Do any Manhattan-based HE readers believe that the High Line Festival, a "ten-day mash-up of music, film, comedy, visual art and performance" that will unfold on the lower west side from May 9th through the 19th, is stealing some of the heat from the Tribeca Film Festival, which is happening now through May 6th? One's a movie festival, the other's mainly about music. Robert DeNiro is the big Tribeca honcho, and David Bowie is "curating" the High Line. If I were working Tribeca day and night for twelve days I'd probably feel a little festival-ed out by the time the...Read More

Good god, this original Star Wars trailer was really awful. It must have been cut by some old-school guys on the 20th Century Fox marketing team. It couldn't have been cut by Marcia Lucas or anyone on the feature-version crew...could it have?

Here's a slightly better one for The Empire Strikes Back that sounds (could it be?) like it was narrated by Harrison Ford.

What is it exactly about "The Bell Jar" and the grimly fatalistic Sylvia Plath saga (i.e., if not one and the same then at least closely related) that Julia Stiles and her mostly female producing partners (Celine Rattray, Daniela Taplin Lundberg and Galt Niederhoffer along with exec producers Christine Vachon and Jocelyn Hayes) feel has been untapped or insufficiently explored by Gwynneth Paltrow's Sylvia, which came out only four years ago and grossed $1,302,242 domestic?

Stiles is planning to star (and possibly direct or write?) a brand-new Plath drama in early '08, based on...Read More

"I think the last time I saw Star Wars was when this (digital) version came out 10 years ago," George Lucas said during a post-screening interview after the 1977 pop-adventure classic showed at the Academy theatre on Monday night. "It was fun to see it on the big screen. I never get to do that." This according to a Wired report by...uhm, there's no byline.

Star Wars creator George Lucas

"The filmmaking process is naturally very sloppy," Lucas commented. "People assume that making a movie is very precise, that you lay it all out. It doesn't...Read More

Sam Raimi's two political donations to George Bush in '04 only amounted to $900, according to Newsmeat.com. The Spider-Man helmer gave $300 to the Bush campaign on 1.14.04, and then another $600 on 7.8.04. Raimi also gave $450 to Senator Arlen Specter, apparently to support his campaign for the '96 Republican Presidential nomination.

And yet Raimi isn't a total Republican -- he also gave $1000 to Barbara Boxer's U.S. Senate campaign in '02. He also donated $1200 to the Political Action Committee of the Directors Guild of America in '05.

I like conservatives personally -- they talk in a plainer,...Read More

The Cannes Film Festival's Directors' Fortnight slate is supposed to be announced on May 3rd, but Variety's Alison James is reporting now that the sidebar's opening-night pic will be Anton Corbin's Control, a biopic about the late Ian Curtis, the Joy Division singer who hanged himself at age 23. Bono, members of New Order and Depeche Mode will attend (and may perform at) the opening- night party on Friday, 5.17, following a gala screening of the black-and-white film.

Curtis and child on May 13,. 1980 -- five days before he hung himself in his bedroom.

Robinson Devor's Zoo (ThinkFilm, 4.25) deserves a certain respect, although many viewers will find themselves contending with suppressed laughter and/or disgust. Even its detractors will admit it's a curiously haunting, beautifully photographed thing. (And exquisitely cut and scored.) I acknowledged this in a piece that I ran on 4.3.07 . I also said "there's something profoundly troubling about a talented filmmaker giving his earnest and thoughtful attention to a ridiculously perverse (the term I'm most comfortable with is 'diseased') sexual practice."

One of the funniest passages I've read about this film is contained in Manohla Dargis's 4.25 N.Y. Times review, to...Read More

Studios owned by super-sized corporations haven't been in the business of making real movies in a dog's age. Not with any consistency, for sure. We are living in an era of mass devolution, and pitiless world-market realities demand that studios create and sell the hell out of renewable brands and franchises that the least educated, least sophisticated people in the world can groove to with having to think twice.

And yet somehow and in various hard-to-figure ways, studios like Warner Bros,, Universal, Dreamamount, Disney, New Line and 20th Century Fox along with their indie-mentality "dependent" production-distribution...Read More

The Tribeca Film Festival acquired an unsavory rep when IndieWire broke that story about ticket prices being raised by 50%. That was three and a half weeks ago. Today, finally, the money issue was addressed by festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein. And the explanation is basically that she and her partners have been saddled with rising costs and have personally been losing money on the festival, and they had to alleviate this.

Rosenthal says the festival loses about $1 million annually, and that she, her co-founder...Read More

I should have mentioned this yesterday, but George Clooney's intention to make a dark and dry political comedy out of Rachel Boynton's Our Brand Is Crisis is a very good one. The people who loved Wild Hogs will stay away in droves, but if it's done right Clooney's adaptation could be a great metaphor piece about Americans trying to export its own culture and values -- i.e., American political values by way of spin, focus groups, compassionate lying and image-massaging -- into other cultures and making things much worse in the process.

Admitting that he "ain't a pretty boy no more," Roger Ebert has announced that he and wife Chaz will appear at the Ninth Annual Overlooked Film Festival (opening tomorow nnight) at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Ebert hasn't been able to speak for several months due to a tracheostomy (he's hoping that "another surgery" will remedy this), so he'll be confining himself to facial and hand gestures, "eye rolling," written notes and whatnot.

"I have received a lot of advice that I should not attend the festival," Ebert has written in today's Chicago Sun...Read More

It's an old tune about how the Harry Potter movies have stopped mattering. The zeitgeist-connectivity factor peaked three years ago with Alfonso Cuaron's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Tens of millions have been programmed to pay to see them, of course (picture those school kids marching into that gothic Orwellian factory in Alan Parker's Pink Floyd: The Wall), and you can bet this will happen when David Yates' Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Warner Bros., 7.13) arrives.

The trailer looks exciting in the same old flash-cut, ooh-wow way that...Read More

I'm running this old photo partly because Jack Nicholson turned 70 yesterday, and partly because those hundreds of little speckles on this photo (it's a scan of a print) have nearly ruined it, and it's breaking my heart. Nicholson was my first big-name interview and the print used to be smooth and shiny and all silvery, and now look at it. Anyway...

25 years ago and very cold outside, as the backdrop suggests.

Here's a bigger 5000 pixel version. I also have a couple of different scans on my desktop. I tried cleaning this scanned photo...Read More

The official poster for the 60th Cannes Film Festival is up. Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Wong Kar Wai, Penelope Cruz, Pedro Almodovar....who is that, Ken Loach in the middle? I almost recognize the other three. If this image is too small, a bigger version is at the Cannes Film Festival website.

As they finish post-production chores on No Country for Old Men, which will play at Cannes next month, Joel and Ethan Coen are making it known that their next two films will come out of a new deal with Focus Features and Working Title. The first, which will begin shooting this summer, is called Burn After Reading, and will costar George Clooney, Brad Pitt (as a gym trainer) and Frances McDormand. This will be followed by A Serious Man, which was reported by Variety's Dade Hayes as being "a dark comedy in the vein of Fargo." If anyone has either script, please get...Read More

I was so caught up in the drama of Carina Chocano a few hours ago (which turned out to be not so dramatic) that I missed the late-morning news about the death of Boris Yeltsin. He was the first Russian leader I genuinely admired (or half-admired), and I think he's also the last one to qualify in that regard.

Yeltsin was a brave, erratic man, a fighter, a moody reformist, a drinker (which led to health problems), charismatic and bear-like...the guy whose best moment came when he stood up on that tank in August 1991...Read More

There was an item saying that L.A. Times film critic Carina Chocano had allegedly been "taken off duty" by her editors and given a weekly opinion- analysis column in the Sunday edition. I called six or seven people and heard nothing, then someone finally called to explain. The deal is that Chocano hasn't been kicked off the beat as much as subjected to a kind of editorial experiment. Plus she got married recently (i.e., out of the country) and has been honeymooning. Plus, I'm told, she's going to be reviewing again starting Friday.

The Read More

If you care about westerns or urban action movies, you care about the sound of gunfire. I love it when a filmmaker takes the time and effort to make the old blam-blam sound exactly right, or in some better-than-real-life way (like Michael Mann did with Tom Cruise's pistol shots in Collateral). And it always turns me off when gunfire sounds wrong. This hardly happens any more, but I was reminded last weekend as I watched John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven what really bad gunfire sounds like.

Then I remembered that I wrote about this very topic close...Read More

The fanboy factor has resulted in a buy-out of tickets to tonight's 30th Anniversary screening of Star Wars at the Motion Picture Academy. But "due to attrition, no-shows and cancellations," a certain quantity of seats should be available to pikers in the stand-by line. People like myself, I mean.

I'd like to attend because producer George Lucas will be doing a q & a after the screening along with other members of the team, but I'm not sure if my withered sense of dignity will allow me to wait in line for 90 minutes or more to see a 30 year-old...Read More

Despite an angry studio publicist's denial, Radar's Kim Masters is reporting in a just-up Radar piece that Spider-Man 3 (Columbia, 5.4) has surpassed 1963's Cleopatra as the most expensive movie ever made. With the enthusiastic go-go support of Sony chairperson Amy Pascal, Sam Raimi's third and presumably final Spider-flick cost $350 million, she writes, compared to Cleopatra's inflation-adjusted budget of $290 million.

Add a guesstimated $150 million in marketing costs and Spider-Man 3's final tally will be $500 million, according to Masters' calculations.

Spider-Man 3 is pretty much ding-proof -- the fanboys are going to break...Read More

Was there any film that was truly, madly and absolutely Fred Zinneman's? He did High Noon proud, but that 1952 western wasn't Zinneman's as much as it was screenwriter-producer Carl Foreman's. From Here to Eternity was well assembled by Zinneman, but it's hard to see him as the auteur with Montgomery Clift, Burt Lancaster, screenwriter Daniel Taradash, Frank Sinatra and Deborah Kerr being so perfectly on their game. Likewise, A Man for All Seasons seemed more particularly empowered by the brilliance of screenwriter Robert Bolt and actors Paul Scofield, Roy Kinnear, John Hurt and Robert Shaw than by Zinneman's solid, somewhat...Read More

French actor Jean-Pierre Cassel died three days ago -- Thursday, 4.19 -- in Paris after a long illness. A statement was issued Friday, the Hollywood Reporter posted Rebecca Leffler's story a day after that, and some of us didn't get around to reading the story until Sunday. The 74 year-old was Vincent Cassel's dad. The elder Cassel's final film, Julian Schnabel's The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, will show at the Cannes Film Festival next month.

"From the moment he steps onstage, with his hunched walk and lumbering step, Frank Langella has avoided the obvious route of Rich Little-style impersonation of one of the most impersonated figures in history. What he delivers instead is an interpretation that, without imitation, still captures and exaggerates Richard Nixon's essential public traits: the buttered-gravel voice, the scowling smile, the joviality that seemed to contain an implicit threat.

"The friend with whom I saw the play asked me afterward if I had noticed how much better Langella's Nixon impersonation became as the show progressed. Langella's performance had not...Read More

L.A. Observed is reporting (and I heard this independently today on my own) that about 70 L.A. Times newsroom jobs are being chopped, which will reduce the editorial staff "from 920 to around 850." Okay, that's rough and I'm sorry for those about to be put out to pasture, but if the the paper version of the Los Angeles Times were to disappear tomorrow, a part of me would truly rejoice. I've never loathed a newspaper in my life like I hate the Los Angeles Times with those wads and wads of ad supplements falling out all over the place when I...Read More

Danny Boyle's Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 9.14), a sci-fier about a team of astronauts on a celestial mission to re-ignite a dying sun, won't open stateside until after Labor Day, but it opened across Europe earlier this month. Some British and European critics have been groaning about the ending, but so far it's got an above-average 88 % Rotten Tomatoes rating, so it doesn't sound too problematic. It sounds excellent, in fact, if you leave out the equation of the finale.

