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.

It's pretty much as screenwiter Andrea Berloff described it three or four months ago -- a boy-down-the-well movie only darker and with blood and bruises and crushed bones, and times two. Not the most striking or...Read More

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. An official release will be sent out tomorrow. The publicist told me to...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" One, deemed "a notoriously hard-to-find relic from the film’s original construction" plus 12 additional sequences are not available...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 a great relationship, " he said. "We all make mistakes and...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. That's the only thing that will even half-assedly begin...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 to do to a young girl."

...

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 to change its plans. Nobody is...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 -- when Gibson campaigns he'll be asked over and over about the anti-Semitic remarks and not the film, etc. -- and that he has major career-repair...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."

Is there anyone who's seen the big-screen Vice...Read More

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 'blurted out a barrage of anti-Semitic remarks' -- 'fucking Jews' and 'The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world' and asking the arresting deputy 'Are you a Jew?' -- during his DUI arrest early Friday morning. So there was no attempt at an early departmental cover-up, Smith is...

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 hilarity and occasional applause. [SPOILER! SPOILER!] When...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 for a guy with an obvious problem or two. Put yourself in Gibson's shoes minus the ugly epithets, and imagine that you've just stepped into it...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, using five Sardinian shepherd singers and an additional singer from Senegal. With Reijseger I shall work on the transition of the film into the unreal....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. Sometimes friendly persuasion doesn't do it. Sometimes a chasm opens up, the heart goes ballistic, the mind races and the waters part. And in this sense,...Read More

A Mel Gibson geiger-counter reading from Houston critic Joe Leydon, who wrote his morning to say his wife "just returned from a morning visit to the health club for a half-hour or so on the treadmill. The club isn't exactly upscale, but it's in a nice neighborhood -- actually, a very nice neighborhood -- and many of the folks who live around there are Jewish. (No, I'm not stereotyping: The very large Jewish Community Center is nearby, and the supermarkets have well-stocked kosher sections -- something you don't see nearly so often in other areas here in Houston. And, no kidding, the area...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. I'd hit it off pretty well with Douglas a few weeks earlier...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.

No slight to the aforementioned (they're all stand-up pros), but David seems to have shifted me out of the Columnist category (where my link has been sitting since '02) because I've changed the HE format to emphasize the bloggy shorter-item stuff on top of my twice or thrice-weekly features, and...Read More

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 to finish the sequel instead of Donner. The new DVD will have all kinds of...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, that "the Earth's temperature is at a 400-year high, that the first half of 2006 was the hottest in history and that melting ice caps spell trouble...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. I mean jeez, even suggesting Hollywood isn't original isn't original. In some form or another, the point itself has been...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.

The photos, selected by editor Paul Duncan, are exceptional but F.X. Feeney's smoothly written 30,000-word essay is the soul of it. The book is a peach and a picnic for lovers of "Repulsion", "Knife in the Water", "Rosemary's...Read More

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. I acted like a person completely out...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." -- Babel screenwriter Guillermo Ariagga (also the writer...Read 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 co-director Valerie Faris (center) is also holding a Perrier bottle, but with both hands...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 as this one is -- a rare instance of a sensual and...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. (TMZ's report says that "sources say Mee...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 is calling it right now (Friday at 5:11 pm), wouldn't it make sense to show it in Toronto? Of course it would. If The Departed had,...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...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 ripoff a week or so ago....Read 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. I wonder if they're sending this puppy to the Toronto Film Festival? (If they aren't, that will send...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. No Rob-Lowe-in-the-'80s...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."

That's fine (I guess) but also kinda weird. I don;t mean to sound unhip, but I'm still under the impression that McG...Read More

"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. And I include myself in that equation."...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 is also set to play there.) McDonald, director of...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, change the title and Benjamin Button name and they'll be fine. If they don't do this, guys like me are probably going to start looking around for...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, who died last year from cancer at age 54. (A sad break. I first met Hill during a Manhattan press gathering for Escape From New York...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...which is probably what the righties are...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, makes you pay closer attention, accelerates your pulse and cleans the blood. And if you're working in rough weather...well, wear a raincoat and galoshes and something to protect your head with. Life is short, amigo, and very few people on this planet have known true...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.

