HE reader Richard Huffman wonders if N.Y. Post reporters Kati Cornell and Samuel Goldsmith were "played" in the reporting of a 3.15 story about Ashley Alexandra Dupre, given an end-of-the-story quote attributed to defense attorney named Steve Zissou, the character played by Bill Murray in The Life Aquatic.

"What's the likelihood that someone has that name outside of that Wes Anderson flick?," Huffman wrote. The answer is that there are men and women with movie-character names all over this country. They're ubiquitous. And they'll probably have to deal with bad jokes about this the rest of their lives.

Switchboard has...Read More

"Therein, the patient must minister to himself."

Another story about the challenge that Paramount is facing in the selling of Stop-Loss, this version from the Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik.

Ever since last summer's tanking of summer of A Mighty Heart and In The Valley Of Elah, the mantra is that American guys and gals don't want to know from movies about the Iraq War and its combatants, and yet Kimberly Peirce's drama, opening 3.28, is "the first movie told entirely from [Iraq veterans'] point of view...a movie emblematic of how soldiers really feel," she says.

And so the Stop-Loss trailers...Read More

I'm been led to believe, beyond the implication in this "Page Six" item, that Ben Quick, Billy The Kid, Brick Pollitt, Anthony Judson Lawrence, Harry Bannerman, David Alfred Eaton, Ari Ben Canaan, Eddie Felson, Ram Bowen, Chance Wayne, Hud Bannon, Lew Harper, Professor Michael Armstrong, Butch Cassidy, Rheinhardt, Hank Stamper, Joseph Rearden, Henry Gondorff, Doug Roberts, William F. 'Buffalo Bill' Cody, Reggie Dunlop, Murphy, Frank Galvin, Harry Keach, Gen, Leslie Groves, Sidney J. Mussburger, Sully Sulllivan, Harry Ross, Dodge Blake and John Rooney may be facing a hard situation. But it's almost as hard to think of any 83 year-old guy working...Read More

John Adams, the seven-part miniseries, has been airing for two hours now on HBO East, and the rave reviews, I now realize, were totally on the money. It's awfully damn good -- superbly acted, atmospherically correct, absorbing at every turn, great visual compositions, "important," delicious.

It's the kind of thing that feature films have obviously given up on. Unless, you know, Roland Emmerich is the director and every now and then a guy's head gets blown off by a cannonball or a church full of American Christians is burned to the ground by British troops...Read More

"I want to know what qualifies Hillary Clinton to be president? Is it because she was married to the president? If that were true, then Robin Givens would be heavyweight champion of the world. If Hillary's last name wasn't 'Clinton,' you know...she'd just be some crazy white woman with too much money and not enough lovin'. That's where I come in. I know women like that. You don't want them answering the phone at 3:00 in the morning.

"This, in conclusion. Three weeks ago, my friend Tina Fey, she came...Read More

"We all have our own private hells. I hope his private hell is hotter than anybody else's." -- Home Depot founder and former New York Stock Exchange director Ken Langone speaking a few days ago about former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

People will be making cracks behind Spitzer's back for the rest of his life because he's an almost comical case of an unexamined life. A man brought down by a refusal to honestly examine himself and adjust his personal and political relationships accordingly. A man who was adamant about prosecuting and punishing a flawed world for the usual corruptions and lack of...Read More

Tim Murphy's New York magazine interview with Tony Kushner, who's been working on the script of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln movie, which is based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," has inspired a thought.

Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner, Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama

Given Kushner's observations about the parallels between Lincoln and Barack Obama (which, by the sights of certain wise HE talkbackers, automatically makes Kushner a rank sentimentalist who's clearly lacking in seasoned judgment) and what Goodwin said about this topic to Tim Russert on TV...Read More

"Jann Wenner isn't the only one who finds Barack Obama 'Lincolnesque in his own origins, his sobriety and what history now demands,'" writes New York's Tim Murphy. Kushner, now working on a screenplay about Abraham Lincoln for the indecisive Steven Spielberg [see above], notes that Lincoln "could bring together people of wildly disparate ideological bents and remind them of the moral core of their visions." And he believes that Lincoln would endorse Obama. "They're both from Illinois," Kusher says. "You can really trace a line from the politics of Lincoln through American pragmatism to the politics of Barack Obama."

My 19 year-old son, a Syracuse sophomore, doesn't converse in Valley-speak, but my younger son, who's much smarter than me, does somewhat. In a dry, white-ebonics sort of way. He's an exception. Most Val-speakers do it mall-style. The fact is that tens of millions of under-30s talk in this profoundly irritating dialect -- unashamedly, kind of flamboyantly -- as if they're all from the same genetically-afflicted sub-species.

