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. I'll be converting to MPEGs, for sure, but can anyone view these inane driving clips with any ease or...

"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...Read 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 has been upticking over the last two or three weeks (it's now at 64, 30 and 8), but it's only managed a 69% Rotten Tomatoes rating. That said, L.A. Weekly critic Scott...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.

In any event,...Read More

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, but I would figure sometime...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 this morning. "The person in this job needs to have an unimpeachable integrity, and Hiller's decision amounts to a vote of...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...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.

I'm...Read More

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 covered much more throughly and interestingly by Deadline Hollywood...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.

In order to hold on to the dwindling readership of Genx and GenY-aged movie nuts who are also video-game and graphic-novel fans (some scholastically-challenged, some not) and to save...Read More

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. The Larry "Bud" Mellman irony is that he may or may not have been ironically hip. He was a guy who looked and sounded like a clueless middle-class droid but seemed on a certain level to be mocking himself, or at least mocking the stooge that he seemed to be "playing"....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...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 ('97), but it's the same line of country -- I need to watch the British miniseries.

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? I know it's a good and uncommonly haunting...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 -- a carefully measured,...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...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 half-bad. The seams show from time to time (the budget was lean), but it's better than decently made. A low-key caper movie-slash-ethical drama, The Hoax never once pissed me off, and that's saying something by today's standards.

Richard Gere schmoozing after Sunday night's "special screening" of The Hoax

Set in the early '70s, it's about how author Clifford Irving (Richard Gere,...Read More

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 let 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) that momentarily destroys 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) are probably guessing what the issue is already.

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

"Page Six" says the Motion Picture Assn. of America's rating s board "just might flip out" when they see Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse (Weinstein Co., 4.6), a wink-wink exploitation movie in quotes that's being sold as a tribute to the cheeseball sex-and-violence flicks that used to play in urban downmarket movie theatres in the '50s, '60s and '70s.

Wait a minute..."might" flip out? As in "they haven't seen it yet"? A little more than two weeks before opening? I don't think I believe that. The Weinsteiners are looking for an R rating but "some of [the film] is so...Read More

The same"Page Six" item also mentions that between the two Grindhouse movies (which are either called Death Planet and Terror Proof or Death Proof and Terror Planet or Planet Proof...same difference) -- will be broken up by an intermission composed of a series of fake trailers "for such fictitious titles as Werewolf Women of the SS, directed by Rob Zombie. and another, directed by Hostel's Eli Roth, called Thanksgiving, "in which a town's celebration of Turkey Day is interrupted by a mad slasher."

Dyanne Thorne in Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S.

Tracking indicates that TMNT (Warner Bros,., 3.23), the jacked-up CGI'ed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles flick, is going to take the weekend. It's at 83, 25 and 5, but you always have to figure higher with kiddie movies because phone surveyors don't talk to six year-olds. It could do between $20 million and $25 million.

Close on the turtles' heels will be Antoine Fuqua and Mark Wahlberg's Shooter (Paramount) -- 59, 37, 10. It could do $12 to $15 million, maybe a bit more.

Everything else opening this weekend is looking weak. Mike Binder's Reign Over Me is at 56, 34 5...Read More

This anti-Hilary Clinton You Tube ad (i.e., "Hilary 1984"), which went up fairly recently, has been disavowed by spokespersons for Barack Obama's campaign, who are saying they had "nothing whatsover" to do with it. It's a fairly stunning attack ad -- stunning for its anger and the obvious fact that its creator sees Clinton as some kind of liberal Big Brother figure. It's a sampling, of course, of the classic Apple 1984 ad that ran way back when. Fact is, it's fairly brilliant.

A San Francisco Chronicle piece by Carla Marinucci that ran...Read More

They're live! "Screaming Huckabees"is live! "Get 'em while they're hot before Russell's lawyer (or Tomlin's) swoops in and takes 'em down. Tomlin is more aggressive in this clip, no question. (She's funny, though.) Russell doesn't sound like the aggressor until the very end of the second clip....then he goes blooey.

It's a shame that those two YouTube videos of screaming matches between director David O. Russell and costar Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees have been yanked. It's now 1:30 pm Pacific, and at least one of them was "live" and downloadable between 30 and 45 minutes ago. Toronto Star critic and blogger Peter Howell watched Huckbees #2 about 30 minutes ago, he just told me, but when I clicked on it at 1:15 pm Pacific it had been pulled. Both are gone...erased.

Did anyone copy these clips (called "Screaming Huckabees #1 and...Read More

Premiere.com is running a gallery of choices for the 25 best (i.e., most striking, innovative, eye-catching) movie posters of all time. I could argue or qualify or nominate my own all-time best, but that would occupy two or three hours of my time...forget it. Suffice that a wider and richer assortment (at least 125 posters with comments) can be found at this British site.

But I can't let this go without a brief tip of the hat to this amazing Downhill Racer one-sheet. The spartan/oblique...Read More

All right, agreed, I should have linked last weekend to Glenn Kenny's response (appearing on his newish blog, "In The Company of Glenn") to Peter Bart's 3.15 Variety column. The following passage is especially savory. Mort Sahl said it: the cruelest jokes are the funniest:

"Bart says, because A.O. Scott and Kenneth Turan hated 300, and because Stephen Holden didn't much care for Night at the Museum, and because no critic found anything nice to say about Ghost Rider, movie reviewers ought to 'consider a sabbatical until September, when movies aimed at their quadrant magically reappear.'

"By...Read More

Regarding the ongoing discussion about CG-enhanced performances (i.e., Jennifer Connelly and Jeff Okun's CGI tear in Blood Diamond) , reader Jack Price has passed along this www.lookeffects.com reel. He suggests paying attention to the third-to-last shot, before Passion of the Christ and Southland Tales.

Moving Picture Blog's Joe Leydon is weirding out on us -- he's recommending readers to watch a Monday evening Starz cable network showing of "the criminally under-rated" Shopgirl ...good God!

"Steve Martin the author is well served by Steve Martin the multihyphenate in this delicately nuanced 2005 dramedy," Leydon writes...bullshit! And that goes double for Leydon's claim that it's "a smartly reconstituted yet surpris- ingly faithful adaptation" of Martin's novella.

I could rephrase what I wrote about Shopgirl during the 2005 Toronto Film Festival , but it's easier to just paste it:

"Shopgirl is said...Read More

"It has become something of a truism that web culture is driven not by traditional, top-down forms of tastemaking like the judgments of professional critics or the strategies of corporate marketers, but rather by the lateral operations of social networks," observes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott in a piece called "The Shape of Cinema, Transformed at the Click of a Mouse."

"Niches and coteries form organically, as like-minded people bond in cyberspace over shared enthusiasms. And this, in turn, encourages a do-it-yourself approach to production and distribution [of movies]. Just as a band, at least...Read More

When an actress has it, there's no missing it. A certain spark, a special spritz ...something extra that sticks to the wall. This doesn't mean she's absolutely destined for stardom or worldwide fame or even steady employment (life being more indifferent and unfair than not), but I feel compelled to say this clearly and plainly, not because I'm a talent scout but because I know what I know: Lucy Brown, a 27 year-old London actress who performed at last Monday's WordTheatre presentation, has it.