I knew it was gone and filing a theft report was probably a waste of time all around, but I...Read More

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; Stephen Frears' The Queen with Helen Mirren, James...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 and more of a place where people on the bottom rung are...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 whacked and that Liman is replacing him...Read 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 smoldering hatred, like Osama bin Laden or...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's poster-art concept of a big snake putting its mouth around an entire train car isn't, it turns out, just a drawing-board concept.)...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. It's a little echo-y and hard to make out,...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. Not because it sounds like an impertinent Mel Brooks title, but because I would simply want to see a movie about a Jewish gambler. I just would. It speaks to me. It sounds like rude fun. I would also be a bit more intrigued if the...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. The book will be published in September by Viking Juvenile, and Gus's film will begin shooting around Portland in the fall. Set in the world of Portland's skateboarders, it's...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 now online at...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, which is that characters have wills of their own that argue with the plot decisions made by the writers who've created them. If you've ever worked...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," Selig writes. "About 98% of all released prints of U.S. films dubbed into German here, and some distributors see...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 Scary Movie and then turn around and write a good...Read More

"What makes Clerks 2 both winning and (somewhat unexpectedly) moving is its fidelity to the original ,em>Clerks ethic of hanging out, talking trash and refusing all worldly ambition. If anything, the sequel is more defiant in its disdain for the rat race, elevating the white-guy-doing-nothing prerogative from a lifestyle choice to a moral principle." -- N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott.

A defense of M. Night Shyamalan by Slate's Ross Douthat. Key passage: "While Shyamalan may be a narcissist with delusions of grandeur, he's also a filmmaker of rare talent and creativity (these are hardly mutually exclusive categories, after all), and however lousy Lady in the Water proves to be, he deserves to survive this summer of embarrassment and live to film again. He's not a Dylan or a Disney, to pick just two names from the roster of ridiculous comparisons that [Michael] Bamberger fastens on, and his potential has often gone frustratingly unfulfilled in the nine years since Haley Joel Osment told...Read More

"It was just around the time when the giant eagle swooped out of the greater Philadelphia night to rescue a creature called a narf, shivering and nearly naked next to a swimming pool shaped like a collapsed heart, that I realized M. Night Shyamalan had lost his creative marbles. Since Mr. Shyamalan's marbles are bigger than those of most people, or so it would seem from the evidence of a new book titled 'The Man Who Heard Voices' (and how!), this loss might have been a calamity, save for the fact that Lady in the Water is one of the more watchable...Read More

I have to pack and blow town and get down to San Diego for Comic Con, so no more postings until late tonight. I don't even have my press credentials but the site says I'll be okay if I just show up with clippings (the term "clippings" sounds like such an anachronism) and a business card. I'll take as many photos as I can. I just hope there are wi-fi areas inside the San Diego Convention Center. I think it's fair to say that the heat is on Friday afternoon's Snakes on a Plane presentation in more ways than one, given...Read More

One of my biggest pet peeves is the emotional flavoring that the Fox operator uses when she says the words, "...while your call is transferred." I don't know who Fox hired or who coached her, but listen to the schpiel and then pay close attention to how she gives an extra ladelling of maternal sweetness to the last four words. To me, it's insincere and even a tiny bit odious. She sounds like Louise Fletcher playing Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Tell me if you don't agree.

There was a top-secret screening of My Super Ex-Girlfriend (20th Century Fox, 7.20) last week on the Fox lot, but I wasn't shrewd or pushy enough to get into it (and you do have to "work it" to find out about these showings and wheedle your way into them by hook or crook) so no reaction from this corner. I could have seen it last night but I decided to see World Trade Center instead.

