There's reason to half-believe that Once (Fox Searchlight, 5.18), a curiously intoxicating date movie, might catch on. A suggested copy line -- "If you can't get laid after seeing Once with someone you're after, you can't get laid" -- is one reason. Whatever the odds of this happening (a decent box-office haul, that is), it seems that director John Carney is planning on some kind of spirited reception.

Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova in Once

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Notable Hollywood smoothie adorned in regal 17th Century duds and put to canvas by successful Moscow painter Nikas Safranov, profiled by L.A. Times staffer Jeffrey Fleishman. Safranov, a bit of a smoothie himself. is peddling the 2007 version of children-with- great-big-eyes paintings....no?

"Another problem with killing Tony Soprano [at the end of the about-to-start final season] is how likable he is, despite his pathologically long list of misdeeds and murder. We like him, that's why we watch the show, and doing him in more than the writers and the audience can bear. Indeed, they want to believe he can change.

"'Arthur Miller used to say, you don't go to the theater unless you see your- self onstage,' says Glen O. Gabbard, a psychiatrist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who wrote ...Read More

Will Ferrell as an astronaut, a bullfighter, a ballerina and a referee. Four new-movie ideas proposed by Arizona Daily Star smartass Phil Villarreal that would broaden Ferrell's following and build upon his tremendous talent.

"After Hollow Man, I felt that I should change gears, because I felt that it wasn't a personal movie anymore. I felt like I could not express myself in a personal way and said that I have to back off from the fantasy and the science fiction or the studios or whatever. I have to do something that's for me; I want to do something which I believe in again." -- Black Book director Paul Verhoeven speaking to Coming Soon's Edward Douglas.

Paul Verhoeven

A letter about comedians going serious (Sandler, Murphy, Rock, Ferrell) by L.A. Times reader named Nicholas Silver was published in today's edition. I don't agree with everything he says (particularly a remark about Adam Sandler seeming shallow in Reign Over Me), but he says it fairly well:

"You want to know what we really learn when comics like Adam Sandler and Chris Rock make so-called serious movies? We learn how very shallow they are and, by extension, how very debased we are as Americans for paying so much attention to them.

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I've recently read Peter Buchman's scripts of The Argentine and Guerilla (both dated 10.4.06), the two-part Che Guevara saga that Steven Soderbergh will begin filming sometime in May with Benicio del Toro in the title role, and they're awfully damn good -- a pair of lean, gritty, you-are-there battle sagas, one about success and the other about failure. Together they comprise a strong and properly ambiguous whole.

Benicio del Toro as Ernesto "Che" Guevara

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Responding to criticism about the Tribeca Film Festival jacking ticket prices from $12 to $18, spokesperson Tammie Rosen has told N.Y. Post reporter Sara Stewart that "in an effort to provide the best possible experience, we have raised our prices, which have until now been lower than most other festivals.''

To which N.Y. Post critic and blogger Lou Lumenick responds: "While it's true that the Toronto Film Festival gets $15 a ticket, it's also true that their offerings are substantially better than those in Tribeca...Read More

As I've become a fan of recent spoken-word performances and WordTheatre in particular, I'm inclined to mention a Taylor Negron show being performed at Hollywood's Egyptian this Sunday, 4.1.07, at 7:30 pm. Called "Taylor Negron Remade As Fiction," it's being described as "an invocation with violin, cello, piano and human voice, presented by WordTheatre and Delta Highway." Negron will riff on Karen Carpenter, Lucille Ball, Charles Manson and the storm surge of Katrina. Lili Haydn (a.k.a., "the Jimi Hendrix of the violin"), L.A. Philharmonic cellist Ben Hong and pianist Adam MacDougall...Read More

One of the most glaring visual errors in major motion-picture history was Alfred Hitchcock's decision to use this shot from North by Northwest (1959). A seated pre-pubescent kid (directly to the right of Eva Marie Saint's left shoulder blade), having obviously grown tried of listening to loud blam! blam! pistol shots over and over in rehearsals and/or previous takes, plugs his ears prior to Saint "shooting" Cary Grant.

The weekend's big box-office battle is between Blades of Glory, the Will Ferrell-Jon Heder-New Homophobia comedy that the hairy-backed hoo-hoo crowd is reportedly hot to see, vs. Meet The Robinsons, the Disney 3-D animated deal that toddlers and their families cramming into starting this afternoon. No one cares who the winner will be, or how much money will be made....nobody wants to know anything because it's a weekend of mourning. If I could wave my hand and make the Ferrell flick into a failure, I would, but it's expected to do around $35 million.