Lucy Brown -- Monday, 3.12.07, 8:25 pm

By this I...Read More

Last Monday night at London's Cafe de Paris I attended one of Cedering Fox's WordTheatre gatherings -- a literary salon-type deal in which a blend of modestly famous and very famous actors (West Wing star Richard Schiff and British actor Ian Hart were the headliners) stand in front of a mike and read short stories to 150 or 200 people, with those in attendance getting to feel slightly special as a result.

(l. to r.) Richard Schiff, Ray Panthaki, Lucy Brown, Ian Hart at last Monday evening's WordTheatre performance at London's Cafe de Paris

Actors are always...Read More

All of those wonderful high-concept George Lois Esquire covers from the mid to late '60s are viewable online here. in fact, some some 70 years worth (going back to 1933) are uploadable.

Three and a half years ago I Want Media interviewer Patrick Phillips asked Esquire editor David Granger "why magazines today seldom publish such distinctive, graphic covers? Do they simply not sell at the newsstand?" Granger said yeah, that it's "feared that those kinds of covers won't sell. At various times during my time here we've done more concepty, graphic covers, and generally...

New York Post columnist/critic Lou Lumenick yesterday slammed Variety editor Peter Bart for the content of his 3.15 column which, in Lumenick's view, makes Bart "Hollywood's [new] blowhard-in-chief" for "once again pandering to the studio suits (i.e., his biggest advertisers) by attacking the New York Times' A.O. Scott and the legion of other critics (including Post critic Kyle Smith) who failed to appreciate the artistic subtleties of 300."

When she was at the Hollywood Reporter, Anne Thompson's weekly single-topic column was called "Risky Business," a moniker she created from whole cloth back in the late '80s. Now that she's shuffled over to Variety the weeky column isn't called anything, and the Thompson blog -- known as "Riskybiz blog" at the Reporter -- is now called "Thompson on Hollywood." The Reporter acquired some sort of dominion over the "Risky Business" name when they hired Thompson three or four years ago, and now they don't feel like giving it back. They're legally entitled, but it's not very gracious or considerate of...Read More

"In short, 300 is a perfect combination of moral wrongheadedness and inept filmmaking. On any level beyond the pictorial, Snyder makes clunky Cecil B. DeMille epics like The Ten Commandments look positively deft. It presents itself as an instructive case study in nobility and bravery, but the only lesson I came away with was, 'When in doubt, kill the hunchback.' Go tell the Spartans, indeed. Tell them to go fuck themselves." -- excerpt from a review by L.A. City Beat film critic Andy Klein, the Alexander-the-Great of 300 haters.

According to an article in today's Taiwan United (which only I can read because I own the necessary question-mark decoding software), the Taiwan (Taipei) Golden Horse Film Festival is angling to invite Gong Lias the festival's jury president, pending the Taiwan's News Bureau's approval. (What the...?) But Li said she hasn't received any invitation yet, that the job is demanding and tiring, and that she may not have time to do it as "she may play in a big-budget Hollywood film in June, which she's now in negotiations [about]."

(l. to...

"There are about five things to write songs about: I'm leaving you. You're leaving me. I want you. You don't want me. I believe in something. Five subjects, and twelve notes. For all that, we musicians do pretty well." -- Elvis Costello to Esquire's Tom Junod for one of those "What I've Learned" pieces.

On last night's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, Maher asked guest Chris Rock, "So I hear you're running for president?" And Rock answered, "Yes, and I'm all black."

It's insipid but allowable to draw a link between Lena Headey's 300 hot-bod character being named Gorgo (i.e., "Queen" Gorgo) and Kal Penn's character in The Namesake being named Gogol. Especially with both films opening on March 9th...what are the odds?

Lena Headey, Kal Penn

Both names imply some kind of ogre-ish appearance or essence, but which is more problematic? I can roll with Gorgo, actually -- Headey and director Zack Snyder have made her into a strong but sexually ruthless character, and the name is obviously similar to "Gorgon," a Greek mythology term that refers...Read More

When it's all said and done on Sunday evening, Zack Snyder's 300 (renamed in a roundabout way by L.A. City Beat critic Andy Klein as Go Tell The Spartans to Go Fuck Themselves) will end up with $30 million give or take. That's a more-than-50% plunge from last weekend, but it'll still be at $110 million or thereabouts by tomorrow night. God help us...God help us all.

Some commentators have been clucking, "My, look at the stunning disparity between what the critics and the ticket-buying public love and hate...critics sure are out of step with Joe...Read More

Calling Jeff Okun, the Blood Diamond teardrop special-effects ace who got into a friendly debate with me a few days ago. This Ronald Reagan teardrop photo on the cover of the 3.16 Time magazine isn't up to Okun's level. It looks like a glob of digital glycerine mixed with saline fake-boob solution. I just watched the Blood Diamond DVD and I'm much cooler with Jennifer Connelly's.

Ocean's Thirteen is going to Cannes so the festival can throw the spotlight on George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Al Pacino ...fine. Nobody's going to trash this latest Steven Soderbergh-er like The DaVinci Code or Marie Antoinette got trashed, even if it's on the level of Ocean's Twelve, which I have a special affection for because of the improvised Julia Roberts-pretending-to-be-Julia Roberts scene in the Rome hotel room with Bruce Willis.

I was just wondering why, in mid-March, Alison James' Variety story about this didn't veer into speculation about some likely (or somewhat...Read More

I think I know this one. In fact, I'm dead certain. It's from Pauly Shore's In The Army Now.

Changing your agent is like buying a new car. It feels better to drive one with that fresh-car smell, especially if it has a more powerful engine or a better-sounding music system, or because it's more energy-efficient. I know that cars are primarily about emotion and secondarily about function. That said, I've been waiting for Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu to jump ship since around this time last year, which is when his longtime Endeavor agent and ally John Lesher took the job of running Paramount Vantage. He stayed with Endeavor through the award-season Babel campaign out of familial loyalty, but on...Read More

There's nothing wrong with Cate Blanchett taking a straight paycheck job in the forthcoming Indiana Jones film, which people are somewhat interested in seeing but also skeptical about because Harrison Ford (a.k.a., the guy who catches z's in the back seat of his girlfriend's car while she's shooting on a nearby sound stage) turns 65 in July.

Not only is the stringbean-thin Blanchett great at tongue-in-cheek vamping (she was the best thing in The Good German), but she'll look like a freshly-sprouted flower in Indy IV alongside Uncle Festus. She probably wants to lighten up...Read More

Premonition, the poorly reviewed Sandra Bullock film, tracked at 75, 25 and 19 yesterday morning, which means it'll earn somewhere north of $15 million. 300 may be #1 again but expect at least a 45% to 50% drop. Chris Rock's I Think I Love My Wife -- 60, 31 and 11 -- will do mezzo-mezzo business, maybe around $10 or $12 million. Dead Silence -- 42, 20, 4 -- is no Saw. Of all the forthcoming March openers, Blades of Glory (Will Ferrell as a preening, amusingly obnoxious ice-skating champ) is looking the best (64,40, 7). Reign Over Me, opening a week...Read More

Reign Over Me is Mike Binder's "best film, and these are two of the best performances I've seen from either Adam Sandler or Don Cheadle, and that is saying something for both of them," writes HE columnist Moises Chiullan (i.e., "Arthouse Cowboy") from South by Southwest.

"What's that? Sandler isn't an actor, he's a comedian? And Cheadle playing the straight man is no big task? Wrong, wrong, wrong.