A friend who caught it last night disputes David Poland's view that it's "an epic of misogyny", although knowing how movies...Read More

The coming Disney layoffs plus the big studios saying "no" to rich big star deals on movies are seen as evidnce of "an industrywide contraction," and some in Hollywood are getting more and more scared of this, reports L.A. Times staffer Claudia Eller. "It's as if the managerial elite has made a secret pact to adhere to certain business principles that they want to enforce on agents and artists," says producer Brian Grazer. Eller says that Grazer "sees studios as more rigid today about how far they'll stretch to compensate even the biggest stars, directors, producers and writers on movie projects,"...Read More

The new Saw 3 trailer will have its world premiere in theatres before showings of The Descent, which Lionsgate is opening on 8.4. Not online...screens only. Drop everything, cancel the trip to the Home Depot, put off the cat's declawing at the vet, put both cars in the garage and batten down the hatches....the Saw 3 trailer is hitting screens on the same day as The Descent. (Who was that guy in the '50s who was known for going "Oooh! Oooh!" in low-budget comedies?)

Josh Capps , the HE reader trying to get his fiance Nadine out of Lebanon, says "our situation has worsened. Despite being told otherwise by the very same department at the embassy on Monday, I was told today that even if America continues to evacuate all citizens are out, they'll only evacuate permanent residents. I was told point blank they wouldn't evacuate student visas , even those with extreme extenuating circumstances like Nadine's. At this point I feel I'm against the wall, so I'm trying contact as many media outlets as possible, hopefully pressuring the government to change this policy. Or, at...Read More

Soggy All Over

M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water (Warner Bros., 7.21) is some kind of disaster -- fanciful, leaden, disconnected. But underneath all the preciousness lies an egoistic obstinacy that I found strangely touching. Night wants so much to make something loving and penetrating and out-there brave, and the failure of the thing to even ignite, much less lift off the runaway, almost breaks your heart. Almost.

Lady has a good thing going inside of it -- a notion that average neurotics who lead inconsequential lives inside big apartment buildings can be selfless, gallant and resourceful -- but the fairy-tale plot...Read More

This one-sheet for Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson (ThinkFilm, 8.11) strikes me as one of the better designed I've run across in some time. It's something in the ripeness, the buoyant pastel colors and neat brushstrokes... the way it doesn't exactly "say" anything about the plot or Ryan Gosling's character, and yet suggests some kind of character problem with that dead- blank expression on Gosling's face...all very cool. I hereby nominate it for a Hollywood Reporter Key Award.

A slow news day today, but World Trade Center tonight and Comic Con tomorrow.

"Film distributors in Israel have decided not to invite film critics to press screenings. They feel bad reviews hurt the film's financial potential. This has been going on for nearly eight weeks but only recently has attracted trade press coverage. Most critics have rejected the distributors' offer to be re-invited to screenings if we only push back the publication date of our reviews, and give their movie, their massive-mega-million-dolar blockbuster, 'one weekend of grace'. The companies are G.G (Globus Group), UIP (Universal. Paramount. Dreamworks), WB. and Forum Film, representing Disney, Miramax, New Line and Sony. It's been speculated here that this...Read More

Toronto Star movie critic and essayist Peter Howell survives fierce Canadian rainstorm, inspects tree damage!

Here's an interesting N.Y. Times piece, written by Elizabeth Hayt, that ran a couple of days ago about sex and seasoned women in movies and books. The primary focus is Laurent Cantet's Heading South (Shadow Distribution) and its story of older single women who enjoy sexual vacations with poor younger men in in Haiti in the 1970s. An interesting view on middle-aged female eroticism, but how real is it?

I saw Heading South (or Vers lr Sud) in Toronto last year, and found it above- average, authentically flavored, moderately erotic. It costars Charlotte Rampling, the reigning poster...Read More

The summer is a time for indie-sector "mosquito" movies. I'm speaking of movies that you need and want to see, but there's always something else you have to do first and then it's suddenly later than you thought it was. But knowing these little films are being screened and the awful guilt you always feel when you realize you could have gone to see this one or that one the night before except you were struggling to finish a piece and you looked up and it was 8:35 pm....it's very tough. All to explain it's analagous on some level to being in a...Read More

