Superman Returns was in 2005 theatres last weekend, or about 225 more theatres than The Devil Wears Prada was playing in, or about 1778. And yet Prada made more money, earning $4,774,000 with a $2600 average. Superman Returns made $3,570,000 with a $1700 average.

9/11 Comfort Blanket

Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.9) is a well made, emotionally satisfying rescue movie. It happens to be about a couple of Port Authority cops (played by Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena) who got buried in the rubble of 9/11, but it could be about any two family men who nearly buy it while doing a tough job on a bad day.

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Mel Gibson has checked into a rehab facility for his alcohol problem, as reported by the Star's Lee Hannon and confirmed by his publicist Alan Neirob. However, a neighbor quoted in the story thinks Gibson has gone into the wrong rehab facility. If you want to read about this, here you go.

A South Park Mel Gibson segment via UTube, obviously made with The Passion of the Christ in mind. Moderately funny (okay, more than moderately), but Matt and Trey need to make a new "sugar tits and bad Jews" version.

That rumor about Heath Ledger being cast as the Joker in the next Batman movie has turned out to be true. A Warner Bros. publicist told me ten minutes ago the next Batman flick for Warner Bros. will be called The Dark Knight, and that Chris Nolan will again direct, and that Ledger will indeed play the infamous cackling twisted baddie who has it in for Batman, etc. Big payday for Heath, obviously -- doing it for his kid, and because he always seems to enjoy going weird and quirky...Read More

Here's a fairly good review of Apocalypse Now: The Complete Triple Dip, the DVD containing both the original theatrical and the Redux versions of Francis Coppola's 1979 classic. I'm kidding about the DVD's subtitle -- it's actually called The Complete Dossier.

The most exciting extra for a lot of people will be a full 17-minute reading of T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men" by Marlon Brando. There are also 13 deleted scenes, including one called "Monkey Sampan...Read More

Only a week or so on the job and Disney production chief Oren Aviv has already defined himself as a disciplined dispenser of carefully composed (read: disengenuous) press statements.

First he told N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson that he was "surprised when Disney chairman Dick Cook asked him...to succeed [Nina] Jacobson" and that he "never asked for [the] job." Now he's telling Slate's Kim Masters that he's ready to look past Mel Gibson's attitudes about Jews. "I've worked with Mel on several films over the years and we have ...Read More

The anti-Jewish thing has been tattooed into Mel Gibson's forehead and there's no laser procedure that will remove it. There's only one way to deal with it, and that's what Henry II did after Thomas Becket was murdered. Gibson needs to do penance. He needs to visit a prominent temple, take his shirt off, kneel on the stone floor and submit to lashings by a team of rabbis. Repeatedly, I mean. For weeks and probably months to come. He needs to make a show of groveling at the feet of Hollywood's Jewish bigwigs...Read More

An Access Hollywood piece set to air this evening reportedly quotes Lindsay Lohan's manager-mom Dina as saying that the wording in the letter sent to her daughter last week (i.e., the one warning Lindsay to cool it on the partying and missing work or else) by Morgan Creek honcho James Robinson was "way out of line" and "ridiculous." She reportedly added, "Maybe [Robinson] has personal issues with whomever and it came out with my child. I don't know him. I can't judge him. I don't think it was a smart thing...Read More

Here's the Save-the-River-Oaks-theatre petition site, and here's another Houston Chronicle article (it ran last Friday, 7.28) about the public clamor to try and save this beautiful old theatre with the beautiful red-and-yellow neon marquee. Over the last ten days or so the online petition (sponsored by the Houstonist.com site, although you'd never know it by looking at the petition page) has close to 14,000 signers.

The Chronicle story also reports that City Councilwoman Ada Edwards and "other council members" hope to persuade Houston-based Weingarten Realty Investors...Read More

Hard-nosed assessments of Mel Gibson's compromised reputation by (a) Endeavor agent Ari Emanuel, (b) L.A. Times guys Robert Welkos and John Horn, (c) Variety's Gabriel Snyder, and (d) the Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson. Plus two stories about this -- the list is getting longer by the minute -- by USA Today's Anthony Breznican.

The judgment is basically that Gibson's Apocalypto (Disney, 12.8) is over as an Oscar contender...Read More

It's been 22 years since the first Miami Vice season on the tube in '84-'85, and I never rented the February '05 Vice DVD that had that entire season on it. But reader Dewey Yeatts of Whitehall, PA, is saying that Michael Mann's just released Miami Vice features is based on a February '85 Vice episode called "Smuggler's Blues," in much the same way that Mann's Heat ('95) was a big-star feature version of the 1989 TV movie he wrote and directed called "L.A. Takedown."

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Nikki Finke is quoting Lt. Steve Smith, the guy "in charge of the detective bureau for the Malibu/Lost Hills station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, as saying that 'the contents seem to be similar' between the official reports and the four pages posted by TMZ.com indicating that Mel Gibson...

