I can't find a stand-out money quote, but Peter Rainer's Bloomberg.com piece about Richard Dreyfuss is well phrased and fully felt. Four months from turning 60, Dreyfuss used to be an essential player who was sent all the best scripts early on. He deserves a lot better than what he's getting today. I'm sure he was glad to be hired to play a loaded gay guy in The Poseidon Adventure, but it felt to me like a minor insult.

For some unfathomable, better-left-unexplored reason I went to an L.A. Film Festival screening a few hours ago of a newly colorized version of 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), which will come out on DVD on 7.31.07. I came out with the bitter knowledge that I'd just pissed away 90 minutes of my time on this planet because I liked the movie when I was a kid (i.e., when I had no taste) and because I was curious how good or bad this newly colorized verison might be.

The colorizing, personally supervised by stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen...Read More

Whoa, whoa...the iPhone doesn't have a replacable battery? N.Y. Times "Talking Business " columnist Joe Nocera was jerked awake by the following passage in David Pogue's early-bird review of the device, to wit: "Apple says the [iPhone] battery starts to lose capacity after 300 to 400 charges. Eventually, you'll have to send the phone to Apple for battery replacement, much as you do now with an iPod, for a fee."

"That couldn't be, could it?," the mind-boggled Nocera asks. "Did Apple really expect people to mail their iPhones to Apple HQ and ...Read More

Two particular-interest quotes are contained in Michael Ceiply and Mark Landler's N.Y. Times piece (Saturday, 6.30) about the standoff/ contretemps between Tom Cruise and German military officials over their opposition to Cruise playing Col. Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, the German Army officer who led a plot to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944, in Bryan Singer's soon-to-shoot Valkyrie.

Quote #1 is from German journalist Josef Joffe: "Stauffenberg for Germans is like Jefferson and Lincoln, motherhood, and apple pie all rolled into one...Read More

Ratatouille, the weekend's #1 film, is projected to tally $48,406,000, having earned $16,075,000 on Friday. Yes, that makes it the softest Pixar opening since 1988's A Bug's Life, but that's to be expected with such a relatively exotic and sophisticated subject (the travails of a French rat who wants to be a chef). But it's going to show legs once people see it and talk it up.

Live Free or Die Hard did a little over $10 million last night -- figure $30.8 million for the weekend and a five-day cume of $45.8 milliion...Read More

"The studios are so dependent on pre-existing brands, they're not allowing anything new into the pipeline. They want to know what was the video game or what was the comic book. It's shortsighted. But what's being missed is the next generation of new stuff. Because nostalgia is creative death." -- Transformers producer Tom DeSanto, speaking to N.Y. Times reporter David Halbfinger.

Halbfinger mentions that DeSanto's partner, Don Murphy...Read More

Timothy Gray's potential-Oscar-nomination piece for Variety (dated 6.28) starts off by naming three Best Actress favorites -- Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose, Julie Christie in Away From Her and Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart.

I fear that number is going to be narrowed down to two. We all know when a picture dies a quick box-office death the high-calibre performances in it tend to droop in estimation, so as unfair as it may sound I wouldn't be surprised if Jolie (who gives her best performance ever as Heart...Read More

ABC-TV critic Joel Siegel has left the earth -- dead from cancer at 63. Tough break, sad news, nice guy (if a little too nice to too many movies), too soon. Condolences to friends, family, colleagues. The last time Siegel was on my radar screen was when he got into that snarl with Kevin Smith over Siegel walking out on Clerks 2. I could mention this and that but let's let it go for now.

I can't write about this until tomorrow, but the hype has turned out to be absolutely true -- Stephen Walker's Young@Heart is the reigning heart movie of the LA. Film Festival (and in both senses of the term, delivering both warmth and sadness) and will be a guaranteed winner when it goes out commercially.

And sooner or later, trust me, it will do that. If it comes out later this year, it's almost guaranteed to end up as one of the five nominees for Best Feature Documentary. I'm serious. It's not a "great" documentary, but it touches you big-time.Read More

I saw Michael Bay's Transformers (Dreamamount, 7.2) at 10 pm last night in that big spiffy theatre on the Paramount lot -- the one with really superb sound and projection quality that was built in '97 or thereabouts. Movies are always presented at their very best in this theatre. I was beaming start to finish as I watched a digitally-projected Zodiac there last March. So on a high-quality projection level at least, I was honestly looking forward to seeing Bay's latest, even if it is about Mustangs and boom-boxes and helicopters turning into giant robots.

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I've tried to play this brand-new Lions for Lambs trailer six times (it's currently an AOL Moviefone exclusive) and the hell with it. I have a perfectly functioning laptop with Windows XP and all the major media players and no time at all for trailers that don't play free and easy. I saw the green MPAA logo, a silent MGM lion and then nothing...and then I heard the lion and then Tom Cruise saying a line and then nothing. So I went back and tried to play it twice more and it failed both times.

