of Richard Lester's sublime and underseen Petulia on Tuesday, 6.20. Marshall Fine's blurb on Petulia's Amazon page is a little square-ish, but a pretty good sum-up: "This Richard Lester film will tell you more about how confusing the '60s were than any hackneyed NBC miniseries ever could. In this fragmented love story, told in a nonlinear fashion that bounces back and forth in time, George C. Scott plays a newly divorced surgeon who meets a charming if scattered young woman, Petulia (Julie Christie). He falls into an affair with her,...Read More

G.I. Jesus stars Joe Arquette and Patricia Mota at Cinevegas party at Mandalay Hotel and Casino -- Tuesday, 6.13.06, 11:25 pm.

(a) G.I. Jesus director-writer Carl Colpaert, star Patricia Mota at Mandalay Hotel party -- Tuesday, 6.13.06, 11:27 pm; (b) Tattooed leg belonging to young woman at Mandalay party -- Tuesday, 6.13.06, 11:40 pm; (c) Ocean's 11 club -- Tuesday, 6.13.06, 9:15 pm; (d) budget hotel; (e) support for U.S. troops; (f) horse sculpture; (g) Mid '50s French lobby poster for John Ford's The Searchers.

You should have heard TV news anchors making fun yesterday of Daryl Hannah's climbing up that walnut tree in order to try and prevent a 14-acre garden from being turned into a warehouse so that Ralph Horowitz, the owner of the property, could make a profit. Hannah was doing something right, noble and gutsy, and those complacent overpaid TV anchors with their fussed-over hair styles and "gee, what's up with Daryl Hannah?" attitudes were nothing short of revolting .

This is one of the dumbest-sounding ideas for a movie I've read about in a long time. Which means, of course, it could turn out to be very, very cool.

There are obliquely satirical elements here and there in Carl Colpaert 's G.I. Jesus but to call it "a topical satire that takes a harrowing and humorous look at a Mexican national's brief furlough from the frontlines," in the words of Variety's Justin Chang, strikes me as a very strange take. Chang isn't "wrong" but...

Mexican Goof Ride

At the risk of sounding brusque, Jared Hess's Nacho Libre (Paramount, 6.16) is to Napoleon Dynamite, his breakout debut film, as Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic is to Rushmore or Bottle Rocket.

I know, I know -- that's a damning thing to say. But I'm only trying to qualify what's right and (only occasionally) wrong with it. It's really not that much of a letdown.

Jack Black in Jared Hess's Nacho Libre (Paramount, 6.16)

Let's acknowledge once again that Jack Black is an authentic genius -- it's not just the manic-volcanic energy inside...Read More

With everyone doing articles about established film critics getting whacked or demoted and/or losing their influence because they're thought to be out of touch with the cyber generation (here's an argument against that myth by Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman), I naturally presumed that a forthcoming book by recently dismissed Daily News film critic Jami Bernard called "The Incredible Shrinking Critic" would be about this syndrome. And it's not. It's a book about Bernard's "excellent adventure in weight loss." It'll probably sell, come to think of it. (Sorry for misspelling Ms. Bernard's first name in an earlier edit.)

Hollywood Wiretap is linking to JoBlo.com's 6/12 posting that Paramount Pictures has bumped David Fincher's Zodiac out of its previous mid-to-late November slot to January 2007, even though I reported evidence of this date change three days ago (i.e., Sunday, 6.11). I've since been told by Paramount publicity that the Zodiac bump was decided upon months ago, even though right now the IMDB still has it listed as an 11.22.06 release. This is a long and ambitious real-life whodunit with quality-level actors (Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey, Chloe Sevigny) that screams "fall or holiday release." Okay,...Read More

So what happened to the heat over Nacho Libre? Last month I kept hearing that audiences were laughing at the trailer, that it was the summer's big comedy slam-dunk, etc. I hope I'm not stepping into another Break-Up situation, but recent tracking on Nacho Libre (Paramount, 6.16) indicates a not-that-great opening weekend. Maybe a little more than $20 million, I mean. There's a chance, in fact, that The Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift (Universal, 6.16) might ace it out. Another film that's not looking all that vigorous is The Devil Wears Prada (20th Century Fox, 6.30). Hold on...what happened to the hairdresser bandwagon?...Read More

Taking time out from Cinevegas this evening to see Nacho Libre at the Orleans megaplex in Las Vegas...the moment arrives.

Elvis Mitchell interviews Lawrence Fishburne in front of large crowd at Brenden Cinemas #13 in concert with Fishburne receiving the Cinevegas Half-Life Award -- Monday, 6.12.06, 8:20 to 9:05 pm.

(a) Anyone who says they prefer coming to Las Vegas and taking in fake atmosphere crap like this instead of experiencing the real thing in Venice, Italy, or Paris, France, has a serious problem -- Monday, 6.12.06, 9:40 pm; (b) Oversized Bellagio Bell sitting in a cavernous passageway between one of the many visual-climax stations inside L.V.'s Bellagio hotel, which...Read More

"I would love to find condoms...it's kind of disgusting to be pawing around other people's personal waste." -- Private eye John Nazarian, a guy who's apparently stepped into Anthony Pellicano's shoes, speaking to L.A. Times writer Rachel Abramowitz.

Ann Coulter vs. George Carlin on Jay Leno Wednesday night...this ought to be good, right?