Today's Hollywood Hills fire started behind the Oakwood Gardens complex on Barham Boulevard, just up the hill from Warner Bros., around 1 pm or a little before. The fire was first reported as having consumed five acres. It grew to about 100 acres. It peaked for about 90 minutes, and was pretty much suppressed by 4 pm. I was looking at the huge plume -- it reminded me of the smoke pouring out of the twin towers on 9.11 -- from Olympic Boulevard in West L.A. and then West Hollywood as I was riding on the motorcycle.

Rod Lurie's intention to remake Sam Peckinpah's 1971 classic Straw Dogs is perhaps the most inspired idea he's ever had as far as movie-directing material is concerned. Lurie is a bit of a tough guy and a man's man (as anachronistic as that may sound), and I'm betting that he understands better than most what makes the original Dogs a great (certainly a near-great) work.

The story, based on a book called "The Siege of Trencher's Farm," strikes all kinds of primal macho chords, all of them tethered to the territorial imperative...Read More

The trailer for I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (Universal, 7.20.07) strongly indicates that the film is another New Homophobia comedy (and therefore a bit of a groaner going in) but also that it might be pretty funny. Or at the very least, a lot funnier than the second and third acts of Evan Almighty.

Adam Sandler, Kevin James

"I'm not damning content by ordinary folk," says Barry Diller on this Financial Times q & a, as posted by Nikki Finke. "I'm just saying, if you want to reach large audiences then rely on professionals, meaning people who are in the industry and are trained for it, rather than just idiot savants.

Barry Diller

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David O. Russell will adapt and direct Sammy's Hill, a film based on Kristin Gore's chick-lit, inside-the- Washington-beltway book about a single woman coping with romantic and job-pressure issues, and that's good news all around. People forget from time to time how good Russell can be, and that real talent mitigates bad behavior. (My view is that loud profane arguments are not a problem if you're up against Russell -- the problem is when the yellers are second- and third-raters.)

But producer Doug Wick struck exactly the wrong chord when he told THR's Tatiana Siegel that Read More

"The price of a ticket at the emerging Tribeca Film Festival is increasing by 50% this year," reports Indiewire's Eugene Hernandez. "While most tickets for last year's festival were sold for $12, this year tickets for the majority of screenings are priced at $18" -- a higher per-ducat price than at any other major American film festival ." The TFF launched on the spirit of downtown recovery from 9.11.01, but now it has a new rep -- the nation's most avaricious and money-grubbing film festival.

"The price of seeing a movie at the Tribeca Film Festival is ...Read More

The official lineup for the 2007 Cannes Film Festival (5.16 through 5.27) won't be revealed until 4.19, but Cineuropa is reporting that "according to different sources," the event will open with Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights and close with David Fincher's Zodiac, with Francis Coppola's Youth Without Youth expected to join Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Thirteen as an out-of-competition title.

My Blueberry Nights star Norah Jones (l.) with director Wong Kar Wai. The English-language romantic drama costars Jude Law, Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz, David Strathairn, Tim Roth and Ed Harris.

I ran a Read More

"The thing about the Kraut and me is that we have been in love since 1934, when we first met on the Ile de France, but we've never been to bed. Amazing but true. Victims of unsynchronized passion." -- Ernest Hemingway to biographer A.E. Hotchner on his never-consummated love affair with Marlene Dietrich, as regurgitated in this N.Y. Times piece by Ashley Parker about some "racy letters" from Hemingway to Dietrich that will soon be unsealed.

"Quentin works when he wants to," Harvey Weinstein says to Anne Thompson in her latest Variety column. "There's no pressure from us to work at all. It's better when he's excited about something. He blends his life and his art. He's not a journeyman director. He doesn't have to make a movie every year."

No pressure? Wanton unstructured types like Tarantino secretly crave it deep down...Read More

Yesterday's collapsing-values, fall-of-the- Roman-empire statement came from former DreamWorks marketing ace Terry Press: "Everybody knows that culturally, kids rule the roost. The numbers for kids and the age they adopt things like iPods (and) cell phones...all show that kids are growing up faster. If you make records or something you want consumed in the culture, you have to resonate with kids." She's right, of course, but an entertainment culture that caters first and foremost to toddlers, tweeners and young teens has opted for dilution and marginalization...Read More

Las Vegas used to be the last working refuge of performing scoundrels. It doesn't seem as tainted these days, in part because the aesthetic of the culture has sunk down to Vegas's level over the past 15 to 20 years, but the possibility of Michael Jackson committing to a long-term performing gig as a way of launching a possible comeback reiterates what Vegas and its audience are basically about.

No arguments with the choices of the Nerve.com team for the Most Important (i.e., brazen, influential, talk-stirring) Nude Scenes of all time, but most of us recognize that nude scenes are about "importance" second and erotic intrigues and arousals first. The good ones are, at least. And in this sense Ingmar Bergman's The Silence has almost no parallel. Sven Nykvist's black-and-white photography of the sultry, vaguely self-disgusted Gunnel Lindblom in various states of undress in that downtown hotel room (and bathroom) is the stuff that lifelong dreams are made of.