Adjusted weekend grosses are in, and Miami Vice's tally will be closer to $25,195,000. Business didn't bump up very much on Saturday but it's still the all-time biggest opening weekend for a Michael Mann film. And Little Miss Sunshine will end up with $357,000 after opening in seven theatres, and a per-screen average of $51,000. I saw LMS last night in Century City, by the way, and with a not-very-hip crowd. They got and responded to maybe 40% of the stuff that crowds seeing it at Sundance and at the L.A. Film Festival responded to with Read More

This is a really dramatic photo of a huge movie-lot fire, but it had nothing to do with the well-being of Casino Royale , the latest James Bond flick starring Daniel Craig. A set simulating an area of Venice, Italy, that had been used by the Royale team was what caught fire. It happened earlier today outside of London, caving in the roof of a Pinewood Studios sound stage. But the movie wrapped a while ago so no biggie. No one was hurt and insurance will cover the damages.

'I have a middle-aged soul. When I turned 38, I said to my wife, 'Am I not 40 yet?' I feel like I've been 40 for about seven years.'" -- Paul Giamatti speaking to the Guardian's Gaby Wood. A lot of people and writers I know have described Giamatti's Miles and Thomas Hayden Church's character in Sideways as "screwed-up guys in their early 40s." Giamatti was probably 36 when he shot the film in '03.

An L.A. Times goes after the L.A. County Sheriff's Department in the Mel Gibson DUI anti-Semitic tirade story. Get 'em, sweat 'em....feet to the fire. What journalists do. But step back and think about this for a second. The Lost Hills cops may have tried to do a nice human thing, which was save a guy from great embarassment and career damage. Dishonest and procedurally incorrect, okay, but a fairly decent thing to try and do...Read More

I wrote Werner Herzog yesterday and asked whether Rescue Dawn will be included at the Toronto Film Festival roster. "At the moment we should treat the Toronto Film Festival as some sort of a rumor, as there is no clear confirmation yet," he answered.

"I just arrived in London for music recordings with the cello genius Ernst Reijseger -- we did the music together for my two movies The White Diamond and The Wild Blue Yonder...Read More

Here's how hatred and prejudice are pried loose from the grooves of the brains of bigots. They are told by an aroused world community that if they don't flush them down the toilet in a demonstrable and thoroughly believable way they are dead in the water as far as any commercial aspirations are concerned. They do what the world tells them to do not because they've "seen the light", but because they want to survive and thrive...Read More

A Mel Gibson geiger-counter reading from Houston critic Joe Leydon...Read More

And here's the knowledgable and engaging Mr. Leydon, writing on his just-launched blog, on the persistent pleasures of The Manchurian Candidate. The black-and-white one with Laurence Harvey and Frank Sinatra, of course. "At once unmistakably of its time and undeniably timeless," etc. I know this, we all know this...but it's nice to read someone say it yet again. There's a showing on Turner Classic Movies on Tuesday evening.

I'm cutting out around noon to go up to a Kirk Douglas black-tie tribute thing that the Santa Barbara Film Festival crew is throwing for him in Goleta (just west of Santa Barbara). I'll be gone for the remainder of the day, so no burning the wick to the bottom and back to the skillet first thing manana.

In 1982 I flew from Manhattan to Laredo, Texas, to do a Douglas interview on the set of Eddie Macon's Run for the New York Post...Read More

"If it's true what's reported [about Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic tirade], frequently hatred, bigotry and prejudice, which is controlled, explodes at moments of stress and crisis," Rabbi Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, has told N.Y. Times reporter Allison Weiner. "Liquor loosens the tongue of what's in the mind and in the heart, and in his mind and in his heart is his conspiracy theory about Jews and hatred of Jews." Or to put it succinctly, "in vino, veritas."

Watchers of Movie City News' front page may have noticed that David Poland has removed the link to Hollywood Elsewhere (which he always called "Jeffrey Wells") from the Columnist links and has placed me under the Gossips, alongside Nikki Finke, Mark Ebner and Rush & Molloy.

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I don't get why Warner Home Video is issuing their all-new DVD of Richard Donner's cut of Superman II -- a fresh construction of the 1980 film -- in late November. Because they figured everyone would be....what...Superman-ed out by late summer? I'm into seeing it now. Who wants to wait for Thanksgiving?

Donner never got to do his own cut because the notoriously eccentric producers of the first Superman series (Alexander and Ilya Salkind) dismissed him and hired Richard Lester ...Read More

Has anyone ever heard this song "I'm Easy" over the closing credits of any movie? No, not the Keith Caradine song from Robert Altman's Nashville but a Boz Scaggs tune off his 1970 "Boz Scaggs" debut album. I can't remember which film it is, but I'm 85% sure I heard this tune on a soundtrack of some early '80s film. I thought I might be Hal Needham's Sugar Tits (1985) but I checked and I was wrong.