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The waiting-in-line-at-the-Grove-to-pick-up- an-I-Phone-on-opening-day story turned out to be a dud. Not that many bodies, no shoving or pushing or raucousness of any kind, nobody shouting "open the doors!" Just 70 or 80 nice people sitting on the curb and on fold-up chairs, waiting patiently under the hot early-morning sun and...you know, quietly shooting the shit or reading or checking e-mails on their I-Books or soon-to-be-yesterday's-news handhelds

the genius of the crowd; window display; curb-sitters; black comfort shoes

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Roughly 75% of the the critics are supportive of John Dahl's You Kill Me, the dark and somewhat skewed Ben Kingsley- Tea Leoni comedy about a Buffalo-based hitman trying to recover from alcoholism during an attempted dry-out in San Francisco. I mean, 75-25 is a pretty good RT average.

Ben Kingsley, Tea Leoni

That's more or less how I feel myself, having found it mostly likable, amusing, agreeable...but with a few undeniable speed-bumps. And yet Kingsley is one of our absolute best...Read More

I meant to run Thursday's tracking summaries yesterday, but nothing had changed very much since my last report so I kind of lost interest. Ratatouille is assured of a commanding #1 status (never in question), but it's probably going to end up with a Sunday-night total of $50 million, give or take. In some quarters that will be seen as underperforming by Pixar standards. I was estimating Live Free or Die Hard...Read More

Frazzled cameraman: "How, come, Simon, whenever I'm with you, I put my life in danger?"

Zen-Minded Journalist: "Because putting your life in danger is actual living. The rest is television."

This is a line heard at the end of the trailer for Richard Shepard's The Hunting Party (Weinstein Co., 8.17), a thoughtful actioner previously known as Spring Break in Bosnia.

It's basically about three guys -- a TV journalist on the downswirl (Richard Gere), his smart-ass camera operator (Terrence Howard) and an upstart journalist whippersnapper (Jessie Eisenberg...Read More

"And now here is Heather Graham, who demurs when you ask her age even though simple math shows it to be 37, shivering in a too-cold hotel suite wearing a borrowed dress that shows her arm flab and Versace shoes that pinch her feet, and she's promoting an inert little movie called Gray Matters that will perform so poorly in the U.S. it won't even be seen in Canada until the end of June, and then only in a straight-to-video release." -- from a Toronto Globe and Mail profile by Simon Houpt.

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Richard Kelly has finally moved on from the somewhat disastrous Southland Tales chapter in his career by launching a new movie, The Box, a PG-13 horror film based on a Richard Matheson short story that became a Twilight Zone episode.

Kelly has written the screenplay. (An earlier report mentioned his having co-written it with Eli Roth). The $30 million flick, bankrolled by Media Rights Capital, will start shooting in the fall. Cameron Diaz will star as a thirty-ish wife with a greedy, opportunistic streak. (No word on the guy playing her husband.)

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You have to wade through six paragraphs of stalling before getting to the meat of Leo Lewis's first-anywhere-review of Harry Potter and The Order of The Pheonix (Warner Bros,., 7.11) in the London Times, but he finally gets around to calling it "a solid, occasionally spectacular set-piece that struggles unsuccessfully to give us thrills and fun we have not already had in previous installments."

In short, it's another big lumbering under-achieving tentpoler in a summer season that has seen two or three of these before...shocker!

Lewis also notes that Pheonix...Read More

It's nearly time to get out the notepad and start making a list of seemingly ambitious, seemingly high-pedigree dramas coming out in late September, October or early November that won't be showing at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival (or Venice or Telluride). The bizarre case of The Departed aside, it always means something when a low- or mid-budgeted fall drama ducks out of these three festivals. This was reflected in an article I wrote last fall about Running With Scissors called "The Old Toronto Sidestep." Ditto a piece about the festival-avoiding History Boys called "...

It's not being announced on the El Rey theatre's website, but Once costars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova will perform at that Wilshire Blvd. venue on Wednesday, August 1st. They'll also perform at an invite-only industry event at West L.A.'s Landmark on 7.31, and tape appearances with Craig Ferguson, Carson Daly and Jay Leno.

Here's the trailer for David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (Focus Features, 9.14), which will apparently play at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. The trailer tells you it's a Cronenberg fim, all right. Steely, ominous undercurrents running every which way. Focus Features is presumably screening it for long-leaders; I guess they'll get around to guys like me down the road.

Viggo Mortensen is Nikolai (i.e., "Nee-koh-lie"), a London mobster who gets into a head-turning, challenged- values situation when he crosses paths with Naomi Watts' Anna, an "innocent midwife" trying to "right a wrong", etc. The costars are ...Read More

Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn (MGM/UA, 7.4) is "seriously racist," argues Reeler columnist Lewis Beale in a persuasive and well-organized piece.

