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...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 wait for the company...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. Germany is a country of established churches, and so Scientology is viewed as a...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 -- hjgher than expected.

Evan Almighty will do...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, is "widely reviled by executives at Paramount and DreamWorks for allowing his personal website (donmurphy.net) to be used by Transformers fans to attack the two studios, and the movie’s...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's Marianne Pearl) falls off the list by Labor Day.

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...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.

So...Read More

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.

Gut reactions from the priveleged who...Read More

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

A couple of TV news guys and two or three Apple flunkies were standing around outside...Read More

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 -- he seems incapable of delivering a line or an emotion that...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 to earn a weekend figure in the mid 20s and the high 30s for the five days. Sicko will do pretty well ($10 million, perhaps a touch higher), but it...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) -- who embark on an impulsive,...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.

Arm flab? The disdain...Read More

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.)

A site called Upcoming Horror Movies,...Read More

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 "is far crueler than its predecessors and begins to...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 "Art of the Dodge."

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 Armin Muehler Stahl and Vincent Cassell (playing...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.

"Not that I'm surprised by...Read More

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's best-selling novel into a movie about his miraculous directorial...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?

"To believe the latter, all you have to accept is that, in imagining the sort of heroic figures they themselves would like to be, straight men would project onto them...Read More

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 Observed copped out...Read 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.)

What follows may sound insubstantial or overly inside-baseball or anecdotal to some, but it's a weird snapshot that gives you a taste of what...Read More

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 movie. It's has some good scenes, some material that works."

"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 totally muddied up his once-hallowed reputation...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, nothing like Redgrave when she was in...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 means $25 to $30 million for the weekend, maybe...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 is, to my mind, still the best thing he's ever done. He's been fine in a lot of things since (I liked his work...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. "Just about...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 is coming" got...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 Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the man...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.

I'm not speaking of chick flicks precisely, but...well, yeah, I mostly am. Episodic chick flicks about suffering that isn't alleviated until the characters have gotten old or died in some sudden or painful way, or variations of same written by gay guys, or super-sensitive-couples-in-trouble...Read More

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 columnists...you have to occasionally...Read 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.

That sounds shitty and unhelpful, but most of us are fairly passionate about seeing movies only at deluxe, blue-chip locations or at home on DVD, and no in-betweens. Call them high-thread-count venues....I don't care...but I just don't want to...Read More

"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 to connect the creators of movies with their consumers. He has immense power, and he's used it for good, as an apostle of cinema. Reading his work, or listening to him parse the shots of some notable film, the movie lover is also engaged with an alert mind constantly discovering things -- discovering them to share them." --from a...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 Every Picture Tells a Story (at 1311 Montana)...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 critic Scott Foundas asked the questions, but he didn't have to work very hard at keeping the...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 will do $10,532,000 this weekend, off 25%, for a total of $108 million. Pirates 3...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.

I went out and asked a female usher, "If a film is doing pretty well on its opening weekend, how many people usually show up for the first show of the day on Saturday?" The 11 am show,...Read More

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...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.

Every big-timer who contributed to this film in some significant way needs to drive out to the desert and hide out for a week or two. I would if I were in their shoes. I'd be packing my stuff right friggin' now,...Read More

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's farewell...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 might have written for a play about older guys whose...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 will have a hard time getting to $100 million...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 and she can't pull off that French/ Italian/ north African accent. Putting Aniston in A Mighty...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.

"His earlier films have been morality tales, populated by victims and villains, with himself as the dogged go-between, nodding in sympathy with the downtrodden and then marching off to beard the bad guys in their dens of power and privilege. This method can pay off in prankish comedy or emotional intensity -- like any showman, Mr. Moore wants you to laugh and cry -- but it...Read More

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 looks...wow, interesting as hell. But the day-and-date release scheme places it in...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 that cost over $100 million to make and always get the suckers on opening weekend, no matter how good...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...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...Read 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.

"[Not to mention] the apparently singularly difficult proposition of having both a life (and even sex) along with a big career. So the frequent bonding conversation among some of the best of the singles is that in the 'glamour capital of the world,' they're getting the short end of the stick." -- from a beautifully...Read More

"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 People) will jockey for position with sleeper summer hits like Waitress and Once, not to mention the...Read 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.

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," the LAFF notes observe. "Featuring a truly revelatory performance by Dustin Hoffman, the film follows a convict newly released from prison as he tries to adjust to life on the square....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.

Jason Schwartzman, Owen Wilson and Adrien Brody...