The just-posted trailer for Ocean's 13, rated PG-13 for "brief sensuality." And George Clooney has written directly to Radar and denied having anything to do, even indirectly, with getting those Huckabees clips circulated, and offers "a million bucks to anyone who can prove otherwise."

I missed this Defamer echo (posted yesterday) about that disgruntled making-of-Transformers poem. My fault for going to a play yesterday afternoon (Liev Schreiber in Talk Radio) instead of staying at my desk at Starbucks on Lex and 85th.

Indiewire columnist Anthony Kaufman recently passed along a two-pronged statement from producer Ted Hope about The Hawk Is Dying, the somewhat morose Paul Giamatti movie that opens at Manhattan's Cinema Village tomorrow (on 3.30). Hope said Hawk is now in better shape than when it played to lousy reviews at Sundance 2006, and that he's so proud of it that "if you go and aren't truly glad you went, I will personally refund your money...just send me your ticket stub at This is That in New York...I promise."

Michael Pitt, Paul Giamatti

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Stuck all day in JFK-to-LAX jet, and the first thing that kicks in back in the office is M.C. Rove. It's almost breathtaking. Here's another version with some awful lead-up patter.

The people who run Soho House, a private club in the West Village, see themselves as the keepers of an elite but very delicate environment that can be harmed and/or diluted by photos of the club's interior. I posted an award-level shot of the dining room in this space on Wednesday afternoon, and I was asked by Soho House management this morning to take it down. This episode plus that throughly-unto-itself Soho House vibe I described the other day (i.e., Londoners trying to keep the rude energy of New York outside while maintaining their idea of a certain clubby corporate serenity...Read More

Mia Farrow and her son Ronan, in their capacity as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassadors, are accusing Steven Spielberg of indirectly aiding and abetting the genocide in Darfur by cuddling up to Beijing government in his upcoming capacity as a 2008 Olympics visual pageant organizer.

"Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994 founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide?," Farrow wrote in today's Wall Street Journal. "Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl...Read More

The news that Dreamgirls Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson has been cast as Forest Whitaker's daughter in Winged Creatures, which Hollywood Wiretap's Pete Hammond reported exclusively earlier today, is supposed to quicken our pulses. I'm stilll trying to understand why this film is called Winged Creatures. (Sorry, but I naturally flashed back to Larry Cohen's Q -- a film about the winged serpent called Quetzlcoatl.)

Winged Creatures is about a group of disparate people who are commonly affected by a "tragic shooting" in a diner. Question...Read More

"Sources" -- i.e., more than one person -- have told Radar's Jeff Bercovici that George Clooney, who got into some kind of hostile shoving or fisticuffs with David O. Russell during the filming of Three Kings, was somehow involved in circulating those Russell vs. Lily Tomlin I Heart Huckabee video clips that got around a week or so ago.

Stan Rosenfield, Clooney's p.r. guy, told Bercovici that it's a bullshit rumor, but the Radar guy is speculating -- emphasis on the "s" word -- that a sound mixer named Edward Tise ...Read More

I fell by last night's Sopranos premiere (i.e., a screening of the final season's first two episodes) at the Radio City Music Hall. After it was over, I mean (around 9:40 pm), and as the after-party was about to begin. Fox News entertainment reporter and all-around good guy Bill McCuddy offered to take me inside as his plus-one, but it was mainly a cast-and-crew party, there was a huge, slow-moving line waiting near 50th Street and Sixth Avenue to get in, and it looked like too much of a zoo.

Just after last night's Sopranos premiere

"Mike Binder's an interesting filmmaker," AICN's Drew McWeeny wrote two days ago. "As far as I can tell, he's not chasing any trends. He's not trying to make the next giantsupermegablock- buster. He's just a guy who seems to be honing a personal voice, film after film, getting better as he does. He's never become a hipster fave like Wes Anderson or [Paul Thomas Anderson], and he's never achieved the pop culture significance of Woody Allen in the early days.

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New York Post critic Lou Lumenick pays a visit to the last operating grindhouse in the New York City area. It's a greasy dump called the Fair Theatre, "a successor to the tradition of the crumbling, grimy showplaces that used to line both sides of 42nd Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, located on a shabby stretch of Astoria Boulevard near La Guardia Airport."

Lumenick hopped on the M60 bus and actually visited this place -- alone, unarmed, no security escort.