"The movie portrays nearly all of Christian Bale's Laotian captors and their North Vietnamese allies as subhuman, barely-civilized sadists who live to inflict torture and physical abuse. The paranoia and gaunt frames of the Americans (Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies) attest to their brutal treatment, which is no doubt based on reality. Nevertheless, sitting through Rescue Dawn is like watching a war movie made by the Ku Klux Klan.

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This is not a preemptive expression of disrespect, but yesterday's announcement about Ryan Gosling being cast in Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones produced an involuntary twitching sensation. (Not a literal twitch of the neck or facial muscles, but a faint internal shuddering by way of a psychological spasm.) Both of these guys are renowned for making sure that the movies they make/create are always about them before anyone or anything else, which suggests that a huge battle of the egos will commence when filming begins.

Jackson will insist on turning Alice Sebold...Read More

Indiewire's Brian Brooks is reporting that Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited will open the 45th New York Film Festival on Friday, 9.28. This is a totally expected announcement given Anderson's allegiance to the NYFF; Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums opened there in '98 and '01 respectively.

The piece also says that Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men will be the festival's centerpiece screening, and that4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days -- Cristian Mungiu's Roumanian "abortion movie" that won the Cannes Palme d'Or -- will also screen.

A good percentage of the movie-journo cool-cat brigade will have seen Paul Haggis's In The Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, 9.21) by Labor Day, but the odds suggest it'll be shown at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival (September 6th through 15th). It's an even safer bet that the investigative thriller-slash-broken-heart drama with Tommy Lee Jones, Charlize Theron and Susan Sarandon will play the Venice Film Festival. I don't know anything about a Telluride venue.

How to explain the fact that 300 has earned more than $200 million from an overwhelmingly male audience? Does iit mean that "20 million closet cases snuck off to see an illicit fantasy about bare-chested men in Hellenic Speedos," as Slate's Matt Feeney inquires, "or that young men from the vast heartland of this very conservative, Christian, pro-military country flocked to see an unabashedly heroic tale of Occidental, republican military glory?

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Slate's Christopher Beam on The Weinstein Company's decision to pay a Democratic "phone vendor" to contact a select group of potential moviegoers and encourage them to see Sicko, in the manner of a grass-roots political campaign.

"Yippee-Ki-Yay" -- spoken by Bruce Willis in the original Die Hard -- is not the greatest one-liner in action movie history, as Eric Lichtenfeld suggests in this Slate "Summer Movies" piece. In this context the word "greatest" would have to mean "most satisfying in a zingy, bull's-eye sense." Without question, the line that takes the cake in this respect is "Hasta la vista, baby" -- spoken by Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Last night's "Who Let The Blogs Out" poolside chat was okay, but it only really got going during the last 15 or 20 minutes. Moderator and Variety columnist Anne Thompson did a fine job, but I knew we weren't quite doing the expected thing when I saw an attractive 30-something couple get up and leave about 20 minutes in. "Uh-oh, we're dying," I told myself. My only consolation is that the walk-out couple was very attractive, and attractive people tend to be a little more vapid than others. (Ask Woody Allen.)

Would-be panelist Kevin Roderick of LA ObservedRead More

After the W hotel chat I ran over to the Sicko premiere screening at the Academy and...man, am I lucky! I was born with tough Anglo-German genes and I hardly ever get sick. God help me if it were otherwise, and God help all of us if the U.S. health care system isn't radically overhauled some day soon, meaning that the corporate slimeballs and politicians who are profiting wildly off the misery of many need to be exposed and tarred and run out of town.

Michael Moore during last night's Sicko after-party -- Tuesday, 6.26.07, 10:25 pm

Faced with an either-or situation, I chose to see Peter Berg's The Kingdom last Monday night and not Len Wiseman's Live Free or Die Hard, which I was invited to see at Westwod's Avco by Fox publicity. This was my only Die Hard shot, I was told, so I decided to shine the Avco and pay to see it at a commercial screening on Wednesday. (I'll probably be going to today's 4:15 pm show at the Grove.)

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Live Free or Die Hard "is an epic piece of shit," writes The Hot Button's David Poland. And yet "as stupid and incompetently made as Live Free of Die Hard is, I laughed a lot. It is so amazingly bad that it really is kind of good. It's agonizingly bad, and resultingly, a lot of fun." A few minutes after reading this, I spoke to a guy who's seen it (unlike myself) and he shrugged off the Poland-isms. "It's not that bad," he said. "It's just another dumb Die Hard...

"Few documentaries could be as different as March of the Penguins and Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a scary, fascinating documentary about gang life in Haiti's worst slum. If only due to the access achieved, there has never been anything quite like Asger Leth's film; it's amazing it even exists and that the director is still alive. Rough as can be in both content and style, Ghosts will be welcome everywhere tough, provocative docus are shown." -- from Todd McCarthy's 6.26.07 Variety review.