AICN is quoting from a forum commentary written by longtime Danny Elfman orchestrator Steve Bartek on his own website that Elfman has removed his name from the credits of Nacho Libre (Paramount, 6.16). "A couple of the main cues we spent lots of time on were taken out and replaced with music Danny didn't want to be associated with," Bartek reportedly wrote, "and I believe he was upset about the way the studio treated him in doing the replacement -- not very above-board -- so most of the score is still Danny's but his name will not be there." Not...Read More

"Toshiba has introduced a $500 HDTV player that, at least for now, can only play movies from three major studios. Later this month, Samsung will release the first Blu-ray machine, which will be able to play more movies, but it is expected to cost about $1,000. Technical hurdles were behind Pioneer's decision last week to delay the release of its Blu-ray player -- which will cost about $1,500 -- until September. Studios have released only a handful of movies thus far because so few players have been sold. Another complication is that consumers with older high-definition television sets may not get the...Read More

The story is not that Jim Carrey and manager Eric Gold are on the negotiating ropes -- the story is that sanity is creeping into the judgment of big-studio execs who determine whether to green-light big-budget films. I've long felt that the system of paying $20 to $25 million fees and/or massive gross point percentages to big stars who can presumably "open" a film is a bad thing for the business as a whole. (Especially considering that a big name appearing in a shitty no-interest film never seems to make a financial difference.) Big talent should be decently compensated, but the really big...Read More

Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner's The History Boys having won six Tony Awards last Sunday night, including one for Best Play, seems to suggest that Hytner's film version, which Fox Searchlight will bring out in the fall, has instant credibility as a year-end Oscar contender. I don't think that's necessarily true. And I'm saying this, frankly, because of the older- man's-hands-on-schoolboy-genitals factor. (Sorry, but I didn't write the play.) I was lucky enough to see The History Boys in early May before going to Cannes Film Festival, and there's no question that it's a brilliant and impassioned tribute to the glories of...Read More

The perpetuating of the Superman-as-gay-icon thing is bizarre. After seeing Bryan Singer's film last week I wrote that those speculating about echoes along these lines are "dreaming...this is a film about purity of spirit." And Singer has said his Superman "is probably the most heterosexual character in any movie I've ever made"...and he's not wrong. But the Guardian won't let it go.

John Ford's movies have been wowing and infuriating me all my life. A first-rate visual composer and one of Hollywood's most economical story-tellers bar none, Ford made films that were always rich with complexity, understatements and undercurrents that refused to run in one simple direction.

The closing shot of John Ford's The Searchers

Ford's films are always what they seem to be...until you watch them again and re-reflect, and then they always seem to be something more.

But the phoniness and jacked-up sentiment in just about every one of them can be oppressive, and the older...Read More

"The problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves but wiser people are full of doubt." -- Bertrand Russell quote embraced by Bill Maher to call attention to a new Maher-produced documentary about the state of religion in the world.

The Chinese government censors are so relentless...like termites, like beavers on amphetamine...and they just don't quit with the lame-ass no-no's.

Gyorgy Ligeti, a Hungarian composer who created one of the trippiest motion picture scores of all time with his work on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey , died today in Vienna at age 83. If you don't remember the 2001 score, listen to an excerpt here and it'll come right back to you.

Props to N.Y. Times columnist David Carr for not just sticking it to arch-conservative "hate-monger" Ann Coulter in the usual way...hah!

"Certainly one advantage of 'youth' in the arts is ignorance, to know so little as to be fearless. To not grasp that certain things one may dream up are actually impossible to do. When I finished Apocalypse Now I of course thought, 'If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn't have even tried [this]." Certainly old age brings 'experience' and that is not to be discounted, but in the arts, fearlessness is a more desirable genie than experience . Fearlessness is cousin to innovation, whereas experience can be the parent of fear. Once you've fallen out of the tree a few...Read More

"We are not here to be liked," 20th Century Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman tells N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson. "We don't work for talent agencies. We work for Fox. Our job is not to worry about agents who jibber-jabber to reporters, who worry about headlines." Co-chairman Jim Gianopulos tells Holson that that currying favor "is not tolerated around here from anyone; you are not going to get ahead scheming."

Coming Home

Carl Colpaert's G.I. Jesus is the first truly exceptional Cinevegas film I've seen so far.

Compared to the pickings over the last two days, this psychological domestic drama almost feels miraculous. The reception may be more muted out in the real world...who knows? But it's certainly good enough to play at the Telluride or Toronto Film Festivals, and with some minor refinements it could even end up being distributed.

(l. to r.) G.I. Jesus costar Joe Arquette, director-writer Carl Colpaert, costars Telana Lynum and Patricia Mota following Sunday night's screening -- 8:05 pm....

"I would love to go off and make a picture like Capote or George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck." -- Steven Spielberg mouthing the equivalent of creative crocodile tears to Peter Bart and Peter Guber during a segment of AMC's "Sunday Morning Shootout" that aired this morning.

"Remember -- all sequels are whore movies. You do the first one because you want to do something wonderful. You do the sequel for money." -- guy with heavy credits who's done some laps around the track.

Haven't seen the latest Entertainment Weekly with the story about the most controversial films ever, but good for Nikki Finke having written that while she "has no real problems with EW's list, it's as if only the post-Star Wars prequel generation came up with it." If, in fact, EW is deliberately skewing its reporting toward a younger demographic (as they seem to be), they're surrendering whatever cinematic historical authority points they may have accumulated in past years. The story reportedly leaves out Brokeback Mountain, and also blows off (according to Finke) Carnal Knowledge, Easy Rider, Straw Dogs, Apocalypse Now, I Am A...Read More

Confusion hovers over the release of David Fincher's Zodiac, one of the most highly anticipated dramas of the fall and a personal can't-wait for yours truly. The IMDB has an 11.22.06 U.S. release date but Coming Soon has it coming out January 19, 2007. There's also a Robert Downey fan site that's reporting the release date as 1.19.07. It says that Fincher is doing some reshoots (which Downey is involved in) and will resume filming reshoots sometime in late June. There's no reason that additional shooting in the mid-summer should cause a film with a skedded late November release...Read More

"My loyalty never dies," Anthony Pellicano has told L.A. Times writer Chuck Philips. "You're not going to see me take the stand against the clients and employees and other people that are going to be testifying against me. I didn't rat them out. You understand? I am never going to besmirch a client or any other person that I gave my trust to or who gave their trust to me. I'm never going to do that. I am going to be a man until I fall -- if, in fact, that happens." It's not a hip thing to say in...Read More

Tropicana Ave. west of Las Vegas Blvd. -- Saturday, 6.10.06, 8:50 pm.