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An inside operator who's enjoyed a certain perspective on the making of Transformers (Dreamamount, 7.4.07), the forthcoming Michael Bay fantasy-actioner, feels it's "loads of crap" and "not fit for a barge." These and other opinions were amusingly conveyed in a Transformer wrap poem that was posted last night on a certain website, and then taken down. A journalist friend copied and and sent it along before the erasure. The Beowulfian account lies three graphs hence.

Merd...Read More

Boiler Room and Wall Street are both about a young, lean hungry-for-money guy (a) gaining entry to the world of high finance, (b) learning the ropes, making big bucks and getting a little drunk on the juice of it all, and (c) eventually going too far, getting busted and crashing into a hole of shame and disrepute. Now we have a third one to process -- a big-screen adaptation of Jordan Belfort's The Wolf of Wall Street (Bantam, 9.25.07) with Martin Scorsese directing, Leonardo DiCaprio starring and Terence Winter writing the script.

Belfort's book...Read More

Those who recall the halcyon days of "Sixteen" may want to spend a minute with this YouTube video, captured a few days ago at a Syracuse University concert, and consider the moves of the bass player (i.e., stage right).

There is, to me, a kind of warm-bath comfort in the fact of Al Pacino appearing in some current or upcoming film (i.e., one that has a kind of substance) and surging on the oats of raging septugenarian hormones and looking like some kind of incorrigible sartorial dog.

No more guest editorships at the L.A. Times op/ed section because publisher David Hiller has been spooked over the Brian Grazer/Andres Martinez/Kelly Mullens editorial-intimacy scandal and has decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

One should never make decisions about substantial matters out of fear or anger. Hiller is obviously being driven by the former -- he's running for the hills.

There's nothing inherently corrupt about bringing in guest editors -- the idea would obviously make things more nervy, exciting, lively. Nothing betokens death as much as a person or organization unwilling to take risks. As Read More

Things aren't as soft as they seem for Reign Over Me, which took in $8 million last weekend for an 8th place showing. What matters is that (a) the $4788 per-screen average was fairly decent and (b) the film is expected to motor along with good word-of-mouth from women and over-25s. The per-screen tally was better than the opening-frame $3617 average for Spanglish, a semi-serious Sandler film that "actually outgrossed comedies Billy Madison, Happy Gilmore and Little Nicky," according to Variety's Ian Mohr. Reign director Mike Binder...Read More

Several days after the Hilary 1984 video surfaced, cimaxed and subsided, the N.Y. Times ran a summary piece about it, written by Maria Aspan.

IGN's Stax Flixburg is reporting that Darren Aronofsky's next directing chore will be The Fighter, a fact-based boxing drama that will reteam Departed co-stars Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon. Filming is expected to begin this summer in Massachucetts, he says. (Variety's Michael Fleming and Pamela McClintock almost certainly read Stax's story, made a few calls and posted their version last night at 7:16 pm, without acknowledging that Stax broke it. That's the way they do things over there.)

There's a premiere screening of the first two episodes of the final season of The Sopranos tomorrow night at the Radio City Music Hall, plus an after-party with the cast somewhere...terrific. Just got into town, didn't do my advance homework, there's no chance of attending and this is the end of the line.

"In a world where everyone has an opinion -- and can both share their own and seek out others online -- respect for critics has taken a severe nose dive," observes Lewis Beale in his latest Reeler essay. "But everyone seems to have forgotten that just because you have an opinion doesn't mean it's well-thought-out.

"None of the fanboys at Ain't it Cool News, for example, can measure up to the chops of Jim Hoberman or Manohla Dargis. I mean, I love opera, but I'll be damned if I'm going to write a critique of Don GiovanniRead More

A brilliant review by the Toronto Star's Geoff Pevere of Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes The Barley, a sobering drama about the terrible price paid by Irish militants in their battle against British troops in the early 1920s. Pevere compares what Loach is saying about violent means -- "when it comes to deciding to kill, there is no end" -- to the traditional American six-shooter philosophy that "violence is a reasonable means to a justified end -- especially if it pre-empts or avenges other forms of violence."

The great Jamie Stuart's latest video piece is an arch, goofball-satiric interview with Black Book director Paul Verhoeven. A female voice-interviewer, an audience-reaction soundtrack and a dash of canary-yellow animation have replaced Stuart's trademark angst and ennui and lonely-guy gloom. In short, a startling stylistic departure.

Scott Frank's The Lookout (Miramax, 3.30) has some good things going for it. Jeff Daniels' performance, for one. The dialogue, the craft and the care that went into it, and the snow and the slush covering the dreary Midwestern locales. But it's largely about a young brain-damaged guy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) dealing with hunger and temptation, and I think life is brutal and exhausting enough without having a brain injury to contend with, and I just decided early on I didn't want to go there. Sorry, but I spook easily.