Does the appointment of Bob Gazzale as the American Film Institute's new president and CEO signify any kind of change? He'll replace Jean Firstenberg this coming November and....then what? Will he re-think the idea of coming up with new variations of AFI Best Lists in order to produce more AFI Awards TV shows (i.e., revenue streams)? Or he's just going to glad-hand and groove along and continue to let this once respected organization be seen more and more as a remnant of its former self, as something basically flabby and sleepy, as an organizational emblem of Hollywood's over-50 milquetoasts?

Tarsem Singh wishes he could get more people to watch The Fall, which might lead to a distribution deal down the road. I don't want to sound like more of a slacker than I already am, but I can't even make myself read this Patrick Goldstein column about Singh's situation, much less see the movie. It screened at last September's Toronto Film Festival, but it sounded a little airy-fairy and nobody grabbed me by the lapels and said "see it!," so I shined it.

Reminding for the last time about tonight's Film Independent Poolside Chat at the W Hotel at 7pm. Variety's Anne Thompson will moderate, and the guests will be L.A. Observed columnist Kevin Roderick, former Oscarwatch.com columnist Sasha Stone (her site is now called Awards Daily) and myself. Don't count on Perez Hilton showing -- he's in a very emotional place right now.

Nikki Finke and David Poland passed. I'm back on the bike at 8:05 pm in order to attend the Sicko premiere at the Academy, which technically starts at 8 pm.

In a press release about the forthcoming TCM documentary Spielberg on Spielberg (airing July 9th at 8 pm), George Lucas is quoted as follows: "Steven is the consummate filmmaker. He has an extraordinary ability to make brilliant movies -- brilliantly artistic, brilliantly entertaining, and brilliantly successful. Steven's genius is that he knows, innately, how to communicate through film. He is one of the few directors I know who can actually edit in his head while he is filming."

Here's HE's compassionate revision of this statement, which I've sent along to TCM publicists: "Before he compromised and then ...Read More

It's not exactly a bad time to push Mamie Gummer, but it's not the greatest time either. She's Meryl Streep's look-alike actress daughter who plays the younger 1950s version of her mom's character in Lajos Koltai's Evening, which opens Friday. There are just two problems. One is that Evening, a baahing little lamb of a movie, is being sent out this weekend into a forest filled with wolves. Another is that Gummer's obvious resemblance to her mom runs 100% counter to the idea behind Claire Danes portraying a young Vanessa Redgrave, since Danes looks nothing, nothing, Read More

Will Ferrell vs. Pearl, the confession machine. "She's what we call a loose cannon...we don't control her!"

There are four or five cretins in this photo giving adoring, you-go-girl smiles to Paris Hilton as she got out of the slammer. Blowups of their faces (especially the vapid-looking blonde with the big white teeth and the large African-American guy with the light brown leather jacket) need to be put online and posted on telephone poles and construction sites all over Los Angeles.

No question about it -- Ratatouille is going be the #1 film this coming weekend. It's tracking at 82, 36 and 13, which is very high for a family film. Tracking never picks up on the full b.o. gobsmack of animated fare.

Live Free or Die Hard (20th Century Fox, opening tomorrow) will perform impressively this weekend, but I'm betting that opening day will be the biggest of the five. The word-of-mouth will half-help and half-hurt, and so the Sunday-night total will be strong but short of historic. 89, 40 and 16...Read More

After doing an above-average job with a romantic lead role in Catch and Release, Timothy Olyphant is back wearing his evil-and-dangerous mask in Live Free or Die Hard. One-trick-pony villains embody the very essence of movie boredom, and Olyphant has always been a multi-colored performer -- a witty darkman with a touch of perversity, a clever kidder, an existential tightrope walker, an absurdist comedian.

I haven't seen every last Olyphant performance, but his drug-dealer character in Go...Read More

"To be honest, of all the things I had to consider making the movie -- the story, the characters, the actors -- the hardest thing for me was the action sequences. There's only so much left that you can do with action. I think we've done a good job, but I really had to rack my brains to try to think of something fresh." -- Live Free or Die Hard director Len Wiseman speaking to USA Today's Scott Bowles.

One tactic Wiseman decided upon, according to Bowles, was to quadruple up on the explosions...Read More

I wonder what the story is behind a deliberately perverse decision by Paramount Vantage marketers to describe Sean Penn's credits on Into The Wild (9.21) in a blatantly non-grammatical way? The one-sheet says "screenplay and directed by Sean Penn." Obviously it should either say "screenplay and direction by Sean Penn" or "written and directed by Sean Penn."

Penn's credit copy on Into The Wild one-sheet

Did Penn go ballistic and say, "I don't care about grammatical....this is how I want it"? Because he knew it would get attention in the way "The Birds...Read More

Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, a thriller about the real-life attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler, apparently won't be filming in Germany due to a German defense ministry ruling denying permission because of star-producer Tom Cruise's allegiance to Scientology. The Germans feel that Scientology is a con and not a legitimate religion (whatever that means), but it seems excessive to say "nein" to a major American film company trying to shoot in their country just because of Tom Nutjob. I mean, it's not like Singer is trying to shoot Battlefield Earth there.