Valley-speak is about conveying sincerity and a lack of pretense, and vocalized with the exact same tonalities no matter what part of the country the speaker lives in. It involves the usual Jeff Spiccoli vocabulary...Read More

Because I disliked his tweedly-deedly performance as the Lord of the Rings "Gollum," and because he seemed so closely allied with the grand designs of Peter Jackson, I had a kind of negative-reflex thing going with Andy Serkis. That changed when I saw his quietly menacing portrayal of British psychopath and child-killer Ian Brady in the '06 HBO drama Longford. I was totally on the team from then on.

In any event, I read in an Indie London interview piece this morning that Serkis is about to start on work Tintin, an animated feature about the Belgian comic-strip character "and...Read More

I'm presuming HE readers understand that the '08 Oscar Balloon has its own page now with a feedback/comments option. Should I double up by pasting it at the bottom of the page, where it's been for three and a hlaf years, or will people adapt to the new click-through deal?

HE's weekend projection for Horton Hears a Who, the animated Dr. Seuss film from 20th Century Fox, is $45,878,000. Roland Emmerich's 10,000 B.C. (Warner Bros) will be off 57% from last weekend's debut for a Sunday-night tally of $15,720,000. Never Back Down (Summit) will wind up with $9,386,000. The repulsively low-grade College Road Trip (Disney) will rake in $8,946,000 for a fourth-place finish. Vantage Point will come in fifth with a $5,592,000 weekend total.

The weekend's best hold will come from Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job, off a mere 21% for a weekend total of $4,679,000 and a $9.600,000 cume. (People obviously...Read More

Agence France Press published an article two days ago about the rumors surrounding the '08 Cannes Film Festival line-up. The confirmed Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the rumored Sex and The City were mentioned, of course. Both would show out-of-competition like Ocean's 13 andU2-3D were last year.

The usual Cannes suspects and their new movies were mentioned: Steven Soderbergh's The Argentine, Abel Ferrara's Chelsea on the Rocks, James Gray's Two Lovers, Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Barbet Schroeder's Inju.

Also mentioned were some French films -- Agnes Jaoui's Parlez-Moi de...Read More

An interesting Geoffrey Macnab piece in the Independent (dated 3.14) about the best Irish "troubles" films currently viewable on DVD. It includes a chat with Paul Greengrass, who directed one of the very best, Bloody Sunday ('02), which I could never fully understand until the DVD came out with English subtitles.

My favorite Irish conflict fims, in this order: Bloody Sunday, The Informer, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, The Boxer, Michael Collins, Cal, Odd Man Out, The Outsider, A Casualty of War. Two TV movies dealing with this subject/background that I'd very much like to see are Alan Clarke's Contact...

I'm trying to think of a thoughtful, non-prurient reason for running this Alexandra Dupre photo and this link to 20 photos that went up earlier today on the New York Post website, and I can't think of one. I can't even think of a comment. Okay, her nose looks a bit smaller.

All I can add is that I'm contributing in a small way to helping AD cash in on her notoriety, and this, in a sense, is a very American, get-along, go-along thing to do. Which may, in the view of this site's...Read More

Necessarily and none too soon, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's inflammatory statements have been repudiated by Sen. Barack Obama. But I can't help but shake my head about the most assaultive sermon Wright ever gave -- the one that's gotten loads of airplay today -- about how U.S. foreign policy essentially invited the 9.11 attacks. Because what he said was pretty close to the truth.

If you ask me the most alarming thing about this six-and-a-half year old videotape is Wright's delivery. He says that God waved the attacks on, and seems to be almost relishing the fact that this country suffered what...Read More

10 or 12 seconds of music, all strings, two notes, no melody. I'm figuring people know the movie it's from anyway. It's got a very strong vibe. Obviously not a comedy.

For the sake of its own dignity, the Cannes Film Festival should impose limits upon itself in terms of providing a forum for questionable, possibly tacky films to make a pre-release splash. I know very little about the upcoming Sex and the City movie, but my first reaction to reading Elizabeth Snead's 3.14 Envelope story that the 5.30 New Line release might make its worldwide debut in Cannes was "oh, no...bad idea."