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 play sisters, with the basic story being about Leigh's concerns and...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 and other roadblocks" and claiming that going...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 in the #1 position. I'm saying this because of a general understanding that kicked in around eight or ten years ago that the industry's long-established...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 but nowhere near great or classic," he begins. "There's nothing remotely wrong with it -- the story is solid, the performances were really good, but I was just expecting a little bit more. The whole movie seems to be building up to the end so a lot of the scenes in...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.

It's too early to pull the trigger, but I'm going to be a coy tease and say at least this, which is that yesterday afternoon's film is absolutely one of the '07 Big Ones -- a movie that will definitely be on the top of the list...Read More

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.

Todd McCarthy, author of Fast Women:...

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, which was an 8-perf process in which the negative went through the gate...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.

"There's another side of that too. The gore obscures, particularly in the minds of critics, some of the reasons why...Read More

Film Independent and the Los Angeles Film Festival is staging a poolside chat at Westwood's W hotel next Tuesday night (6.26) from 7 to 8 pm called "Who Let The Blogs Out?" Possibly to be hosted by Variety columnist Anne Thompson and definitely to be attended by yours truly, the topic will be "the on-line merging of celebrity, industry news, and popular culture, and the rise of the blogger as the arbiter of information in modern day Los Angeles."

There's no telling if Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke, Kevin Roderick, MCN's David...Read More

Okay, I'll roll with the $40 million weekend projection for Evan Almighty, but I say again it hasn't been tracking all that fantabulously. By this I mean pretty well, but not necessarily big enough to indicate a slight or decent profit. Not for a movie that cost over $200 million and is costing the usual-usual to market.

Okay, the numbers have been climbing somewhat this week, and if those Christian families show up...aaah, leave it alone. Evan Almighty is the big media beat-up movie of the moment, but its first-weekend fate is in God's hands now. I know it'll fall big-time when...Read More

This is the end of the once-respected Marc Forster -- a total capitulation of a man who showed he knew how to make emotionally sensitive material play on-screen in Monster's Ball, but whose instincts have been off ever since, especially in the woefully sloppy Stranger Than Fiction. (His direction of Finding Neverland was the first serious indication of trouble), And now, finally, comes the final dropping of the pants with this Variety story announcing that Forster will direct the 22nd James Bond film.

Michael Moore piracy quote #1: "I'm glad that illegal downloaders] were able to see my movie. I'm not a big believer in our copyright laws. I think they're way too restrictive.

"I just read Don DeLillo's book ‘Falling Man', a wonderful book. If I were suddenly to take this out of my bag and say to you, ‘Hey, you should read this, it's great' would I be breaking the law? No. I'd be sharing something with you. I'm sharing a work of art with you, and what happens is that if you like that book, there's a very good chance you might...Read More

Michael Moore piracy quote #2: "Every filmmaker intends for his film to be seen on the big screen. [The mass pirating of Sicko] wasn't a guy taking a video camera into a theater. This was an inside job, a copy made from a high-quality master and could potentially impact the opening weekend box-office. Who do you think benefits from that?" -- from a Hollywood Reporter article by Gregg Goldstein.

Nikki Finke is reporting that Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese will team on a Paramount film called The Winter of Frankie Machine, based on Don Winslow's book about a retired hit man, although the title will be shortened, she says, to just Frankie Machine. The story's about an aging hit man (De Niro) who's hounded out of a respectable retirement as the target of a hit himself.

I really can't stand the idea of watching another movie about another hit man. I'm hit-manned out, although this one sounds more like a meditation on old...Read More

Jett and I were at a Carl's, Jr. around 1:15 pm today, and there were about 25 or more Latino kids there, and every last one was either bulky, chunky, over-fed or fat. I was watching a Braves-Red Sox game yesterday on ESPN, and I was struck by two Atlanta pitchers -- one who was relieved in the ninth inning, and the guy who relieved him -- who were both pretty big...barrel-chested, round faces, Babe Ruth-ish. Earlier this month Jett and I stayed for two nights at a youth hostel in Positano, Italy, and I noticed several zaftig American college-age girls...female Seth Rogen's...Read More

Seeing three movies today -- John Dahl's You Kill Me at 11 am, a high-expectation fall release drama at 2 pm, and Danny Boyle's Sunshine at 7:30 pm -- so I'll be out of commission for a while. I'll try and post some stuff in the late afternoon.

I remain a loyal Obama supporter, but this Sopranos finale spoof is the best thing Hilary Clinton has done for herself and her campaign since she announced her candidacy.

And it was done so quickly...my God! It costars Bill Clinton ("No onion rings?...my money's on Smashmouth") and the Sopranos' "Johnny Sack", it alludes to Chelsea Clinton parallel parking her car outside, and it has a lot of the same shots and some of the same rhythm.