Cruise is going to play ...Read More

New Yorker critic David Denby has called Lajos Koltai's Evening (Focus Features, 6.29) "one of the rare movies that are too sensitive for their own good." My sentiments exactly, I'm afraid, except for Denby's use of the word "rare." Movies that overdose on moist-eyed sensitivity are almost a genre unto themselves.

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Poor, addicted, self-destructive Tom Sizemore -- a walking car wreck in a town filed with drug-meltdown cases -- has been doing his level-best for years to erase his career and poison himself in the bargain. The simplest and cleanest procedure would be to kill himself, but it appears that Sizemore is into half measures. TMZ reported this morning he was sentenced to 16 months in the slammer (Donovan Correctional Facilty, near San Diego) for violating his probation in a 2004 methamphetamine conviction.

Two zippy quotes from Allison Hope Weiner's 6.25 N.Y. Times piece about Harvey Levin's TMZ. One is Levin himself saying that despite initial reservations about launching a celebrity website, "I started seeing that if you don't have time periods and publishing cycles, you can publish on demand and beat everybody." The other is a non-identified publicist equating Levin's power with that of columnist Walter Winchell in his 1940s heyday. "If you have something you know [TMZ] will like, you tip them to it," he says. "It's kind of the old way you dealt with the old-time gossip columnistsRead More

The single worst TV ad for a line of pseudo-hip '80s jackets by a celebrity pitchman ever made or aired. In fact, it ranks as one of the worst ads ever, for anything, in any medium. (I'm posting this because of Phil Leotardo's goombah nephew...figure it out.) Thanks to Mutiny Co.'s Jamie Stuart for passing this along.

This is hard to explain, but here goes: as much as I love the fact that slightly grubby sub-run theatres like Lyndon Golin's Regency Fairfax and the Silent Movie theatre a block or two south are doing pretty well, I never really feel like actually driving over and plunking down five or six bucks for a cheap seat at either establishment.

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"I couldn't let it just hang. Eight years of my life, and a fucking artsy cut to black? It was eating me up inside. I just had to tie up the loose ends. I'm positive this is exactly how [creator and executive producer] David Chase wanted fans to interpret the ending." -- Sopranos fan Louis Bowen explaining to an Onion staffer why he felt compelled to murder James Gandolfini last Tuesday at an Italian Greenwich Village restauant called Occhiuto's.

"Whatever else they may be, movies are stories people tell us; and a review is a conversation the critic has with both the filmmaker and the audience about the power and plausibility of the tale. No one has done as much as Roger Ebert...Read More

Shortly before Strangers on a Train was released, Farley Granger (i.e., Guy Haines) ran into Robert Walker (i.e., Bruno Antony) at a party in Hollywood. "He said, 'Farley, we have to get together...I miss you...We should not let the friendship slip away,'" Granger tells L.A. Times staffer Susan Granger. "I took his number and he took mine, and the next thing I knew he died."

On Wednesday, 6.27, Granger will be signing copies of his co-written autobiography, "Include Me Out: My Life From Goldwyn to Broadway" at the Santa Monica branch of ...Read More

At 64, Werner Herzog is our filmmaking god of dark adventure, a willful but adventuresome artist whose characters -- both in his features and documentaries -- test the boundaries of human madness and quixotic folly." -- from Patrick Goldstein's 6.24.07 L.A. Times profile, titled "Werner Herzog's Night Vision."

Arnold Jones, brother of the late Anderson Jones, informs that a memorial is being planned for Saturday, 6.30.07 at 1 pm at a small church all the way the fuck down in Long Beach (location yet to be disclosed). Flowers and condolences can be sent to Andy's parents, Anna and Arnold L. Jones, at 1471 E. Fairifield Ct. Ontario, CA 91761.

The Straight Time gang -- Dustin Hoffman, director Ulu Grosbard, Theresa Russell (looking pretty hot for having just turned 50), Harry Dean Stanton, cinematographer Owen Roizman -- took the stage last night at the Billy Wilder theatre, following a 6:30 pm screening of the 1978 noir classic.

(l. to. r.) Theresa Russell, Ulu Grosbard, Dustin Hoffman, Harry Dean Stanton and producer Tim Zinneman -- Saturday, 6.23.07, 8:55 pm; Grosbard, Hoffman, Stanton; best wide shot

L.A. Weekly...Read More

As expected, Evan Almighty was flat on Saturday. Sequels don't usually increase business from Friday to Saturday, and this one's coping with mixed word-of-mouth so the adjusted projection is now $32,112,000. 1408 was down also (horror peaks on Friday night with the young), but the projection went up -- it's now expected to hit just over $20 million. The John Cusack-er may even overtake Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer for the #2 slot...maybe.