A 7.28 L.A. Times piece about how Paramount Classics marketers played the "swelter card" for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth by running a recent ad that asked, "How hot is your city today?" atop a blazing sun and bright red background. The ad reminded everyone that it had recently been 99 degrees in New York, 104 in Salt Lake City and 108 in Phoenix. The ad also ran reminders, according to Kelly-Ann Suarez's story...Read More

"When it comes to mass-market moviemaking, and especially at a time when the average cost of a studio release is creeping toward $200 million U.S., there is no room for originality in Hollywood. Never was and, barring some kind of wholesale revolution in industry thinking, never will be. It's not wanted and, for the time being at least, not needed: after all, this summer's most popular movie is also this summer's most tediously uninspired, by-the-numbers retread: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest...Read More

Deep Polanski

Over the last couple of weeks I've been reading "Roman Polanski" (Taschen), an eye-filling and genuinely inspiring review of one of the greatest living filmmakers of our time. It runs 192 pages, and I wouldn't have minded an extra 100 pages or so. I have no problem with calling it the most insightful, alluring and fetchingly phrased book about Polanski ever.

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I first saw this via Anne Thompson's RiskyBiz blog, but here's Mel Gibson's apology statement about what happened in Malibu yesterday with the DUI and the reported anti-Semitic and "sugar tits" comments: "After drinking alcohol on Thursday night, I did a number of things that were very wrong and for which I am ashamed. I drove a car when I should not have, and was stopped by the LA County Sheriffs. The arresting officer was just doing his job and I feel fortunate that I was apprehended before I caused injury to any other person. ...Read More

"There is hardly any arthouse theatre left [in the U.S.], but I have a feeling that Hollywood is looking very closely at what I'm doing right now because in all these big action films with all the great special effects, real storytelling and real beauty and human depth are getting lost." -- Rescue Dawn director Werner Herzog speaking to The Australian's Rosalie Higson.

"I'm happy you brought up [Quentin] Tarantino. They say that I [am] influenced [by] Tarantino, so I had to go and rent Tarantino movies to see who was my influence. I think Tarantino belongs to the other kind of writers. It's clear that he hasn't suffered real violence in his life. I don't have that sense of smell. I was cut by a knife before I was 14. So I know that violence is real. My cinema has nothing to do with Tarantino. You want to see one American influencing me? Go to William Faulkner." -- BabelRead More

They always say "never hold a drink in your hand when posing for a press photo" -- here's why. Little Miss Sunshine co-director Jonathan Dayton (l.) appears to be holding a bottle of Perrier, but the mere presence of a bottle in his right hand plus that vaguely smirky expression on his ruddy bearded face (he looks half-bombed) plus the straw pork-pie hat doesn't make for a winning combination. If he'd put the bottle down and buttoned his jacket he'd be fine.

Sunshine...Read More

Miami Vice did $8.8 million yesterday (Friday,7.28) with a projected $26.5 million by Sunday evening. Universal is probably going to end up with a gross of roughly $75 or $80 million at the end of the domestic run, which they'll keep about 50% of which probably won't cover their p & a (prints and ads) outlay. There's foreign and video, of course, but there's no way this Michael Mann pic, which cost over $135 million to make, isn't a disappointer. A shame, too, for a film as rich and pleasurable ...Read More

This report on TMZ.com is terrible news for Mel Gibson, even though he was apparently loaded when it happened. Gibson reportedly lost his temper and became belligerent after he was arrested Friday on suspicion of drunk driving, and thereafter, a hand-written deputy's report says, spewed anti-Semitic epithets. TMZ has obtained what is alleged to be four pages of the original report, written by L.A. County Sheriff's Deputy James Mee, the arresting officer.

TMZ is also reporting that the L.A. County Sheriff's department had the initial report edited to keep the real story suppressed...Read More

Warner Bros. has decided against showing Martin Scorsese's The Departed (Warner Bros., 10.6) at September's Toronto Film Festival. That's what they told me today. No comment but do the math. It may just be a good down-to-business crime movie and that's fine, but that's what Steven Soderbergh's The Limey was (to me anyway) and that played Toronto. Look at it this way: if The Departed was an "Oscar hopeful," as Movie City News...Read More

Ryuichi Sakomoto's "Bibo No Aozora" is on the soundtrack at the end of Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu 's Babel, and it really sank into me -- the music, the film, the whole package -- when I saw it a second time on Wednesday. Here's a YouTube video of Sakomoto playing "Bibo No Aozora." Just a taste.

For those feeling confused about Kevin Smith's having announced he's filling in for Roger Ebert on Ebert & Roeper next week only to read that Jay Leno is doing the same thing at more or less the same time, here's the deal. Leno is taping his show with Roeper on 8.1, and this show will air the following weekend (8.4 and 8.5). Smith is taping his show on 8.4, and this will air the weekend after next (8.12 and 8.13).

