The raw sound of the gears grinding inside the cable car tracks on San Francisco's Powell Street

I went to a first-time-anywhere screening last night of Gary Leva's Fog City Mavericks -- a tribute to big-name Bay Area filmmakers (George Lucas, Carroll Ballard, Francis Coppola, Chris Columbus, Clint Eastwood, John Lasseter, Phil Kaufman, Walter Murch, Sofia Coppola, Saul Zaentz, Brad Bird) and how they all broke away from Hollywood roughly 30 or 40 years ago (or became regionally self-created) and became anti-establishment, quasi-bohemian regional filmmakers, and therefore an inspiration to all independent-minded filmmakers everywhere. Guys who followed their vision, made money, did it their own way, developed their own kwan.

USA Today's Scott Bowles has written a nice gentle softball profile of Spider-Man 3 director Sam Raimi -- the midwestern upbringing, how he was first bitten by the film bug, how he climbed up the ladder, how he suffered a career setback with The Quick and the Dead and Darkman, how he got his mojo back with A Simple Plan, how he always wears suits, etc. And not a word about his financial support for certain Dark Men, including George W. Bush. Like it doesn't matter. As if such things are peripheral.

MCN's David Poland has ripped into Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 with a fervor that I haven't picked up from one of his reviews since he thrashed Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle in '03.

"There is so much incredibly expensive CG action in this film that many will get through it, not really dislike it, but have a vaguely displeased gut feeling," Poland concludes. "I can't really say it is a horrible movie. But it is quite a mess -- a mess of good intentions gone terribly wrong.

"And it does, indeed, feel like t...Read More

I have to catch a jet back to Burbank...no more filing until the late afternoon.

"In the Electric Mist With the Confederate Dead," a cult novel written by James Lee Burke, has been adapted into a screenplay and is now being directed by the great Bertrand Tavernier -- his first English-language film since 'Round Midnight -- in Louisiana. The problem is that the movie is going to be called In The Electric Mist, which obviously doesn't get it.

We all know that eight words don't fit on a marquee but they should stick with the book title anyway because it sounds right. Chopping the title in half is a crude dumb-down procedure. Read More

The San Francisco Film Festival gave a forum yesterday to theatre director, opera-creator and impresario Peter Sellars to deliver a "State of Cinema" address inside a large theatre at the Kabuki 8 plex. Sellars is a man who lives in his own mystical-energy field and within his own ecclesiastical realm, but who sees and shares everything from within it. It was a stirring, touching, soul-lifting thing to sit in the fourth row and just absorb every brilliant thought, whether you agreed with every last word or not.

Peter Sellars

In yesterday's item about an Academy Oscar-buzz survey that will soon be received by Academy members, I said that the questionaire will ask where Academy members get their Oscar-race information and to what degree..."from the trades or online sites like this one (or Hollywood Wiretap, The Envelope, Nikki Finke, Movie City News) or Patrick Goldstein's column or David Carr or what-have-you?"

It was just a dash-off thing, but I failed to mention Sasha Stone's Oscar Watch.com...Read More

"I think we have a really hard time culturally with what happens to love after the first year," says Away From Her director Sarah Polley in N.Y. Times piece by Katrina Onstad. "It is difficult, and it is painful, and it is a letdown. [But] that first year is so much less profound than what happens when you're actually left with each other and yourself in an honest way. It was interesting to me to make a film about what love looked like after life had gotten in the way, and what remained."

The ballad of the sad arthouse -- i.e., the struggling and (for now) still-hanging-in-there Brattle Street theatre in Cambridge, as reported by the Toronto Star's Peter Howell.

Go the the N.Y. Post site and Reed Tucker's laundry-list piece about summer threequels -- neutral attitude, no opinion of any kind, and focusing almost entirely on the horse-race aspect (which will make the most money?) and ignoring the certainty that the only tolerable ones will be The Bourne Ultimatum and Ocean's Thirteen.

A letter has been sent out to Academy members telling them to expect a survey about their media-reading habits by way of the Oscar race. The survey won't be sent from the Academy but from a publication that the letter doesn't identify. A publicist friend who told me about this last night knows nothing concrete, but speculated that it's probably from one of the trades, or possibly from the Los Angeles Times.

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"'There has been much, much more demand from producers, distributors, directors -- from people in every branch of filmmaking,' a festvial staffer told Variety's Alison James a few days ago. 'Everyone wants to come to Cannes this year.' Journos, however, report a bigger struggle to get that all-important press badge this year. "They are being much more finicky about what publication you write for, how big its circulation is and how many articles you are intending to write," a freelancer told James.

I'm still way behind on the video-editing tutorials, but I feel confident enough to announce that I'm going to start posting short little video reports on Hollywood Elsewhere in a week or so, and certainly by the start of the Cannes Film Festival.