(a) Favor costar Isidra Vega, director-writer Eva Aridjis following Saturday afternoon's screening at Brenden Cinemas adjacent to Palms Hotel -- Saturday, 6.10.06, 5:40 pm; (b) Puffy Chair principals Jay Duplass (director-writer-cinematographer), Kathryn Asleton (star), Melissa Parmenter (producer)-- Friday, 6.9.06, 7:40 pm; (c) former Sundance publicity chief Patrick Hubley, a nice guy who got married last year and travelled all over the world and seems on some level to have "changed" (in a good existential way); (d) Thanks to Gravity...Read More

A respectful salute for Jam in Winans...the guy who did this "Spin DJ is a God" YouTube video. A fantastic little piece -- an exercise in cosmic humanitarian humor and...whatever...a look at the roulette wheel of fate. Winans is talented as shit, and the actor who plays the DJ is great also...a young Joaquin Pheonix.

I've seen four Cinevegas movies so far -- Paul Dinello 's Strangers with Candy on Friday night, and then John Maringouin's Running Stumbled, Eva Aridjis's The Favor and Gregory Berkin and Jack Sheehan's Skin City on Saturday. The Aradjis film, a low-budget domestic drama about a nice, dweeby middle-aged guy taking a stab at fatherhood with the son of a deceased girlfriend, is the only one that passed muster. It feels, at times, a little too plain and earnest in the manner of an ABC afterschool special (that ancient series never stops getting evoked), but it has a pared-down simplicity and a...Read More

I ran into critic, author, screenwriter and Cinevegas juror F.X. Feeney yesterday morning at a Palms Casino diner at the ungodly (by Las Vegas standards) hour of 8:15 am. We got into this and that, but mainly focused on the topics of Michael Mann and Miami Vice (Universal, 7.28)...and for good reason.

Feeney has seen a rough cut of Miami Vice as part of his research for the writing of the upcoming Taschen book on Mann, a massive 192-page visual/intellectual-orgasm coffee-table book that will hit bookstores sometime in early to mid August....Read More

Michael Madsen had complained to the BBC's Chris Vallance about how "there seems to be this driving force to tear down everything that's a little old." He was referring to a plan by the Union 76 company to destroy the Union 76 ball signs at the gas stations, which are being re-designed as flattened wafer-like signs. "These are things that were landmarks, it's a symbol that I remember from childhood," Madsen said. "What's the point of smashing them and putting up flat signs?" Vallance explains that "in Madsen's view Los Angeles' increasingly bland environment is representative of a process of thoughtless modernization...Read More

Blue, Baby...Blue

I strongly hinted Friday morning that Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (Warner Bros., 6.28), which I'd seen the night before, is a very good film. One thing I felt free to actually say at the time (there was a review embargo in effect) is that it delivers in terms of emotionality and a palpable theme. Now that it's okay to write something, we need to admit something: Superman Returns is perhaps not a vital movie for our times. We all know it's primarily an attempt to re-launch a franchise so a bunch of fat guys can make a lot of dough...guys...Read More

Disney/Pixar/Lasseter's Cars is being forecast to pull down something in the mid to high 60s this weekend. It's kinda funny that before The Omen's $12.5 million Tuesday opening, the tracking guys were all projecting six-day (Tuesday to Sunday) cumes in the high 20s. The mellowest, friendliest, most good-timey opener of the weekend's three openers -- Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion -- is playing in fewer theatres and skews older, and is expected to pull in about $3.4 million.

This is awful, really ghastly. Watch it at your peril.

This is an indication of what's right and agreeable about Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion in the manner of Altman's best films, but the way costar Meryl Streep puts it....well. Here she is, talking to the Washington Post's Michael O'Sullivan: "'Usually you know immediately, if the screenplay announces its tone, its darkness, its -- you know -- you can sort of predict, from the first 15 pages, when things are going to blow up physically or metaphorically, and how it's going to resolve, and the whole schwing of it, and what the feel of the whole thing is. The gestalt...Read More

In an interview with Now Playing's Scott Collura, Running Scared director Wayne Kramer (a good hombre) examines what went wrong with New Line's marketing of the film, why critics hated it, and why he pretty much hates critics.

I saw Superman Returns last night, but I agreed not to run a review until opening day. If I left it there some of you might draw conclusions, so let me add without hesitation that Warner Bros.' caution is misplaced. I need to say at least one thing: I've echoed in this space the general interpretation of WB's decision to open Bryan Singer's film on Wednesday, 6.28, instead of the originally announced 6.30 debut, as a desire to maximize the holiday take before the dreaded onslaught of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest the following weekend....Read More

Underdog enterprise is what this country is all about. When I saw this photo, it made me wish I could be in Somerville, Massachucetts, next Friday so I could go to the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square and buy a ticket and say hello to the folks behind this hand-tooled promotion. These people get it...they're on it.

HE will be switching bases later this afternoon (Friday, 6.9) from Los Angeles to the Palm Casino in Las Vegas for a few days of Cinevegas, the "world's most dangerous film festival". I have, in all sincerity, a place in my heart for "the worst money-grubbing place in the world," as Albert Brooks called Las Vegas 21 years ago in Lost in America .