"It's being run like a war. I mean, we're in a battle with these corporations who want to maintain their position. They don't want to give an inch on this, and we're out to upset the apple cart." -- Michael Moore quoted in Kevin Sack's 6.24 N.Y. Times piece about the Sicko director making a big media splash in Washington, D.C. in order to keep the health-care ball in the air.

A YouTube clip of the finale of the final Sopranos episode. I'm suddenly ambivalent about the bullet in the back of the head due to the last shot being a close-up of Tony from the front. If "Members Only" was about to pop him, why didn't Tony turn his head to the right just a split second before? Wouldn't he spot aggressive movement out of the corner of his right eye? This National Lampoon Scarface parody clip is pretty funny.

A friend suspects that Evan Almighty's numbers may drop today ("word of mouth isn't good, sequels always drop Friday to Saturday"), meaning it may not even do $33 million for the weekend. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer will end up in second place with almost $21 million, down 54% from last weekend. And 1408 is doing okay with a projected Sunday- night tally of $19,295,000.

Ocean's 13 will make $11,300,000 or the weekend, down 43%. (It'll just make $100 million, over and out.) Knocked Up...Read More

Right after this morning's 10 a.m. Ratatouille screening at the Arclight, I slipped into the theatre across the hall playing Evan Almighty. It's tanking in relation to expectations, but I wanted to see for myself how many bodies were inside. There were ten people in the seats -- a family of five, a couple, and three singles. Holy shit, I said to myself.

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Brad Bird's Ratatouille (Disney/Pixar, 6.29) is, in all ways but one, a sublime experience. Call it a gifted-underdog-fights- the-odds fable (it's about a French rat named Remy who manages to become the most admired chef in Paris) and a very entertaining souffle by way of inspired writing, delightful wit, great voice-acting and eyeball-popping digital animation. It's not a great film, but it satisfies and then some.

The visuals are so good and dazzling that Ratatouille delivers a perpetual throb sensation within your moviegoing heart. See it for any reason that comes to mind -- the reviews alone...Read More

"I went to a screening of Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn fighting off one of those desperately lonely, uncertain states we all find ourselves in at times. Two hours later, I came out of the theater flying, simply too in love with life to fret over some ground-level personal nonsense. Herzog's film about torture and starvation is the feel-good movie of the summer." --from Steven Boone's review on Matt Zoller Seitz's "House Next Door" site.

It's official -- Evan Almighty has tanked in relation to earlier box-office projections. It did around $11 million yesterday in 3600 theaters, and therefore won't take it much more than $33 or $34 million by Sunday night, which is significantly lower than the $40 million weekend projection that Universal and other handicappers were putting out a few days ago.

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Has Ratatouille snagged the Best Animated Feature Oscar before DreamWorks' and Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie (opening 11.2) even gets out of the gate? I'm seeing the rat movie an hour and 17 minutes from now at the Arclight, and the excitement levels are fairly high. The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Kilday says Ratatouille "isn't necessarily a shoo-in [at this stage], but by summer's end it's likely to have established itself as the animation front-runner."

"When other people in the junket rooms would just nod politely, do whatever was asked of them by the studio, and play ball (myself included), Andy Jones would speak up, occasionally get thrown out, but always manage to sneak back in.

"I still don't know what happened at the double-junket for Jeepers Creepers 2 and Cabin Fever, but after there was all this chatter going on with him finally being shown the door, he was at my roundtable fifteen minutes later asking his questions and going to town like nothing happened." -- from Mark Wheaton...Read More

"Relationships I thought were going to last didn't last. And to tell you the truth, the past five years, the older I get the shorter the relationships get, and now it's like a game of musical chairs. There's nobody left. It's sad." -- Unmarried psychologist Dave Mahony, 42, speaking to N.Y. Times writer Allen Salkin in a piece about middle-aged guys (some nudging 50) living in Fire Island house shares and cruising chicks and sipping Heineken from plastic cups at crowded parties. Mahony's observation is poignant and well-sculpted, like something John Guare...Read More

As of 6:15 pm today, the people running the E! website couldn't be bothered to post even a small-type mention of the passing of Andy Jones, a guy who worked and wailed for them pretty well in his heyday. He did a fair amount of on-camera work also. Jones had issues, okay, but he deserves at least a modest farewell piece. But I guess that wouldn't attract readers, huh? Really classy, guys. Hats off.

"Despite its $200 million-plus budget, the presence of Steve Carrel and an aggressive campaign aimed at Christians, it appears that this story of a modern day Noah will generate a weekend gross that is only in the $35 to $38 million range. I'm told that the three major tracking services have the movie at $35 million or $36 million, but one studio has the picture at $38 million and another says that it gets to $40 million tops. If this number holds, and keep in mind that it is a preliminary number, Evan Almighty...Read More

A handwriting analysis of Paris Hilton's pre-pubescent scrawl ...funny. Best snicker of the day.