Snead quoted Sarah Jessica Parker ( a.k.a., Carrie Bradshaw) as saying "we are all still figuring out what we want in terms of...Read More

Congrats to The Reeler's Stu VanAirsdale for landing a full-time gig with Defamer. It will begin on March 17. I'm predicting that within six months VanAirsdale will have to go to the dentist for cosmetic dentures due to having ground at least a centimeter off his smile teeth. I flirted with some kind of limited Defamer contributor status in late January (I liked the idea of growing HE's audience), but a little voice kept telling me, "Do this and you'll die."

If you're on the ropes with a life-threatening illness and it doesn't look good, what difference does it make if you have a cigarette? It's a tough situation, but if I was Patrick Swayze's best friend and he pulled out a smoke and lit up, I'd shake my head but my main attitude would be, "Whatever, man."

My father's doing better than Swayze but he's not in the best of shape either. Bed-ridden, gaunt, stuck in a hospital room. The kids and I paid him a visit last December. He asked to bum a cigarette at...Read More

After wandering barefoot in the woods for over a year, Deborah Kampmeier's Hounddog, which everyone (and I mean everyone) dissed at Sundance '07, has finally been acquired for theatrical distribution. The sucker, according to N.Y. Post critic/blogger Lou Lumenick, is Empire Pictures, which plans to open the southern gothic drama in "more than 500'' theaters on 7.18.

Robin Wright Penn, Dakota Fanning

If any movie ever had the words "straight to DVD" tattooed on its forehead, it's this one. Why could Empire be thinking? Is this a tax writedown?

I wrote the following about Hounddog...Read More

Responding to the Weinstein Co.'s decision to open Vicky Cristina Barcelona on 8.29.08 instead of December, N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick wrote a day or two ago that he'd "be tempted to say the Woody Allen movie is being dumped if I hadn't gotten a lecture last year from Harvey Weinstein himself on how the second half of August is no longer a wasteland."

I was lectured on this very same point in 1993 by a Columbia Pictures publicist when I was researching an article about Mike Myers' So I Married An Axe Murderer. I...Read More

I watched a DVD of Michael Haneke's original 1997 Funny Games last night. Some of it, I mean. Haneke's English-language version (which opens tomorrow) is such an exact remake -- shot for shot, line for line -- that I couldn't stay with it. It's simply too ugly to absorb twice. I'll never see the new version or the old version ever again. And yet the game Haneke is playing is undeniably about something that matters. If you can take it, you should see it.

"Can a movie be gripping and repellent at the same time?," asks Entertainment Weekly's...Read More

From a visual standpoint, the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer (Warner Bros. 5.9) looks like interesting comic-book candy. Here's the high-def trailer, and the Quicktime version. I can't say I've seen a feature film with this precise visual scheme (live actors-meet-cartoon reality) ever before. It's like Sin City in color, minus the noir attitude. The more it went on, the more I was willing to overlook the McDonalds' logo on Emile Hirsch's helmet.

I got into a fierce argument with an attorney friend yesterday about Obama vs. Clinton. He voted for Obama in the California primary, argues his case with friends and may donate to his campaign, he says. But he doesn't agree with my feelings about the malignant tone and spirit of the Clinton campaign. He doesn't exactly believe that Obama and Clinton are tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee, but he feels they're more or less cut from the same cloth. So I wrote him a letter this morning to apologize and explain where I'm coming from.

Several HE readers have claimed I never say why...Read More

Alejandro Amenabar, director of The Sea Inside (winner for the '05 Best Foreign-Language Oscar) and The Others, is about to begin filming Agora, an historical epic starring Rachel Weisz. They're kidding, right? A title that means absolutely nothing to anyone except ancient-history scholars? Did I not just quote Jack Lechner's observation that one should never choose a title that's "incomprehensible until you see the movie, but not intriguing enough to make you want to see it"?

An 1885 painting of Hypatia by Charles William Mitchell.

Weisz will play Hypatia of Alexandria, a mathematician, astronomer and philosopher...Read More

Hormonally-driven, sensation-seeker, risk-enjoyer -- three characteristics of the type of guy (like former New York governor Eliot Spitzer) who tends to cheat, according to this 3.12 Newsweek article by Mary Carmichael. Cheating on a partner you're commited to and care for is obviously hurtful and destructive and deserving of condemnation. But I have to admit that the person being described here is me. I'm easily bored, and I find myself saying more and more often, "Is that all there is?" The things that did it for me ten years or ten months ago don't seem to satisfy as much today. I need...Read More

I meant to get into Jack Lechner's piece about bad movie titles yesterday (posted by Variety's Anne Thompson). It was apparently inspired by Quantum of Solace, the admittedly terrible title of the next James Bond film, but I can riff about movie titles for hours.