I love the sun, the desert dryness, the babes at poolside, the artery-clogging breakfasts, the overwhelming sense of apartness from the real world...a place where Jesus and his disciples would surely...Read More

A "pretty significant sequence" was cut by director Bryan Singer from Superman Returns that will turn up on the "special edition" DVD. Singer calls it "kind of a fun look into Superman's journey off the Earth into space." Big deal.

Merger stories are so damned fascinating. I'm kidding. You have to pay attention and all, but like I wrote last January when I first heard of the planned merger of Lionsgate (it was called Lions Gate back then) and MGM, there's no cosmic dimension to the mere shifting of funds from one entity to another, no more than the daily ebb and flow of the seas.

If I were a N.Y. Times media columnist with a vanquished drug problem in my past, I'd probably leave well enough alone. It appears that David Carr (a.k.a., "the Bagger") is made of sterner stuff. He has my respect and interest in what he comes up with.

China does a 180, shuts down The DaVinci Code, lies about why. This plus their reaction to Lou Ye's Summer Palace during the Cannes Film Festival makes Beijing seem more tilty-quirky than usual.

"I'd been hoping to shadow a writer for a show on a major network, [and] I was looking for some hands-on experience to round out a rather theoretical film school education, and hoped to gain some as an intern on [his] show," writes Andrea Janes in the N.Y. Press's film issue. But this writer would come running onto set screaming, 'There's no Diet Coke in the fridge! Hello!? Interns!' That's when I questioned what I was getting into by entering this field. I wanted to pay my dues to figure out the industry, but on this particular show, interns' primary duties consisted...Read More

Sean Penn will always be a fascinating great actor, but a thought hit me this morning as I watched this All The King's Men trailer (which I first saw in a theatre two or three weeks ago): Penn's Willie Stark, a ruthless, power-hungry politician, is not charismatic, much less attractive, and if I were a rural Southerner in the 1950s (or whenever) I don't know that I'd want to vote for the guy. So right away there's trouble because King's Men is about a guy who had an exceptional rapport with voters before anything else.

"I can watch the world through Michelangelo Antonioni 's eyes forever. He is the greatest stylist of the modern era, and The Passenger may be my favorite film," David Thomson has written in The Guardian . "It's the one I think of offering whenever people ask that question. And they ask a lot.

"No, it's not in my top ten, but sometimes I think [The Passenger is the one I like the best, by which I fear I mean it's the film I'd most like to be in, instead of just watching." Dream-projecting ourselves...Read More

I decided several months ago that Martin Scorsese 's The Departed will be his best film since Goodfellas because of the urban grit, cops-and-mob-guys milieu. It should be, I mean, or has the best chance to be, given the home-turf factor. And now along comes this AICN early-bird review, which is a melancholy pan, the guy obviously heartsick about what he feels obliged to pass along. There's only one thing to do (and it's not hard), which is to slip into denial about it and stay that way until...

The CAA team is saying adios to the I.M. Pei building that reflected the vision of former agency chief Mike Ovitz, and ICM will soon be gone from that green-stone-and-tinted-glass fortress on Wilshire Blvd...and they're both moving into new digs in Century City, and not far from each other. All signifying some kind of primal generational need to say "that was then, this is now." As former agent Lou Pitt tells N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman, "When you pick up and move from someplace, it's often more than just to find space...when you move, you redefine yourself...it gives you a chance to...Read More

This feels like yesterday's papers, but a source "very close" to Tom Cruise has told Slate's Kim Masters that "he's teetering on the brink of a certain kind of trouble that no star like him has ever been in before." Cruise's films always cost a bundle, and "the weak performance M:I3 is enough to give any studio pause," Masters writes. "Meanwhile, Cruise's production deal with Paramount expires in a few weeks. Negotiations to renew are not, as yet, under way. Without big, profitable movies starring Cruise, the deal is far too rich to be justified. One marketing executive speaks for...Read More

Another surprisingly good opening on top of the $38 million earned last weekend by The Break-Up: John Moore's The Omen , which was critically trashed and wasn't expected to do more than $7 million or so on its demonic Tuesday opener (the 6.6.06 date being the whole reason it was made in the first place), took in $12.5 million yesterday. I saw it last night at the AMC 15 in Century City in a 280-seat house...maybe 30 or 35 seats unfilled. I studied the faces as best I could in the dark, but it seemed to be overwhelmingly an under-25 crowd ....Read More

Here's a good sign-of-the-times story by the L.A. Times Josh Friedman about online sports-betting sites taking in some fairly decent coin each weekend from taking bets on Hollywood box-office . "By putting their money where their entertainment hunches are, [betting-minded moviegoers] are turning the weekend box-office derby -- once followed mainly by studio executives and accountants -- into a participatory sport," Friedman writes. "Online entertainment betting, originally a novelty aimed at hyping the sports books during Oscar season, is on the rise. World Sports Exchange, which runs a gambling site at wsex.com, reports that its movie wagering volume jumped 26% last...Read More

"I'm been suffering the tortures of the damned, sir...tortures of the damned." -- Alex (Malcolm McDowell) to prison minister in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

I'm sorry, but this is mildly amusing. Not the Tropicana tie-in as much as someone on the food chain not saying to someone else, "I'm not saying this is a huge deal because it's not...it's nothing...but the other side of the coin is that it's mainly going to give journalists who've already responded to the Advocate cover (like the L.A. Times John Horn) something to snicker at. So why do it?" (The source of the image is Manhattan Offender, by way of Defamer.)