Jeff Daniels, Joseph Gordon-Levitt

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There's a profile of Joseph Gordon Levitt, the star of Scott Frank's reasonably engrossingThe Lookout (Miramax, 3.30) in today's N.Y. Times. In it, Franz Lidz declares that Gordon-Levitt's performance of Chris Pratt, a brain-damaged janitor, is what "really moves this bank heist thriller along."

Lookout star Joseph Gordon-Levitt (l.), costar Matthew Goode (r.)

"Chris is a promising high school hockey player whose daredevilry causes a fatal car crash, killing his friends and leaving him with little in the way of short-term memory," Lidz writes. "Gordon-Levitt fashions him into a still but soulful character...Read More

Carl Colpaert's G.I. Jesus, which I saw and mostly raved about last summer during my visit to Cinevegas, is playing (barely) in Los Angeles right now, and it will open in New York City on 4.6. When a film doesn't open with the usual promotional ad push there's a tendency to assume it's got problems and isn't worth catching. Well, it's not a note-perfect film (I had some issues with two or three aspects) but G.I. Jesus is absolutely worth seeing.

(l. to r.) G.I. Jesus

Woe to the shell-shocked Hollywood Reporter with the news of yet another defection -- film business editor Nicole Sperling is leaving to report for Entertainment Weekly out of its L.A. office. Said it before, saying it again -- if the Reporter wants to really save itself and not just apply this or that band-aid procedure, it should hire/buy out David Poland and the Movie City News team (a move that Poland himself suggested a few weeks ago). If this happens MCN will be obliged to sublimate its identity as well as its style of writing and reportingRead More

In another piece about comedians trying their legs at drama (i.e., on the heels of Caryn James' 3.25 N.Y. Times article), MSNBC's Stuart Levine begins his version thusly: I'm very excited to see the new Adam Sandler movie, Reign Over Me, for one big reason: It's not an Adam Sandler movie.

"In other words, this one's not geared for 12-year-old boys who'll collapse in laughter at the sight of any and all bodily functions. Reign...Read More

N.Y. Times columnist Caryn James is on probation with an ankle bracelet for having gone sweet on Will Ferrell, the world's dorkiest-looking and, I feel, the most monotonous and not-all- that-funny comic performer around today. I'm feeling this more acutely than usual because of the impending Blades of Glory (Dreamamount, 3.30), which I'm dreading like the plague even though it's going to wail at the box-office five days from now.

Will Ferrell, Ron Perlman

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I was told at last night's Grindhouse screening, by the way, that Planet Terror and Death Proof will be released as separate films in Europe.

I asked a couple of Weinstein publicists how long each film is on its own, but they weren't sure. Chris Nashawaty's EW piece says they both run 85 minutes. Each, presumably, will have the fake trailers for the fake crappy movies attached when they play overseas.

"Hollywood is bracing for a new government review of the marketing of violent entertainment to the young," reports N.Y. Times guy Michael Ceipley. "The Federal Trade Commission is putting the final touches on a follow-up to its September 2000 report on the marketing to children of violent movies, music and video games. The first such assessment in three years, it will examine the selling practices of a mainstream entertainment industry that in the interim has become increasingly dependent on abductions, maimings, decapitations and other mayhem...Read More

A film critic friend wrote a couple of days ago to ask "who are Richard Brody and Ken Marks, and why are they sullying The New Yorker's critical reputation?

"I was reading the capsule movie reviews in the current issue (3/26) of the mag, and my eye happened to fall upon raves given to two of the worst films in current release: Norbit and Reno 911!: Miami. Brody describes Norbit as a 'raucous, vulgar comic extravaganza' and [seemingly] loved every moment of it. He concludes that Eddie Murphy...Read More

I don't know why I'm running this, but some guys are reimagining Star Wars as if it had been created and visualized by Jules Verne. The style/aesthetic is called steampunk. I think it would be better all around if all things George Lucas (including Star Wars) was just left alone. A few steampunk sites -- #1, #2, #3, #4 and #5.

I went to high school for two years in Wilton, Connecticut, and I visited there often over the next few years, and can say with at least some familiarity that Wilton was always a moderately conservative town. But I've always understood that the high school was a somewhat progressive institution. No longer, apparently.

A planned April performance of a play about U.S. troops and the Iraqi War called "Voices in Conflict" was recently cancelled by principal Timothy H. Canty, due to "questions of political balance and context." Translation: conservative voices in Wilton wanted it suppressed.

A N.Y. Times...Read More

I've read Chris Nashawaty's Entertainment Weekly cover story (issue #927) on Grindhouse twice, and it seems curious that there's not even a mention -- not even a wisecrack -- about the emotional upheaval that resulted from Planet Terror director Robert Rodriguez's indiscretion with costar Rose McGowan during shooting early last year, and his wife-producer, Elizabeth Avellan, finding out and freaking and then suing for divorce, and Rodriguez allegedly suffering some kind of emotional meltdown and the shoot being somewhat more difficult because of this.