"Sandler has everything he needs in his tool kit that every great American actor has had: humor, charisma, emotional sensitivity, and depth among them. He usually doesn't get to show them off. He says...Read More

Some people who saw Judd Apatow's Knocked Up at South by Southwest (including Variety critic Joe Leydon) are doing cartwheels. Leydon is calling it "uproarious...more explosively funny, more frequently, than nearly any other major studio release in recent memory...indeed, even more than the filmmaker's smash-hit sleeper The 40-Year-Old Virgin."

I'm sure that's great news for those of us who didn't laugh all that much at Virgin. I know I'm not the only one who felt that most of the comedic material in the first hour (i.e., before the better, more emotionally wholesome second-half...Read More

Reign Over Me costars Adam Sandler, "never making a false step while maneuvering though vertiginous mood swings," and Don Cheadle, "deftly commingling instinctive decency with quiet desperation, are individually excellent in the film, and bring out the best in each other. And the pic itself transcends its real but relatively minor flaws to score a satisfyingly potent impact." -- Variety critic Joe Leydon in a just-posted review.

Showest has been downgraded, devalued, etc. Nikki Finke reported this a few days ago, and now N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman has done the same. And by George, I think we've got it. "Mass events at places like ShoWest have been replaced by one-on-one contact with the exhibitors responsible for the lion’s share of American cineplexes, like AMC, Regal and Cinemark," Waxman writes. "Studio executives say they can cover most of the country with a few phone calls or a visit to an exhibitor’s headquarters in Kansas City, Mo., or Knoxville, Tennessee."

As this Pete Hammond audio interview with Mike Binder confirms, Reign Over Me (Columbia, 3.23), which Binder directed and wrote, has a gnarly marketing issue that'll require some expert finessing.

Reign Over Me director-writer Mike Binder (l.); Pete Hammond

The over-30 couples who would absolutely respect and admire and probably love this film are disinclined to attend because Adam Sandler plays the lead, and the under-30 popcorn-munchers who love Sandler's dumb comedies are (probably) cool to it also because they can smell the quality aura coming off this film and they (probably) don't want...Read More

If the guy who hired you goes down, you too will go down. Jungle law says you can't just kill a lion -- you have to also kill all the lionesses and cubs and political allies. And so Ruth Vitale, the former Paramount Classics co-president who was hired 16 or 17 months ago by the recently- whacked Henry Winterstern to run the distribution of First Look Studios, is jobless once again.

Today's announcement follows Winterstern's departure by about 12 days. Vitale will stay on as a First Look consultant through the end of the year. I...Read More

Bought a copy yesterday afternoon of Warner Home Video's just-released DVD of Peter Ustinov's Billy Budd (1962). Black-and-white scope is one of my favorite visual formats, and what an exquisite and luscious silver-toned transfer this is -- spotless, velvety smooth, ultra-crisp perfection with each carefully-lit value and tiny detail on view, and assembled exactly right.

(l.) Terrence Stamp as Billy Budd in '62; as Wilson in The Limey some 37 years later

The film itself is taut and intelligent and finely sculpted. If you have the character to get into a film that delivers in...Read More

I thought it was generally understood that Scarlett Johansson hurt herself pretty badly by starring in the triple black-spot whammy last year that was Scoop, The Black Dahlia and The Prestige, and that further alliances with Woody Allen feel like thin-ice excursions given the close-to-shocking atrociousness of Scoop. (Didn't Joe Queenan write a Guardian column last fall about how Johansson is just about over? Scoop was so bad it made me think that perhaps Allen himself had lost it. He could never have made anything that bad in the '70s or '80s or '90s.)

Hence, Johansson's decision to costar in Allen's next...Read More

In the 3.19.07 issue of Maclean's (which I haven't yet found an online link to), critic Brian D. Johnson's lead review starts with a catchy sub-head: "No wonder Hitler loved these guys -- Spartan supermen celebrate the joy of war in 300."

Johnson notes with...Read More

The obvious motive in giving Kevin Munroe's new-age digital Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle flick the title of TMNT (Warner Bros., 3.23) is that it sounds less odorous and sloggy. No '90s CG technology, no guys in turtle suits, etc. Voice-actors Chris Evans, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Mako, Kevin Smith, Patrick Stewart, Ziyi Zhang and Laurence Fishburne presumably got decent-sized paychecks for their trouble. The closer is that all the press screenings on both coasts are happening at kid-friendly hours.

Zodiac is superbly made," writes New Yorker critic David Denby, "but it's also a strange piece of work. As [it] goes on and on, and it becomes clear that no denouement is possible (the crime was never solved), we have to ask what the reason for all this cinematic blind-alleying might be. Any honest neurotic could probably tell you: the emotional payoff of an obsession is not attaining some longed-for goal -- it's the obsession itself, which fulfills certain needs. If it didn't, it wouldn't be an obsession.

"Jake Gyllenhaal's Robert Graysmith, whom no one takes seriously at first, wants to...Read More

Christian Hamaker of www.artsandfaith.com has sent along a copy of a recent Top 100 List of Spiritually Significant Films. Carl Dreyer's Ordet at #1 for the second year in a row, and Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According to St. Matthew, one of my favorites, ranking at #4. Martin Scorcese's The Last Temptation fo Christ, which Christian claims to "loathe," is at # 63. A film called Balthazar is ranked at #11 -- I presume they're referring to Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, a film about a saintly donkey that's obviously a Christian-spiritual parable.

"All of Tehran was outraged" by 300, writes Time correspondent Azadeh Moaveni. Not just its enormous financial success, she writes, but the fact that it was made at all since it's being seen by locals as an attempt to drum up resentment and war lust for invading Tehran.

"Everywhere I went yesterday, the talk vibrated with indignation over the film 300 -- a movie no one in Iran has seen but everyone seems to know about since it became a major box office surprise in the U.S.," Moaveni reports. "As I stood in line...Read More

"My movie is more like an opera than a drama. That's what I say when people say it's historically inaccurate. You have to understand the convention I'm working in. Everything is at 11." -- 300 director Zack Snyder speaking to MTV.com's Josh Horowitz.

HE comment: Exactly! Snyder has brilliantly nailed what's thick and heavy-smoke oppressive about innumerable graphic-novel type films that are primarily about whoa-cool-dude visuals -- they're cranked up to 11, which delivers a certain spirit-bludgeoning, can't-miss-it-unless-you-happen- to-be-overdosing-on-heroin awesomeness. But "11" is not what life is like. "11" is the universal wank-crank aesthetic of all CG-for-CG's-sake movies.

Same goes...Read More

During my London-fog period of a couple of days ago, Salt Lake City Weekly film critic Scott Renshaw ran a noteworthy piece on Bilge Ebiri's Screengrab, voicing a view that "serious-minded filmmakers need to begin tackling issues of spirituality, in order not to leave it to the hacks."

HE response: The finest all-time films have always been about spiritual connections between wayward mortals and something eternal or transcendent (like Anthony Quinn's moment on the beach at the very end of La Strada), but serious filmmakers need to stay away, far away, from films about faith or religion. Leave faith films to...Read More

If I hadn't been slogging around in a kind of slow-motion gelatinous London membrane yesterday, I would have posted Stu Van Airsdale's early-bird Reeler posting about some of the '07 Tribeca Film Festival selections. such as: (a) Angelina Jolie's A Moment in the World, a documentary that's most likely about her U.N.-sponsored humanitarian efforts (and is apparently her behind-the-camera debut); (b) Lucky You, the trouble-plagued, endlessly delayed Curtis Hanson gambling movie with Eric Bana, Drew Barrymore and Robert Duvall; (c) Spider-Man 3...please; and (d) the feature directing debut of Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit, called The Education of Charlie...