Less amusing is a note from an exhibitor friend telling me that Superman Returns has a "confirmed duration of 158 minutes."

"At 7:56 am on Wednesday, 6.8.06, Jeffrey Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere put himself and his site (www.hollywood-elsewhere.com) in full compliance with U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act by submitting to a demand from Time Inc. Deputy General Counsel Nicholas J. Jollymore, received this morning at 7:45 am, to remove a photo of Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie and Shiloh Nouvel that People magazine paid $4.1 million to publish "exclusively," so to speak."

I've been sent a convincing-looking copy of Margery Simkin 's casting breakdown for James Cameron's Project 880, which will apparently begin shooting in Los Angeles sometime in November. Simkin's sheet offers the following plotline: "In the future, Jake, a paraplegic war veteran, is brought to another planet, Pandora, which is inhabited by the Na'vi, a humanoid race with their own language and culture. Those from Earth find themselves not only at odds with the Na'vi but also with each other." The characters besides Jake are Neytiri (young female lead, "exotic" in some way or another), Grace (a "mentor" figure, already cast),...Read More

I saw the link on Hollywood Wiretap, but the story about Seth Mnookin's story in a soon-to-sell issue of Vanity Fair that delves into allegations of plagiarism by Dan Brown in the writing of best-selling "The DaVinci Code" is on the website Editor & Publisher. The charge is that Brown appropriated portions of his novel from Lewis Perdue's "Daughter of God"....oops. Kind of a movie-plot spoiler just mentioning that title.

A well-written Jack Black profile by Time's John Tyrangiel focusing, naturally, on Nacho Libre. Some press screenings are starting to happen (perhaps as soon as later this week) with the all-media happening on 6.13.

Sitting exclusively on Hollywood Interrupted, the always-lively website of Mark Ebner, one of the most intriguingly contrarian, conservative-leaning dudes I know in this town (check out his amusing video report about being video-harassed by a dark-suited Scientology goon in Hollywood a few days ago) is a trailer for Young Americans, a pro-troops doc being shot by former Hollywood manager Pat Dollard.

Everyone else has been posting the Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Shiloh Nouvel family photo, and I felt like joining in because the folks at People magazine, for whom I worked with modest satisfaction in the L.A. bureau office for 20 months (August '96 to April '98), paid $4.1 million for the photo rights, and it felt good to help show it around to help diminish the allure of the print version showing up later this week. Call it a sincere gesture from the heart. But then came an e-mailed threat on Wednesday morning from Time Inc. Deputy General Counsel Nicholas J....Read More

I won't be seeing Warner Home Video's long-awaited The Searchers DVD until tomorrow, but I've got a slight concern with the aspect ratio, as indicated by the stills on this review page on DVD Journal's site. John Ford's 1956 film was shot in VistaVision, the aspect ratio of which (when the film came out of the lab, that is) was 1.66 to 1, although it was commonly projected at 1.85 to 1. These stills look to me like an aspect ratio of about 2 to 1 -- not quite the widescreen aspect ratio of 70mm...Read More

It's 2:18 pm...I guess I'm going to run down to a nearby theatre and see how opening day for The Omen is coming along . I somehow can't see people taking long lunch hours to see a noontime or 1 pm show, or skipping the second half of the work day, etc.

On top of the not-too-terrific Omen tracking and the 30% Rotten Tomatoes rating is an apparently crucial matter of 6.6.06 not being the correct Lucifer date. "When Christianity took over the Roman calendar, in the 4th Century, the monk who compiled the dates got it wrong," according to Australia's Catholic Film Office chief Dr. Richard Leonard. A piece in the The Australian, quoting Leonard, says "historians backdated to confirm the timeline of activities in 1582, and it was discovered the dating was four years out. Leonard said the mistake had not been corrected and that going by the original dates,...Read More

It's very rare for a trailer to capture the tone and spirit of a comedy as lovingly as this one for Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26). Trailers almost always accentuate the most primitive aspects of a film in order to grab the broadest demographic -- this one doesn't. My respect to whichever Fox Searchlight exec made the particular determination, plus whichever in-house editor or outside agency did the work. (Everyone was lunching when I called.) The trailer assumes that the audience is hip enough to get the jokes, which are all about character and family conflict (i.e., not one pratfall or...Read More

I spoke to a 40ish woman on my Jet Blue NYC-to-Burbank about Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" (which she loved, couldn't put down), "Angels and Demons" (an even bigger fan), Ron Howard's film version (really loved it) and so on. Just for fun, I showed her Anthony Lane's capsule review in the New Yorker (which compared The DaVinci Code to the plague). Then I asked if she's seen, or plans to see, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. She was noncommital so I let her read David Denby's New Yorker review ("detailed, deep-layered, vivid, and terrifying...every school, college, and church group,...Read More

Announcing a very special Hollywood Elsewhere Nacho Libre promotion! With the HE "Hollywood sign" logo hand-woven into the forehead area and my own head shot sewn into the occipital, back-of- the-head area, it's a very timely, enticing-to-women cabeza accessory for fans of Jared Hess and Jack Black's Nacho Libre (Paramount, 6.16). Ideal for wearing to hot parties, hot clubs (i.e., particularly the hard-to-get-into kind that charges 12 bucks for a glass of crappy Chardonnay), baseball games, political rallies, Mexican restaurants, Russian steam baths, etc. Priced at only $24.95 plus shipping -- order today! There may be...Read More

Bus stop poster on Hollywood Way just outside Burbank Airport -- Monday, 6.5.06, 9:05 pm.