A rich, extremely successful actor-director has a rep of being a bit of a conservative goony-bird, or at least a guy who's staunchly religious and off on his his own philosophical beam. (I'm not saying it's in any way weird to be a hardcore Catholic with a Holocaust-denying dad. It's allowable in a free society, and if this is what works for the guy, fine.)

Let's also say this actor doesn't like being thought of as an oddball and wants, perhaps on a subconscious level, to let people know he's not some ultra- Catholic tight-ass and is ...Read More

Owen Wilson is officially denying any inspiration or connection on his part between the "Dupree" character he plays in You, Me and Dupree and "Cousin Dupree," the song written and performed by Steely Dan.

Wilson didn't address the possibility that someone else in the creatve food chain -- Dupree screenwriter Mike LeSieur, let's say -- might have gotten the idea for the Dupree character from the Steely Dan song. (Read the song's lyrics and tell me somebody's not doing the sidestep.) Steely Dan's Walter Becker and Donald Fagen complained about the alleged ripoffRead More

The trailer for Martin Scorsese's The Departed (Warner Bros., 10.6) is up and looking good. It hasn't been cut to suggest that Scorsese has made something startling or "extra" -- it tells you it's probably just a good sturdy cops-and-bad guys drama about a criss-cross undercover deception. Yeah, I know: Miami Vice in Boston only doubled, and with a more colorful, charismatic bad guy (Jack Nicholson), right? But no Michael Mann-like visual flourishes, the trailer implies. Nothing too moody or off-angled or digitally artified...Read More

Earlier this week Linday Lohan's rep Leslie Sloane-Zelnick said that her client hadn't shown up for work on the set of Morgan Creek's currently-rolling Georgia Rule and had subsequently been taken to an L.A. hospital because she was "overheated and dehydrated" because she was "filming in 105-degree weather for 12 hours." Horseshit, Morgan Creek chief James Robinson has essentially declared in an angry 7.26 letter sent to Lohan and her reps. And now The Smoking Gun has gotten hold of a copy and posted it...good going!

There are probably thousands who aren't getting what that 8.4.06 EW cover with Samuel L. Jackson [three or four items below] is about. It's a little obscure if you're not a Frank Sinatra fan as well as a bit of a vinyl freak, but it's a riff on the cover art for Sinatra's 1957 Capitol album "Come Fly With Me."

MSNBC's Dave White explains the appeal of star Colin Farrell: "[He] has a sex tape that is the only commonly seen denominator among the friends I talked to [about him for this article]. And a party-hard rep. And subsequently a stint in rehab under his belt at 30. And his own shrine on the gossip websites. And tabloid stories of him bedding more famous women than just about anyone of his generation.

"But whether those stories are true or not isn't the point. There's not a shred of soft ambiguity about him. ...Read More

Execs at Warner Bros, egged on the Entourage word-of-mouth factor and Endeavor agent Ari Emanuel (i.e., the real-life model for Jeremy Piven's Entourage agent "Ari Gold"), have had "conversations about the film rights" for Aquaman, according to L.A. Times industry-beat hotshot John Horn. (The rights are owned by DC Comics, which is owned by Time Warner Inc.) "

Horn adds that "one top filmmaker's name also has surfaced as a potential Aquaman director -- Charlie's Angels alumnus McG."

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"I will put a round precisely through your medulla ablongata which is located at the base of your brain straight through a point mid-distance between your upper lip and the bottom of your nose and you will be dead from the neck down. Your finger won't even twitch. Do you believe that?" -- catchy-immortal Miami Vice dialogue spoken by Detective Gina Callabrese (Elizabeth Rodriguez), as highlighted and celebrated by Better Than Fudge pundit Josh Horowitz.

Quote #1: ''What's unique about Snakes is that the idea of the movie has excited people...but that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the movie we made. I'm hoping it does. But I just don't know what people are expecting.'' -- New Line Cinema president Toby Emmerich tells Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Jensen in the 8.4 issue.

Quote #2: "The hepcats loved the title and had fun with it, but they never realized (or wanted to realize) what kind of film Snakes on a Plane actually was all along...Read More

The brilliantly honed, way-above-average trailer for Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel (Paramount Vantage, 10.27). If only other trailers were two-thirds or even half as good. Who cut this? I'd like to know. (The link has been off and on all day, but it's okay now.)

Attendees at Tom Luddy's Telluride Film Festival will be among the first to sample a possible Oscar-shot performance by Forrest Whitaker when he plays the flamboyant, psychopathic Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in Kevin McDonald's The Last King of Scotland, which Fox Searchlight is opening limited on 9.26, per the IMDB.

Telluride pass-holders are never told in advance what will be shown during the four-day film festival, which will run from 9.1 to 9.4, but info on this one slipped out, I'm afraid. (Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel...Read More

Former literary agent Victoria Wisdom has her first production deal -- a psychological thriller starring Hilary Swank called Labyrinth -- on the front page of Variety via Michael Fleming. A story of a mental patient "with multiple personalities who holds clues to the whereabouts of a serial killer", Labryinth is an American remake of director-writer Rene Manzor's Dedales , a French- produced flick that the IMDB says came out in 2003.