"It's 33 years old, but it's just a shadow of its former self. It used to be prestigious, but now it's seen as a chore. The movie studios used to vie for the attention of theater owners and operators with elaborate dog-and-pony shows, celebrity meet-and-greets, and teaser reels about upcoming films. No more -- ShowWest just isn't a big deal to Hollywood anymore.

"Blame the consolidation of screens by leading chains Cinemark, Regal [and] AMC, which control a combined 14,000 screens and 55% of the box office revenue.

"'ShoWest started out as a gathering of hundreds of mom-and-pop exhibitors who...Read More

"Did Mike Binder tonight" -- i.e., interviewed him in conjunction with a screening series after showing Reign Over Me. I think I recorded it with your recorder but am afraid to check it for fear I don't know what I'm doing. Mike was excited I was taping it at any rate. BRILLIANT FUCKING MOVIE. Emotionally spent watching it. Adam Sandler...WHO KNEW??? My upscale West L.A. movie crowd even commented on the fact they would have skipped it normally because it starred Sandler but were drawn because I included it in my film series. They were BLOWN AWAY -- telling all their friends...Read More

Haste, jet-lag, a knack for the occasional "duhh" move. Whatever the reason, I think my best excuse for reading this Something Awful Kevin Smith parody riff as legit is that I was so amused, nay, aroused by the imaginary title of a new Smith movie -- Derogatory Term For Slacker Twentysomethings: Funny Word After Colon -- that I somehow wished away the obvious tells that it was a parody piece. As far as parody allows, it hit my funny bone in exactly the right way. The acknowledgement of an obviously overly wordy and self conscious title somehow made it seem moderately (and...Read More

The Hollywood Reporter's Tatiana Siegel is announcing that Katt Williams, a stand-up comic ("The Pimp Chronicles") and Norbit costar, will write and star in Marshalls, a DreamWorks comedy about "the first black marshals of the Old West." Beloved envelope-pusher Eddie Murphy will produce and co-star. The two obvious recalls, of course, are (a) Murphy's famous 48 HRS./Reggie Hammond line from 25 years ago -- "I'm your worst fucking nightmare, a nigger with a badge!" and (b) Blazing Saddles again, perhaps with more edge and almost certainly with something other than jaunty Mel Brooks-like tone, for reasons of pride if nothing else.
...

"I saw Zodiac over the weekend and couldn't agree more. Really liked it, I mean. Of course I'm a big Fincher fan, but I'm also now a Mark Ruffalo fan. Out of curiosity I checked his IMDB page and I didn't see anything noteworthy other than a couple of 'also starring' roles in Collateral, Spotless Mind and All the King's Men. Have I missed the boat on this guy completely? Because the other stuff is all chickflick crap.

"Also, do you know if there is a PDF of the Vanderbilt script with the 12-page closing dialogue [delivered by Jake...Read More

Blood Diamond special effects supervisor Jeff Okun responded today to yesterday's followup piece about Jennifer Connelly's fake CG teardop, and I answered him line for line. Here's how it went...

Okun: Jeff -- First, thank you very much.

Wells: You're welcome, and thanks again for writing yourself.

Okun: I greatly appreciate your sense of honesty...

Wells: Thanks.

Okun: but do I sense a bit of outrage in your feelings about CG?

Wells: Perhaps a bit.

Okun: All this over a supposed tear?

Wells: Not the Connelly tear itself...Read More

N.Y. Times contributor Terrence Rafferty on the sometimes unholy alliances between French Nouvelle Vague-ers and Hollywood filmmakers, the latest being Chris Rock's re-jiggering of Eric Rohmer's Chloe in the Afternoon in his new film, I Think I Love My Wife (which I riffed on a few ago).

"For film critic and historian Joe Leydon, the cross-pollination of Hollywood and YouTube is only natural. He calls the clips on YouTube "the cinematic equivalent of garage band recordings...just as there will be elements of garage bands that will be incorporated into mainstream music, there will also be garage bands signed to recording contracts with major labels," says Leydon. "I'm sure that some of the people who will be releasing summer comedies in 2008 are making little comedy shorts for display right now on YouTube." -- from Dave Roos' "The Jackass Generation,"in issue # 67 of MovieMaker magazine.

Another great '70s crime movie is coming on Warner Home Video DVD, and on the very same day (May 22nd) as the release of WHV's Prince of the City two-disc set -- Ulu Grosbard's Straight Time (1978), in which Dustin Hoffman gives one of his most bitingly real performances.

He plays a hard-core felon, Max Dembo, just released from a six-year stretch in the slam, whose difficulties with a goading, mind-fucking parole officer (M. Emmet Walsh) and his fraternizing with two ex-con pals (Harry M. Stanton, Gary Busey) eventually nudge him back to a life...Read More

Kevin Smith has announced that "we've finally secured funding for the sixth film in the Jersey Trilogy, tentatively titled 'Derogatory Term For Slacker Twentysomethings: Funny Word After Colon.'

"We're currently tinkering with the tag line -- I suggested 'just because they do something doesn't mean they have to do something,' but corporate's pushing for 'punchy, two-sentence sarcastic comment...balls.' After fighting all this time just for permission to do the project I'm inclined to let them win the battle, but we'll see what the future brings."

I personally prefer the generic title. I wouldn't hesitate to pay to see a movie called...Read More

I've heard from a Canadian source that Zack Snyder's 300 may have made as much as $29 million yesterday. That obviously means a weekend total that could be as high as $65 million or even $70 million. This is obviously much, much higher than anyone expected. (The last estimate I heard was roughly $40 million.) Wild Hogs came in second with $8 million, the guy says.

I don't hold with Tom Tapp's putdown of Peter Biskind's "The Story of The Sopranos" piece in the new Vanity Fair. Sometimes words of praise are entirely just and fitting. I worship this show -- it can't be spoken of too highly -- and everything Biskind says about it is spot-on. My words exactly.

Sopranos departed (l. to r.): David Proval, Vincent Pastore, Annabella Sciorra, Joe Pantoliano, Drea de Matteo, Steve Buscemi

I particularly agree with his flat declaration that The Sopranos "is one of the masterpieces of American popular culture, on par with the...Read More

MTV.com's Josh Horowitz sat down with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, the writers of the forthcoming Jason Abrams-directed Star Trek feature, and sifted through the general emptiness of their project. The fact that Trekkies -- a fanboy sub-culture that stretches back nearly 40 years, for heaven's sake -- are still hanging in there and supposedly revved up about this new Trek pic is something that's gone beyond the realm of a cultural curiosity/embarassment. The thought of tens of thousands of people out there who are still into memories of Kirk, Spock, Scottie, Bones Chekhov, Uhura....the mind reels.

The Zodiac-inspired "I Am Not Avery" series...T-shirts, buttons, bumper stickers, etc. I've never worn a promotional T-shirt in my life, but I'd almost consider wearing one of these.

Blood Diamond visual effects supervisor Jeffrey A. Okun has written to say that he "[takes] take great issue with the impressions and facts of your article on the Jennifer Connelly teardrop [in Blood Diamond]." Fine, except all I did was quote from and attempt to summarize a two-week-old Times Online piece by Ben Hoyle.