I've asked the Fox Searchlight folks about seeing Sunshine here in Los Angeles...Read More

John Carney's Once, the most unassuming and wholesomely affecting love story in years that turned into the Big Find at Sundance '07, opens on May 18th -- a little less than four weeks off. Fox Searchlight, which acquired it last February, has launched its own Once website. (The Irish version has a little more pizazz.) Here, in any event, is a fairly decent trailer that catches the mood and tone of the feature.

Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova in John Carney's Once

This little Dublin-shot film is about a couple of gifted but struggling musicians --...Read More

It's a little raggedy and amateurish -- it could obviously be a lot smoother and slicker -- but the Black 20 folks who made this Spider-Man 3 product-placement trailer were coming from a good place.

If you care about the Vin Diesel vs. Mathieu Kassovitz clash on the Prague set of Babylon A.D., here's a rundown courtesy of "Page Six." Diesel is starring as "a war vet-turned-mercenary escorting a woman from Russia to Canada," blah, blah...and then "things get dangerous when it turns out the woman is carrying an organism that a bizarre cult wants to harvest to produce a genetically modified Messiah," blah, blah. It co-stars Michelle Yeoh, Gerard Depardieu and Charlotte Rampling. Kassovitz, 39, has directed eight films prior to this one (including '03's Gothika) and is a fairly well-known actor(Munich, Amelie, Amen, Birthday Girl). The...Read More

Brando, the two-part, four-hour Turner Classic Movies documentary that will air on May 1st and 2nd, is a relatively candid, nicely sculpted, entirely respectable portrait of the single most influential actor of the 20th Century, and probably also the greatest.

I was concerned that producer Leslie Greif and writer Mimi Freedman might make it too much of a valentine to the eminent Marlon Brando, and perhaps gloss over the tragedy of his life, but they consider and in some ways explore most of the substantive issues (i.e., the truth as most of his friends understood...Read More

Collider.com's Steve Weintraub (a.k.a. "Frosty") spoke to producer Avi Arad at the recent Spider-Man 3 junket about the apparently locked-in decision to have a grey-colored Hulk in the new Edward Norton movie. "While someone else may have posted the story earlier than me," Weintraub writes, "I'm the one who asked the questions that got [Arad] to talk. You can listen to the audio and hear me asking the questions for the proof."

Jon Kasdan's In The Land of Women (Warner Bros., 4.20) has only managed a lousy 48% Rotten Tomatoes rating, but it's picked some classy "cream of the crop" allies, including L.A. Times critic Kenneth Turan, the Philadelpha Inquirer's Carrie Rickey, the Toronto Star's Susan Walker, the San Francisco Chroncile's Mick LaSalle and Newsweek's David Ansen.

That said, many of the positive comments come from an attitude that say, in a nutshell, "Jon Kasdan is young and therefore his first-time-director mistakes are forgivable, on top of which it's a little easier...Read More

It's being claimed that "the most powerful indictment of the news media for falling down in its duties in the run-up to the war in Iraq" is contained in a 90-minute PBS broadcast called "Buying the War," which marks the return of Bill Moyers Journal this coming Wednesday (4.25). Editor & Publisher was sent a preview DVD and a draft transcript for the program this week.

"While much of the evidence of the media's role as cheerleaders for the war presented here is not new," an E & P analysis reads, "it is skillfully assembled, with many fresh quotes...Read More

Hollywood Wiretap's Tom Tapp has posted Harvey Weinstein's reply to Patrick Goldstein's "what happened to the old Harvey?" piece that ran a few days ago in the L.A. Times. Weinstein's answer is published in today's Calendar section but not online (and barely visible in the paper) so Tapp has reproduced it for everyone's reading pleasure:

"Goldstein says he misses 'the Harvey Weinstein (he) used to know,'" Weinstein begins, "claiming that 'the Oscar impresario who...was truly, madly, deeply in love with movies' has been replaced by a 'slimmed-down mogul...who has lost his way.'

"I never fell out of love with movies,"...Read More

Defend your own fort and make your own judgments, but Todd McCarthy's review of Spider-Man 3 -- "the three main characters and the film itself stuck in a rut...a dip in quality and enjoyment [from Part 2]" -- strikes me as a bit more straight-from-the-shoulder than Michael Rechtstaffen's review in the Hollywood Reporter.

Am I saying this because McCarthy is saying what I've been suspecting would be the case all along? Yes. It's no secret that I'm predisposed to trash Spider-Man 3. (And I don't like living in this place at all, let me...Read More

Spider-Man 3 may have more to deliver than the usual fan-wanking, simple-dick plotting and intravenous CG opium, to judge by this rave Michael Rechtshaffen review in the Hollywood Reporter. But I've had issues with Rechtstaffen before and I really don't trust him much. Nobody should. He's a "trade reviewer" who accepts the notion that he's supposed to keep things fair and polite and balanced, which means that a lot of his reactions, in my view, tend to be a little too gracious.

Keep in mind that Rechtshaffen gave a friendly pass to The Last Mimzy -- that should tell you...Read More

The Cannes Film Festival is "a long way to go to see Sicko a few weeks early. And it's a rather expensive trip to see next year's Robert Koehler Collection three months before the highlights all land in Toronto." -- from David Poland's 4.20 Hot Blog...funny. But does this mean Poland has figured out a way to see No Country For Old Men and My Blueberry Nights in Los Angeles sometime next month?

"The auteur theory, I've finally decided, can kiss my ass," says Guardian columnist John Patterson. "I'm done with it. It bores me. I flee in great haste from the mere mention of its name. It's a cult of personality. It's a marketing scheme. It's become a misleading umbrella-term falsely uniting a diverse body of collectively created work under a single name.

"And it just encourages the tacky, egomaniacal film-school cult of the writer-director as lone presiding genius. More and more I tend to find myself believing in what the writer Thomas Schatz called 'the genius...Read More

I'm not getting a significantly"different" vibe from this Bourne Ultimatum teaser, but it's still the only summer three-quel I'm even half interested in seeing. I take that back -- I'm fully interested because Matt Damon is a wee bit cooler than Daniel Craig, Bourne movies are the action-thriller gold standard these days, and because the gifted Paul Greengrass is once again directing.

"The only thing the Cannes Film Festival lineup is missing [this year] is a film by Larry Clark. Or, failing that, one by Vincent Gallo." -- a recent e-mailed comment by a Hollywood publicist who's none too charmed by this year's roster.

"George was very quiet, and verbally inarticulate. It was only in his written work that he spewed these relentless scenes of gore and torture. His job was in the University Bookstore, and when I inquired about him once, I was told he was a good worker, but 'quiet.' I thought, 'Whoa, if some kid is ever gonna blow, it'll be this one.' He never did. But that was in the days before a gun-totin' serial killer could get top billing on the Nightly News and possibly the covers of national magazines." -- Stephen King on the Cho Seung-Hui syndrome, in a new edition...Read More

If there's anyone in L.A. who knows know to operate any Windows-friendly video-editing software that's made for dummies and isn't too costly (like Ulead Movie Studio 10, which I have a copy of), and (b) wants to earn a little tutoring money, please drop a line. I need to start posting some short video reports on Hollywood Elsewhere by the time of the Cannes Film Festival (if not before), and while I'm sure I could figure it out on my own eventually, I need to learn fast. My laptop, camera, software...will travel.

This four-day-old Lewis Beale/Reeler piece about the do's and don'ts of remakes ("Re-made in the USA") is sensible and well-written, but the ultimate pearl of wisdom was delivered years ago by the great John Huston: "Don't remake good movies -- remake bad ones!" Or, to follow the train, "Don't adapt brilliant books that are praised by Michiko Kakutani -- adapt pulp and give it a bit of soul and embroidery."

"Hollywood's marketers have become tremendously efficient at getting their core audience to see their big movies. They don't need critics for that. But critics have a larger utility: to put films in context, to offer an informed perspective, to educate, outrage, entertain. We're just trying to do what every other writer is doing: making sense of one part of your world. So, dear reader: If our opinions on a movie don't coincide, I don't care, and neither should you. I'm not telling you what to think. I'm just asking that you do think." -- Richard Corliss responding to Peter Bart's 3.15 Variety...Read More

Those Nervepop guys -- Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce, Faisal Qureshi -- yesterday posted a two-parter about the Most Historically Inaccurate Films Ever Made, and one of the most deserving, they feel, is Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning. They're not wrong, and yet no one ever gave a damn. For a very fundamental reason.

Basing their film on the FBI's hunt for the killers of three Civil Rights workers (Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman) in 1964 Mississippi, Parker and Gerolmo "twisted the historical record in the service of what Pauline Kael called...Read More

Variety's Allison James reported some inside dope this morning about why Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream wasn't included in the Cannes Film Festival lineup: "The new British crimer, starring Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell, was offered the closing night slot," she wrote, "but discussions came to an end when Allen balked at that idea."

Allen got pissy, in all likelihood, because being offered the closing-night slot is generally regarded as a friendly backhanded compliment. Draw your own conclusions about how Cassandra's Dream stacks up in the eyes of the festival programmers compared to Allen's Match Point,...Read More

Fracture is tracking at 58, 31 and 9....figure $10 to 12 million this weekend. Hot Fuzz is at 28, 35 and 7, but that's a limited release (a few hundred screens) and I'm told it should do pretty well by that standard. In The Land of Women has been clocked at 43, 21 and 6. Vacancy is at 61, 28 and 6. Spider-Man 3 is way, way up there -- 97, 67 and 35 with two weeks to go. It could earn over $100 million. The Spider-Man films are very popular and that's fine, but how many millions will be paying to see...Read More

This Terrence Rafferty piece about Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye appeared in last Sunday's N.Y. Times, but the film won't be playing at Manhattan's Film Forum until tomorrow so it's still okay to discuss it. This casually-paced detective film, released in 1974, re-imagines Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe as an old-fashioned man of honor with a zen slacker attitude. The intrepid but low-key Elliot Gould got under the skin of this loose-shoe'd shamus and gave the second-best performance of his life (after "Trapper John" in Altman's M.A.S.H.).

The Long Goodbye's most noteworthy signature, I've always...Read More

Okay, so Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung-Hui was imitating the hammer bit in Old Boy in that video he sent to NBC. Big deal. Isn't it fairly common for psychopaths to wax positive about iconic entertainers or movies that they feel represent them on some level? Didn't John Dillinger allegedly admire this or that Hollywood gangster flick (i.e., James Cagney in Public Enemy)? Didn't Joseph Goebbels, the top-dog Hitler propagandist, once talk about his admiration of Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent for what he saw as expert pro-western propaganda?

(l.) Cho Seung-Hui; (r.) Choi Min-sik in...

TMZ has a transcript and an audio file of Alec Baldwin ripping into his 11-year-old daughter, Ireland (he calls her a "thoughtless little pig" at one point) and trashing her mother Kim Basinger. The tape has either cost Baldwin his visitation rights or threatens to, but either way there are anger-management techniques that work, and there's always standard psychotherapy.