There was once a serious notion, believe it or not, that milk-fed Jennifer Aniston might portray Marianne Pearl in A Mighty Heart. Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil considers this might-have-been scenario, and in the process persuades a certain bigmouth to comment as follows:

"Jennifer Aniston is not a bad actress, but she's not right for A Mighty Heart,. No casting director in their right mind would say, 'Let's try Aniston in the role.' For one thing, she's not right physically. She's not exotic like Angelina Jolie...Read More

Sicko director Michael Moore "has hardly been shy about sharing his political beliefs, but he has never before made a film that stated his bedrock ideological principles so clearly and accessibly," writes N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott.

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When I mentioned yesterday that the winner of the 2007 Best Picture Oscar will most likely be one of those Iraq War/Afghanistan movies (Charlie Wilson's War, Lions for Lambs, In The Valley of Elah), I didn't mention three others set in that troubled area. My reasons for excluding them are mostly sound. Peter Berg's The Kingdom is sounding more like an out-and-out thriller. Marc Forster's The Kite Runner may be a bit too smallish and exotic to be considered an early Oscar favorite. And Brian DePalma's Redacted...Read More

I missed my only shot at seeing Evan Almighty last Tuesday when I blew off the all-media at Mann's Chinese in order to see Danny Boyle's Sunshine, which does indeed fall apart during the final act. If I have nothing better to do this weekend and find myself in a plex where it's showing, I might pop in and watch it.

This would only happen under duress as I am fundamentally, philosophically, psychologically, ethically and religiously opposed to all big-studio, digital-fart tentpole movies...Read More

I heard this morning about the massive heart attack that poor Andy Jones, the colorful journalist, E! columnist and Film Stew contributor, suffered last night at Hollywood's Arclight plex during a press screening of A Mighty Heart. (Not funny, don't go there). And I spent three fruitless hours this morning trying and failing to get a reliable read on his condition -- people either didn't pick up or they dummied up or they didn't know anything.

Andy Jones

There's no solid confirmation of anything, but L.A. Fish Bowl reported at 11:50 am that Jones has passed away.Read More

The one press screening of Live Free or Die Hard (20th Century Fox, 6.27) will be the all-media on Monday, 6.25, at 7 pm. At the crummy, down-at-the-heels Avco in Westwood, no less. That conflicts with lots of other interesting opportunities (the LA Film Festival showings, of course, as well as a shot at seeing Peter Berg's hotly-anticipated The Kingdom) and I really don't know what to do. Maybe this LFODH review from the Montreal Film Journal will provide some guidance. Wait..."sub-par," "hardly distinctive," "bring back McTiernan"?

The winner of the 2007 Best Picture Oscar is most likely going to be one of those Iraq War/Afghanistan movies. The national anguish over Iraq and terrorism and the Middle East (specifically over the American lives lost and the billons of dollars invested so far in wars and skirmishes in these areas) demands it, and I suspect that the Academy will want to say something passionate about that general tempest during an election year. It'll be either Charlie Wilson's War (1980s Afghanistan) or Lions for Lambs (recent Afghanistan) or In The Valley of Elah (recent Iraq War).

I forgot to mention this last weekend, but before going to last Friday's somewhat disappointing 4K digital screening of Dr. Strangelove at West L.A.'s Landmark, I slipped into theatre #10 -- upstairs and on the smallish side but with perfect sightlines and luxurious seating -- and I noticed that Once was playing on the screen. But what got me wasn't the digital projection (which looked fantastic) as much as the sound.

The voices and the ambient sound was unusually clean and full. It didn't feel the least bit distorted or pushed. It's a little hard to understand some of OnceRead More

"It's a Darwinian grind, and there is a huge dose of attrition killing the most normal of [Hollywood's female producers and production executvies], as a superhuman kind of desire is necessary to deal with the hours, the lying, the incredible and increasing difficulty of putting a movie together.

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"With September and the rest of the fall now bursting with major Hollywood releases and Academy Award aspirants, the previously uncrowded terrain of summer no longer looks so hospitable for more serious movies. In the next five weeks alone Oscar hopefuls like A Mighty Heart and Evening, Sundance favorites like Joshua and Broken English, Cannes sensations like Sicko, Don Cheadle's star turn in Talk to Meand films directed by the likes of Steve Buscemi (Interview), Werner Herzog (Rescue Dawn), Danny Boyle (Sunshine) and Griffin Dunne (Fierce PeopleRead More

Tonight the L.A. Film Festival begins with a 7:30 pm screening of Kasi Lemmons' Talk To Me (Focus Features, 7.13.07), followed by an under-the-stars Westwood street party with everyone drinking, schmoozing and milling around.

Talk To Me is about the late Ralph Waldo "Petey" Green (Don Cheadle), a Washington, D.C. TV and radio talk show host who started out as a run-around, a drug addict and a prisoner in Lorton penitentiary. But he gradually made it into broadcasting and used his mike to speak out against poverty and racism in the late '60s, etc.