Dedales played at Roger Durling's Santa Barbara Film Festival two or three years ago, during which Wisdom met and signed Manzor and yaddah-yaddah. Read More

The only thing wrong with the deal to finally make a film of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" -- Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett costarring under directed David Fincher, from an adaptation by Eric Roth -- is that totally twee title. It makes the film sound like a pain-in-the-ass 1953 Danny Kaye movie that's overly taken with its own whimsy. Just forget about paying proper homage to Fitzgerald's short story...Read More

"For [chairman Brad] Grey, anxious to put his own stamp on Paramount and to deliver on his promise to quickly redefine the once-cautious studio as a bold, filmmaker-driven place, World Trade Center was the perfect fast-track project. It came prepackaged with a script, director, star and budget, and gave Paramount a prestige movie for the summer of 2006." -- Claudia Eller on how World Trade Center came together, largely due to the tenacity of producer Debra Hill...Read More

We're shocked, shocked, that Paramount hired a rightward-leaning p.r. agency called Creative Response Concepts to promote World Trade Center to various right-wing lobbyists, think tanks and patriot groups. Expediency sure makes curious bedfellows, doesn't it? If World Trade Center is warming the hearts of righties and Bushies and Iraq War supporters, fine. It's a good film (okay, a little weak during the second act but it rebounds) without any big abrasion points for liberals, so why not? In a way, the absence of political content in World Trade Center makes for a kind of political content...Read More

"For the record, the crew of Miami Vice worked during a hurricane warning. And that's no bullshit." -- Kim Masters in her second Slate piece about Vice and Michael Mann. Okay, okay...maybe Kim's got it right here. But "safety", of course, is an overvalued thing. And relative lack of safety has its upsides. It keys you up...Read More

Snakes on a Plane doesn't open for another three and a half weeks so take this was a grain, but however well it's going to perform, there's going to be a signficant group -- over-40s who don't go online much, I'm guessing -- that's going to avoid it like the plague. This doesn't mean it's not going to do very well with the people who want to see it. But it's a film that folks are either hot or cold on. Not a lot of middle grounders. That's all I'm saying.

When someone takes something from you it feels like a kind of rape. Like some kind of home invasion. I'm feeling that now because my $450 bicycle -- a really nice one, my pride and joy -- was stolen last night. It was locked to a sign pole in front of the Clarity Screening Room building at 100 Crescent Drive, where I went for my second viewing of Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu's Babel and a small after-party.

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The trailer for Brian De Palma 's The Black Dahlia in Windows Media and QuickTime. There's no official website, which is odd for a film opening in seven weeks time (i.e., 9.15).

Among the highlightsof the just-announced 63rd Venice Film Festival (August 30 th September 9): Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (which I favorably riffed about after seeing it during Comic-Con), with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz; Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland) with Adrien Brody, Ben Affleck, Diane Lane and Bob Hoskins; Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men (which has been seen by Babel director Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu and "on a shot-by-shot basis [is] beautifully filmed and superbly composed, like Kubrick", as he told me last night).

Plus Brian DePalma's The Black Dahlia; ...Read More

Congratulations to Gunner Palace helmer Michael Tucker for The Prisoner, Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair (Germany/USA), his doc (made with partner Petra Epperlein) about an Iraqi cameraman's wrongful arrest and interrogation by American forces, being accepted as one of the docs playing at the Toronto Film Festival.

Congrats also to Danish director Asger Leth and producers Cary Woods and George Hickenlooper for their doc, Ghosts of Cite Soleil, getting into Toronto also. I wrote about Ghosts after catching it last March. It's about two pistol-packing Haitian brothers who ran slum gangs during the final months of Jean Bertrand Aristide's presidency, and how things got worse for them after Aristide was deposed.

After seeing it, I wrote that "I now see Haiti as less of a Ground Zero for abstract political terror ...Read More

Ethan Hawke's The Hottest State is a drama based on Hawke's debut novel, set in Manhatttan, about a frustrating relationship between a Texas actor named William (Mark Webber) and a singer/songwriter named Sarah (Catalina Sandino Moreno), with a previous romantic interest named Samantha (Michelle Williams) flitting in and out of his life. And now Hawke's 117-minute film will play as an out-of-competition selection at the upcoming Venice Film Festival. Which means, presumably, it'll show at the Toronto Film Festival also. State also stars Laura Linney, Sonia Braga and Hawke.

I've been reading about Doug Liman's currently-lensing Jumper, a $100 million-budgeted supernatural thriller based on the Steven Gould novel about a 17 year-old (played by 20 year-old Vanity Fair and Being Julia costar Tom Sturridge) with emotional problems who discovers he can teleport from one place to another, and how he uses this gift to sleuth around for the guy who killed his mother, blah, blah. Another variation on Spider-Man (young superhero with hang-ups) and Batman (murdered parent naturally calling out for exposure and revenge). I should mention there are reports that Sturridge has been whackedRead More

Episode #1 of "Tabloid Wars", the six-part series focusing on the uphill, day-to-day hump that various N.Y. Daily News staffers experienced last summer, preemed on Bravo last Monday evening and will be repeating all this week. (There's an airing today at 6 pm eastern.)