It's conceivable, of course, that Baldwin's tirade may have been about daughter acting spoiled and dealing with him like a egoistic tweener prima donna...maybe. She wouldn't be the only child of a celebrity to turn...Read More

Millions of people out there are probably counting the days before Spider-Man 3 opens and planning on jumping into the bath tub with all their friends and having a great old time no matter how good it is, and that's fine. But some of them are saying I'm incapable of enjoying a summer popcorn movie because I don't get them, and that I've therefore decided that Spider-Man 3 is going to suck no matter what, and this is is why I misread that Leo Lewis review that came out of the Tokyo junket.

First, I love a good summer popcorn movie...Read More

Forget any dreams about Todd Haynes' I'm Not There and maybe even Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood turning up as part of the Cannes Film Festival's "Director's Fortnight" section. A fairly connected source has called and said "it's been clear for a while that there was no way in hell the Haynes' film was going to be ready in time....it's very [tapestry-like] and had to come down in length, but the nature of it with all these people playing [Bob] Dylan makes it difficult to trim down in the right way. I mean, they can't just go in and whack...Read More

For perversity's sake or simply to alleviate boredom, I'm going to briefly riff on Judd Apatow's Knocked Up (Universal, 6.1) by sampling and counter-punching Joe Leydon's South by Southwest Variety review, which was (I want to describe it carefully) Niagara Falls orgasmic.

Katherine Heigll, Seth Rogen in Judd Apatow's Knocked Up

I agree with many of Leydon's reactions. Knocked Up is Apatow's best film so far, it's graced with Seth Rogen's star-is-born performance, and the fact that it's a caring, human-scale look at growing up and coping with responsibility means it'll probably connect with...Read More

The good Cannes Film Festival announcement news is that many of the predictions came true and a lot of high-profile titles and big-name directors will be in attendance at the 60th anniversary gathering next month. I've got an initial count of at least 23 must-sees, including (thank the movie gods) Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country For Old Men, Michael Moore's Sicko, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights, Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart and Abel Ferrara's Go-Go Tales.

a still from Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park -- the name of the young...

That item I ran last Monday about Mann's National theatre closing its doors this weekend is true, says a Variety story that went up this evening. The Mann exhibition execs who should have announced or at least confirmed the closing of this historic Westwood landmark chose not to because...I don't know, you tell me. Because they're assholes? Because they couldn't deal with their feelings of grief?

A fairly brilliant, dryly funny piece by the New York Observer's Hilary Frey about what happened to three particular actresses -- Parker Posey, Claire Danes, Chloe Sevigny -- who were "It" girls in the mid '90s before the zeitgiest turned to others and the sun went down and they got older, etc. Congratulate Them!," the blue boldfaced copy says. "They've Had It With Clubs 'n' Columns. Once-Flickering Starlets Aren't Has-Beens -- They're Grown-Ups!"

I'm sorry but the Worth 1000 movie poster pictured below is funny and deeply sick -- it reminds me of an old joke that went around a few weeks after New York deejay Murray the K. died in 1982 -- it began with "What do they call Murray the K. in heaven?" and the reply was, "The second Beatle"; this is funny also; ditto.

Spider-Man 3 (Columbia, 5.4) blows, according to Times Online critic Leo Lewis, delivering a three-stars-out-of-five review. Having caught the film at the Tokyo premiere, Lewis calls it "a daft, highly polished couple of hours of fantasy fun," but that's just a lot of blah-blah on his part. Read the damn review -- Lewis has a sense of humor but he basically says it sucks stinking hairy dog balls.

"The central theme of the film is that even superheroes can have a dark side," he writes. Whoa....mind-blower.

"There is not enough of the super-villains and...Read More

Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke is saying "there's no truth to the internet rumor that Imagine's Ron Howard has a deal, or is close to a deal" with Warren Beatty to play Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, Howard's forthcoming film about interviewer David Frost and the U.S. president who used to sweat profusely on his upper lip.

Finke is referring to my report that went up yesterday, which was based on speaking to a certain party in the loop. The way I phrased it was that the Beatty deal isn't "signed, sealed and delivered" but that it's "nearly complete." (I also...Read More

I could live with not seeing Uwe Bolle's Postal, but I like the insensitive, no-excuses rudeness of the trailer (as posted on Anne Thompson's Variety blog). There's no U.S. distributor, but when and if somebody picks it up they shouldn't wimp out and change the title because of the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

It grieves me to live in a country in which people are most likely going to continue to occasionally flip out and spray their workplaces and classrooms with automatic rifle fire whenever the pressure gets too great. I can't believe i just wrote that, but ours is...Read More

What happened to Rachel McAdams? She was standing at the top of the Hollywood plateau in '05 after her breakout performances in The Wedding Crashers, Red Eye and The Family Stone. Everyone wanted to work with her. She had "it" and everyone knew it. Then she seemed to hit the brakes and say "uhhn, wait a minute." And she's been in an idling mode ever since.

What happened is that she hooked up with former Notebook costar Ryan Gosling (whom she's been with for about two years) and decided to be...what's the term? ...extremely discerning in terms...Read More

If Joel Schumacher is directing, you know it'll be "a Joel Schumacher film," especially with the word "saints" in the title. Somebody needs to sit down and do a definitive study, but I always go "uh-oh" when I see that word in a title of a movie or a book or anything.

I notice that the El Capitan's special Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End advance-ticket-purchase and general here-it-comes! promotion doesn't mention any squishy-pillow rentals or shiatsu ass massages in the lobby for people who may have trouble coping with the nearly three-hour length. If I had kids who were six or seven I would be horrified at the idea of taking them to this thing. It would be agony.

"I told him he was crazy. I said, 'You have a fantastic script. I think you're insane, George.' You can say things like that to George and he doesn't even blink. He's one of the most stubborn men I know." Hats off to Frank Darabont for saying this to George Lucas after the legendary Star Wars creator threw out Darabont's Indiana Jones 4 script. (Cheers also to Darabont for telling MTV.com that he said this.)

"As I travel around, I have never seen a president and a vice president more disliked in more places than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The Bush-Cheney team, by its own hand, has undermined its ability to talk about American principles in a way that foreigners will take seriously. They have moral clarity and no moral authority. Foreigners just have to say 'Abu Ghraib' or 'Guantánamo' and that ends the discussion. It also lets the foreigners off the hook.

"I think Barack Obama has the potential to force a new discussion. For now at least, he has a certain moral authority because...Read More

I'm working on a Knocked Up response piece as I speak, but it needs to be acknowledged that Seth Rogen is a star. He's witty and affable with a cool-sounding gravelly voice, he's a brilliant writer, and he projects an agreeable bullshit-free, smart-stoner persona that goes over gangbusters with men and fairly well with women because they find him puppy-dog cute. He's pretty much the new John Belushi -- just as wily and overfed, but a little more easy-going and a little less manic and over-the-top. But definitely a guy's guy and funny as hell.

I'm...Read More

My Blackberry e-mail and web access wasn't working last night after I came out of a screening of Judd Apatow's Knocked Up, and now I know why.

Variety's Allison James has finally run a Cannes 2007 advance-buzz piece, and her big lead-graph prediction is that Wong Kar Wai's My Blueberry Nights will play the opening-night slot. That's it? Everyone's been saying that, and the Cineuropa guys predicted that one over two weeks ago.

If Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men doesn't play at next month's Cannes Film Festival, and thus deny Coen-heads the first peek at Javier Bardem's performance as Chigurh, the ogre-ish hit man, a lot of people will be bitterly disappointed.

The official Cannes festival...Read More

It's not signed, sealed and delivered, but I'm hearing that a deal for Warren Beatty to portray Richard Nixon in Ron Howard's Frost/Nixon is nearly compete, and they he'll costar with Michael Sheen (The Queen) as Frost. A guy with some perspective on Beatty's dealings says "naaah, that's not gonna happen" so maybe not. And yet people close to the situation are saying it's pretty much Beatty so let's see how it pans out.

Richard Nixon (l.); Warren Beatty as Bulworth (r.)

I'm told by another source that Howard offered the Nixon role to...Read More

Criterion's Ace in the Hole DVD is supposed to come out in July. For some reason Criterion's website doesn't reveal the precise date, and the isn't listed on Amazon.

A tape of President George Bush thanking the National Rifle Association "for your work to make America safer" was shown to over 3000 NRA members at a gathering in St. Louis last Saturday night, or roughly 40 hours before Monday's Virginia Tech shooting tragedy. The playing of the Bush tape is reported in this 4.15.07 St. Lous Post-Dispatch story by Aisha Sultan. John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, was the guest speaker at the NRA convention, which was held at St. Louis's Edward Jones Dome.

Nikki Finke is reporting that Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Disney, 5.25) (a) hasn't yet wrapped its CGI work, (b) has so far cost more than $300 million, and (c) it "is said to be at least as long as Pirates 2...and [is] probably longer "because director Gore Verbinski had to tie up all the stories and wanted to use as much footage as he could," an insider told Finke.

That's just one "insider," of course, and very possibly one with an axe to grind against Verbinski, but has there ever been a...Read More

That Cinema Blend rumor about Tom Hanks agreeing to play Professor Robert Langdon again in Angels & Demons is correct; ditto that Hanks is getting paid a whopping salary. But filming on Angels & Demons won't be starting in July, as the Blend story suggested, because Ron Howard's film version of Frost/Nixon, based on the acclaimed play by Peter Morgan, will absolutely begin shooting in August (i.e., four months hence) and be in theatres by the early fall of '08.

This is rock-solid fact. No maybe-ass cocktail chatter. Take it to the bank.

Angels and...Read More

A witness to the mayhem at Virginia Tech yesterday was hiding with others in a room behind some kind of locked or barricaded door, according to one news story I read, and he said that the gunman tried to push his way in and couldn't, and (according to one news report) that he then tried to shoot his way in -- two or three rounds were fired at the door handle or lock mechanism -- but couldn't.

That, I said to myself, is something that screenwriters of Hollywood action thrillers and horror films have never...Read More

Grooming for television is more intensive and exacting than just combing your hair in front of a bathroom mirror, but it shouldn't take this long under any circumstance. Not an especially flattering moment for Presidential contender John Edwards. 15,272 people have watched this on YouTube.

I've never seen this column as strictly movies- and-nothing-but. Each and every wind and current in American culture routinely blows into the entertainment industry and back out again -- it's what makes it extraordinary turf. Movies are the basic concern, of course, but yesterday's Virginia Tech massacre felt like a major tremor, and I probably should have responded in some small way, as some readers wrote yesterday.

The gist of some postings was how could I be angry about the alleged 170-minute length of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End with such a terrible real-life...Read More

I convulsed after reading a listing on Film Jerk that says Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Disney, 5.25) is going to run 170 minutes. I called four or five Disney distribution people to check and they all did the shilly-shally, so let's presume until we hear otherwise that Film Jerk has it right.

I've been hearing all along that POTC: ATW was going to be just shy of three hours, but I didn't want to believe it and I still don't. If the 170-minute report turns out to be true, I think it's fair to start trashing this puppy...Read More

This is a little bit better than those grotesque teddy bear T-shirts, but it's still not uptown enough for my tastes. Imagine being the manufacturer and after kicking ideas around for two or three days deciding that "I Love Nappy Headed Hos" is the best slogan you've heard. Imagine what kind of person you'd have to be to come to that conclusion. There's also that Fruit of the Loom label. I'm not going to get into this because guys like Joe Leydon will get offended, but you know what I mean.

Westwood's Mann National, a big single-screen house that once played the exclusive runs of The Godfather and The Exorcist, will close at the end of this week. This theatre has been dying for years. We live in a megaplex stadium-seating world, and sagging-at-the-heels behemoths like the National -- a once-grand showplace that still has pretty good and projection quality -- are all going to be toast sooner or later.