The thrust of Okun's letter seems to be that Connelly's teardrop on her cheek was digitally manipulated (i.e., copied or substituted), but in an emotionally genuine way because she really did "cry" while performing the scene...just not in the precise way we see her crying in...Read More

Friday was one of those days in which circumstance, travel fatigue and profound technological mysteries conspired to block me from filing for too many jet-lagged hours. It's 9:40 pm London time, I got maybe two and a half hours of shut-eye on the plane last night, I chugged three cans of Red Bull for dinner this evening and I don't even have the energy to plotz. I'm not explaining/complaining ...well, I am. But if you'd been through today's ordeal...

Love and kisses to the people at Heathrow who sell cell-phone SIM cards at more than double the market value. Hearts and flowers to...Read More

Chris Rock's I Think I Love My Wife (Fox Searchlight, 3.16) isn't over-the-moon great, but it isn't half bad. The one-sheet tells you it's a generic marital infidelity comedy and it certainly has the lightness of tone that goes with the form, but it also has some mildly surprising grace notes and side-intrigues that you don't usually get with this sort of thing.

I could write a 1500-word piece, easy, about the indications in Chris Rock's expression and body posture in this shot, which was taken last night outside the Arclight, prior to the premiere screening...

Sharon Waxman's 3.8.07 N.Y. Times piece says First Look honcho Henry Winterstern was deep-sixed last Friday (Winterstern tells Waxman he resigned because the board didn't want to buy Nu Image/Millennium Films) because of "a disastrous 2006 at the box office and a taste for spending, with little cash flow to show for it."

(l.) deposed First Look chief Henry Winterstern; Benjamin Siegel

My impression from the Waxman article is that Winterstern is kind of a Bugsy Siegel character, and that he was whacked for the same reasons Siegel was shot to death,...Read More

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke is reporting that (a) "the mood at the Hollywood Reporter" in the wake of the announced departure of editor Cynthia Littleton and columnist Anne Thompson is "horrible" right now, that "the last vestige of humanity [at the Reporter] leaves with [Littleton]." and that "everybody feels like the sky is falling." Finke is also passing along speculation that Littleton's replacement might be Billboard editor Tamara Conniff, "but she's not popular with THR staff, and Hollywood types are telling me it would be a poor choice."

Another piece about movies that make guys cry, this one by MSNBC's Ian Hodder. Hasn't this subject been covered ad infinitum? I explained several years ago that the one big thing guys cry about is loss -- the son or daughter they didn't love enough, the childhood dog that died, the woman that got away, the loss of a friend, the loss of a wallet with lots of cash in it. Fill in the blanks but that's the trigger mechanism.

So where's the visual? I'm just a guy kvetching from the sidelines, but can you imagine being an editor of a serious online news site and putting up a story that's entirely about a composite image of James Bond and not putting up said image?

I guess this Fox deal to make The Happening is an M. Night Shyamalan bounce-back. After the debacle of Lady in the Water, I mean. Hearing that nobody wanted to buy The Green Effect I figured he'd be in movie jail for at least a year and a half to two years, or perhaps longer. But no -- Night is resilient, relentless, exacting, tenacious. That said, The Happening plot sounds like a big gulp: "a paranoid thriller about a family running from a natural crisis that presents a large-scale threat to humanity."

A month ago Time writer/columnist Joel Stein told a Palo Alto audience about an interview he did with Leonardo DiCaprio in early 2000 (the idea was to talk The Beach). DiCaprio wouldn't agree to experience anything with Stein, so it became a shopping-at-Ralph's piece because Stein (a) noticed a Ralph's card peeking out of Leo's wallet and figured he was a penny-pincher and (b) offered to buy Leo's groceries. Leo agreed, they went to the Ralph's in West Hollywood (at the corner of Beverly Blvd. and Doheny) and here's the piece that resulted. DiCaprio was furious about it. He decided that...Read More

Reactions to 17 year-old Daniel Radcliffe's lead performance in a just-opened West End revival of Peter Shaffer's Equus have been respectful and admiring. Daily Telegraph critic Charles Spencer said that he "brilliantly succeeds in throwing off the mantle of Harry Potter, announcing himself as a thrilling stage actor of unexpected depth and range." Good for that -- throwing off mantles can be a tricky thing at times.

Joanna Christie, Daniel Radcliffe

Radcliffe plays an extremely hung-up, possibly insane English kid who's blinded six horses, but the more startling aspect is that he plays a big scene in...Read More

"Directors have started to manipulate actors' performances in post-production," wrote Times Online Arts Reporter Ben Hoyle about two weeks ago. "Modern visual effects technology allows them to go beyond traditional cosmetic changes, such as removing wrinkles and unsightly hairs, and adjust actors facial expressions and subtly alter the mood of a scene.

Case in point: Ed Zwick's decision to add a teardrop to Jennifer Connolly's cheek as she's speaking -- SPOILER! SPOILER ALERT! -- to the dying Leonardo DiCaprio at the end of Blood Diamond. At a Visual Effects Society conference in Los Angeles in...Read More

The best trailer mash I've seen in months -- Glen and Garry and Glen and Ross. Four sad, desperate men with Tourette's Syndrome -- Al Pacino, Alan Arkin, Ed Harris, Jack Lemmon -- who receive a spirit-lifting Stand and Deliver wake-up from a gifted visitor, played by Alec Baldwin, who cuts right to the chase and doesn't mince words. Such as: "Only one thing counts is this life...are you hearing me, you fucking faggots?"

No offense to the guys in the film or its director, James Foley, but I saw these actors perform Glengarry Glen Ross...

My tracking sources are AWOL this week, but Nikki Finke reported yesterday that Bob Shaye's The Last Mimzy (New Line, 3.23) isn't tracking. She said it has/had a "zero" rating, referring, I presume, to the % of those who called it their first choice. That's pretty gruesome for a film slated to open a little more than two weeks away, but it's hardly a mystery why no one wants to see it. The title is atrocious.

The use of the word "Last" is bad enough -- declaring that anyone or anything is the "last"...Read More

Yoko Ono has triumphed again in her ongoing Chinese Commmunist censor campaign to keep the late John Lennon's reputation as hallowed, pixie-dusted and Ono-sanctified as possible. Truly, this woman's avarice and manifest control-freak compulsions are a spiritual canker sore on the Lennon legend.

A little more than two weeks after she withdrew music-rights permission for a 90-minute documentary called John Lennon: Working-Class Hero (possibly because it contained a reported interview with Lennon's first wife Cynthia, who "allegedly complains on-camera that drugs and Ono were responsible for the break-up of their marriage"), Ono has reportedly blocked...Read More

Everyone's seen 300 except me...still. I drove down to last night's all-media IMAX screening at The Bridge to try and amend that distinction, but Warner Bros. publicity staffers arranged to pack both screenings (the 6:30 and the 9 pm) with fan boys in order to...I don't know, convince journalists what a huge hit this film already is? No need to convince me -- I've seen the tracking and realize that Zac Snyder's heavily CG'ed battle-of-Thermopylae movie is looking at a likely $40 million gross this weekend.

They call 'em fan boys, fan boys, fan boys! And...

There can be no question that by the force of his own voice and power, and particularly the influence he had upon President Lyndon Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's advocacy of aggressive military tactics against the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong in 1964, '65, '66 and '67 directly resulted in God knows how many thousands of dead American soldiers.