The spot was shot to announce that Hilary's official campaign song is Celine Dion's "You and I." I am constitutionally opposed to...Read More

A friend has seen Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone (Miramax, 10.17.07), a Boston-based crime drama about the search for a missing four-year-old girl by a pair of private detectives, played by Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan. And he's telling me it's a break-out performance for Casey, which makes the early fall an especially flush time when you add the younger Affleck's reportedly exceptional turn in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which Warner Bros. is bringing out in September.

Gone Baby Gone is based on Dennis Lahane's novel (one of...Read More

The saga of George Hickenlooper's Factory Girl will be reshuffled once again with a third version set for release on July 17th. The cliche would be to call the film's arduous shape-shifting "a long strange trip," but it really has been that.

I was lucky enough to see the first version -- '60s Andy Warhol-ish, instinctual and somewhat raw, downtownish -- last summer, and I raved about it soon after, and particularly about Sienna Miller's tragically fluttery performance as Edie Sedgwick. Then I saw the second version -- Harvey-ized, newly shot footage, Santa...Read More

"Ratatouille is not only the best animated film of this year and the best animated film to land in American theaters since Spirited Away, it is the best work of Brad Bird's already legendary career, and the best American film of 2007 to date. If that is not enough, there are only a couple of films due this summer that have any hope of matching this film for quality."

If the previous words were written by anyone but David Poland, I would be even more jazzed about Ratatouille (Disney, 6.29). But unfortunately they were in fact written by the man who couldn't...Read More

Movie City News is saying that Google "seems to be policing the full, uncut, single-file versions of Sicko posted to their video sharing system, removing not only the one that was up all weekend, but another couple of new ones that cropped up this morning." Okay, but what possible difference does that make when you type in "Sicko download" on Google's search engine (as I just did ten minutes ago) and nine -- count' em, nine -- sites come up offering free Sicko downloads?

Obviously pirates are pirates are pirates, but I'm also starting to consider a couple of scenarios:...Read More

Three links -- a visual shot-by-shot analysis, an in-depth analysis on Gawker and another one from Bob Harris -- that make a very strong (damn near unchallengable) case that Tony Soprano sleeps with the fishes. The guy with the Members Only jacket (curly haired, cold-eyed ...looked a little bit like a young Phil Leotardo) came out of the bathroom and put a bullet into Tony's right temple.

Tony Soprano's killer takes a second look before heading for the john

Torture porn and the general gross-out horror flicks are running out of steam, but does that mean people are cool to any kind of scary movie, even an upscale, quality-level gothic horror flick like 1408? It's tracking at 56 general awareness, 30 definite interest and 9 first choice -- not bad but not a volcano either. The definitely-not-interested percentage is 12, which obviously indicates a turn-off element.

Paramount Vantage's A Mighty Heart is only at 44, 22 and 6. There seems to be a feeling out there that people aren't interested in anything Middle East-y or 9.11-ish. (Damn milquetoasts, ostriches, too-sooners.) This...Read More

Five films opening this weekend (6.22 to 6.24) are, quality-wise, exceptional. It's almost irritating that they're bunched into a single weekend because one or more is sure to suffer from the competition, especially given the wrist-slitting likelihood that Tom Shadyac's allegedly lame-o Evan Almighty (Universal, 6.22) is going to get the crowds and make the most money.

I've seen three of the five goodies opening this weekend -- Mikael Hafstrom's 1408, Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart and Zoe Cassevetes' Broken English. (Click on titles for links to HE reactions.)

I can't say anything definitive (let alone personal) about...Read More

The Sicko pirating is spreading further...good God. Last week stolen Sicko's were being offered on priatebay.org and BitTorrent.com. (The pirate monikers were reported by Newsweek in this week's issue.) And now the Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein informs that viewers "could find it easily on YouTube this weekend."

The 124 minute health-care doc (Weinstein/Lionsgate, 6.29) was "posted by at least two users in 14 consecutive video chunks," with one version receving "500 to 600 views per segment, with one of the first segments garnering nearly 1,700 views" and "another version uploaded Saturday garnering 200-300 views per segment, with the first 10...Read More

"Official estimates as to how many children Angelina Jolie now possesses, and from how many continents, change on a weekly basis. When not giving birth herself, she likes to order in. How this has affected Brad Pitt is unclear, but his expression is sometimes that of a man who stepped out to hail a cab and got run over by a fleet of trucks." -- from Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of A Mighty Heart.