Mann's National has a date with the wrecking ball

I mentioned the National's closing to a twentysomething L.A. woman, and she told me she'd never been there. The...Read More

I'm sorry, but there's no rebooting The Hulk. The cord has been cut; the faith broken; the legend poisoned. It was killed by Hulk and its well-meaning but ill-suited director, Ang Lee. Anyone who tries to bring this concept back to life will know that it is now and forever accursed. Director Louis Leterrier thinks that by casting Ed Norton as Bruce Banner/The Hulk for a new go at the legend -- an untitled Hulk flick that Universal will open in the summer of '08 -- that things will be different. Hah! The Movie Gods determine these things for reasons we can't...Read More

As biopics about self-destructive artists go, Oliver Dahan's La Vie en Rose -- the sad story of French songbird Edith Piaf -- is above-average. It screams "passion" from every pore, and delivers in the way a movie like this should -- superb period atmosphere (World War I to early 1960s), handsome production values, fine ensemble acting, skillful editing and, for a film about a very intense and event-filled life, appropriately longish (140 minutes). But it is essential viewing for one reason and one reason only -- Marion Cotillard's bracingly vivid, wholly convincing, almost mind-blowingly hardcore performance as Piaf.

...

Variety critic John Anderson feels that the "substantive issue" to be taken with Vacancy, the Luke Wilson-Kate Beckinsdale homicidal- menace film from director Nimrod Antal (Kontroll), "is its reliance on inexplicable cruelty and viciousness.

"Seldom has criminal violence been so unabashedly used for entertainment, in a story in which the criminals are perpetrating violence to be sold as entertainment. It's doubtful the filmmakers were intending to deliver an oblique moral argument against their own movie, but they did so all the same."

That aside, Antal "proves himself an able director who has made a highly cinematic movie," Anderson adds. "Shooter...Read More

L.A. Times staffer Glenn Bunting got his hands on detailed budget documents for Sahara, a poor man's Indiana Jones adventure flick with Matthew McConaughey, Penelope Cruz and Steve Zahn that came out in 2005 and lost at least $78 million despite having earned $122 million. That's because it cost $160 million to make and racked up $81.1 million in distribution expenses. This makes it "one of the biggest financial flops in Hollywood history," Bunting writes.

A story based on tangible black-and-white data and the usual verifying and follow-up calls, and Movie City News is...Read More

This shot is out-of-focus ugly because I took it in a state of double duress. One, I was having a cardiac arrythmia attack due to a sudden realization that the Pacific Grove actually wanted $12.75 of my hard-earned money so I could see Disturbia. (I paid, but it felt really awful to shell out almost $13 to see a merely-acceptable thriller so I can reconsider Shia LeBouf.) And two, the ticket girl was saying to me, "Sir, you can't take a picture of the board....sir! Sir!"

The Pacific Theatres execs who pushed this price-hike through late...Read More

"I know it's hard to believe that your rock band TV idea, which every writer in this town has thought of at one point, was not on my mind half a year after you told it to me. Yes, you thought of breaking the fourth wall. Groucho and George Burns stole it from you.

"Why don't you sue the guys who have that new show How to Be a Rock Star on the WB? I must have told them your idea. Nobody has ever goofed on rock bands -- not Spinal Tap or The Rutles or 800 Saturday Night Live sketches. I...Read More

Wow...this Jason Whitlock column (which ran in the Wednesday, 4.11 edition of the Kansas City Star) about the Don Imus brouhaha is perhaps the boldest eyeball-to-eyeball, take-it-or-leave-it view I've read about this whole mess so far.

The guy's obviously a traditionalist-conservative of some sort, but he's more or less saying the same thing I said a day earlier (Tuesday, 4.10), to wit: "It's obviously malicious and insensitive to denigrate people in this fashion (or any fashion), but everyone is dumping on everyone else these days -- why single out Imus? It's a shitstorm out...Read More

"It's possible that the only people in this whole sorry story who are not hypocrites are the Rutgers teammates and their coach, C. Vivian Stringer. And perhaps even Don Imus himself, who, while talking way too much about black people he has known and ill children he has helped, took full responsibility for his own catastrophic remarks and didn't try to blame the ensuing media lynching on the press, bloggers or YouTube.

A N.Y. Times illustration by Barry Blitt that accompanies the Rich column

"Unlike Mel Gibson, Michael Richards and Isaiah Washington, to take just three...Read More

Criterion is releasing a two-disc DVD of Lindsay Anderson's If.... on 6.19. And in tribute to this, Manhattan-based reader Chris Clark has slapped together a home-made trailer for it, hoping to "maybe drum up some interest for the first-time audience," as he puts it.

Released in 1968, If... "is a daringly anarchic vision of British society, set in a boarding school in late '60s England," the blurb reads. "Before Kubrick made his mischief iconic in A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell made a hell of an impression as the insouciant Mick Travis, who, along with...Read More

I found this 4.13 AICN review of Juan Carlo Fresnadillo's 28 Days Later (Fox Atomic, 5.11) highly persuasive. The Danny Boyle original (i.e., 28 Days Later) absolutely hooked me on the horrific idea of seething red-eyed zombies who run like quarterbacks, and the following graph is what got me in particular:

"What's great is that every so often you latch onto a character [and] think 'oh, that's obviously the hero' or 'well, she's the heroine' only to watch them get torn to bits ten minutes later. There's nothing predictable about who survives and who doesn't...Read More

So you pronounce Shia LeBeouf's last name how? Lebwehff, Leboaf, Lebuff or Leboof? (His first name is pronounced like "hiya") And does the popularity of this 20 year-old actor, recently officially confirmed as the second lead in the Indiana Jones IV movie that'll start shooting in June, signify a multicultural turn in the road in mainstream American culture, at least among the under 25s?

Shia LeBoeuf in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

He obviously has an exotic-sounding name -- half Middle-Easternish, half French. (I'll bet 97% of the people reading this right now aren't 100%...Read More

Will Ferrell vs. his landlord. Moderately, conceptually amusing in an unforced way. Wait...here's something funnier.

A little more than two years ago I ran an early Shoot 'Em Up piece, which was basically about the long hard effort that director-writer Michael Davis underwent in order to get the film funded by New Line Cinema with the help of producers Don Murphy, Susan Montford and Rick Benattar. (New Line execes Jeff Katz and Cale Boyter oversaw things for the studio.) Since then it's been the usual usual -- principal, test screenings, re-shoots, etc. -- and now, finally, with a September 7th release date in place.

It began filming in Toronto in...Read More

Whenever any cultural catch-phrase pushes its way into the headlines or the columns, T-shirt makers always rush in to capitalize. Obviously millions of shmucks out there have bought this crap in the past, etc., but the people who rush these things out don't have an eye for uptown design. I mean, these "Nappy Headed Ho" teddy-bear dolls are pathetic. And here I am giving them added attention.

"I do like weed," Kirsten Dunst has told a reporter for Live magazine. "I think America's view on weed is ridiculous. I mean, are you kidding me? If everyone smoked weed, the world would be a better place."

She's right, for the most part. Pot is an influencer and molder of one's spiritual outlook, attitude, philosophy, etc., and it does tend to expose the user to intrigues and fascinations that a beer-head would never consider, much less explore. Plus potheads tend to be cooler, funnier, friendlier. (Well, mostly.) I was totally on the side of Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe and the...Read More

"I enjoyed parts of Grindhouse, although three hours is a long time to watch two directors draw air-quotes around bad moviemaking. Quentin Tarantino is a pretty good writer and a monstrously gifted director, and I'd rather his movies were hits. But I can't pretend to be disappointed that Grindhouse is stiffing, because creatively it's a dead end that he's been traveling toward for a dozen years." -- EW "Final Cut" columnist Mark Harris in a 4.12 posting that repeats the old gripe that by riffing and sampling from movies instead of (horrors!) drawing from personal observation and life experience, Tarantino is a...Read More

Last Thursday's tracking got it wrong. Disturbia hasn't been neck-and-necking (or slightly edging out) Perfect Strangers -- it has left that poorly reviewed Bruce Willis-Halle Berry drama in the dust. Disturbia is being projected to do $24,131,000 (2925 theatres, $8200 a print) by Sunday night, while Perfect Stranger will come in fourth with roughly $11,163,000, at $4000 a print.

Last Wednesday I posted claims from two well-placed sources claiming that Warner Bros. attorneys were trying to keep original Get Smart creators Mel Brooks and Buck Henry from receiving fair compensation fees from the film version. But yesterday AICN's Harry Knowles reported that "ink went to paper and cash went to banks and Brooks and Henry have been officially signed on as creative consultants on the Get Smart movie with Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway. In fact, Carrell has already shot one joke scene that Mel Brooks wrote for his character in this film. With more to come, apparently from both...Read More

John Flynn, director of Rolling Thunder as well as the semi- legendary 1973 crime pic The Outfit (which you still can't get on DVD), passed away on Wednesday, April 4th, and I only just found out today...er, yesterday.

Warner Home Video should naturally release The Outfit on DVD as a fare- thee-well tribute to Flynn. Based on Richard Stark's (i.e., Donald Westlake's) 1963 book of the same name, it's a lean, hardboiled crime film costarring Robert Duvall, Karen Black, Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan, Richard Jaeckel, Joanna Cassidy and Sheree North.

Duvall gives one of his...Read More

Here I am finally paying attention to Alan Ball's Nothing Is Private, an allegedly high quality, sexually frank period drama (based on Alicia Erian's "Towelhead") that sounds like it will definitely be pushing MPAA ratings boundaries. It's basically about a 13 year-old half-Arab, half-Irish girl named Jasira (Summer Bishil, said to be super-phenomenal in the part) getting sexually involved with two older guys while living with her brusque-mannered Lebanese father in Houston in the early '90s.

Summer Bishil, breakout star of Alan Ball's Nothing Is Private

It costars Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, Peter Macdissi, Toni Collette...Read More

A movie called Everything's Gone Green would naturally be presumed to be about conservation and global warming. It's actually a wise, intelligent and mildly amusing little film (emphasis on the "mildly") about GenX mores, values and lifestyles in Vancouver, British Columbia. But it's a little too amiable and mild-mannered, even though it obviously came from the heads of some very bright, sophisticated and spiritually-centered people -- first-time director Paul Fox and screenwriter Douglas Coupland (the author of "Generation X") in particular.

The problem is that dramatically Everything's Gone Green never gets out of second gear....Read More

Todd Komarnicki's Perfect Stranger script "thinks it's far smarter than it is -- the pseudo-profundity runs thick and rich, and what should be killer lines land like matzoh balls dropped off a 30-story building." -- from John Anderson's hilarious brief but hilarious review in the 4.12 Variety.

Readers may also want to consider Stephen Holden's warning in his N.Y. Times review about the "ridiculous, convoluted story" with a "ludicrous bombshell revelation" at the end.

I noted a few weeks ago that Mia Farrow and her son Ronan, in their capacity as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassadors, had accused Steven Spielberg in a 3.28.07 Wall Street Journal editorial of aiding and abetting the genocide in Darfur by cuddling up to the Darfur- coddling Beijing government in his capacity as a 2008 Beijing Olympics pageant consultant.