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Sometimes there's no explanation -- not a simple, easy to-digest one, anyway -- why a certain song seeps through and resonates at a given time. Maybe if the word "Talk" was substituted for the word "Write"...I don't know. I'm also hearing "Jeepster", a T-Rex/Marc Bolan track that Quentin Tarantino uses in Death Proof, over and over. Mainly because it's good.

Forget that projection about TMNT doing close to $35 million or even cracking $30 million -- it's being projected to earn $27,492,000. (Obviously not a shortfall, but the guy who projected a possible $35 million take was feeling his oats.) 300, a Hollywood Armageddon movie that too many people are refusing to hate, will come in second with $19,352,000, off 41% from last weekend. And the third-place Wild Hogs will earn $14,328,000, off 25% from the previous round.

Shooter will come in fourth with about $13,682,000. The Hills Have Eyes 2 is next with $10,131,000...Read More

A preview trailer for the final Sopranos season, including a line I've known was coming for many years -- "Mr. Soprano, we have a warrant for your arrest."

Half of Grindhouse (Weinstein Co., 4.6) -- okay, 55% or 60% -- gave me a kick that I haven't gotten from a mainstream film in a long, long time, and I owe 100% of that pleasure to director-writer Quentin Tarantino, who is definitely back in the saddle with this one and going yippie- ki-yay.

Everyone knows that Grindhouse is a double-feature movie -- a pair of late-'60s style exploitation flicks intended as a jaunty tribute piece. Created by Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez...Read More

The reason I decided the other day that the final Sopranos season is comprised of ten episodes instead of the actual nine -- yes, the tally is definitely and officially nine -- is because of seemingly contradictory information in Bill Carter's 3.22.07 N.Y. Times story.

The article states that the series, called "Made in America," starts on April 8 and that "the final scene of The Sopranos" will air on June 10. The series will run, in other words, for ten weeks....only it won't have ten episodes. Yes, I'm confused.

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Is it the least bit bothersome to anyone (except for the conservatives who read this column) that Adam Sandler is an alleged Rudy Giuliani supporter, and is otherwise regarded as a Bruce Willis-type supporter of right-of-center candidates and causes? I don't think it's such a bad thing for a Hollywood guy to be a Giuliani man. It's a little weird, but far from criminal. I just don't want to hear anything about Sandler supporting Bush/Cheney/Rove or the Iraqi adventure. (Note: Apologies for misspelling Giuliani's name -- I'll never get it wrong again.)

"After reading the postings to your blog, I think the folks who have already seen this film are (a) way too young to know anything about the Vietnam War, or (b) utterly insensitive to the film's racism and reactionary politics. I saw the picture months ago. It's extremely well-made, but I was also appalled that it glorifies a guy who was on a secret, illegal bombing mission inside Laos when he was shot down. In addition, the movie's view of the locals is almost unreservedly racist, in that almost everyone is portrayed as sadistic, venal, corrupt...you name it.

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I thought I'd start playing around with running short video clips from time to time. I'm thinking it'll be especially cool from the Cannes Film Festival and other such destinations. I know MPEG is the easiest loading, most accessible format (I'm buying some video-converting software as we speak), but I'm wondering how difficult it is to view less common video files. I've loaded two -- an avi file from my Canon PowerShot A540 and a video clip shot by a Treo 700...

"Question: Can a film symbolically contain all the elements of a vast, complicated and enigmatic tragedy within the microcosmic story of a single individual accidentally caught up in the ghastly mess of -- for convenient example -- the Iraq war? Short answer: No, not normally.

"Longer answer: A modestly mounted, but curiously poignant little documentary called The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, which somehow -- quietly, devastatingly -- shows and tells you more than you may perhaps want to know about the dehumanization implicit in the mighty, blighted Iraqi adventure." -- from Richard Schickel's Time reviewRead More

"It was like watching a killer whale launch itself with barely a splash completely out of the water. Instead of the usual roar of the engines, the airliner seemed to sigh, as if there were no tension in its wings, which support 811,000 pounds during the demonstration flight. Whoa, the whale can fly! And wait a sec, I'm on the whale." -- Time's Coco Masters on a recent special promotional flight of the Airbus 380.

TMNT (Warner Bros., 3.23) is surging now with adults, even -- 97, 29 and 9, It's still a $25 to $35 million equation. I don't know where 300 will fall (in second place?), but The Hills Have Eyes 2 will be right after the turtles among the newbies -- 77, 30 and 11. Antoine Fuqua and Mark Wahlberg's Shooter will probably come in third -- 64, 36, 10. Reign Over Me...Read More

TMZ is reporting that the Miami New Times is reporting that Lily Tomlin has joked about that YouTube video showing her in a profane spat with director David O. Russell on the set of I Heart Huckabees. Except she didn't joke -- she sounds chagrined to me. "I've never seen it," she said to an interviewer. "Is that when I'm sitting in the seat and really going nuts? Oh my God, I'm gonna die when I see that."