"Experts say that the more permissive attitude of high-end residential rehab programs is primarily a reflection of the demands of a new generation of affluent addicts, more pampered and less inclined to endure the tough-minded approach of the past. There is also a recognition that four decades or so of the A.A.-based approach have produced only the slimmest evidence of success." -- from Sharon Waxman's N.Y. Times piece about cushy rehab facilities and their dicey efectiveness.

If you're addicted to something and you're 90% committed to getting rid of it (no one is 100% committed to this -- there's always that...Read More

Variety's Anne Thompson led a discussion yesterday at the Seattle Film Festival about the migration of film criticism to the web, but she hadn't included a report on her blog as of 2:20 pm Pacific. Amazon.com essayist Tim Appelo also took part. I asked Appelo to send me a recording of the discussion, but he wrote me today to inform that "the recorder died so there's no record of the event."

Appelo had asked me to tap out a thought or two about the topic at hand, which I sent to him yesterday morning. He says he read it "to the...Read More

Here's a trailer for James Mangold's 3:10 to Yuma, the Russell Crowe-Christian Bale western.that's said to be very solid in a back-to-basics, character-driven sort of way. Lionsgate is tentatively planning to release it on October 5. That will make it the first Crowe pic of the season, the other being Ridley Scott's American Gangster, due to open on 11.2.07.

Mangold is a first-rate director. If anyone can re-resuscitate the western....well, it may be un-resuscitable as a genre but I've been told that Yuma is extremely sturdy and well-crafted.

My only problem, looking at the trailer,...Read More

Mel Brooks, 80, is alive and well, but he's dead wrong to have told Cloris Leachman, 81, that she's too old to play "Frau Blucher" in the Broadway stage musical version of Young Frankenstein, which will open next November.

Cloris Leachman now (r.); as Frau Blucher (l.)

Brooks' spokesperson said in a statement that Leachman "was a very funny and game Frau Blucher in our reading, but in the end producers thought the physical demands of doing eight performances a week were too much to ask of her." Brooks would do well to show...Read More

Congratulations to Deadline Hollywood Daily's Nikki Finke for being named "Entertainment Journalist of the Year" last night at an L.A. Press Club awards event at L.A.'s Biltmore hotel. The award was technically for Finke's L.A. Weekly column, but how could they not take her blog into account?

"Finke's salaciously candid coverage of Hollywood and its inhabitants almost feels like a guilty pleasure," the judges said. "She mixes the news with fearless finger-wagging that's just fun to read no matter the subject. She tackles the industry monoliths without the kiddy gloves and she seems to have command of the beat."...Read More

Painted Veil director John Curran says he greatly admires and was deeply influenced when young by Mike Nichols' Catch 22. I admire it also (mainly for the elaborate and carefully planned choreography that went into the cinematography, and for Richard Sylbert's production design) but with reservations -- reservations that are not minor in nature.

For Curran to ignore the problems with Catch 22 in a piece like this is...well, curious. At the very least he's guilty of tunnel vision. Nichols himself has had problems with this film all his life, and he admits to most of them in his Read More

A fairly interesting, nicely written interview with onetime soft-porn star Sylvia Kristel by the Telegraph's Mick Brown. Kristel spoke to Brown in order to publicize her tell-all book called "Undressing Emmanuelle" (which I couldn't find on Amazon).

"There's no precious preciousness to it. I like getting involved [and saying] I'll take care of it.' It comes from independent film. I got used to it -- there's tape on the floor, you pick it up. It's just an awareness you have, like peripheral vision when you're rollerblading in traffic. It comes from being on a lot of sets." -- Broken English star Parker Posey speaking to L.A. Times reporter Mark Olsen.

I'm sorry, but that digitally projected 4K version of Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb that's now showing at West L.A.'s Landmark is nothing special. And it's not just me. My son Jett, who's seen this 1963 Stanley Kubrick film three or four times on DVD on my 36" flat screen, called the digital projection a "disappointment."

The image I saw last night didn't deliver anything close to a top-of-the-mountain black-and-white experience. There was none of that shimmering-glimmering silvery quality of yore, and the blacks were moderate rather than super-rich. I noticed some subtle...Read More

A Fox employee has a slight beef with his employer and no love at all for Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, but he's mainly differing with Drew McWeeny's defense of the projectionist known on AICN as "memflix" who got canned a few days aho for reviewing FF: ROTSS off a test screening:

"I'll be honest with you -- I work for a division of Fox. So this might come off as me making excuses for the company I work for but that's not quite the case. First off, I saw the movie during a private screening on Friday and the...Read More

This, I quickly realized, is not a trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (Paramount Vantage, 11.21.07). I mean, it certainly doesn't summarize "Oil!", the Upton Sinclair novel it's supposedly based upon. The book is primarily a hardscrabble father-son relationship story that serves as a parable about the evils of capitalism. Daniel Day-Lewis plays a 1920s oil prospector named Plainview; Paul Dano plays...I don't know who Dano plays. Goddammit, I'm totally confused and pissed off about all this vagueness and lack of information.