I'll probably run two versions of each report -- one in an MPEG4 format and the other in Flash. No pop-fizz editing, no narration, no music cues...nothing slick. Austere, spartan. Almost no hand-held stuff, 90% tripod-mounted. Visual infuences: Stanley Kubrick (I've got a little wide-angle lens that makes everything look Clockwork Orange-y), Sergei Eisenstein, ...Read More

In 1997, a guy named Michael Regalia bought a 1963 Ferrari Luosso that Steve McQueen used as an "everyday run-around car," and spent 4,000 hours restoring it to its original condition. Christie's is auctioning the car, which is expected be bought for at least $750,000. And Newsweek and other outlets (mine included) are helping Regalia and Christie's in this effort.

Everybody's pitching in, you see, because McQueen is a mythical figure of '60s machismo and because driving this car around will bestow an aura of instant legendary cool upon the purchaser. We're talking major babe magnet...Read More

Eddie Murphy is continuing on his glorious career-recovery path by covering himself in the terra firma of kiddie movies. Last year at this time he was thought to have made a turn in the road and was on his way back to true career vitalty with his said-to-be-triumphant performance in Dreamgirls leading the charge. Then he bolted out of the Kodak auditorium when he didn't win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar...nothing but class.

I forgot to run this audio clip of Marlon Brando's "cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" speech speech from Julius Caesar, which is naturally brought up in the two-part, four-hour Turner Classic Movies documentary on Brando that will air on May 1st and 2nd. I'm still calling it a relatively candid, nicely sculpted, entirely respectable portrait of the single most influential actor of the 20th Century, and probably also the greatest.

David and Edie Ichioka's Murch, a wonderfully engaging doc about one of the most renowned and respected film and sound editors of our time, played at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last night, and I'm really glad I took the time.

Walter Murch after last night's q & a at SFMOMA -- 4.27.07, 10:57 pm

The smooth and avuncular Walter Murch, 64, is commonly regarded as the Yoda of film and sound editors...Read More

For the third weekend straight, Disturbia was #1 -- $9,248,000, off 29% and a $52,323,000 cume. Invisible was #2 with $7,975,000 and $3900 a print. Next, the Nic Cage film, was #3 with $6,908,000 and $2783 a print. Fourth-place Fracture did $6,804,000, off 36%...hang in there, Ryan and Tony! Blades of Glory did $5,210,000 for a fifth-place showing, and Meet the Robinsons was close on its heels with $4,892,000. Hot Fuzz, #7, expanded slightly and took in $4579, off 22%. Eighth-place Vacancy did $4,193,000, off 45%. Condemned...Read More

I'm told that Children of Men dp Emmanuel Lubezki (a.k.a. "Chivo") will be shooting the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading, which is one of the two films Joel and Ethan are making for Focus Features. The Coens and Lubezki "won't be using many storyboards as it will be done in a handheld verite-style," my source confides.

George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand...Read More

True story: I was sitting earlier today in the fairly famous Caffe Trieste, an espresso-cappucino joint on the border between North Beach and Telegraph Hill, when who walks in but Owen Wilson and Kate Hudson. I've written once or twice about how Owen and I used to talk with some degree of relaxation and trust in the mid to late '90s and how he stopped picking up the phone when he got big, but that was six or seven years ago. Move on, shake it off, be here now.

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New Line has signed Queen Latifah to either play Steve Martin's or Lily Tomlin's role in a remake of All of Me. I'm presuming that my first reaction upon reading this in yesterday's Variety -- a mixture of revulsion and horror -- is being echoed all across America and on all the ships at sea.

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The Reeler (a.k.a. Stu Van Airsdale) reported early this morning that Angelina Jolie was likely to screen her documentary A Moment in the World at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center "around 4 or 5 p.m." Who gives a shit, right? As I write this it's 3 pm in New York City, and you know wild-dog papparazzi are almost certainly congretating at TPAC as we speak. News at 11...

Nicole Kidman is intending to produce and most likely star in a remake of How to Marry a Millionaire, with Sacha Gervasi (The Terminal) delivering the screenplay. The 1953 original costarred Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable as three plucky gold-diggers. Great, except Kidman has gotten too old to play a woman looking for a rich guy to support her, and there's no way she can play, say, Bacall's role without seeming distasteful.

Kidman will be hitting 40...Read More

Today's LX.TV Tribeca Film Festival webcast includes footage of the red-carpet premiere of Brando plus interviews with Patricia Clarkson and John Turturro as well as clips from the TCM movie featuring Al Pacino and Ed Norton. A festival doc called Hellfighters is also profiled by former sportscaster Jon Frankel.

Frank Langella, who's been getting great reviews for his performance as Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, the Peter Morgan play that just opened in Manhattan, scored a major coup by snagging the Nixon role in Ron Howard's movie version, which will start shooting in August and come out in the fall of '08. Howard wanted Warren Beatty as Nixon but apparently Beatty managed to somehow persuade Howard and partner-producer Brian Grazer to reconsider. (I could speculate but I won't.)