"Is Mr. Spielberg aware that China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide?," Farrow wrote. "Does [he] really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games?" Spielberg obviously read the editorial because four...Read More

24 years after the release of Rob Epstein's The Times of Harvey Milk, one of the most touching documentaries ever made, and more than a year after Brokeback Mountain awoke Hollywood to the idea that well-crafted tragedies about gay men running into destructive forces can melt the hearts of Average Joes, a race has suddenly kicked in between two projects and two big-name directors -- Bryan Singer and Gus Van Sant -- to make a dramatic feature about assassinated San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk.

(l. to r.)...

This muddy-looking video clip is why Jerry Seinfeld should host next year's Oscar awards, Key passage: Award shows are "all a big jerkoff," he says. "They don't mean a goddam thing. Stupid... they're all stupid. On TV, it's beyond me why we feel the need to...dig out these jagoff bowling trophies six times a year so all these people can pat each other on the back about how much money they're making [and] boring the piss out of half the world. And I had not already won [a lot of ] these awards, I would not be talking like this."

The first comprehensive stab at HE's 2007 Oscar Balloon (which is now mint green with brighter colored balloons) is up and running. Please give it a once-over and suggest any appropriate takedowns or additions. As the year progresses I will start to boldface those contenders who have exceptional heat. I'm not trying to say that the '07 Oscar race has begun...please. That won't happen (i.e., it won't begin to take on any kind of shape) until July-August, with the real kickoff, as always, being September's Toronto Film Festival. Enjoy the balmy Oscar-free climate while it lasts.

Lonely Hearts (Samuel Goldwyn, 4.13) wasn't nearly as hard to sit through as I'd been told to expect. In a groggy, heavy- lidded way I could even describe this period police drama as reasonably decent. And if you're into red-lipped hotties it's worth checking out for Salma Hayek's performance as infamous serial killer Martha Beck, a bad-ass mama who's emotionally obsessive (to put it mildly) and almost sadly malicious.

What's great about Hayek is that her twisted behavior feels earnest and believable. She's way too pretty and curvy to play Beck as she actually was (i.e.,...Read More

Anyone who saw and loved Sandra Nettlebeck's Mostly Martha when it opened five years ago needs to click on the trailer for No Reservations (Warner Bros., 7.27), the Scott Hicks-directed remake with Catherine Zeta Jones and Aaron Eckhart playing the Martina Gedeck and Serge Castellito roles. It looks like a spirited romantic souffle, but it seems exactly (and I mean exactly) like the German movie, only slicker and cuter with a power-pop girly song on the soundtrack.

There's one toxic line in the trailer, I regret to say. Jones, playing a sophisticated chef coping with heavy...Read More

"For what it's worth, today in my magazine writing class at Hunter College we discussed the Don Imus brouhaha, and not one kid, not even the black kids, thought he should be fired. Censured, fined, suspended...sure. But not fired. Looks like they understand the First Amendment better than the craven corporate types." -- hotshot Manhattan entertainment journalist Lewis Beale.

Disturbia and Perfect Stranger are going to be neck and neck this weekend. The latter is tracking at 71, 33 and 14, and Disturbia has been clocked at 61, 35 and 15. Neither one is going to blow the roof off.

A guy I know suspects that Disturbia might perform a little bit better, possibly because moviegoers are picking up oppressive formula fumes coming off the latter, a Bruce Willis-Halle Berry thriller. (A friend says Stranger, which had its all-media screening last night, has an irritating twist element at the finale that's been used solely because movies like this are supposed...Read More

It's over for Don Imus....temporarily, I presume. CBS honcho Leslie Moonves pulled the plug on "Imus in the Morning" earlier today, and this combined with MSNBC's decision yesterday to drop its simulcast of the radio show means the guy is totally over and lights out. For now. Obviously an economic decision due to sponsor queasiness about sticking with Imus with the racial context heating up and the Sharpton-generated calls for his dismissal. Never pick on the unpowerful. Imus will make some more amends, and then go off to his ranch and chill for a few months, and then his show will return...Read More

Being a graduate of Wilton High School, I ran a summation on 3.25.07 of a N.Y. Times story about several teenaged students who were outraged that their WHS principal, Timothy H. Canty, had cancelled an April performance of a play they were preparing on the Iraq War called "Voices in Conflict." Canty told Times reporter Allison Leigh Cowan that he kibboshed the play over "questions of political balance and context." Translation: conservative voices in Wilton wanted it suppressed.

Wilton High School principal Timothy J. Canty, seemingly dejected and despondent in the wake of news that "Voices...

There are some who reject the concept of icky money, and claim that if you earn it semi-honestly that all money is green and nurturing, no matter what tactic you used to obtain it. But if you were with Lionsgate and you believed deep down that there is such a thing as icky money, what would you feel ickier about -- making millions from bloody slasher films, or making millions off the Christian faith market?

A guy named Stephen Tramontana, whom I haven't spoken to but who resides in the L.A. area, has a website called The Real Grindhouse. It's largely about a film called Grindhouse, a kind of hommage to grindhouse movies made in the same style as the real McCoys from the '60s and '70s, that he and a partner, Lenny Shteynberg, made and finished in '03 for about $4,000.

Tramontana is claiming on the site he and Shteynberg met Quentin Tarantino at a party in '02, and that they told him about their Grindhouse movie idea during...Read More

Blackbird, the David Harrower play that I briefly reviewed early this month (after doing a dud phone interview with the play's star, Jeff Daniels), opened on Tuesday, 4.10, and has gotten rave reviews, including this one from N.Y. Times critic Ben Brantley.

"To Kurt Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, summed up his philosophy: "Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- God damn it, you've got to be kind." -- from the N.Y. Times obit for Vonnegut, who died on Wednesday in Manhattan.

After my riff on the Get Smart movie went up earlier today, I received three interesting e-mails. One containing a draft of the Get Smart movie script (dated 3.30.06, by Tom Astle and Matt Ember), a second pointing me to a Get Smart TV series fan site that has posted a fairly negative, very detailed review of Astle and Ember's script, and a third from a guy in the business who asked to be referred to as "Agent Orange." I know him -- he's for real.

"Agent Orange" doesn't like the script...Read More

Congratulations to Bingham Ray for landing a new gig as marketing and acquisitions chief for Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, and apologies for not raising my glass yesterday along with everyone else. A smart and shrewd indie veteran tying in with a successful like-minded operation... clink.

Kimmel, 69, has been financing films since the late '70s, and has a distribution deal with MGM, although Focus, Paramount Vantage and Universal have also cut deals with him. Ray's new division. And he seems to have good taste in the films that he's financed so far. These include Breach (an above-average espionage piece that I found more...Read More

Start with a boilerplate Jerry Bruckheimer- style inspirational sports drama plot -- a tough coach molds some young black students into a hard-charging team (a la Glory Road and Pride). Set it in a more-racist-than-today time period ('50s or '60s or earlier). Include a rote third-act competition climax with the students going up against a team of elite white guys and showing 'em what for. And then mix it in with the intellectual pursuit-and-triumph vein of films like Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds and Stand and Deliver.

(l. to...

Seven days and a wakeup until the official 60th Cannes Film Festival slate is announced on Thursday, April 19th, probably in the wee, wee hours. But I've already emotionally divested myself from the idea of catching a Croisette screening of Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones concert doc (which has seemed to some like a reasonable prospect, given the certainty that Scorsese will be at the festival) because it's just not happening. "No chance in hell," a friend from Paramount distribution told me a little while back. "Paramount isn't even seeing an early cut of it until mid May. It won't be ready at...Read More

Because the title of a hit TV show from the mid to late '60s called Get Smart is still a semi-recognizable brand (primarily among boomers and older GenXers who were in their early tweens to late teens when "would you believe...?" was a cool catch phrase, and who are now in their 40s, 50s and early 60s), Warner Bros. is making a Get Smart movie with Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway in the Don Adams and Barbara Feldon (i.e., Agent 99) parts.

USA Today's Anthony Breznican has written a totally boilerplate, just-the-facts piece about it,

A Cinema Blend rumor says that Tom Hanks has agreed to play Professor Robert Langdon again in Angels & Demons, the Da Vinci Code sequel, and that he's getting paid the "biggest salary ever paid to an actor in the history of Hollywood." Filming on Angels & Demons "should" start in July, the story says, with Hanks joining costar Gisele Bundchen under director Ron Howard. This means Howard's Frost/Nixon won't shoot until the end of the year...do I have that right?

One question about Stu Van Airsdale's video excerpt from last night's Lincolm Center Diane Keaton tribute, at which Woody Allen, Meryl Streep, Steve Martin, Martin Short and Candice Bergen spoke and praised and shared set stories. The question is, why show a video of Martin's somewhat funny, somewhat inane banjo performance when we could have just as easily watched and listened to Allen deliver his remarks, which seemed to have been the hit of the evening? What's with the damn banjo?

"I'm sure you've all, at one time or another, heard the term 'passive-aggressive,' " Allen...Read More

I should have posted this earlier, but David Poland sussed out the Grindhouse exhibition situation in Portand pretty well last night, and in the process explained how Nikki Finke's account missed the bigger picture.

"A simple look at the theaters in Portland via Fandango would show that one of those five non-Regal theaters is, in fact, an independent, one-screen stand-alone theater -- the CineMagic," Poland wrote. "It has been operating under a variety of names since 1914. And, as coincidence would have, less than a mile away from The Clinton. In other words, Weinstein Co did choose a true...Read More

"Right now, the sheer gusto that Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino take in hot-wiring tired cliches and overly familiar archetypes is highly entertaining, if not downright addictive. But even while [their current collaboration] is most exciting, most deliriously kinetic, it is hard to shake the impression that, sooner or later, these filmmakers really should seek inspiration in something other than other people's films."

So said MovingPictureBlog's Joe Leydon 11 years ago, in a review of From Dusk to Dawn, which Rodriguez directed from a script by Tarantino.

"The appetite for ‘70s recycling has greatly diminished during the past decade, [and] audiences have...Read More

Making a bomb of epic proportions sometimes lands a filmmaker in "movie jail" unless he/she has an especially admirable resume. This is what kept Cameron Crowe, the director-writer of Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, from incarceration over the last year or so following the disastrous reception of Elizabethtown, which opened and quickly died in the fall of '05. But you can't go through a major critical and commercial calamity without having it affect you on some kind of woe-is- me, what-the-fuck-am-I-doing? level.

Elizabethtown was Crowe's Waterloo. I know that it seemed to me and a lot of...Read More

Orlando Bloom definitely suffered some kind of career tumble-down in '05 when Kingdom of Heaven bombed (despite the director's cut of that Ridley Scott film being a near-masterpiece) and Elizabethtown turned into the biggest high-expectation wipeouts of all time. He's in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, of course (nothing to be terribly high or proud about), and he appeared in a little film called Love and Other Disasters that played at Toronto '06 and then went away. Things have obviously stalled for the poor guy, and I'm sorry. He was actually quite good in the Scott film.

But now Cinematical is...Read More

Personal insult labels are fairly standardized the world over. One insult adjective, one insult noun. The disser focuses on a trait that he/she considers unattractive on some level (be it physical or character- based) and then attaches it to a noun that carries a strong whiff of denigration and devaluation.

I remember someone at Spy magazine referring to Donald Trump back in the mid '80s as a "thick-fingered vulgarian" -- now, that's insulting for a big-money guy looking to be respected by the big-city elites. But that was then and this is now. Everyone is getting...Read More

If Harvey Weinstein puts a longer version of Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof (i.e., the second half of Grindhouse) into theatres sometime this month, I'll pay to see it in a New York minute. (And that's saying something for a freeloader like myself.) Especially if sex scenes featuring Vanessa Ferlito are added.