You know a movie title is bad, says Lechner, when (1) it's incomprehensible until you see the movie, but not intriguing enough to make you want to see it; (2) it sends a misleading signal about tone or content (example: Cinderella Man); (3) it's boring or (4) it's Ballistic: Ecks...Read More

It is hurtful and degrading, I feel, to evaluate the sexual attraction levels of humans like a trade critic might evaluate the features of a new car or cell phone, but since Ashley Alexandra Dupre (a.k.a. Ashley Youmans), otherwise known as the prostitute who spent some private time with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, being in the business of offering her sexual wares for big money, I want to clarify a point I made yesterday, which is that her nose is too big.

She has a kind of Beagle Boys nose, which...Read More

I asked the independent producer quoted below to elaborate on the eternal trusim that anyone who smacks of any kind of competitiveness or type-A ambition is always threatening to the person above them. She passed along an allegedly true story about a senior production vp who'd just taken over the job of studio president, having arranged to get his previous boss fired. Obviously not wanting the same thing to happen to himself, he had to decide which of the studio's production vps he could trust and which he couldn't. Who stays and who goes?

The studio chief decided on a brilliant deciding...Read More

Variety's Michael Fleming has written that "insiders have been surprised to find WB brass aggressively courting New Line production prexy Toby Emmerich to run a scaled-down version of New Line" on the Warner Bros. lot. Except Fleming doesn't explain why the surprise. Is it because running a vastly scaled-down operation is being seen by industry players as a comedown for Emmerich?

No, says an insider I spoke to this morning. "Why would [WB production chief Jeff] Robinov want a New Line player in there?," he asks. "His way of doing things is to put his own people into posts, like putting Polly...Read More

In a 3.13 N.Y. Times article by Bill Carter, Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels and writer Jim Downey have tried to quash talk about the show's satirical sketches having favored Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Which -- hello? -- has obviously been the case. Michaels tells Carter that he's "sensitive to the suggestion that we're in the service of Hillary Clinton this year....that obviously is not the case...we don't lay down for anybody."

Fred Armisen and Amy Poehler in a recent SNL sketch.

I don't believe that at all. I think Michaels and Downey...Read More

Obviously not the same issue as the one that led to Edward R. Murrrow's historic broadcast against Senator Joseph L. McCarthy, and yet reminiscent of this. To paraphrase Paddy Chayefsky, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann was "positively clanking with moral fervor" here, and rightly so. His closing words: "Good night, and good luck."

Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, a doc "about the daily lives of Antarcticans," will be jointly distributed by ThinkFilm and Image Entertainment in partnership with Discovery Films. I'm so on top of things (i.e., frazzled, distracted) that I missed the first screenings at last September's Toronto Film Festival.

The subjects are the Antarctic community of "McMurdo Station, on Ross Island, the headquarters for the National Science Foundation and home to 1100 people during the austral summer (October to February.) Beyond the settlement, he ventures through a science-fiction landscape, from the under-ice depths of the Ross Sea, to the...Read More

Geraldine Ferraro played the race card, got slammed for it, denied she had done so, and now has resigned at the request of the Clinton campaign. Tarnished her rep, good riddance to bad rubbish, close the door on your way out.

If you were Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the 22 year-old whose hotel-room sessions with New York governor Eliot Spitzer led to his resignation earlier today, wouldn't you want to get out of the prostitution racket by trading up on the publicity? It would be sad and sordid and icky, but don't we all need to strike the iron when it's hot?

If I was a talent manager and she came to me looking for help, I would pitch a reality show in which Ashley tries to change her life by submitting to an Eliza...Read More

The full-on Incredible Hulk trailer. Norton: "I've got problems...it's a little more complicated than that." And when he turns all Hulky, he sure isn't green. Mostly a sandy brown with a slight greenish tint, or so it seems to me. God, do I hate that raaahhrrraaahhh! sound that post-production guys always use to convey the sound of terrible rage and energy coming from the mouth of some humungous life form.

A friend with access to huddlings in the Woody Allen camp says that in his next film (i.e., the one after Vicky Cristina Barcelona) Evan Rachel Wood will play Larry David's love interest. The untitled piece "is an old script that Woody wrote for himself but now he feels too old for it, so we'll get the young sexpot Larry David," I was told an hour ago.