It's just a sketchy little teaser that delivers...Read More

"The problems with Evan Almighty mostly boil down to questions of scale. The movie warns of an imminent flood, yet delivers only sprinkles of laughter or anything approaching magic. It's mildly diverting for kids and families in a way that would be perfectly fine as an ABC Family cable project (perhaps before The 700 Club), but sails into the summer anchored to all the baggage and expectations a comedy with an enormous budget invites. Universal has courted church groups and will need them to line up, two by two and then some, to fully recoup on their epic investment." -- from Brian Lowry's...Read More

Angelina Jolie's people advised her yesterday to flip her position on journalists being required to sign those statements, and so she's flipped -- and that's that.

"Ratatouille is delicious," writes Variety's Justin Chang. "In this satisfying, souffle-light tale of a plucky French rodent with a passion for cooking, the master chefs at Pixar have blended all the right ingredients -- abundant verbal and visual wit, genius slapstick timing, a soupcon of Gallic sophistication -- to produce a warm and irresistible concoction that's sure to appeal to everyone's inner Julia Child.

"Though the latest crowd-pleaser from The Incredibles writer-director Brad Bird arguably reps a harder sell than earlier Disney/Pixar toon outings, the combo of critical excitement, energetic word of mouth and...

Listen to these two brief scenes from a certain Sidney Lumet film and tell me it doesn't make you want to pop in the DVD and watch the whole thing. I love brash New York dialogue -- I could listen to it all day.

I was genuinely unnerved last night -- okay, somewhat scared -- as the heavy-creepy stuff began to happen in Mikael Hafstrom's 1408 (MGM, 6.22). Roughly 30 minutes in, and people to the right and left of me were feeling it also. This is good, I said to myself. I'm feeling queasy and anxious and insecure, and I'm generally immune to the crap that scary movies tend to push.

The difference is that 1408 isn't peddling the usual usual -- not your typical torture-porn, anything-goes, too-bad-if-it's-not-credible shocker stuff, but seriously chilly vibes that are rooted in a...Read More

Two weeks before its 6.29 nationwide opening, Michael Moore's Sicko is grappling with a serious piracy problem, especially now with sites like Gawker and journalists like Ad Age's Claude Brodesser-Akner writing openly that illegal downloads on a certain peer-to-peer content site are now happening left and right.

At what point do you admit to mass piracy?

I wasn't going to say anything and hope for the best as far as Sicko's distributor, The Weinstein Co., is concerned, but the Gawker and Ad Age postings have let the...Read More

I mentioned twelve classic or very good 1982 films in the review just below of John Patterson's Guardian piece about the-year-when-things-started-to-go-wrong. Just for fun I threw together a list of similar quality films that opened 20 years earlier and they numbered 24, including ten bona fide classics -- Billy Budd, Knife in the Water, Lawrence of Arabia, Lolita, Lonely are the Brave, The Manchurian Candidate, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ride the High Country, Shoot the Piano Player and To Kill a Mockingbird.

The Guardian's John Patterson has written a lament about the downturn of commercial cinema that manifested in 1982.

Despite the release of first-raters like Blade Runner, The Road Warrior, Diner, Missing, First Blood, E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, 48 HRS., The Verdict, Sophie's Choice, My Favorite Year, An Officer and a Gentleman and Tootsie, Patterson notes that "one can indeed foresee today's mainstream Hollywood: special effects; science fiction replacing the moribund western; the rise of serious gore; one-dimensional worldviews and a paucity of powerful ideas."

1982 was the year in which everyone realized that the move-brat generation "had helped kill off...Read More

Much better looking, high-resolution versions of the No Country for Old Men trailer are now up on Rotten Tomatoes. My comment two days ago about the Miramax marketing guys having "made this marvelous film look like an action-horror flick about a stalking ogre" was, I think, fair. I only meant that the film is obviously upmarket -- brilliant, nerve-wracking, melancholy, funny-creepy, meditative and engineered like a Swiss watch. And that the trailer (and I'm not saying this is unwise from a marketing standpoint) is pretty much aimed at the gorillas.

Six years and three months ago -- on 3.21.01 -- I considered a spate of dreadful early 21st Century youth-market pics like American Pie (has anyone re-watched this thing lately?), Saving Silverman, Head Over Heels, Say It Isn't So, Tomcats, Josie and the Pussycats and American Pie 2. I then considered the young actors who'd starred in these films, and decided that they'd basically become (or were fated to be) shit magnets. As it turned out, I was mostly (or at least half) right.