Landed in Burbank's Bob Hope Airport last night around 8:10 pm, and the first movie image to catch my eye -- at a bus stop on Hollywood Way -- was the chick-flicky one-sheet for Superman Returns. This is the best poster image WB marketers have come up with for this film yet. If I were gay or female I could see being really intrigued, but it has a cross-gender pull. It should have been the teaser poster way back...Read More

For Jennifer Aniston, "The Break-Up follows a terrible professional run. In the last year she has appeared in two high-profile movies -- the disappointing thriller Derailed and the stink-bomb comedy Rumor Has It -- and the smaller Friends With Money, in which she was the least convincing member of an ensemble. The characters in these films are wildly different, but Ms. Aniston's performance isn't. She projects the same high-maintenance Jennifer Aniston style -- the trademark sleek hair, the natural-looking makeup, the body so toned you wonder how many hours a day a person can spend with a trainer. [Plus] she exudes coolness and...Read More

Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antoinette "may also be [her] most personal film to date, not because she is herself the scion of a royal Hollywood family, but rather because she came of age during her father's lean years, when the palace of Zoetrope was set upon by angry creditors and King Francis was forced into working as a director-for-hire just to pay the bills. This is a movie made by someone who knows firsthand what it means to watch a once-glorious empire crumble ." -- L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas in his sum-up piece on the Cannes Film Festival.

Spring Street and Crosby, looking west -- Monday, 6.4.06, 11:50 am.

(a) Straight up Crosby, facing north -- Monday, 6.4.06, 11:52 am; (b) Spring Street facing east -- Monday, 6.4.06, 11:55 am; (c) This Starbucks (Spring & Crosby) has an especially friendly, unforced, study-hall vibe, on tyop of the wi-fi and that Wild Orange tea.

I'm sitting at a small round table at a Starbucks at the corner of Crosby and Spring Streets, and I feel icky and look like hell but I don't care because I'm not feeling quite as sick and submerged as I have since Saturday night, which was when a Paris virus invaded my blood. Constant fatigue, nausea, fever, aching muscles, weakness, sweat-sleeping ...awful.

After a second night of ache and torment at my brother's place last night (i.e., Sunday), the damn virus seems to be losing steam. I tried plugging in this morning at 4 ayem...Read More

Okay, now I really have to go...plane's leaving...back online Stateside sometime this evening, at which time...well, who knows?

Aaahhh...the beautiful, most sensuous, immaculately studied "nothingness" in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, especially in his early '60s period. The Italian master's career will be on view in a three-week retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Rose Cinemas starting Wednesday, 6.7.

Sunday is travelling day...back to NYC and Brookline, where my son Jett is ceremoniously graduating from high school, so no posts until late tomorrow, at best. And maybe none at all...we'll see. It's 9:48 pm in Paris and still only dusky so far...good night and good luck.

Okay, I'm eating my words about the goddam Break-Up tracking (i.e., what I wrote about it being toast) during the Cannes Film Festival. I was wrong and intemperate and rash, and I made an effing mistake, and I hope I've learned a lesson from all this. It'll sink big-time next weekend, of course (50% or 60%), but from today's perspective this is a very impressive, based-on-an-almost-total-bullshit-ad-campaign opening (the Tonya Harding joke notwithstanding)....

The Break-Up is a bigger hit than expected, so let's hear it for Universal's Big Con marketing! The Vince Vaughn-Jennifer Aniston drama-with-laughs is projected to do about $37 million this weekend, having done about $13.7 million last night. It'll be off about 50% to 60% next week once the word gets out that it's not hah-hah funny, but that was the plan all along. X-Men 3 is off radically. Last night's take was down 77% from the Friday before...a huge drop. The experts are projecting $34.9 million for the weekend, which will amount to roughly a 60% to 65% drop from last...Read More

"Although Pauline Kael knew comparatively little about how movies got made, she was unbeatable at taking off from what she had seen. But beyond that, she would take off from what she had written, and there was a new theory every two weeks. A lot of her theories had to do with loves and hates. She thought Robert Altman was a genius. He can certainly make a movie, but if it hasn't got a script, then he makes Pret-a-Porter . That's one of the most salutary lessons of this book: what makes the movie isn't just who directed it, or who's in it,...Read More

Not Half Bad

The Break-up, which I saw yesterday in Paris under the title of La Rupture, is a much better film than I heard and read it would be, and one of my thoughts as I left the UIP screening room is that Universal has lied its ass off by selling this film the way they have.

Deceptive ads and trailers are respected, of course, because they tend to sell tickets. Last Thursday's figures projected that The Break-Up would earn about $25 million or so domestically, a drop from an earlier projected figure of $30 million. But that turned out to...Read More

Patrick Gagne and Elena Timofeeva, waiters at Cafe qui parle who've been very kind and gracious in letting me sit and work in their free wi-fi establishment for hours on end -- Saturday, 6.3.06, 3:40 pm.

(a) A couple who sat next to me and producer Tricia van Klaveren last night at Safari, an Indian restaurant on rue Risseau -- Friday, 6.2.06, 10:05 pm; (b) At a local vegetable-fruit market this morning -- Saturday, 6.3.06, 9:55 am; (c) ditto.

Catch-a-Fire director Phillip Noyce has attracted the ardent interest (if not the actual signatures on a contract, piece of paper or napkin...yet) of Heath Ledger and Rachel Weisz for the eventual filming of an Autralian-based marital discord drama called Dirt Music. The film will be adaptation of Tim Winton's novel by Pip Karmel and respected playwright Justin Monjo. Variety's Michael Fleming is reporting that the financing hasn't been quite put together either, but with Ledger and Weisz on-board that shouldn't be much of a problem. Noyce is also reportedly working on a sailing-race movie called Sydney to Hobart with producer Lynda...