I thought this was generally known, but perhaps not: that end-of-March release date for Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn is no more. MGM "still does not have all delivery items from producer Steve Marlton," says a guy in the thick of it, and there is "still some remaining legal mess has not been sorted out yet by the production."

The thinking is to maybe release the film by the end of May in L.A. and N.Y. and try to keep it alive until the fall, or so I've been told. It's all a little bit up in the air.

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An assessment of the heightened interest in advertising on cellphones, as summarized by N.Y. Times reporter Eric Pfanner. Mobile phones are conventionally referred to as "the third screen, behind television and the computer," Pfanner writes. And yet Bob Greenberg, chief executive of R/GA, an agency based in New York that specializes in digital advertising, says he actually thinks about a cell phone screen "as the first one...it's with me all the time."

Francis Coppola scared some of us half to death when he said a few weeks ago that the themes in his latest film, Youth Without Youth, are about "time, consciousness and the dream-like basis of reality," and that "for me it is indeed a return to the ambitions I had for my work in cinema as a student." The reality is not so terrifying, apparently, given that Sony Pictures Classics has acquired North American distrib rights for Coppola’s film -- his first in ten years.

The press release doesn't say when SPC will release Youth Without Youth...Read More

In response to the whole appearances issue regarding the Andres Martinez-Kelly Mullen relationship being a seminal factor in producer Brian Grazer being invited to guest-edit the L.A. Times "Current" section, publisher David Hiller has scrapped this coming Sunday's edition and Martinez, seething and indignant, has resigned. (Click to play song while reading the rest.) "Hiller's decision to kill the Brian Grazer section this Sunday makes my continued tenure as Los Angeles Times editorial page editor untenable," he blogged...Read More

I've been waiting to read some definitive article in a mainstream publication that repeats what I'm hearing from the guys at West L.A.'s Laser Blazer, and which has been reported on various industry and gamer sites, which is that Blu-ray has surged ahead of HD-DVD and that the aroma of absolute victory is in the air, like the scent of burning leaves on a late-fall afternoon.

Has there been a clear-cut game-is-over, Blu-ray-has-won story in any major publication (Variety, N.Y. Times, Wired, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post) over the last couple of months that I've missed? ...Read More

Talk about teary farewells -- the final Sopranos season (an abridged one composed of ten episodes) kicks off April 8 and ends on June 10, and after that's over it'll be all over. Nothing lasts forever and the pages need to keep turning, and there will always be those DVD box sets (which I'd love to see some day in Blu Ray) but it feels sad -- there's no escaping that. I know that producer David Chase will never make, say, a three-hour Sopranos feature, but if he were to announce one I'd be delighted.

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Of all the blog tributes to journalist Cathy Seipp, who departed yesterday afternoon around 2 pm, I was most touched by Luke Ford's. A memorial gathering is happening at Mt. Sinai Hollywood Hills (5950 Forest Lawn Drive) tomorrow Friday morning at 10 ayem.

That L.A. Times dustup over editorial page editor Andres Martinez putting the high hard one to 42 West publicist Kelly Mullens has been the thing to talk about for the last 24 hours. That's due to their relationship having created a slight appearance of unseemly influence regarding the Times having chosen producer Brian Grazer -- whom Mullens has been working for, being a client of 42 West-- to be a "guest editor" of Sunday's L.A. Times' Current section.

L.A. Observed correspondent Kevin Roderick reportedly broke the story, but it's been ...Read More

The 2007 Oscar timetable, which, of course, will largely unfurl in '08. The big show will happen on Sunday, 2.24.08.

Three dishonest nude scenes -- #1, #2 and #3 -- featuring a weeping and pleading Natalie Portman being tortured in Milos Forman's Goya's Ghost. which opened last November in parts of Europe but won't be seen in the U.S. until July. The scenes are well-shot and chillingly acted (Javier Bardem is especially creepy), but dishonest because of the timid angles, the chickenshit editing and the reported use of a body double.

With his latest column, a piece that praises the primal visual energy of 300 and disdains the fuddy-duddy critics who are too caught up in the aesthetics of 1970s-era quality to understand the genius of young guys like Zack Snyder and his digital Hollywood brethren, L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein has made me realize something...something that old-school, late-GenX and boomer-aged editors probably need to consider also. Seriously.