London's Daily Mail went with this story also, and Variety...Read More

Quentin Tarantino has told the Telegraph's John Hiscock that his stand-alone Death Proof, which will show at the Cannes Film Festival and then commercially in Europe, will run 30 minutes longer than the 85-minute version that was included in Grindhouse, the three-hour, ode-to-exploitation double feature that became a devastating financial fizzle for the Weinstein Co. a few weeks ago.

Somewhere along the way I absorbed the idea that the longer Death Proof...Read More

Jack Valenti, the consummate Hollywood politician and chief of the Motion Picture Assn. of America for 38 years, died this afternoon. The news broke right while I was flying from Burbank to Oakalnd, hence the late posting. The head of the Motion Picture Association of American for 38 years, Valenti was a brilliant operator, a wise wordsmith and an elegant man. Oh, and a great raconteur.

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Radar's Jessica Grose asked me and two other big-mouths -- Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel and Colin Covert of the Minneapolis Star Tribune -- to comment on three new TV ads directed by big-name directors. (Note: Radar told me to view and assess three ads, and if they've chosen to only post reactions to one or two of them, that's their doing.)

A $50 million deposit into Tom Hanks' I.R.A. account to star in Angels and Demons? The reported fee is actually $35 million plus a potential $15 million in back-end revenue. You be the judge.

I'm heading up to the San Francisco Film Festival in a couple of hours. I probably won't be back into things until 5 or 6 pm. There's a big opening night hoo-hah that I'll probably try to attend.

The late Dan Cracchiolo, the hot shot get-around who worked as Joel Silver's top guy in the mid to late '90s and a little beyond, once told me about a conversation he and Silver had about the size of the craniums of big movie stars. He said that Silver told him, "Dan, all big stars have really big heads." Physically, he meant.

I've spoken to a fair number of big-name actors and can testify that this is frequently the case. Mel Gibson has a big head; ditto Kirk Douglas and Kevin Costner...Read More

Israeli critics and their editors are being bullied and strong-armed by the two biggest Israeli film distributors, Matalon and Forum Film, and Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke is trying to get others riled up about it. In response to this, Tel Aviv Time Out's senior critic and film editor Yael Shuv has written to lend his voice to the protest.

Why don't these stories tell us what we want to know, and let us see what we want to see? Britain's Daily Snack reported last night that Hugh Grant has been arrested for assault "after allegedly hurling a container of baked beans" at photographer Ian Whittaker yesterday morning (i.e., Tuesday) somewhere in west London.

What I want to know is, did Grant hit Whittaker with the beans in the head or the chest or where? Did the take-away container splatter all over the place and cover Whittaker's face in brownish-red sauce and gooey-drippy beans?

And where's the photograph...Read More

LX.TV is the media sponsor for the Tribeca Film Festival, and they're sending along videos of the day-to-day action. Today's video includes a clip of Al Gore, an interview with Paul Haggis, and red-carpet footage of the opening night party.

Ten minutes into watching Stephanie Daley, I was experiencing that "okay, don't worry, this is going to be very good" realization. But I was also feeling slightly on-edge because I wanted this moody, expertly realized drama to stay on-track and build and dig in and deepen and so on. And it did that. And the performances were killer. And then came the ending, which, to me, felt a little too ambiguous and a touch sudden, as in "wait...that's it?"

Endings are very, very important -- you could argue that they're almost the whole ball game -- but Stephanie Daley...Read More

There was some talk a while back about Sean Penn's Into The Wild (Paramount Vantage, 9.21.07), an adaptation of Jon Krakauer's book about a young guy who tried to live like Jeremiah Johnson in the Alaskan wilderness but was found dead inside a bus four months later, possibly turning up at the Cannes Film Festival.

the real Chris McCandless

That may have been a slight possibility (Wild...Read More

The American Pavilion -- the big white schmooze tent on the beach at the Cannes Film Festival -- has been re-christened as AmPav to discourage notions that it's only for Yanks. "More than 40% of our membership is made up of journalists and industry professionals from countries other than the U.S.," founder Julie Sisk has proclaimed. And something else has changed. Last year it cost $25 bucks to buy an advance entry into this well-run establishment -- this year it's been doubled to $50 in advance and $100 on-site. It's still worth it but whoa.

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...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?

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"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

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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.

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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.

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 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.

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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 husband Craig HatkoffRead 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 Times...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 all...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...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 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.

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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 Anne Thompson...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.

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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...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...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 HurtRead 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.

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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...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...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

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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...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...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...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 ...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.'

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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...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...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 of the system.'"

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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...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'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 KaelRead 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 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...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...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?

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.

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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.

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