I'm getting blasted by readers for revealing an alleged fatherhood angle in Superman Returns. All I did was link to a Roger Friedman Fox 411 column that was up for all to see, and then a guy wrote in and said the son was the sire of Lois Lane and James Marsden 's Richard White character (which may be the case...haven't seen the film), so I ran a commment from a guy who claimed to have read the Superman Returns script and who said the Friedman item was accurate. I wouldn't have revealed the possible paternity issue on my own, but...Read More

It's not "Page Six" editor Richard Johnson's DUI charge as much the fact that he was driving at all in Manhattan that surprises me. There is no point in driving your car around Manhattan...none. It's one of the greatest places in the world to keep your weight down from walking your ass off all the time, or at least for highly-absorbing people-watching in the subway. Cars are bad for the soul because they insulate the senses and amplify the ego. If you don't walk you're not living a Manhattan-type life...it's that simple.

"As a generation of top critics move into their 50s and 60s, newspapers are chasing the same young demographic as advertisers and studios. Just as film distribution and marketing are adapting to the rise of digital delivery, the internet is altering the face of film criticism. [As] daily newspapers are losing circulation, [so are they losing] Hollywood advertising and their influence over moviegoers. As publishers struggle to hang on to their readers via online content, blogs and podcasts, some are replacing experienced critics with younger, less expensive models." -- Anne Thompson in yesterday's (6.2.06) "Risky Business" column, which obviously captures a portion...Read More

Anne Thompson's article is one of a string of pieces along these lines. A couple of days ago I spoke to New York magazine's Stu VanAirsdale about pretty much the same subject, which I gather will be online on Sunday or Monday. VanAirsdale had an idea that somehow Manhattan-based critics, who are presumably more in thrall to the aesthetic legend and criteria of NYC-based critics like Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Stanley Kaufman, James Agee and Otis Ferguson than, say, critics from New Mexico or Iowa might be, are somehow being affected more profoundly by the incursion of New Media writers and...Read More

"The man is a liar and a murderer, and I say that with all due respect." -- a line from Woody Allen's Scoop (Focus Features, 7.28.06), in which Hugh Jackman (to go by the trailer) appears to be the above-described, which seems like a red herring. The descriptive term that applies to the film seems to be " frothy comedy". Costarring with Jackman are Scarlett Johansson, Ian McShane, James Nesbitt, Jim Dunk and Allen himself. The trailer tells it, but the plot's about a London-visting college journalist (Johansson) who happens upon "the scoop of a lifetime."

"There is no one quite so boring as a man who is universally liked and admired. By this standard, Bob Berney is a very, very boring fellow. He needs just a little Harvey Weinstein flavoring to jazz up his image. Right now he's too mellow, too considerate, and has made too many shrewd decisions about which movies to acquire or co-produce." -- An observation from a certain smart-ass in Ann Hornaday's Berney profile in the Washington Post, which turns on Berney's -- Picturehouse's -- efforts to launch and sell Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion (opening 6.9).

"Look...it's a bird!...it's a plane!...it's a young, well-built, good-looking man who resembles Chris Reeve as he looked 28 years ago in a blue skin-tight suit with a red cape and boots and a very large erection, flying across the sky!"...yes!. (For the knee-jerkers out there, the exclamatory sentence I've just written -- wrote last night, I mean -- is not an example of straight intolerance of gay echoes or subtexts in mainstream films but (in my head, at least) a goof on that syndrome. Straight reactions are obviously reflected in John Horn's L.A. Times piece about perceived homoerotic subcurrents, reflections and...Read More

Roger Friedman's item is correct, according to the script: the scene where this is revealed is the last one in the movie (or at least it was in the script I read) and I thought was quite well done. In the context of the movie this subplot works okay, but if they intend to make a successful franchise out of this I'm not sure how they will navigate around the idea of a super-powered brat flying around with Daddy in sequels . It's really the sort of thing they should've done to give closure to the franchise, but this will likely be...Read More

The question is, what is Brad Pitt made of? -- Friday, 6.2.06, 1:15 pm.

(a) Paris plex onBoulevard des Capucines des Italiens, right around the corner from the old Paris Opera -- Friday, 6.2.06, 1:10 pm; (b) UIP screening room on rye Meyerbeer, where I saw La Rupture at 1:30 pm today -- it has the most comfortably upholstered screening-room seats I've ever sat in, bar none; (c) Un object d'pasta in storefront window -- Friday, 6.2.06, 3:40 pm; (d) Two turns of a streetcorner and about 150 yards from UIP...Read More

Focus Features is screening Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland (9.6) on both coasts, and since I've written so much about its development (the death-of-Superman drama used to be called Truth, Justice and the American Way) over the past two years, it's heartening to report that the reactions so far have been pretty good. "I thought it was a very solid piece of work, a noirish murder mystery with lots of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential influences," says a Manhattan- based journalist. "Adrien Brody (who is excellent) plays a down-on-his-heels P.I. who is hired by the recently deceased George Reeves' mom (Lois Smith) to investigate...Read More

Fox 411's Roger Friedman is running an item about a possible paternal plot twist in Bryan Singer's Superrman Returns (Warner Bros., 6.28), which is Brandon Roush's Caped Crusader is (or eventually becomes) a dad over the course of the film. "Previews already show that Lois Lane, played by Kate Bosworth , has what looks to be a four-year-old son and no husband," writes Friedman. "The only other candidate for fatherhood would be Perry White's son, Richard (James Marsden). But that not only makes little sense, [but] has a low-level function for a dramatic reveal. You can only imagine Lois screaming to...Read More

A 5.25 New Republic piece about the attempted swift-boating of Al Gore and An Inconvenient Truth.