(l. to r.) Robert McNamara, Bill Maher, Dick Cheney

It is just as certain that if McNamara had suddenly died or disappeared in early '65, say, and under-Secretary of State George...Read More

There's something comical about the fact that Ralph Fiennes, at the age of 44, is the new Colin Farrell -- a champion, a stallion, a serpent in the garden. Fiennes and four buck-naked ladies caused a mild stir by skinny-dipping in a swimming pool inside the Hotel Tuilerieen in Bruges, Belgium. Fiennes s filming a feature called Bruges (great title!), which also stars Farrell (yes -- a coincidence) and Brendan Gleeson.

A spokesman for the jury that convicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby of four counts today of perjury and obstruction of justice earlier today told reporters immediately afterward that many felt sympathy for Libby and believed he was only the "fall guy." Gee...did he really think so?

"I saw 300 tonight," a manager-producer friend wrote last week. "Empty and shallow but still cool. I did enjoy seeing as I love the Thermopylae story. More entertaining than I thought it would be, but nowhere near the film it could have been. Gladiator Lite, as in very. And it ain't Spartacus. Greek mythology done MTV-style. The blood looked more like Jackson Pollock than Goya. No emotional content. Lotsa splashing.

"The semi-naked men, rather than any real plot, kept me amused. Did men in Sparta always parade around half naked? A bit of fiction here. I've also never seen such...Read More

"In 2007, the divide between critics and the moviegoing habits of mainstream American [audiences] seems further apart than ever," writes Variety's Ian Mohr. Which has led some to conclude (or "crow," as Mohr describes the tone of one Disney exec) that "critics are out of touch with their readership."

Just because people pay to see something doesn't mean they love it, or even like it. Many people will pay to see second-tier movies and sit there and seethe, or do the opposite and surrender. Some will sit for almost anything that raises an occa- sional smile or a chuckle. They'll watch something...Read More

My arguments with David Poland have gone on and on, but the idea he threw out this afternoon to save The Hollywood Reporter from a really tough competition with Variety down the road, a fight that might eventually prove harmful or even fatal, isn't half-bad and actually sounds sensible. Poland's idea is that VNU, parent of THR, would buy Movie City News in order to recreate the Hollywood Reporter.

The Reporter probably does have to do something radical and revitalizing in order "to become a “must read” again," says Poland. "And the only way to do that is to add young, smart...Read More

Not long after Elvis Presley died of a drug overdose in August 1977, the blunt- spoken John Lennon told a reporter that Presley "died in 1958, when he went into the Army." An honest response to the death of the print version of Premiere magazine, which was revealed today, would be along the same lines: Premiere -- the once-ballsy Hollywood magazine that was about nervy, sharp reporting and not upscale fan-mag aesthetics -- died in May 1996 when much of the upper-level staff quit over editorial interference.

"You could feel the life forces leaving at...Read More

Tens of thousands of L.A. Times "Calendar" readers were informed yesterday in the "Guide" section (page E20) that Mike Binder' s Reign Over Me will open on Friday, March 9th. Informed not just by the film's inclusion in the list of bullet graphs identifying the title, makers and synopses of the films opening five days from now, but also with a big, can't-miss-it photo of Reign costars Don Cheadle and Adam Sandler .

The unfortunate fact, however, is that Reign won't be opening until March 23rd. Sony had it down as a 3.9 release about...Read More

Hollywood Reporter columnist and Riskybiz blogger Anne Thompson is now officially a Variety person. Her new title is Deputy Editor of Variety.com, working with/under Variety.com editor Dana Harris. Her daily/hourly blog will now be called www.riskybusinessblog.com (to differentiate from the riskybizblog she has/had at the Reporter). Her weekly "Risky Business" column will continue in the Variety print edition (most likely debuting Sundays in the weekly edition) .

Nikki Finke reported this about an hour and a half ago. Variety delayed all morning on the official announcement and finally got it up at 1:51 pm. You have to move fast...Read More

Variety's Diane Garrett has answered a question I put forward on 2.17 about the prospects of a restored African Queen DVD. The answer is, don't hold your breath. The video rights are now held by Paramount Home Video (Fox Home Video having allowed its license to lapse) and the film is "awaiting restoration" -- i.e., no funding has been approved/finalized to pay for a restoration of this 1951 classic John Huston film -- "and has no set release date" -- i.e., no restoration in sight, no release plans.

Garrett also reveals that the Criterion...Read More

Zack Snyder's Battle of Thermopylae epic 300 is being read by certain brainy journo types as a modern-day political metaphor, according to this tongue-in-cheek Michael Cieply piece in the N.Y. Times.

I won't be catching it until tomorrow night's IMAX screening at The Bridge, but somehow a question reportedly asked of Snyder by a press-junket smarty-pants -- "Is George Bush Leonidas or Xerxes?" -- seems beside the point, given the heavily visual graphic-novel origins (i.e., shorthand for a primitive-mythical storyline geared to 15 year-olds) plus the repeated observation about the film's homoerotic, gay-porn tone...Read More

Responding to yesterday's remark that "the consistency in supporting and back-slapping low-brow entertainments straight out of the gate is what sets Americans proudly apart from other cultures....is there another big-time industrial western society as blue-collar oafish as ours?," hotshot Manhattan entertainment journalist Lewis Beale writes the following:

"I would submit that if you've ever been in a European resort when it has been descended upon by lager louts from Britain, Germany, Holland or wherever, you will know that the ratio of idiots in these Western industrial powers is as high as in the U.S. I once spent a couple of days in...Read More

Hollywood Elsewhere has a certain awareness/readership in London, so here's a shout-out for a WordTheatre event I'll be attending at Cafe de Paris (4 Coventry Street, London W1D 6BL) on Monday, 3.12.07.

WordTheatre is a literary salon with branches (communities?) in New York, Los Angeles and London,. It's about actors and writers performing short stories (or portions of larger works), and a classy, pro-level thing all the way. Monday's event will be the first of four in London this year. Proceeds for the first show will benefit The Parkinson's Appeal. Richard Schiff, Ian Hart...Read More

No question that Donovan's "Hurdy Gurdy Man" has been permanently reconfigured (or will be soon) in the public consciousness by its having been used in David Fincher's Zodiac, in much the same way that Gene Kelly's recording of "Singin' in the Rain" never had quite the same cheer after Stanley Kubrick used it as a kind of perverse theme song n A Clockwork Orange.

L.A. Times film critic Kenneth Turan has written an agreeable travel piece about a recent pilgrimage he made to Monument Valley, largely in tribute to his memories of seven John Ford films that were shot there -- Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, Sergeant Rutledge and Cheyenne Autumn.

And of course, Turan follows the herd by describing or discussing Monument Valley only in terms of the staggering beauty of the place and not once about the whopping absurdity of any 19th Century settlers living in Monument Valley...Read More

Daylight savings time begins a week from today, or Sunday, March 11th -- three weeks earlier than usual. Get ready to manually reset your Treos, Blackberrys and computers because many devices, apparently, haven't been programmed to synch with the new time change arrangement.

A 3.5.07 N.Y. Times story by Steve Lohr says that "the daylight-time shift, according to technology executives and analysts, amounts to a 'mini-Y2K.' That is a reference to the rush in the late 1990s to change old software, which was unable to recognize dates in the new millennium, 2000 and beyond.