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The day after tomorrow Ulu Grosbard's Straight Time will have an LA Film Festival screening at the Billy Wilder theatre at 6:30 pm, and I've just been told Dustin Hoffman will definitely take part in the post-screening discussion with Grosbard and producer Gail Mutrux.

"When people speak lovingly of films from the 1970s, Straight Time is exactly what they are talking about -- loose, unpredictable and character-driven...Read More

In late '04 (two and a half years ago) Wes Anderson was the big-cheese auteur with his latest film, The Life Aquatic, about to open, and by anyone's yardstick a kind of imposing older-brother figure. Noah Baumbach, obviously, was the new kid on the block -- Anderson's up-and-coming screenwriting collaborator (on Aquatic) whose second film as a director-writer, The Squid and the Whale, was unseen and awaiting its debut at Sundance '05. And yet Anderson's film was soon regarded as a disappointment; three months later Baumbach's was seen as anything but.

Variety columnist Anne Thompson has put up a web-exclusive trailer for Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding (Paramount Vantage, 10.19.07). Obviously a smart, sharp dramedy about screwed-up relationships -- high on my list of want-to-sees and (I would guess) an almost certain '07 Toronto Film Festival attraction. Scott Rudin (naturally...this is home-turf material) is the producer.

Margot at the Wedding director-writer Noah Baumbach, star -wife Jennifer Jason Leigh

Hey, does anyone have a PDF script they can send me?

Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh...Read More

Variety is reporting that Perez Hilton's webhost, the Australia-based Crucial Paradigm, has dropped Perezhilton.com because of four lawsuits against Hilton pushed by eight photo agenices over Hilton's alleged theft of shots that have run on his site.

The Oz plug-pulling has left the gossip columnist's site temporarily on the ropes, running on "less than full power...a skeleton or temporary situation where he can still post [with] limited interactivity" with his archives missing, etc.

Hilton (i.e., Mario Lavandeira) posted a reaction earlier today, admitting to "feeling overwhelmed by our temporary technical difficulties...Read More

Forget the would-be significance of the American Film Institute's refreshed list of the most powerful/important/ legendary films of all time because none exists. The AFI has been whorishly shopping its once- distinguished brand on the tube for years with best-this and best-that presentations, and none of their efforts at self-promotion signifies a damn thing (except for their own diminishment).

That said, there's something strangely stubborn, even bizarre, about the members continuing to put Orson Welles' Citizen Kane...Read More

A reader I know who doesn't want his name mentioned saw James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma on 6.18. I'm running it mainly as a counterpoint to that recently posted AICN review that came out of the same research screening:

"I have to say that it was a very good film...Read More

These "Worst Scenes from the Worst Films Ever" clips went up two months ago -- proof positive that HE is one of the hottest quickdraw sites on the net. (The getting-eaten-by-a-super-shark scenes are the best...obviously.)

I spent most of this morning tapping out thoughts about that high-expectation prestige movie that I saw yesterday afternoon. I also did a phone interview with a real-life guy who's portrayed by a major actor in this film. I searched around online for everything I could find out, and I mulled and mulled and mulled.

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I went over to Book Soup last evening to talk with Variety critic Todd McCarthy about his new book, Fast Women: The Legendary Ladies fo Racing, which is about the world of pre-corporate American race-car competition in the 1950s and the women -- Denise McCluggage and Evelyn Mull receive the lion's share of McCarthy's attention -- who were a vibrant part of that scene. Here's an mp3 of our chat, which I had to finish quickly in order to see Danny Boyle's Sunshine on the Fox lot at 7:30 pm....yeesh.

A restored version of William Wyler's The Big Country, a liberal-minded western about the pointlessness of dumb machismo and turf wars (and perhaps even a metaphor about the mentality behind the Cold War of the 1950s), is playing at the Academy on Friday night at 7:30 pm. This is a photo-chemical restoration funded by the Motion Picture Academy and the Film Foundation, with the hard work and heavy lifting done entirely by AMPAS preservationist Josef Lindner.

Country was shot in 35mm Technirama...Read More

This is a textbook example of an "up" mood movie poster -- Samuel L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett bathed in caramel sunlight, Jackson reaching for God's grace, Hartnett and his kid smiling, etc. It's a poster that says, "If you see our movie, you will feel as if you've taken an emotional quaalude." No point in dissing this -- feel-good sells have worked before and will work again -- but Resurrecting The Champ is more measured and mature and matter-of-fact than this. It's not into pushing highs, which I'm saying as a statement of respect.

"I go to see the films because I like them. I like to be scared anyway. And I think you have a tendency to see things come in waves. If one thing is successful others follow in its wake. And the thing is, Hostel 2 is actually a better picture in every way. It's very clever and Eli Roth is a tremendous talent, and has a tremendous eye as a director. The material makes a lot of people uneasy; it makes me uneasy.

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