I didn't pay for a second encounter with Grindhouse last weekend because I didn't want to sit through the Rodriguez zombie film a second time, plus I didn't feel a great need to go there all over again (especially at the cost of three...Read More

I'm way, way late to the party on reactions to Jimmy Kimmel having ambushed and tongue-lashed Gawker editor Emily Gould on a guest-hosted Larry King Live segment last Friday night, but I'm only a day late in responding to Gould's post-mortem commentary about the on-air fracas.

Gould's defense is fairly cogent -- comprehensive, point-by-point, emotionally balanced, a wee bit snide -- plus it brought something into relief that I hadn't really considered before, which is that Kimmel is sounding like a bit of an old-school pisshead with a Joey Bishop attitude about the internet.

Kimmel was fuming that...Read More

The quietest opener of the coming weekend has to be Lonely Hearts, a period police procedural set in the late '40s and early '50s, which means all the actors will be wearing bulky-ass trenchcoats and fedoras and talking like they're in costarring with Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. It's a little bit strange that there's zero buzz around this thing and the fact that the opening is being so faintly promoted because it's got a few big names -- John Travolta, Salma Hayek, James Gandolfini, Jaredo Leto, Scott Caan and Laura Dern.

This...Read More

Every time I buy a few things for the refrigerator, I'm kinda forced to contemplate the seemingly tortured, sadly dysfunctional relationships of Brangelina and Tomkat. It's genuinely sickening the way the tabs keep hammering away. I'd become a loyal customer of any sensibly- priced market that doesn't stock them, just to avoid looking at those damn headlines.

I'll admit to a deep-down rooting interest in wanting to see Katie Holmes break free, but that's mainly because I've been brainwashed by the writings of anti-Scientology guy Mark Ebner. If I were Brad or Angie I'd commit...Read More

There are two films opening this weekend with decent tracking -- Perfect Stranger (73, 21 and 8) and Disturbia (54, 31 and 8). The others are as follows: Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters (35, 26 and 3), Pathfinder (30.26 and 2), Redline (43, 25 and 1) and Slow Burn (32, 26 and 1). No tracking on the smaller openers -- Everything's Gone Green, Lonely Hearts, Private Fears in Public Places, Red Road and Year of the Dog. Fracture (New Line, 4.20), the Anthony Hopkins-Ryan Gosling thriller from director Gregory Hoblit, is at 42, 31 and 2.

They may be some younger readers out there who can't tell right away what Hollywood guy is reputed to have said the following with a straight face, but whose wisdom is actually under-rated at times:

(a) "Go see it and see for yourself why you shouldn't go see it"; (b) "If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive"; (c) "Don't pay any attention to the critics -- don't even ignore them"; (d) "I don't think anyone should write his autobiography until after he's dead"; (e) "That's the way with these directors, they're always biting the hand that...Read More

When the Sons of Hollywood threesome is flown to Afghanistan later this year for their fight to the death, put Brandon "Greasy Bear" Davis on the plane with them.

Randy Spelling, David Weintraub and Sean Stewart -- the young stars of a new Entourage-y reality show called Sons of Hollywood -- are giving an excellent impression of being diseased and over-priveleged lowlife scum -- representatives of the very thing that Islamic fundamentalists despise about western culture and values. I'm saying this because they need to consider and even accept this opinion because once they do, there is a chance for redemption.

The producers of Sons of Hollywood need to fly these bozos to the mountains of eastern Afghanistan for a hand-to-hand combat with...Read More

Harvey Weinstein has told Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke that he's "incredibly disappointed" with the piddly $11.6 million that Grindhouse brought in last weekend, and that he's thinking about re-releasing the movie around the U.S. "in a couple of weeks" as two separate feature-length movies -- Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof (only longer with deleted sex scenes put back in) and Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror with extra stuff also. (Which is what the European release plan has been all along,)

"Quentin's movie goes out first in competition at Cannes," Weinstein told Finke. "He'll do an extensive...Read More

"I've made about 120 movies. I think maybe six are good. The two pictures that I'm most remembered for are two pictures I never thought would be successful. I thought The Magnificent Seven was going to be terrible. And I turned Bullitt down four times. I thought, 'This'll be another dumb picture with a car chase.'" -- Robert Vaughan speaking to The Observer's Sanjiv Bhattacharya.

What are the other four? My choices are The Young Philadelphians, The Man from Independence, The Bridge at Remagen and The Towering Inferno. None of these are wonderful, but they're decent.

"To to be a well-known actor...Read More

An interesting piece by Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke about how The Weinstein Co. flipped off the core audience for Grindhouse by refusing to book the Quentin Tarantino- Robert Rodriguez film in actual grindhouse cinemas like Portland's Clinton Street Theatre.

"I received some very interesting info this weekend from Seth Sonstein, the owner/programmer at the Clinton Street Theater, detailing how he tried in vain to convince The Weinstein Co. to allow his venue to play the pic," Finke begins. "The Clinton is a unique single-screen indie art house considered a true Grindhouse in Portland, Oregon. (For...Read More

With the whiners and haters making Hollywood Elsewhere such a pleasant place to be in recent days, I thought I'd share a letter from a longtime reader named Alexandro Aldrete, who lives in Monterrey, Mexico. Sometimes it helps to consider the perspective of someone outside the country -- someone with different cultural references and whatnot -- to see things in a fresh light. (And I'm not saying he's right or wrong or anything in between.)

"The reason I'm writing is because the comments situation has gotten to a point where it's frankly pathetic," Aldrete begins. "You must have the most consistent group...Read More

What are three darkest and most traumatic disasters of the past six years? 9.11, Katrina and the Asian tsunami, right? The last two were about awful floodings, drownings, hundreds of bodies, stench, misery on a massive scale...really horrific wrath-of-God stuff. And yet everyone's ho-humming about the summer's biggest (i.e,, the most grossly expensive) comedy, Evan Almighty (Universal, 6.22), being about God (Morgan Freeman) deciding to bring the absolute worst super Katrina-tsunami of all time down upon the world.

We all know that Universal isn't going to drown everyone while trying to make us laugh, and that...Read More

The trailer for Jon Kasdan's In The Land of Women (Warner Independent, 4.20) -- an intelligent-sounding, well acted, seemingly sophisticated romantic drama about an introspective young guy (Adam Brody) nursing a broken heart who visits his grandmother (Olympia Dukakis ) in the midwest and falls into a semi-initimate relationship with a mother (Meg Ryan) and her daughter (Kristen Stewart) -- looks like it might be pretty good.

In The Land of Women director-writer Jon Kasdan

And Brody is appealing in his MySpace site video introduction. The only thing that scares me is that the IMDB...Read More

All of the prominent weekend movies were more or less flat yesterday (i.e., didn't increase upon Friday's numbers) and yet Grindhouse dropped 19%. This means it won't even hit $13 million -- this morning's estimate is that it'll have $12,123,000 by late tonight.

Today is a dead movie-going day because almost all Middle Americans are visiting family and hiding chocolate Easter eggs and sitting around watching The Passion of the Christ on DVD as they lash each other with cat 'o' nine tails.

The rundown: Blades of Glory is #1 with $23,614,000, Meet The Robinsons is #2 with $17,175,00 Are We...Read More

"The main difference between The Sopranos and its spawn wasn't prurience, it was ambition. Most shows overreach or 'jump the shark' when they pile on too much melodrama and too many dead bodies. On The Sopranos, it was the opposite: The show lost its way when it put murders and mischief aside and weighed itself down in ponderous character sketches and too many Bergmanesque dream sequences.

"Those flights of fancy were not surprising given how often the series was hailed as Shakespearian or Dickensian. Norman Mailer recently called The Sopranos the closest thing to the Great...Read More

Harrison Ford has long shown a kind of avoidance mentality (some would say a chickenshit attitude) when it came to starring in realistic docu-dramas. He famously declined to star in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (a movie about drugs), and then bowed out of a starring role in Stephen Gaghan's Syriana, which was about the geopolitics of big oil. ("I didn't feel strongly enough about the truth of the material ,and I think I made a mistake," Ford allegedly said). He also sidestepped a shot at starring in A History of Violence.

Now, weeks before he starts work on the fourth Indiana Jones film,...Read More

The only people I know in real life who smoke are (a) young and courting a kind of contrarian identity, (b) older with vaguely self-destructive attitudes, and in some cases beset by addiction problems, (c) serious "party" people with unmistakable self-destructive compulsions and tendencies, and (d) life's chronic losers -- riffraff, low-lifes, bums, scuzzballs. Cigarette smoking used to be extremely cool but no longer, and that goes for actors in movies too.

All the above associations seem to kick in every time sometime lights up in a film, and it's gotten so that I don't want...Read More

Here's the difference between a highly judgmental British film columnist like the Guardian's John Patterson and a streetcorner mess-around-and-fess-upper like myself. Patterson thinks actors who've won Oscars should be subjected to a three-strikes-and-you're-out law -- i.e., appear in three turkeys after winning your Oscar and you have to give it back.

Halle Berry ought to return hers, he feels, because she made Catwoman, Gothika and now Perfect Stranger (which Patterson hears is "Color of Night bad"). And Hilary Swank has to almost give her Oscar back as punishment for making The Black Dahlia and The Reaping. (One more and she's done.)...Read More

Good heavens...has anyone looked at the "Road to Box-Office Hell" Grindhouse projections on the front page of Movie City News? Poland didn't jump in, but Coming Soon projected $25.8 million, Box-Office Guru said $25 million, Box-Office Prophet said $24.3 million, and the more cautious Entertainment Weekly analyst said $19 million. Coming Soon's Ed Douglas informs that Box-Office Guru predicted a $29 million haul....hah! (My estimate, posted yesterday, was that it would do around $20 million.) Apologies for my earlier dyslexic posting -- Douglas predicted $25.8 million, not $28.5 million.

It's a blue and cloudy Saturday morning for poor Harvey Weinstein with those weekend Grindhouse projections of $20 million or thereabouts falling way short. A studio-based estimate has Grindhouse coming in fourth with $11,992,000 for the weekend. (It made about $4,894,000 yesterday.) The just-shy-of-$12-millon estimate is probably about a million short -- I see it doing around $13 million when the final data is in. (Figures for the top ten plus The Hoax are in the next item.)

Once again, a tasty hip-popcorn movie that a lot of big-city critics and urban types are having a great...Read More

A big studio's estimate for the weekend box-office vs. Fantasy Moguls.com estimates...ready? FM has Blades of Glory, the weekend's #1 film, at $20.8 million while the studio projects $24,467,000. (It's off 26% for the weekend, off 20% yesterday, and on its way to over $100 million.) Meet the Robinsons is being projected by FM at $17 million for the weekend -- the studio is eyeballing $16,852,000 for weekend with a 33% drop, which isn't bad. The thoroughly detestable Are We Done Yet? will do $16 million by FM and $16,237,000 weekend by the studio. (It did only $5,387,000 last night which tells me...Read More

"Quite frankly, his bad studio pictures really hurt him. He squandered all the good will from Porky's and A Christmas Story. But he just loved the process. It was in his blood. He loved storytelling ...he wasn't subtle. It's going to be a sadder place without him." -- The late Bob Clark's former producing partner Len Carmody speaking to the Toronto Star's Peter Howell.

Can you believe this friggin' Carmody guy? 36 hours after the death of a former partner -- a guy he knew and liked! -- and he's calling him "unsubtle" and a maker of "bad studio pictures." HE...Read More

"It's natural to want to hide behind someone else's decision to make [a hit movie] and the fact it made money a year ago. With a sequel they can't be blamed. They cannot take the bullet if it fails." -- a Hollywood know-it-all talking to the Toronto Star's Geoff Pevere about the forthcoming sequel-heavy summer.