My personal must-to-avoids in that pre-9.11 time pocket were Jason Biggs, Freddie Prinze Jr., Chris Klein, Amy Smart,...Read More

Christian Mungiu's Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, which won the Palme d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival, may be the most ecstatically received Roumanian film in history. I missed it at Cannes myself, so naturally I was looking forward to seeing it at the upcoming Los Angeles Film Festival, where it had been booked by its Parisian producer-financier, The Wild Bunch.

But IFC, which acquired Four Months in Cannes with plans to open it sometime in the fall, has pulled it from the L.AFF, despite a prominent listing in the printed program. A...Read More

In relatively honest fashion, Film Jerk's Edward Havens attended a research screening of an allegedly "truncated" version of Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., 9.21.07), although it's hard to think of any 140-minute film as truncated.

I have to confess to profound disappointment in reading that Jesse James, like Blade Runner, uses narration and, in Havens' view, will be "a tough nut to crack if you're not paying total attention, words I am certain the studio would never want to hear, even though they had to...Read More

"To some extent, the noncommital perfs, lazy dialogue and retro-cheesy visual effects could be chalked up to the pic's refusal to take itself too seriously; one would be hard-pressed to recall the last time the apocalypse was treated this breezily onscreen. But at a certain point, even the most popcorn-hungry moviegoers may find themselves craving something in the way of real dramatic stakes. To defend Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer on the grounds that it's unpretentious is to make too generous an excuse." -- from Justin Chang's 6.14 Variety review.

Angelina Jolie didn't want the wolf-vulture element trying to wheedle personal stuff out of her during the Mighty Heart junket, and she seems to be down on Fox News because...I don't know why. Because of their political associations? So yeah, she's trying to control things, and that obviously makes her a non-advocate of freedom of the press. But I don't blame her that much for playing her cards this way.

Universal Pictures has settled with Frank Davis, the African-American first assistant director who'd filed a racial discrimination lawsuit over his getting fired off 2 Fast 2 Furious. It's rough getting canned -- it can really hurt -- but when I read the comments of Universal production executive Andrew Fenady, as passed along by L.A. Times reporter Lorenza Munoz, I couldn't help but go "hmmm."

Fenady testified that doubts about Davis's work performance "arose before he was aware [he] was African American. Fenady said his concern mounted when he attended a meeting in August 2002, after Davis was hired, during which the first...Read More

"As the light fades and the first stars come out, the movie begins. It is thrilling, larger than life, romantic -- heightened by the night air, by the vastness of the screen. For the first time, I understand the concepts of sexiness and attraction -- Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty emanate both.

"In the beginning, there is something fun about the movie -- madcap, Keystone Cops, outlaw heroes, the chase. I sit in the back seat with my brother eating penny candy: Pixie Stix, Atomic Fire Balls, root-beer barrels, Lik-m-aid. And then I am afraid, overwhelmed....Read More

In an L.A. Weekly piece about the just-opened Landmark plex in West L.A., which is committed to showing mostly indie-level fare, critic Scott Foundas talks to San Francisco exhibitor and Telluride Film Festival co-director Gary Meyer about the future of upscale exhibition.

"It's my feeling that within the next 10 years, the screen count in the U.S. will go from the current 37,000 to under 10,000 screens," Meyer predicts. "Films will come out theatrically, on DVD and through on-demand cable simultaneously. There will be the occasional event film that may only be available in theaters,...Read More

16 or 17 months after the 2006 Tribeca Film festival debut of Jeff Garlin's I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, a smart and emotionally poignant character comedy in the general vein of Paddy Chayefsky's Marty, it's finally going to be put in front of paying audiences. Three and a half months from now, that is.

Jef Garlin, Sarah Silverman in I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With

IFC First Take and The Weinstein Company will be booking Cheese into theatres in "late September," according to a just-received press invite to some early-bird screenings. My gut tells...Read More

Show me this cold and I'll tell you with 85% to 90% certainty that this mobile-phone salesman from South Wales is lip-synching as he sings a portion of a famous opera. But it's apparently real. The guy's expression -- his eyes -- as he's listening to the judges praise him makes the case. And yet there's still a voice -- a small-minded voice -- inside saying it's bullshit.

Former O.J. Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro has been defending and rationalizing the Paris Hilton side of the story during talk-show visits on MSNBC and CNN. Radar's Jeff Bercovici is reporting that he's not only a paid shill, but that he hasn't informed MSNBC producers of this fact. (A CNN spokesperson told Bercovici he/she "could not immediately say whether its producers had knowledge of the arrangement.") Last Friday Shapiro was a guest on both MSNBC's "Countdown" with Keith Olbermann and CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" to discuss the case.