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Larry "Bud" Mehlman, the "Late Night with Letterman" guy with the black J.C. Penney suit and the dark-framed glasses and the mincing, high-pitched voice who always spoke like he was closely related to Robby the Robot, has left the planet. He was 85 years old. His real name was Calvert DeForest...Read More

The guy who created that "Hilary 1984" spot that's been making the rounds over the last several days has been exposed by Arianna Huffington, and subsequently whacked by his employer, Blue State Digital, which has had technical dealings with the Obama campaign.

The renegade's name is Philip de Vellis, and he's saying in a statement on the Huffington Post that he's proud of having created the attack ad, that he "wanted to show that an individual citizen can affect the process," and that "this was not the first citizen ad, and it will not be the last...Read More

A congressman's mistress is killed, and a team of investigative reporters secretly work with a police detective to solve the murder. The movie will be called State of Play, an American version of an acclaimed British miniseries that you can buy on DVD. The new version, which will star Brad Pitt and directed by Kevin McDonald from a script by Matthew Michael Carnahan, will start shooting in November. The plot isn't what anyone would call strongly similar to Clint Eastwood's Absolute Power...

Expressions of support and comfort aren't exactly fitting in the case of poor Cathy Seipp, a first-rate journalist, blogger and mom. I'm very, very sorry. Anne Thompson said it better yesterday.

The original Alamo Drafthouse on Colorado Street in downtown Austin is closing down. Another native operation done in by some greedy-ass landlord reacting to the proverbial corporate chain stores pushing up urban rents and making all downtown areas (including those in Prague, Moscow and Beijing) look exactly the same. The upside is that there's a bounceback coming. The downtown Drafthouse will be reborn at the historic Ritz Theater off of Sixth Street.

"Of all the things to make you pause, hand on wallet, before shelling out for a movie ticket, try this: a film about the aftermath of 9/11, starring Adam Sandler. What possible cultural need, one might ask, could be met by such a project? It is thus with a degree of amazement that I find myself nominating Reign Over Me written and directed by Mike Binder, as a movie that might be worth your time."

A near-rave review of Reign Over Me from New Yorker critic Anthony Lane...Read More

The bottom line with the Joe Roth-recutting-Julie Taymor's-Across The Universe story (as written by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman) is one thing and one thing only -- the trailer.

We all know that trailers never tell the truth about a movie, but it's hard to watch this one and not be at least a little bit impressed. It's a kids-tripping-out-in-the-late-'60s thing with the cast singing and dancing to Beatles songs, and it kind of looks to me like Milos Forman's Hair. The trailer has an aura of vision and intelligence...Read More

TMNT "never wears out its welcome and gets the story told efficiently without dragging us down with subplots to pad out the runtime. Nor is the story rushed to ensure a certain number of shows per day in the megaplex. This is a movie about mutated, humanoid turtles who talk like New Yorkers and fight like ninjas...get over it." -- from Moises Chiullan's HE review.

I should have posted a link two days ago to Mark Ebner's Hollywood Interrupted interview piece about one-time recording mogul and accused murderer Phil Spector, who "was always a fatal train wreck waiting to happen," Ebner declares. Spector's trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson is now underway, and Ebner is pledging to provide live-blog gavel-to-gavel coverage from Los Angeles Superior Court.

A pass-along from renowned cartoonist and old-time (i.e, '70s and early '80s hangover) Connecticut friend Chris Browne, who's been writing and drawing "Hagar the Horrible" since 1988.

Denmark's Niclas Kockum says that yestersday's post on Premiere.com's list of greatest movie posters "should acknowledge that the history of good movie posters goes a bit beyond the American borders. If your criteria for a good movie poster is how 'striking, innovative, eye-catching' it is, then you just can't go wrong with old Polish movie posters. Trippy as hell. Practically all of them beat the original posters."

I was okay with Lasse Hallstrom's The Hoax (Miramax, 4.6), but -- this column is often about the "but" factor -- I can't get over Hallstrom's decision to allow an early panoramic shot of New York City's lower half (i.e., shot from the roof of a midtown skyscraper in the mid 40s, facing south) to momentarily destroy the audience's suspension of disbelief. Those of you who know that The Hoax is a period film (it happens entirely in 1971 and early '72) have probably guessed what the issue is already.

The film begins with a wind-blown Clifford Irving (...Read More

A revised estimate has been passed along about the projected gross for TMNT this weekend. A studio-based marketing guy is now saying it'll be more like $25 to $35 million (he actually thinks it'll be closer to $35 million) rather than the $20 to $25 million projection I reported yesterday or the day before.

I saw Lasse Hallstrom's The Hoax (Miramax, 4.6.07) last night in Westwood at a "special screening" (i.e., red-carpet photography but no after-party). It's not without problems (or should I use the word "issues"?), but it's not h