N.Y. Times critic Allesandra Stanley says the series is "not really about the circulation battle between New York's two famously competitive tabloids" -- Bravo's home-team paper and the New York Post . The latter "is barely seen" in the series, she says, and its name "is invoked with ...Read More

On one hand, this trailer for Asylum's straight-to-video Snakes on a Train (8.15) makes a persuasive case that it's just a jerkwad ripoff of Snakes on a Plane with ickier makeup and prosthetics. But having seen that eight-minute product reel for Snakes on a Plane at Comic-Con last weekend, it doesn't seem that much sillier than the New Line film. It seems trashier, yes, but also trippier and more ludicrous. And with a wider selection of snake sizes. (Train...Read More

I finally saw Stuart Gordon's film of David Mamet's Edmond last night, and I was startled by how good most of it is. Good as in brave, brazen, uber-declarative. It's about a middle-aged businessman (William H. Macy) who just can't stand it any more and cuts loose and goes mad over the course of a single evening in Manhattan's seamy sexual underground. (If you have to ask what "it" is then you won't get this movie.) I'll get into this more in a day or two but here's a taste of the dialogue...Read More

Sometimes it's okay to just go with an idea that pops into your head. Because sometimes that idea can be astonishing. (And sometimes it can go the other way.) A guy wrote in today said he didn't care for the title of Curtis Hanson's film Lucky You, and right away an alternative came to me: Lucky Jew...Read More

Oregonian critic Shawn Levy has interviewed Gus Van Sant about his next film, Paranoid Park, which the director-writer is calling "Crime and Punishment in high school." (Wait...Larry Gross wrote a script in the late '90s literally called "Crime and Punishment in High School", and it was called Crime and Punishment in Suburbia when it came out in 2000.) Van Sant's film will be based on a novel by "sometime Portlander" Blake Nelson...Read More

Of all the weekend's five openers, Little Miss Sunshine has by far the highest Rotten Tomatoes rating -- 93%. In fact, it's the only film with a passing grade (i.e., anything with a 70% or more average). But it's only opening in L.A. and New York so the big opener, presumably, will be Miami Vice (64%), followed by The Ant Bully (33%). Woody Alllen's Scoop (31%) is unfortunately the worst film he's ever made, and no comment on John Tucker Must Die.

Kevin Smith is going to sit in for Roger Ebert "next week" (whatever that means in terms of air dates....the weekend after this one coming?) and trade quips with Richard Roeper. Wait a minute....Kevin's My Space announcement says "we'll be checking out Miami Vice, Ant Bully Talladega Nights, Barnyard and maybe (fingers crossed) World Trade Center." In other words he and Roeper are going to review Miami Vice a week or so after the 7.28 opening? Is that how the show sometimes works? You'd think it would be reviewed this weekend...no?

Wait a minute...Curtis Hanson's Lucky You (Warner Bros., 9.8) is opening in six weeks? It's a presumably well-written gambling flick (how can it not be with Hanson having collaborated with screenwriiter Eric Roth?) about a bigtime poker player with issues working against him. Hanson (In Her Shoes, 8 Mile ) has cast Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore, Robert Duvall and Debra Messing in the lead roles. You will obviously open during the Toronto Film Festival but it won't be part of it, I've been told.

The trailer, which started playing in theatres last weekend, is Read More

Just watched the trailer for Stranger Than Fiction (Columbia, 11.10). It's basically about Will Ferrell as an IRS agent named Harold Crick hearing his life being narrated by a woman's voice as he lives it, and the narrator turning out to be an actual writer named Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson) working on a story about Crick's life. Zack Helm's script is a variation on an idea floated in Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo...Read More

For all I know this is totally standard, but Sebastian Selig, a regular reader from Stuttgart, Germany, who works at an ad agency and has a background in film distribution, is telling me that trailers from Michael Mann's Miami Vice have been re-dubbed with more simplistic dialogue by UIP Germany, a.k.a., the "German Paramount."

The dubbed German trailers areviewable in three versions at this location.

"As you can see, they are all based on the three US-trailers but dubbed quite differently...Read More

Cool-cat screenwriter Larry Karaszewski (1408, Man on the Moon, Ed Wood) has written in response to that Nic Cage-as Liberace item I wrote that dissed Liberace project screenwriters Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, the gag-men who wrote large portions of the Scary Movie and Date Movie and Spy Hard screenplays. Karaszewski, who oversaw the development of the Liberace script with partner Scott Alexander, says "it's actually very good." I believe Larry because I respect his work, but I'm having trouble digesting this. How can Friedberg and Seltzer write crap like ...Read More

Bitter Tea

I missed David Poland's 7.24 summary of an old media vs. new media dustup that largely occured the day before, but better late than never. The highlight was a short but stinging criticism of Time magazine critic and documentarian Richard Schickel by Hollywood Reporter columnist and RiskyBiz blogger Anne Thompson for a recent and obviously resentful Schickel diss of online film critics and columnists.