Good God...The Breakup got only a 19% creme de la creme positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and a lousy 30% from the general pool. The domestic weekend take is supposed to be in the low 30s, except for the word-of-mouth factor, which looks like it'll be dismal. (The Atlanta Constitution's Eleanor Ringel Gillespie said that "watching these likable actors flounder around as they try to save a picture that's not worth saving is, well, depressing.") Is a sharp Friday-to-Saturday drop-off in the cards? Whoa...I was just told about a 1 pm screening at the UIP screening room on rue Mayerbeer...Read More

All over Paris each morning, the streets (many of them, but not each and every one) are given a water-soaking, with gallons upon gallons of the stuff spewing into gutters, which strikes me as kind of wasteful -- Friday, 6.2.06, 8:20 am.

(a) Video-store ad for recently-released DVD of Tommy Lee Jones' Trois Enterrements -- Thursday, 6.1.06, 8:55 pm; (b) A nice little place on rue Risseau called le Cave; (c)...and some of the patrons who happened to be there when I walked inside -- Thursday, 6.1.06, 9:25 pm; (d) There's...Read More

"He's virtuous, he doesn't lie, and he's handsome! And I think these are, these are idealistic qualities in the male that you, in someone that you'd want as a husband, I'd imagine ." -- Superman Returns director Bryan Singer on his lead character, quoted by N.Y. Times profiler Michael Joseph Gross.

AICN's Harry Knowles has an engaging, certainly readable conversation with M. Night Shyamalan about Lady in the Water. This, for me, is the stand-out comment: "There's a kind of very independent spirit about [this] movie. You know, we are in the mix right now and I'm watching it and I'm like, 'God, this is like a Coen brothers movie or something.' Like, this is way (chuckles)...it's just very independent and that kind of humor and sensibility, really offbeat kind of stuff all over. It turns into kind of a mainstream movie eventually, but it really has its kind of language in...Read More

Will Tom Hanks and Ron Howard return to Da Vinci Code Land by making a film of Dan Brown's Angels & Demons, which would be based upon Brown's six year-old novel? "We are definitely planning to make this movie with Ron Howard and Tom Hanks," Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal has told Slate's Kim Masters. Lord help us indeed. Sony has hired The Da Vinci Code screenwriter Akiva Goldsman to write Angels & Demons "but there's no deal with Howard or Hanks," Masters writes, "and many question whether either will return. Going through the opening of The Da Vinci Code had...Read More

War is Cruel

I finally caught up this morning with Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross's The Road to Guantanmo (Roadside, 6.23). I realize that I'm expected to jump up and down like many critics did when this half-doc, half-recreated drama had its debut last February at the Berlin Film Festival, but I don't quite feel it...sorry.

I never felt less than absorbed by Guantanamo. I respected and believed what I was seeing...but I didn't feel all that heavily caught up in it for reasons I'll soon explain.

Rizwan Ahmed, Farhad Harun and Afran Usman, although not necessarily in...

Alpha Dog director Nick Cassevettes and producer/financier Sidney Kimmel wanted their film, a controversial, taken-from-real-life, River's Edge-like drama about a pack of teens dealing with the death of one of their own, to be released wide, or at least wide-ish (1000 screens or thereabouts). New Line, however, wanted to platform it. So the guys have jumped ship and now Universal has agreed to distribute it in a wide-ish fashion in early 2007, or a bit more than a year after Cassevetes' film played at Sundance '06. Something about this explanation in Variety doesn't ring entirely true. Methinks there's more to...

If you take the time to read this review of Milos Forman's Goya's Ghost (Warner Bros., late '06 -- wide release early '07) and particularly the description of the alleged Natalie Portman nude scene, it tells you straight away it's a torture scene. (Portman's character is put through major Spanish Inquisition suffering because she's suspected of being Jewish.) Anyone who reads this through and then goes "whoa...a Natalie Portman nude scene!" (as some guys in the talkback section do) is effin' diseased and needs professional help. Ghost also stars Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgaard (as Goya) and Randy Quaid.

There's something here...a straight-shooting, mid '60s Truffaut-ish quality...not modelish (which is what's so appealing)...with that frank expression and those friendly-knowing eyes, she could have starred in Bed and Board or Two English Girls (assuming she can act)...her name is Jennifer Laemlin, and she may not even know who Francois Truffaut was, but she's been very gracious and accomodating as I've sat and typed away inside Le Cafe qui parle (where she works) for hours and hours on end -- Thursday, 6.1.06, 2:10 pm.

(a) Cafe on Boulevard de Courcelles -- Thursday, 6.1.06,...Read More

In Focus interviewer Mike Russell asks, "Is Superman Returns the unofficial Superman III?" And SR screenwriter Michael Dougherty replies, "Okay, uhm, it's funny...I think Bryan [ Singer] and Dan and I need to sit down and discuss this answer before we talk to too many other reporters. My personal belief -- and I know Bryan has been quoted as saying differently -- is that this is not Superman III. I don't feel like it's appropriate to discount Superman III and IV, because a lot of people put a lot of hard work into them, and even if you don't like them or don't...Read More

Harry Knowles is reporting that Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain is going to be be released by Warner Bros. on 10.13. The darkly intellectual fantasy flick was a Cannes no-show because Arnofsky would settle only for a competition status and the powers-that-be wouldn't give him that.

"The whole point of a remake is to either improve upon a flawed film, or to bring a new and/or different perspective to a classic tale. The Omen does neither, [being] essentially a shot-for-shot remake of the [Richard Donner] original, but with weaker performances and more deliberate 'jump scares' to get the teen girls screaming and gripping their boyfriends in fear. In many ways it's disturbing how much director John Moore has adhered to the original film, so much so that those familiar with it in any way will very quickly get irritated or bored with this rehash. Even those new to...Read More