This is a very old and creaky thing to say, but one thing you'll never hear an actor or actress say is, "I did this film because I was offered a lot of money and I never had a shot at any hefty straight-paycheck roles until I won the Oscar, and my agent said to me, as I'm sure all agents say to all Oscar- winning actor clients, 'Now's the time to cash in.

"'Popularity is promised to no actor,' he said. 'Memories are short and windows of opportunity are small, so get it while you can.'...Read More

The problem with Easter weekend is that people in the red-state hinterlands tend to stay away from movies on Easter Sunday (i.e., being into chocolate Easter bunnies, Christian tradition and trying to fortify Ozzie and Harriet family-community values), and that's why Are We Done Yet?, Black Book and Firehouse Dog opened on Wednesday and The Reaping opened on Thursday.

Some people feel Harvey Weinstein made a mistake not putting Grindhouse into theatres on Wednesday also. (He's cheap on advertising; a phrase I heard about Harvey is that "money goes through his hands like concrete.") Grindhouse is tracking decently -- the expectation is...Read More

"I have never believed there's such a thing as a movie that is 'so bad, it's good,'" writes Oregon Live's Shawn Levy. "It's a core tenet for me that photography, editing, screenwriting and acting are forms of art, and I get no more pleasure out of seeing them done badly than a restaurant reviewer does from a meal that leads to food poisoning. It's why I don't watch daytime TV. Or Joel Schumacher films.

"I remain in the camp of Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington or whoever it was who first said, 'There's only two kinds of music -- good and bad....Read More

Grindhouse opens today so I'm rehashing four basic points I covered in my 3.24 review: (a) a sleazy double-feature in the style of late-'60s exploitation flicks, it samples and comments upon a long-dead genre without really "being" anything itself except for a slick showcase of hip-guy-filmmaker attitudes; (b) still, for a film that runs just over three hours (i.e., 184 minutes) it's a live-wire, better-than-okay ride and well worth the $10 bucks plus parking.

The problem (c) is that it starts with a semi-dud (Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, a tired, gloppy and mostly groan-worthy zombie...Read More

At least one other guy agrees with a passage in my 3.24 Grindhouse review that the Death Proof road finale is "one of the most exciting car-chase sequences in cinema history." I'm speaking of Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern, whose review (out today) says that Grindhouse contains "the most thrilling car chase ever committed to film." And the thing that makes it really wail is that none of the road thrills are CG'ed.

This "Seven-Minute Sopranos" YouTube thing is very nice. It's been up for four or five days and everyone's on it. Written (and narrated?) by Paul Gulyas and edited by Joe Sabia. Man, James Gandolfini sure used to be slimmer and have more hair. Little A.J. was really tubby in the old days, and Meadow was no slender reed herself.

"When Premiere magazine announced last month that its April issue would be its last, the epitaph for long-form movie journalism may well have been written," Anne Thompson declares in her latest Variety column. "After all, in a world where movie fans can read about movies, see pictures, trailers and video, and find their theaters and showtimes online, who needs a movie magazine anymore?

"At a time when the likes of celebrity website TMZ.com, Defamer and People.com rush amateur photos of the Hollywood Hills brush fire and news of Mel Gibson's latest indiscretion...Read More

I've been sent the script of Danny Strong's Recount, and it's as good as I'd heard and hoped it would be. As I wrote a couple of days ago, it's the basis of an HBO feature that Sydney Pollack will start directing within a few weeks' time (for airing in early '08), about the battle over the Florida returns in the wake of the 2000 presidential election and how the George Bush forces managed to finagle things in their favor at the end of the day.

I don't want to give anything anyway, but I...Read More

I saw the first two installments of HBO's final Sopranos season last night, and as usual, they're fantastic and brilliant and darkly funny and all the other superlatives, but there's not much in the way of any pulverizing story turns -- nothing decisive or darkly threatening at all regarding the fate of Anthony J. Soprano, his immediate family or associates.

Okay, a prominent character -- a rival -- meets his ultimate fate but not at the hand of an assassin or lawman, and yes, tensions between Tony and two of his closest family allies come seeping...Read More

The trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (Disney, 5.25) does make the film seem like it might be a pretty agreeable serving of horseshit eye-candy. Question is, how long will it be? I wouldn't have disliked the second one if it had been, say, 20 or 30 minutes shorter. A jape should never be lengthy. It should run 100 or 110 minutes, tops.

I just want to say that I went out for a moonlit walk last night (i.e., after watching the first two final-season-of-The Sopranos episodes on DVD) and thought long and hard about all the haters bashing me for delivering my honest opinion of Bob Clark's movies in the same piece in which I reported the terrible news of his death. Obviously the consensus among 90% of the readership is that it is foul and diseased to be render any kind of mixed or negative verdict on a person's work concurrent with their death announcement. That's how I'm reading it, and maybe the haters...Read More

Whatever really happened between Keith Richards and his dad's ashes in '02 -- i.e., he snorted a small portion with a line of cocaine or he used them to fertilize a tree -- no one but no one believes Richards' manager's claim that the snorting story was uttered in jest. (Even if it was.)

Just as everyone presumes that Richards' rep issued the denial because she heard from alarmed Disney publicist Dennis Rice (or from some lackey in the Disney pipeline) and was told that dad-snorting wouldn't go over with the family-fare donkeys who support...Read More

Collider.com's Steve Weintraub (a.k.a. "Frosty") says he's spent the last few days researching a story about The Invasion (Warner Bros., 8.17), the Nicole Kidman zombie film that Oliver Hirschbiegel began to direct (but wasn't allowed to quite finish), and discovered it's much more of a Wachowski Brothers job than anything else.

The Wachowskis re-wrote 2/3 of it, Weintraub reports, and then arranged for addi- tional footage to be directed by James Teigue, the Wachowski flunky who directed V for Vendetta.

"The last time you may have heard of this film was when Kidman was...Read More

The 2nd annual "Green Issue" of Vanity Fair has "an exclusive transcript" from 11th Hour, a new wake-up-to-global-warming doc that Leonardo DiCaprio produced, narrated and co-wrote. (The IMDB provides no release date other than 2007.) This is worth checking out for the video reel of a photo session with Knut (i.e., the little polar bear who was rejected by his mother, and whom some guys actually said should be killed because of that) plus outtakes from the DiCaprio photo shoot in Iceland.

Spider-Man 3 (Columbia, 5.4) will premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on 4.30 -- terrific. File this one under "financially advantageous for Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal's festival but a crass mercenary move that further undercuts the spirit of this once-vibrant event, which was already hurt by last week's announcement about the ticket prices being jacked from $12 to $18 bucks each."

A festival needs to show big-star, high-profile flicks to help promote itself, but shouldn't the ones that get selected at least aspire to some kind of quality-type, serious-moviegoer pedigree? Does anyone believe that a story about Peter Parker...Read More

"The floors were sticky. The seats were worn down to the springs. The smell was a combination of buttered popcorn and bodily fluids. In the back row, someone might be in a heated argument with a fellow patron -- or getting a $5 hand job. Sometimes, a rat would scurry past your leg. Onscreen, any number of sordid acts, seedy pleasures or splatterrific gore played to a crowd that expected extremities at every turn." -- Time Out's David Fear on the 42nd Street grindhouses that are no more.

Speaking of which, a rat (or a very...Read More

Sad, terrible, traumatic news: director Bob Clark (A Christmas Story, Porky's) and his son Ariel died early this morning on the Pacific Coast highway when a foolish, inebriated 24 year-old guy, Hector Velazquez-Nava, swerved and slammed into Clark's Infiniti sedan head-on. Clark, 67, and his 22 year-old son were pronounced dead at the scene.

Nava and his passenger, Lydia Mora, 29, were treated for minor injuries and later released. Nava was reportedly found to be driving under the influence of alcohol and operating a motor vehicle without a driver's license. (What could cause a young...Read More

Disney marketing chief Dennis Rice, a guy renowned for having a contentious attitude towards a certain coterie of journalists and critics who don't pull punches and whose working mantra is "you have to be nice to my movies and clients or I'm probably not going to be very nice to you," is taking a new gig as president of worldwide marketing and publicity for Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner's United Artists.

The rough going-over that Cruise had gotten from the press since the couch- jumping episode seems to have been a factor in the Rice hire. The appearance, at least, is...Read More

Famous people are going to be poked and badgered from time to time about their sexual tastes and proclivities (i.e., by gay media types if they happen to be gay), but it's their own damn business and if they want to keep it private they're damn well entitled and should be left alone. I say this having read on Radar Online that Out magazine's May issue (on sale 4.17) is raising a rude curtain on Anderson Cooper and Jodie Foster, even if there's not much of a debate about where these two are at.

Would...Read More

Martin Scorsese will handle three tasks as the Cannes Film Festival next month -- giving the festival's Cinema Lesson, handing out the Camera d'Or for Best First Film and officially launching his World Cinema Foundation, but there's a fourth task he could be doing, and it would make sense if he did. He could be showing his Rolling Stones/"Bigger Bang" concert tour documentary that he began shooting last October (possibly to be called Shine a LIght), and which Paramount Pictures will release later this year.

Of course, the concert doc (which the IMDB says was...Read More

It's 9:37 ayem and Are We Done Yet? (Columbia, opening today) has a zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Two critics, however -- Reel Times' Mark Pfeiffer and the Orlando Sentinel's Roger Moore -- have included an olive-branch bend-over comment in their reviews, possibly because they hold with Bipedalist's view that it's important for journo-critics to always try to say something nice in order to keep things mellow and respectful.

Pfeiffer said that "this remake of the 1948 RKO comedy Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House is a moderately amusing family film, if not a terribly inspired one." And...Read More

Keith Richards has copped to mixing his dad's ashes with some cocaine and snorting a line of the stuff back in '02. "He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow...my dad wouldn't have cared," Richards told a reporter for NME, the renowned British music rag. "It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

A denial was issued later on, but many of us will probably choose to ignore it.

NME editors wouldn't be expected to know this, but cremated-remains snorting is actually a common, age-old practice among Southern Baptists and...Read More

Reader Marc Gottleib reports that a fire alarm stopped all screenings tonight and forced an evacuation at Hollywood's Arclight theatre. Gottleib was watching a DVD-launch screening of Payback: Straight Up, and about an hour into the film (right after Mel Gibson is saved from getting castrated on the hood of a car by Lucy Liu and her Asian thugs), the film suddenly stopped and the emergency lights came on. And the next thing we know, everyone was being herded out of the auditorium.

"It turned out that we weren't the the only ones and the entire...Read More

The teaser-trailer for Die Hardest....I mean, Live Free or Die Hard (20th Century Fox, 6.27). It's basically Big John McClane (Bruce Willis) trying to keep "an attack on the U.S. infrastructure from shutting down the entire nation," blah blah. Same old high-testosterone, Larry Gordon-Joel Silver macho crap from the '80s in a very slick and freshly-revved package, directed by Len Wiseman (the two Underworld flicks) with some very snazzy CG action effects. Justin Long, Maggie Q, Timothy Olyphant and Jeffrey Wright costar.

Fox 411's Roger Friedman reported early this morning that Leonardo DiCaprio "is in negotiations to star on Broadway this fall in David Rabe's The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel," a sort of anti-military, anti-Vietnam War piece. If I were Leo I would probably want to angle the play more in the direction of the Iraq conflict, if and when the deal actually happens.