I'm sorry for Tennessee-based projectionist Jesse Morrison (AICN's "Memflix") having been whacked for submitting a negative, embargo-breaking review of Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, but whatever happened to the practice of subterfuge?

Morrison had to know he might run afoul of his bosses (he worked for the Malco theatre chain) if it became common knowledge that he's been reviewing the same films he's shown to the occasional test audience, and reviewing for AICN to boot. Morrison can't be so dumb not to have known that.

If he was willing to risk his job by reviewing Fantastic Four/Silver Surfer...Read More

A guy sent me an October 2006 script for the Farrelly Brothers' The Heartbreak Kid (Dreamamount, 10.5.07), which stars the rapidly graying Ben Stiller.

The cover page says "Most Recent Revisions by John Hamburg and Peter Farrelly," and then "Revisions by Peter Farrelly, Bobby Farrelly and Kevin Barnett," and then "From a short story by Jay Friedman" and "Adapted from the original screenplay by Neil Simon," and then "Previous revisions by Leslie Dixon & Scot Armstrong."

"Leslie Dixon did the first draft," the guy explains, "and it was pretty good before it became Farrelly-ized. Her draft attracted Jason Bateman for the lead...Read More

The image is unnatural -- squeezed into 1.37 to 1 when it should be 16 x 9 -- but Variety columnist Anne Thompson has an exclusive on the new trailer for Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country For Old Men.

The Miramax marketing guys have made this marvelous film look like an action-horror flick about a stalking ogre with an early '80s haircut (Javier Bardem's "Anton Chigurh") out to kill and kill again like the most ungodly and merciless Jason/Freddy Krueger psychopath of all time. And he is that, yes, only much, much funnier. And...Read More

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has finally responded to storms of criticism that came down early this year when they declined to nominate Little Miss Sunshine producers Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger as recipients for the Best Picture Oscar because of a dumb-ass rule stating that only three producers can be eligible.

Little Miss Sunshine producers Albert Berger, Ron Yerxa at last January's Santa Barbara Film Festival

Now the Academy will consider more than three producers if and when the situation involves "a rare and extraordinary circumstance." The new decision was "adopted...Read More

It's been eleven months since I ran my first piece on Asger Leth's Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a jolting doc about sex, violence, death and politics in 2004 Haiti, and now ThinkFilm is finally putting it into theatres on June 27th.

"This excellent 88-minute film adds recognizable humanity to a culture that has seemed more lacking in hope and human decency than any other on earth," I wrote early on.

"Everyone will say that Ghosts is City of God but in 'real' verite terms...and it is that, of course. But it's less about...Read More

Somewhat older people (i.e., thirtysomethings) have always looked back on their early 20s with unequal blends of nostalgia and regret, and movies about same are of course permissible and expected, but you can't just "remake" The Big Chill in a present-day context. If you want to remake a movie of this type, pick on Kenneth Branagh's Peter's Friends.

Lawrence Kasdan's 1983 classic was about a bunch of middle-class people in the early '80s who'd lived together and gotten high and enjoyed bacchan- alian sex in the late '60s, and 15 years later were coming...Read More

Allan Murray and Sean Haines' "Paris in Jail" parody video is...not bad. Amber Hay, who plays the jailbird heiress and voices the vaguely catchy song, is slightly more hoochy-kooch than Hilton herself. Here's the "Hurry Up!" version of same.

Pop Machine's Mark Caro rips into the Farrelly Brothers' The Heartbreak Kid (Dreamamount, 10.5.07) with Ben Stiller in the Charles Grodin role.

Going by the trailer, Caro suspects the feature may be a cowardly, slapstick-shallow, hopelessly dumbed-down non-echo of Elaine May's original The Heartbreak Kid (1972), which was funny but at the same time traumatic, angst-y and occasionally cruel. My favorite scene was the abrasive after-dinner confrontation between Grodin and Eddie Albert (i.e., playing Cybil Shepherd's dad), in which Albert tried to buy Grodin off.

Caro understands, of course, that every remake of...Read More

It's always somewhat depressing when a masterful older actor who's enjoying one of those rare late-period career grooves accepts a straight paycheck job as a villain in an empty-ass franchise flick.

I mean, just reading the damn trade stories about same deflates your world. Oh, that's right, you tell yourself -- I forgot that what a pleasure it is to watch amazingly talented performers punch a clock and debase themselves. Every so often, life requires us to bend over and hold our noses in order to pay the bills, but it's extra-gloomy when guys like William Hurt succumb.