Clumsy, lightweight, not-very-good summer comedies and romances are standard in any summer, but the '06 twist is having to call and chase down studio publicists in order to attend screenings of these films. Sometimes publcists show their stinkers at all-media screenings, and sometimes they don't screen them at all -- a trend that kicked in heavily earlier this year. But other times they just screen them quietly. Call and ask to see, let's say, My Super Ex-Girlfriend and they'll say "sure" and give you the time and location...but if you don't call you'll never hear from them, and you'll never see that particular...Read More

"Nothing will prepare you for the rampant foolishness" of M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water," says Village Voice critic Michael Atkinson. "It's as if on some semiconscious level, Shyamalan, who I do not doubt is a serious and self- serious pop-creative original, is calling his own success into question and daring his audience to gulp down larger and spikier clusters of manure, just to see if they will. Or he's lost his mind."

As I wrote last week, I think Shyamalan's sub-conscious game is to get people to write him off and perhaps even deliberately create a huge failure so...Read More

"This is the umpteenth movie I've seen this year about guys in their 30s who aren't quite sure what they want to do with their lives," Scott Foundas writes about Kevin Smith's Clerks 2, "and it's the only one that strikes a real chord, because it's neither an exaltation nor a condemnation of slackerdom, but rather just a sweet little fable about how sometimes the life that you think could be so much better is actually pretty damn good already."

Scott Foundas

Foundas then offers Smith "a few words of brotherly advice: I said before that...Read More

"If you'd like an apology, I'm glad to apologize," ABC movie critic Joel Siegel said to Clerks 2 director-writer Kevin Smith on the radio this morning for walking out of a critics screening of Smith's film.

"And if there's a second movie I walk out on, I'll be much quieter." And then Siegel confessed mid-conversation that he didn't know he was talking to Smith. It's pretty funny -- give it a listen.

As he explained on View Askew, Smith said he wasn't steamed about Siegel walking out of the screening as much as theway he did it.

"I...Read More

I should have linked yesterday to Claudia Eller's L.A. Times account of Nina Jacobson's dismissal as Disney production president. Jacobson was told Monday morning by studio chairman Dick Cook "when she called him from the hospital room where her partner was about to deliver their third child. Despite the record-breaking performance of Disney's current release, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, she was hearing rumors and wanted reassurance that her job was safe. It wasn't."

Acknowledging that the timing was bad, Cook said, "I begged to see her face to face and she wanted to talk to me right then....Read More

Warren Beatty will argue in a forthcoming court trial that he's held the rights to the Dick Tracy comic strip since 1985, and that the Tribune Co., which sees things differently, has no legit ownership clams at all. Beatty filed a lawsuit against Tribune Co. in May 2005, and last Friday an L.A. judge decided to put the issue before a jury. Beatty wants to make a sequel to Dick Tracy, which he directed and starred in, and which Disney released in 1990. I presume that at age 69 Beatty doesn't plan to play Tracy himself in the new film...if he wins,...Read More

I'm sure others have noticed that David Poland is never surprised by anything. And that he always knows stuff months before anyone else, and breaking-news stories always make him go ho-hum. Jesus Christ could float down from the heavens and arrive on the White House South Lawn and Poland would go, "Is anyone surprised by this? Religious zealots have been speaking about Christ's return to earth for centuries. And the lack of morality in our daily political life..." This "Brad Grey has done favors for a lot of people" thing is pretty good, though.

The Nina Jacobson-whacked-at-Disney story had been around for about three hours as of 6:04 pm, and Variety had no story up by that time. It turned out that Variety filed at 6:10 pm, although Sheigh Crabtree's Hollywood Reporter story went up about 5:15 pm, give or take. News breaks on a minute-by-minute basis these days. And if a news org can't file within an hour or two of getting the story, they're bringing up the rear.

This is ridiculous! In the wake of her recent image upgrade as one of the shrewdest and most perceptive studio execs around because she told M. Night Shyamalan that his Lady in the Water script needed work (Michael Bamberger's description of their disagreement is the most riveting portion of The Man Who Heard Voices) and with hundreds of millions rolling into studio coffers from the recent success of Pirates 2, Disney -- of all the times to do this -- has axed Nina Jacobson as president of production and replaced her with marketing president Oren Aviv.