Poland's account opens with a 7.23 Cathy Siepp guest editorial in the L.A. Times that laments a persistent tendency of old-media Times...Read More

A nice, intelligent, very confident trailer for Ridley Scott's A Good Year (20th Century Fox, 11.10). It's obviously going to be an agreeable, intelligent, wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee movie about cherishing the things in life that are rich and fine and good for your soul. And it has another quite-good Russell Crowe performance to boot, and some wonderful capturings of many delectable south-of-France locations. The downside is that the story (i.e., the portion provided by the trailer) seems a tad predictable. But it's all in the telling, right? The singer, not the song.

Since running the Reign O'er Me piece last night and particuarly that top photo of Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler in a vinyl record store, a lot of guys have written in about Sandler's resemblance in this photo to Bob Dylan during his Blonde on Blonde period. The more general response is simply that the Dylan coif looks cool.

One guy wrote, "Wow, I can't believe how much better Sandler looks with long hair. Why does he always crop his hair so short that his head looks like an egg with a nose...Read More

This Superman Returns promo, which was produced and for all I know viewable last month, is one of the smartest and most visually fascinating demonstrations of how first-rate CGI can reconstitute flesh and blood (i.e., in this case Marlon Brando's face). Reader's Note: HE spotted the link to this demo video on David Poland...Read More

"I shared all your fears about Talladega Nights -- not despite but because I'm a Southerner. I never, ever got NASCAR. And I dreaded, dreaded seeing the movie. Yes, it will get an audience automatically because of the combo of Ferrell and the whole insane NASCAR phenomenon, and don't even get me started on the idea that watching guys drive fast around a paved oval is so much more important to a huge number of people than voting or following the news is to them. But I gotta tell you, I laughed out loud at this movie ...Read More

Nic Cage playing Liberace is a great, great idea. I'm there. Cage will get Liberace's voice and posture and clothes just right. And he's producing it also, so he'll get to dictate stuff on all the levels. But there's a problem --a big one -- and it's the fact that Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg, the gag-men who wrote large portions of the Scary Movie and Date Movie and Spy Hard screenplays, have written the Liberace thing.

Fake Cage-Liberace photo stolen from TMZ.com.

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Brian DePalma's The Black Dahlia debuting at the Venice Film Festival....great. I truly don't believe anything good can come of this film except a spike in James Ellroy's book sales. The '40s noir thing is over...done to death. DePalma -- a truly exciting and out-there director from the late '60s to early '80s, and an occasionally successful commerical director from the mid '80s to mid '90s, has been over in the sense of failing to read or respond to the culture for years. I used to love the guy but then he made Femme Fatale...Read More

Guy Ritchie is a once-hot director (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels) who baked his career and turned himself into an international joke when his remake of Wertmuller's Swept Away tanked, in large part because he made it with Madonna, his wife. And then he made things worse with a film called Revolver which nobody liked when it showed at Sundance last January. Now he's having another go, although he's occupying a lower postiion on the totem pole.

According to the Guardian, Richie is the third helmer to try and get a crime flick rolling called Read More

The hottest picture on the tracking list right now is Will Ferrell's Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (Columbia, 8.4), which you and I know is going to be a dumb-ass redneck comedy pretending to be a satire of dumb-assed redneck car culture. We also know that fast-car movies are basically about old-boy nostalgia and the days when you could peel out and wail without worryin' about nothin', man. But times have changed, Jethro...sorry.

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Notice how the cheap metal pot sitting on my non-Martha Stewart stove in my kitchen is not perfectly round? How it's all warped and oddly bent and has a darkly-stained bottom? That's because every day I boil water for tea and then I go back to the computer to write something, and then I come out of my writing coma 15 or 20 minutes later and the water is all boiled out and the pot is just taking the heat.

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So Crash producer Bob Yari isn't paying out all the money he should be paying to the profit participants on Crash -- director-cowriter Paul Haggis, screenwriter Bobby Moresco, Sandra Bullock, Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle and five other actors in the cast -- and the meager money he's parted with has been slow in arriving. This despite Crash having cost only $7.5 million to shoot and the total world income standing at $180 million so far. Why? Hollywood bookkeeping, people skimming, human nature.