Here's...Read More

I'm trying to imagine the mass incomprehension and shock waves that would result if a U.S. President were to deliver such a speech in today's paranoid climate. Forget the nostalgic aspect -- just try to imagine a U.S. President actually speaking these words. The mentality behind it is so far above and beyond the realm of the current White House occupant that the speaker sounds almost like someone from another planet, or certainly like a being created from a wholly different gene pool.

More proof positive that Steven Spielberg doesn't get what's going on out there, and lives in a rich-older-liberal-guy realm that allows for only brief glimpses and glancing comprehensions about the political and cultural truth of things.

Spielberg's powers of perception about the shape of shifting sands are obviously dwindling, which means, of course, that Indiana Jones IV won't be as good as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, much less Raiders of the Lost Ark, because if you're missing stuff in one arena, you're almost certainly missing stuff in other realms. You're either sharp all around the track or you're not.

Michael Moore's Sicko is "agitprop," says Toronto Star national affairs columnist Thomas Walkom, but "it is fundamentally accurate. Moore is making a film for Americans, and what he is telling his compatriots is very simple and very true: that America's refusal to embrace some kind of universal health care system makes absolutely no sense.

"Nor, outside of the U.S., is this a remotely controversial point. In Canada, no one except for a few diehards in the right-of-center Fraser Institute lionizes the U.S. system. Dr. Brian Day, the incoming head of the Canadian Medical Association, is a vigorous critic of Canadian medicare. But...Read More

"There's no room for the concept of profit when it comes to taking care of people who are sick. Those questions of 'how will this affect our bottom line? How will this affect our profits?'...these are immoral questions, and they should never be asked. We have to eliminate the private health care companies from the health care system. It's time for them to go!" -- Sicko director Michael Moore speaking at a very recent health care rally in Sacramento.

The hottest Esquire cover in several years, perhaps decades. I bought a copy in Newark airport last week, but until yesterday a thumbnail capture wasn't viewable on the Esquire site....slackers.

The star of Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart as she doesn't appear in the film

The Jolie cover, of course, in no way makes up for the magazine's (and particularly editor A.J. Jacobs') surreal, shark-jumping, bordering-on- deranged obsession last year with Scarlett Johansson. Esquire has been on indefinite probation status because of this. If it weren't for those "What I've Learned" pieces,...Read More

A 66-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton, profiled by Esquire's A.J. Jacobs, "says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough -- a world without fibs -- but Blanton goes further.

"He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you're having fantasies about your wife's sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It's the only path to authentic relationships. It's...Read More

The day after that perplexing Sopranos finale, I compared it in one respect to the ending of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. Now MCN's Larry Gross has compared it to unexpected killing of Janet Leigh in Hitchcock's Psycho:

"There's a famous choice in movie narrative that nominally offers resolution but in fact destroys the possibility of conclusiveness even more monstrously than this Soprano's finale. That is the murder of Janet Leigh in Psycho, [which] did not emanate as an inspiration, from the psychological necessities of the character of Marion Crane in that movie, nor was it in any meaningful way a...Read More

N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd is calling Sopranos creator David Chase "an apocalyptic tease" and claiming that last Sunday night he "gave us a gimmicky and unsatisfying film-school-style blackout for an end to his mob saga, a stunt one notch above 'it was all a dream.' It was the TV equivalent of one of those design-your-own-mug places.

"Even though I loved the first few years of The Sopranos, Chase always struck me as passive-aggressive," she opines. "The more fans obsessed on his show, the longer his hiatuses would grow and the slower his narrative velocity moved. His ending was equally perverse, throwing...Read More

"New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton maintains a solid lead at 33%, followed by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama at 22%. [And] yet despite Clinton's lead, Obama is the strongest Democrat in hypothetical match-ups with Republicans in the general election, running even or well ahead of the GOP's top contenders. Obama would defeat Giuliani, 46% to 41%, the poll found. Clinton, in a showing that could spark concerns among some Democrats, does not fare as well. Against Giuliani, the poll found she would lose by 10 percentage points." -- from Michael Finnegan's L.A. Times story about a recent Times/Bloomberg poll.

"The 11.9 million viewers who watched last Sunday's The Sopranos finale brought HBO to the edge of an historic feat: a show on a pay cable network available in about 30 million homes was more popular last week than all but one show on the far larger world of broadcast television. Nielsen Media Research reports that only the premiere of NBC's America's Got Talent, with 13 million viewers, did better. ABC, CBS and Fox are all available in 111 million homes for no extra charge, and nothing they aired last week did better than The Sopranos." -- from an AP report on