"The fear was that computers would go...Read More

"I learned that if you don't want fleas, you don't lie down with dogs....but there are only so many distributors out there." The speaker is producer Aaron Ryder (The Amateurs ), the subject is producer Philippe Martinez, head of the troubled distribution company Bauer Martinez; and the forum is an L.A. Times piece by reporter John Horn.

Some of the same Martinez material was covered in a 10.26.06 Sharon Waxman piece in the N.Y. Times, particularly the fallout from his allegedly not living up to promises he'd made about promoting Harsh Times. Horn also discusses The Flock, a Bauer Martinez...Read More

To promote/salute Grindhouse (Weinstein Co., 4.6) in the Los Angeles area, Quentin Tarantino is programming the New Beverly Cinema with so-sleazy-they're-hip-in-retrospect exploitation films. A double-feature every two or three days, playing now through May 1st -- and just about every one a diposable wank except for Roger Vadim's Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), which shows 3.25 through 3.27. (Rock Hudson as a high-school teacher and lecherous poon-hound, plus one or two nude Angie Dickinson scenes....I'm there.)

When and if these films ever get released as a Tarantino-approved DVD box set, I wonder...Read More

World discourse will never lack for intellectual stimulation as long as there is strong diversity of opinion. It's a slightly different equation when you're dealing with documentarians living in states of profound denial, and spreading their disease to millions, like the flu. "Sad" is not a word that comes to mind -- "malicious" says it better.

Wild Hogs wailed at the box-office this weekend while Zodiac struggled. The consistency in supporting and back-slapping low- brow entertainments straight out of the gate (i.e., as long as they feel familiar and amiable-friendly) is what sets Americans proudly apart from other cultures. (Is there another big-time industrial western society as blue-collar oafish as ours?) A slovenly homophobic movie about four pot-bellied male menopausers on motorcycles handily kicks the ass one of the unquestionably great early films of '07...as it should be! Yeah!

It was obviously in the cards for Zodiac to come in second -- I was just hoping against hope...Read More

The long lowdown on Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner's running of United Artists, plus the Harry Sloan determinations that paved the way along with the views of others about the viabiliy of such a venture, according to N.Y. Times reporter Richard Siklos.

Apologies to all, but today was one of those vroom-vroom motorcycle Saturdays. I guess I figured after erranding and plotzing and then running around all morning and then hiking in the mid to late afternoon out in Malibu Canyon it's better to let things lie for a day....just one day...and then jump back in Sunday morning.

A brief David Fincher q & a with the Oregonian's Shawn Levy...and that's it.

A few Zodiac dissenters -- Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern, Salon's Stephanie Zacharek, Washington Post's Stephen Hunter, N.Y. Daily News' Jack Matthews, Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum, Austin Chronicle's Marjorie Baumgarten -- have weighed in, and the Metacritic score has resultantly plunged to 77% positive. This calls for some kind of congregational ceremony. How about David Poland's on Sunday for beer, hot dogs and potato salad?

Does this justifiably pissed-off letter from John Sinno, producer of the Oscar-nominated feature-length doc Iraq in Fragments, complaining about Jerry Seinfeld's having referred to the five nominated docs on last Sunday's Oscar telecast as "incredibly depressing," increase or decrease the possibility that Seinfeld might be hired to host next year's Oscars? Or does anyone care how ticked off Sinno and other doc makers might be? People laughed at Seinfeld's joke, after all.

They shouldn't have, and they damn well should care. Seinfeld not only dissed the docs and their makers -- he flat-out lied. The better-made docs...Read More

That Warner Bros.-funded movie about the political firestorm that happened when Bush White House higher-ups decided in '03 to get Ambassador Joseph Wilson by outing his wife Valerie Plame as a CIA agent....this could be a seriously gripping All The President's Men-type thriller. If the screenwriters -- Jez and John Butterworth -- and the producers -- Akiva Goldsman, Jerry and Janet Zucker -- decide to portray what really happened and not pussyfoot around.

That means they need to go with good colorful villainy (they obviously have to work Karl Rove in as the opportunistic maestro) and...Read More

A curious blend of wartime realism, undercover- spy suspense and almost exploitation-level sexuality, Black Book (Sony Pic- tures Classics, 4.4 in NY and LA) is Paul Verhoeven's strongest and most fully-felt film since Robocop ('87) and before that Soldier of Orange ('77). This World War II thriller -- a surprise -- is one of the three genuinely first- rate '07 films so far, along with Zodiac and The Lives of Others.

Sebastian Koch, Carice Van Houten in Paul Verhoeven's Black Book

Set in late 1944, it's basically a revenge piece -- a saucy Dutch lady named...Read More

A lot of heat has been coming down on sound-mixer Michael Minkle for dissing sound-mixer Kevin O'Connell who's been Oscar-nominated and lost 19 times, last Sunday night during an Oscar press conference. "I think Kevin should go away with 19 nominations," he said. "Kevin is an okay mixer, but he should take up another line of work."

A lot of industry people have voiced anger at Minkle for these words. Editor Walter Murch allegedly sent out an e-mail yesterday condemning Minkle for his words, and now Minke himself has sent out an e-mailed apology (which was sent to be by a...Read More

David Fincher has spoken with MTV.com's Kurt Loder about some future projects -- an Elliot Ness movie, a possible remake of a '70s Michael Sarrazin movie with one of the worst titles in history -- The Reincarnation of Peter Proud -- and a World War II film that Robert Towne is writing (which Towne forgot to tell me about yesterday when I asked him what's doing in terms of new projects)

Loder: "You obviously have an affinity for the serial-killer genre. I'd imagine you don't want to make a career of it, but you are considering making a film version of...Read More

This is a little bit bizarre. I'm almost shocked. 13,127 IMDB readers voted to nominate "the best contemporary American director who has never won a Best Director Oscar", and the two biggest vote-getters were a couple of signature-style "attitude" guys -- Quentin Tarantino, a dedicated lazybones and wallower in all things exploitation-y who peaked 13 years ago with Pulp Fiction, and Tim Burton, whose artistic focus from the late '80s to mid '90s (Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood) spoke for itself and obviously contrasts with the fact that he's been sliding downill since, the lowpoint so far being Charlie and the...Read More

"They didn't know what they had," a guy said last night at the Zodiac premiere. "Big studios almost never get it [i.e., the value of any film they're about to release]. Until it makes money. Then they're delighted."

A significant portion of the Zodiac team -- (l. to r.) producer Brad Fischer, costar Robert Downey, Jr., producer Mike Medavoy, costar Mark Ruffalo (r.) -- at last night's modestly-proportioned premiere on the Paramount lot.

He was speaking of the Paramount execs who decided not to release Zodiac in late December of last year, a move that eliminated any...Read More

"David Fincher's magnificently obsessive new film, Zodiac, tracks the story of the serial killer who left dead bodies up and down California in the 1960s and possibly the '70s, and that of the men who tried to stop him," says N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in today's edition. "Set when the Age of Aquarius disappeared into the black hole of the Manson family murders, the film is at once sprawling and tightly constructed, opaque and meticulously detailed. It's part police procedural, part monster movie -- a funereal entertainment that is an unexpected repudiation of Fincher's most famous movie, the serial-killer fiction Seven,...Read More

I had a Collateral moment about ten days ago that I forgot to mention. It's significant because (a) it's straight out of a key scene in Michael Mann's film and (b) it's never once happened in the 24 years I've lived in this town. I'm talking about a face-to-face with an unperturbed, zen-like coyote. Every animal I've ever been close to outside of a zoo has exuded some degree of caution or fear, but not this guy. He was in some kind of zone and couldn't have cared less.