In a review of a 1977 production of the play in New York with Al Pacino in the lead role, Clive Barnes wrote the following:

"[The play] begins and ends with Hummel's fatal...Read More

An alleged Orson Welles "masterpiece" called The Other Side of the Wind could finally reach theaters sometime in '08, according to legendary director and Sopranos costar Peter Bogdanovich. A deal to edit and complete Wells' final film "is 99.9% finished," Bogdanovich said at an appearance at Orlando's Florida Film Festival last Friday, according to a report on a site dedicated to Welles's work.

"The Other Side of the Wind tells the story of Jake Hannaford, an aging film director played by John Huston, who is trying to make a film, albeit with great difficulty," says an...Read More

The Taylor Negron-Lily Haydn performance two nights ago at the Egyptian Arena Theatre was so good and eloquent and deeply felt that I needed time to let it sink in before writing about it. Negron is a character actor with a certain flamboyancy (of all his films, my favorite is Gun Shy), but I never detected the touch-of-the-poet side. Because movie and TV roles aren't about revealing unsuspected depths. Catch an actor in a good play or in a reading of this kind and you suddenly feel that you finally know them.

Taylor Negron...

Film Threat has posted a video file of "Thanks- giving," Eli Roth's Grindhouse parody trailer with that already-famous bit with the cheerleader doing a bouncing strip-tease on a trampoline, etc. Roth is definitely one sick fuck. Where's the S.S. Nazi trailer as well as the one with Danny Trejo for a bullshit fictional film called "Machete"?

MySpace will hold its own presidential primary on January 1st and 2nd, 2008, prior to any of the regular big-time state primaries (New Hampshire, Iowa, etc.). MySpace president Tom Anderson is being quoted as saying that "Iowa and New Hampshire may be selecting delegates, but the MySpace vote will be the first test of where candidates stand in the election year." In whatever numbers they vote and whomever they vote for, I'll bet anyone that the under-30 generation won't go to the actual November 2008 polls in the same quantity. Because...you know, it's hard, dude. I've got classes and I was up...Read More

Are We Done Yet? (Columbia, 4.4) is a cretinous family comedy about an idiot father (Ice Cube) going through hell as he tries to fix up a huge ramshackle mansion that he's bought in some far-off Oregon country town while his wife (Nia Long) goes "now, now" and his two totally contemptible asshole kids smirk and giggle as he howls and screams and falls through roofs and gets electrocuted. It's an African-American Money Pit with fewer brain cells.

Aleisha Allen, Nia Long, Philip Bolden, Ice Cube in Are We Done Yet?

I knew going in that Are...Read More

Two major columns -- Anne Thompson's in Variety and "Page Six" in the New York Post -- have stuck their necks out and actually acknowledged the Robert Rodriguez-Rose McGowan dalliance during the shooting of Planet Terror (i.e., the zombie feature constituting the first half of Grindhouse), in defiance of the myopic attitude exhibited by Entertainment Weekly's Chris Nashawaty and the L.A. Times' Paul Cullum in their coverage of the Weinstein Co. release.

"Everyone says the country isn't ready for a black president. I think that's ridiculous. Is he going to lose Illinois? Is he going to lose New York or California because he's black? No. And maybe he makes some inroads into other places, and maybe, for once, he could get young people to show up and vote." -- George Clooney talking about the '08 presidential election prospects of Sen. Barack Obama, as conveyed in an over-and-done-with (i.e., four days old) L.A. Times piece by Tina Daunt.

Clooney is right-on except for the part about Obama getting...Read More

I've been hearing about a low-cost, toilet-using broadband system being in the works since '02 or '03, and now it's finally here. And installing Google's TiSP is a "mostly sanitary" process. I meant to run this yesterday (obviously a more appropriate day than today) and I have no excuse.

The most exciting sounding film I've read about today, hands down, is Sydney Pollack's Recount, an HBO feature about the 2000 presidential election and how the George Bush forces managed to finagle things in their favor at the end of the day. With shooting beginning this spring or summer, it'll be a character-driven film about all the squabbling, spinning, vote-disqualifying and Supreme Court deliberating that eventually handed Bush the presidency despite Al Gore winning the popular vote.

(l.) Sydney Pollack; (r.) Danny Strong

Recount will probably be seen at the beginning of the '08...Read More

In the wake of Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise's descent into wackjob eccentricity and with Tom Hanks "no longer viable for most leading-man scripts," Newsweek is saying that Will Smith is become the biggest Big Hollywood Kahuna of them all, followed by Johnny Depp and Ben Stiller.

The ability to sell tickets to the shmoes is certainly exciting beyond measure. When I think of all that money, and all that power that Smith has in the palm of his hand, I just go limp in the knees.

Of course, Smith is a softballer from the word "go" and hasn't accelerated...Read More

Variety's Monica Corcoran considers the always-entertaining phenomenon of movie directors getting into scraps with anonymous online detractors. Specifically, helmers Mike Binder and George Hickenlooper jumping into Hollywood Elsewhere reader-response discussions (including some scattered dissings) of their respective films, Reign Over Me and Factory Girl.

"So it seems directors do, in fact, read their reviews," says Corcoran. "And given the chance to bite back, some would like an opportunity to personally defend their cinematic theses face to face. Just don't expect Internet posters to play along. After all, stripping web revelers of their masks would certainly leaden the dialogue and make cyberspace...Read More

Yes, absolutely, no argument whatsoever -- Robinson Devore's Zoo (ThinkFilm, 4.25) is, visually, a very lyrical piece of work. Sean Kirby's cinematography, especially when taking in the beautiful scenery in and around Enumclaw, Washington (i.e., the final home of a man who died from a perforated colon after having anal sex with a horse, which is what the film is more or less about), is undeniably captivating.

And here's N.Y. Times writer Dennis Lim and his editors paying a respectful tribute to the fact that the film's lyricism "is startlingly at odds with the sensational...Read More

Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse installment, a zombie movie called Planet Terror, "wins points on the basis of sheer accuracy for more exactly replicating the hollow, soul-sucking badness of many low-grade gore films," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "By contrast, Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof, a road-rage opus, so far exceeds almost anything made [in exploitation films of the late '60s and '70s] in terms of dialogue and performance that it seems like a different beast -- one half plotless gabfest, the other half insane car chase.

"The dialogue in Death Proof's first section, an Iceman Cometh-like segment with Kurt Russell dispensing smoothie chit-chat to...Read More

Late to the table, as usual (three days ago...good God!), but Paul Rudd and Michael Showalter reenacting the Lily Tomlin/David O. Russell Huckabees sceamfest is a lot funnier than I thought it would be.

"I'm not an industry insider like you, but I'll bet dollars to popcorn, Peter, that you...hear what I do from some of our most gifted filmmakers -- expressions of deep concern, if not downright despair, about Hollywood's growing hostility to creative enterprises that don't fit the entertainment conglomerates' increasingly rigid templates, and about the precarious plight of the independent film movement. If this is health, then spare us all from too much more of it." -- Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern to Variety editor Peter Bart about Bart's 3.15 column -- over two weeks ago! -- that claimed critics are out...Read More

The Tribune Company and the L.A. Times have been purchased by Sam Zell, a "flamboyant" Chicago real estate tycoon with zero newspaper-managing experience who "fancies Ducati motorcycles, leather jackets [and] playing paintball," according to an L.A. Times article by Thomas S. Mulligan and James Rainey.

Zell is a self-made billionaire, and -- judging from what I'm reading here -- a bit of a rube. In a 12.04 interview with the N.Y. Times, "Zell suggested that he did not have a high opinion of journalists," according to a 4,2 piece by Katherine Q. Seelye and Andrew Ross Sorkin. "I started out...Read More

I smirked...no, I chortled when I read this Ronald Bergan article in the Guardian six or seven days ago -- a piece that explained in some detail what a good film critic needs to have read and seen, and the terminology he/she generally needs to know. I actually found it sobering and slightly humorous. Bergan knows his stuff, and anyone looking to be a serious film critic should absolutely follow his lead. But you also have to swim in the waters as you find them.

Guardian essayist and scholarly film critic...

L.A. Times guy Paul Cullum has struck again with a Richard Gere interview piece about his portrayal of legendary con man Clifford Irving in Lasse Hallstrom's The Hoax. Gere is pretty good in the film -- it's one of his high-wire, high-energy performances, playing another great pretender -- but there's one small thing wrong that turns into a big thing the more you think about it, and it's the kind of thing Cullum would never mention in one of his kiss-ass profiles.

(l.) Richard Gere as Clifford Irving in The Hoax; Irving himself...

A nicely written interview-profile of Grindhouse star Rose McGowan, by L.A. Times staffer Paul Cullum. It's also a little bit chickenshit, truth be told, that Cullum failed to mention, however faintly or anecdotally, the on-set turmoil that resulted from Planet Terror director Robert Rodriguez's indiscretion with McGowan during shooting early last year, blah, blah. EW's Chris Nashawaty dodged this one also. Not that it's an important or worthwhile subject, but avoiding even a cushion-shot mention seems cowardly.

Werner, Werner, Werner Herzog all the way at the Film Forum, starting on May 18th.

Last Monday afternoon I did a brief phoner with the great Jeff Daniels while standing outside a neighborhood luncheonette on Madison and 81st. The idea was to pay tribute to his fine supporting performance in The Lookout, Scott Frank's midwestern bank-job drama. Daniels plays a guy named Lewis -- a lazy, bearded, low-rent, shoulder- shrugging, guitar-playing, middle-aged smartass -- with a dry, succinct wit that settles in and hits the spot. He's far and away the best thing in the film.

After last Tuesday's performance of Blackbird at the Manhattan Theatre Club -- Tuesday, 3.27.07, 9:20...

The American-moviegoer problem with Aishwarya Rai, the super-beautiful, violet-eyed Indian actress, is obviously of a xenophobic and shameful nature, but a problem nonetheless. I'm sorry to sound like a guy wiping windshields at a Baton Rouge car wash, but she has a three-syllable first name that's hard to hang onto and is somewhat difficult to pronounce.

Even after reading this Martyn Palmer article in the 3.30 London Times and practicing the pronunciation of her first name over and over, I still can't remember it. Quick -- turn your head away from the computer screen and...Read More

This may be an April Fool's joke, but Dark Horizons' Garth Franklin has reported (via Reuters) that Al Pacino is "being sought" to join Robert DeNiro in the Departed sequel, based on a script by the brilliant, bulky and bearded William Monaghan.

The film (I know this part isn't bullshit) has no choice but to focus on Mark Wahlberg's "Dignam" character because -- spoiler for people who live in caves! -- he's the biggest name who wasn't killed in the original.

The story revolves around big-time political corruption as the abrasive, motor-mouthed Wahlberg goes undercover to take down an...Read More

The weekend's #1 film and the absolute toast of America is Blades of Glory, which will end up with $33,433,000 by tonight. Meet The Robinsons is second with $25,7000,000...very respectable. And Zack Snyder's 300 came in third with $11,235,000.

TMNT is #4 with $9,001,000, down 63% (popular!) from last weekend. Wild Hogs Roasting On A Spit came in fifth at $8,320,000. Antoine Fuqua and Mark Wahlberg 's not-especially-great Shooter is sixth with $7,927,000, and the indisputably bad Premonition came in seventh with $5,121,000.

The Last Mimzy, down 60%, came in eighth with $3,967,000, just a notch ahead of The Hills...Read More