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"No other writer-producer-director makes males more excited at the prospect of a new film -- especially a cop thriller -- than Michael Mann. But it's an anticipation that crosses gender and taste barriers, integrating art film buffs with the Friday night popcorn crowd. Fans look to this peerless creator of impeccably crafted films about existential male loners -- films such as The Last of the Mohicans, Heat and The Insider...Read More

According to L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein, what makes Michael Bamberger's "The Man Who Heard Voices" "especially damaging" is that Lady in the Water director-writer M. Night Shyamalan told Bamberger absolutely everything and let it all hang out. In so doing, says Goldstein, Night "violated Hollywood PR Law No. 1: Never let people see you as you really are. In an era when stars hide behind their handlers, who vet writers, limit their access and keep them miles away from any dirty laundry, Night let Bamberger see it all -- straight, no chaser."

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Men Apart

We all know the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is happening soon, and that Hollywood has gotten into this already with Paul Greengrass's United 93 (which I still feel is the best theatre-released film of the year so far), and that Oliver Stone's World Trade Center is about to pop on August 9th, and that the TV networks are planning on airing some 9/11 stuff in September.

And I can understand people saying, "Look, leave me out of this...we all went through it and it was awful but I've moved on...enough."

If anyone knows anyone who managed to digitally capture that Kim Cattrall Nissan ad that ran on New Zealand TV before it was banned for being too sexually out-there....the one in which she moaned suggestively while driving over a hump in the road (the ad reportedly shows a yellow road sign with that very word printed in black letters), and then, while talking to a Nissan salesman, says, "Why didn't you tell me it was so big? I just wasn't prepared for it! The all-new Nissan Tiida...Read More

DVD Beaver is one of the greatest DVD sites anywhere. I love the screen-capture comparisons. Check out their comparison piece on new two-disc "Collector's Edition" of Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot.

In Miami Vice, director Michael Mann and cinematographer Dion Beebe "make everything strange -- the hard horizontal lines of office buildings, the maze of tributaries off Biscayne Bay. Shots of Crockett and Tubbs's team are near hallucinatory in their mixture of amorphousness and brisk efficiency. The violence is fast, messy, discombobulating -- much of the climactic shootout is Cops-style, from a limited video vantage, the soft pop-pop-pop of distant guns far eerier than the usual overamplified cannon roars." -- from David Edelstein 's rave review in New York magazine.

Director-writer Neil Labute talked about The Wicker Man (Warner Bros., 9.1) at Comic Con last weekend, and also showed a scene from the opening of the film. Nic Cage is a motorcycle cop pulling over a young mother because her daughter has thrown a doll out in the road. The scene starts to get creepy, and then creeper still...and then shocking, and then demonic.

The Wicker Man trailer is even creepier. They've both left me with a feeling that it's going to be a very unnerving, very scary film ...Read More

DVD Newsroom needs to be denser with Drudge report-type links to all the hot DVD sites, but the idea is good -- a one-stop shopping DVD site with a daily blog digest of studio news and releases. As co-editor Suki Jonze explains, "We watch the watchmen with irreverent beer goggles...no more checking tons of sites....we pull it all together with a nice bloggy bow on top. " Okay, but I want to see a Hollywood Wiretap site for DVD's. That would make me happier.

The Los Angeles premiere -- finally! -- of John Scheinfeld's Who is Harry Nilsson (and Why Is Everybody Talking About Him)? will be a one-shot thing at the American Cinematheque's Aero theatre on Wednesday, 8.23 at 7:30 pm. A truly touching saga of a relentlessly self-destructive genius, Nilsson is still apparently looking for a distribution arrangement of some kind. (A call to Scheinfeld wasn't returned.)

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There's a bit of a "what's this about?" feeling behind Lorenza Munoz's L.A. Times examination of the daunting tasks facing Universal's co-chairman Marc Shmuger, and particularly the industry view (which she seems to personally endorse) that marketing guys like Shmuger and Disney's Oren Aviv running the show at two major studios is a bad trend. I mean, you can feel the agenda when she takes a swipe at Shmuger for "using cold business terms such as the 'product line.'"

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An Indie McTheatre

The first indie film superplex in the country is being built right now in West Los Angeles...ooh-rah.

One doesn't normally think of independent, alternative and foreign movies playing in big, swanky, state-of- the-art theatres...but that's the deal with the Landmark Film Center, which will open in June 2007. Twelve screens, three stories tall, stadium seating, a lounge, a wine bar, a couple of restaurants and a book store. Like the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood, only newer and a few miles closer to the sea.

West L.A.'s Landmark Film Center, due to open in June 2007

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Miami Vice is "about guns and sex and fast boats, and, baffling as it is at times, it's still the kind of brutal fantasy that many of us relish a great deal more than yet another aerated digital dream. We can enjoy the pretense that police work is like this -- sleepless, incredibly dangerous, constantly vehicular, and unsullied by paperwork. The honesty of this kind of movie can be measured by how juicy its sense of licentious pleasure is. Despite its generally saturnine mood, this one passes the test. "

Colin Farrell...Read More

A late-arriving obit for Argentinian director Fabian Bielinsky (The Aura), who died on 6.28. Nicely written by the Guardian's Michael Chanan.