It was around 10 pm. I'd just turned...Read More

Slate's Kim Masters is commenting that the Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu-Guillermo Arriaga feud is still happening because of a statement by joint statement by Babel collaborators (Inarritu among them) in Mexico's Chilanga magazine that attacks Arriaga, to wit: "It's a shame that in your unjustified obsession to claim sole responsibility for the film, you seem not to recognize that movies are an art of deep collaboration." But magazines sometimes take a while to come to press, and for all we know this letter may be several weeks old.

I'm saying this because roughly 30 days ago in Santa Barbara I observed what looked...Read More

Premiere's Stephen Saito on the the 20 Worst Post-Oscar Career Choices of all time. Cuba Gooding is absolutely "da man" in this regard, but Saito reminded me about Richard Attenborough, Roberto Benigni, Halle Berry, Adrien Brody, Michael Cimino, Faye Dunaway, Sally Field, Louise Fletcher, Brenda Fricker, Cuba Gooding Jr., Louis Gossett Jr., Helen Hunt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Sydney Pollack, Susan Sarandon, Mira Sorvino, Kevin Spacey, Hilary Swank, Marisa Tomei and Robin Williams.

Jeff Leeds' N.Y. Times piece is about James Cameron and Jimmy Iovine having "formed a venture that will produce concerts and films in 3-D," fine.

But the headline -- "A Comeback in 3-D, but Without Those Flimsy Glasses" -- is bit confusing since there's no mention of the 3-D process that Cameron and Iovine are working with being viewable without 3-D glasses. There's a sentence in the piece that says that the Cameron-Iovine glasses "now resemble standard sunglasses, and musicians may be able to make their own designs."

Oh, I get it -- the new glasses are no longer "flimsy"....Read More

I recognize the venality, but I couldn't help chuckling at a certain reader response to Gawker's report that Tom Cruise is "in contract for an apartment at the Dakota" for something close to 20 million bucks. Allusions/ parallels between Katie Homes and Mia Farrow's manipulated/imprisoned character in Rosemary's Baby aside, a guy wrote, "I'm going to start passing out copies of The Catcher in the Rye to all the local crazies."

Nine or ten years ago I raved about Marlon Brando's inspired air-bubble death scene in Edward Dmytryk's The Young Lions, which I happened to watch again last night on DVD. The scene is the second to last one, as I recall (I can't locate the original Mr. Showbiz posting), and I don't think anyone has died since with such remarkable delicacy and finesse.

Brando's Christian Diestl is in a German forest not far from an abandoned concentration camp, sick of war and soldiering and bashing his rifle against a tree in a mad rage. He then...Read More

In response to Bruce Willis being named as a former client of Hollywood madam Jody Gibson in a tell-all book hitting the stores today, Willis' pit-bull attorney Marty Singer has told Page Six that "it's a total fabrication...[Willis] doesn't know the woman, he's never met the woman. My client doesn't need to pay for sex, he doesn't pay for sex." Whoa there, sunshine...every man on the face of the planet pays for sex. Dinners, movies, pledges of support, career investments, gifts, lifestyle subsidies, spontaneous endearments, etc. As Otis Young's "Mule" says in The Last Detail, "Any pussy you get in this...Read More

The hope/talk/rumble is that Susanne Bier's next film, the English-language Things We Lost in the Fire, will play at the Cannes Film Festival two and half months from now. The Dreamamount release is just about done, I've been told, and Pete Hammond, who interviewed Bier last Monday night at a film class, has written that Benicio del Toro's performance in the upcoming film is allegedly "dynamite award-calibre." Pic also stars Halle Berry, David Duchovny and Alison Lohman.

The official Dreamamount press website synopsis reads as follows: "When Audrey Burke (Berry) loses her husband in an...Read More

If anyone's interested in a nice quick vomit (as, you know, an aesthetic exercise), all they have to do is click on this. Michelle Monaghan asking lifelong platonic pal Patrick Dempsey to be her "maid of honor", which he agrees to do only so he can attempt to stop the wedding and woo her before it's too late.....blecch! And to put a red bow on it, Paul Weiland, the guy who gave us City Slickers II, is going to direct. Amy Pascal strikes again! That's it for Monaghan also -- she was cool in '04 and '05 (Bourne Supremacy, Kiss Kiss Bang...Read More

"You took a perfectly good genre picture and turned it into a fucking art film!" -- referring to the landmark 1995 serial-killer flick Se7en and allegedly/famously yelled by a certain producer (Arnold Kopelson?) at director David Fincher, according to Philadelphia Weekly critic Sean Burns.

Burns is calling Zodiac "a brilliantly sustained aria of obsession and failure" and "an absurdly entertaining, two-and-a- half-hour, $75 million shriek of alpha- male OCD impotence."

I abhor dubbed films, but if Sony Classics wants to get the jump on the American version of The Lives of Others that Sydney Pollack, Anthony Minghella and Harvey Weinstein are planning to make, why don't they just hire English-speaking actors with German accents (including original Others cast members like Sebastian Koch, Ulrich Muhe and Martina Gedeck) to lip-synch an English-with-German-accents version that can be booked in the rube areas?

The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Kilday announced today that the first new project under the just-renewed pact between the Weinstein Company and Mirage Prods., the production company run by Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, will be -- yoicks! -- an English-language remake of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, which won the Best Foreign Language Oscar last Sunday.

Note: image stolen from nervepop's Bilge Ebiri

I wrote Pollack earlier this morning about this, mentioning that news about the Lives of Others remake is getting around (i.e., Bilge Ebiri wrote something also), and...Read More

L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas is calling David Fincher's Zodiac "a study in the passage of time and the accumulation of massive amounts of information -- a movie that seems to be unfolding inside of a cramped storage locker. And it is, though it may not sound like it, thrilling to behold." This ties into that complaint mentioned in a piece by Village Voice critic Nathan Lee, a friend of his groaning that "I felt like I was stuck in a filing cabinet for three hours" and Lee responding, "Exactly!"

Here we go with another "Al Gore may be too fat to be president" riff, this one written by Pop Machine's Mark Caro. And here's another Caro thing about dumping the short film Oscars.

An early February Nikki Finke Deadline Hollywood Daily story ran the following quotes: (a) "If Al Gore has slimmed down 25 or 30 pounds, Lord knows [what he might do]" and (b) "Gore's weight, which has ballooned since he left office, is widely seen as a barometer of his ambitions, and the Clinton, Obama and Edwards campaigns have been studying his girth closely."

This ties in...Read More

Oscar's biggest loser Kevin O'Connell, a sound-mixer who's been nominated 19 times and lost every time, was allegedly "dissed" by Oscar-winning Dreamgirls sound-mixer Michael Minkler last Sunday night, to wit: "I think Kevin should go away with 19 nominations, Kevin is an okay mixer, but he should take up another line of work."

Now The Envelope's Tom O'Neil is reporting that O'Connell's mom died Sunday night -- very sad, very sorry -- but it seems that Minkler was probably trying to be droll. Dry humor is an art form; ditto deadpan delivery. You have to get it just right. I'm...Read More