Evan Rachel Wood

For what it's worth I think the idea is kind of nervy-cool. Bizarre but why not? What with that blood-spattered Marilyn Manson sex video last year and this...Read More

It's strange that no one has commented so far about the obvious echo factors regarding Michael Bay's Platinum Pictures being in negotiations with Paramount Pictures to do a Rosemary's Baby remake. For humor's sake, at least.

Mia Farrow in Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby

Echo #1 is that we've got a trade story here about a man who's been half- jokingly referred to by film writers, editors and film fans for years as a satanic figure, and now this guy is looking to make a movie about the birth of Satan's spawn. You don't think that's...Read More

Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet has posted two stills from Woody Allen's unfortunately titled Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Weinstein Co., 12.12.08) -- one of costars Javier Bardem and Rebecca Hall, another (below) of a femme fatale-ish Penelope Cruz.

Bardem, Hall; Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona

The oft-repeated synopsis: Vicky and Cristina (Hall and Scarlett Johansson), spending a summer in Spain, make the acquaintance of a flamboyant artist and compulsive hound (Bardem) and his beautiful but insane ex-wife (Cruz). Vicky is about to be married. They find themselves at emotional and sexual cross-purposes. Lezzie action reportedly occurs...Read More

A very significant revolutionary concept has been pushed repeatedly in films produced, written or directed by movie-comedy maestro Judd Apatow over the last three or four years, and I'm not sure it's been explained as throughly as it should be. The idea, admittedly old hat for anyone half-familiar with Apatow World, is that marginally unattractive guys -- witty stoners, clever fatties, doughy-bodied dorks, thoughtful-sensitive dweebs and bearish oversize guys in their 20s and 30s -- can be and in fact are the new "romantic leads" (for lack of a better or more appropriate term) in today's comedies.

...

"And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace." -- David Mamet in his 3.11 Village Voice essay, "Why I Am No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal." Which means he's evolved into what? A free-market libertarian...a right-leaning something-or-other? Whiffs of this have been in the air for a long while. Sooner or later the Mamet machismo element had to manifest in some kind of stated political posture.

Tonight's Countdown with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann will be a watershed moment for Hillary Clinton...or is that "woodshed"? He'll presumably be addressing the tone and character of her campaign (race cards, stating her allegiance/preference for McCain over Obama, deliberate distortions, kitchen sink, scorched earth) in one of his "Special Comments" monologues. Olbermann usually slams Bush administration abuses. For the first time in Countdown's history, his remarks will be directed exclusively at a Democrat.

One of my reactions during the watching of Funny Games last night was a strange political resonance. In a baroque, very specific way, Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet -- the polite but completely psychopathic fiends who, we come to realize, are focused on delivering a terrible fate to a house built upon love, health and a semblance of sanity -- struck me as twin metaphors for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Consider the following: (1) Just as HRC is now "in the house" and won't leave, despite many reasonable people imploring her to do so because of the destruction she's threatening, Pitt and...Read More

Mark Olsen's 3.9 L.A. Times interview with Funny Games director-writer Michael Haneke mentions British-based producer Chris Coen buying the U.S. remake rights, but it doesn't explain why the people at Warner Independent saw it as a worthwhile film to distribute. If it had been my decision, I would have said no.

Consider, for example, what a guy who calls himself "Mr. Mystery" wrote earlier today about seeing a Funny Games preview last weekend at a suburban theatre: "Total silence until the end when someone said 'fuck you!' to the screen, [and] the audience applauded." What loon would say to him or...Read More

"If this movie knows it's merely a movie, and concedes as much, why should we honor its mayhem with any genuine fright?," asks New Yorker critic Anthony Lane about Funny Games.

"When Michael Pitt turns to the camera and asks, with a smile, 'You really think it's enough?,' or 'You want a proper ending, don't you?,' we don't feel nearly as chastened or ashamed as [director Michael] Haneke would like. We feel patronized, which is one of the worst moods that can beset an audience. Would Psycho have been a more profound film if...Read More

Michael Haneke's Funny Games (Warner Independent, 3.14) is simultaneously the ugliest and most repulsive violent melodrama I've ever seen (including the thoroughly disgusting I Spit On Your Grave) and the smartest and nerviest critique of sexy-violent movies in the bang-flash vein of Quentin Tarantino, Tony Scott, Oliver Stone, Eli Roth and other purveyors and marketers of homicidal style.

A fair percentage of those brave enough to see this Warner Independent release this weekend are going to walk out on it -- trust me. It's a hateful and infuriating film, no question, and yet it has a...Read More

Edward Norton is reportedly fighting with Marvel's chairman David Maisel and production prexy Kevin Feige over the final shape and tone of The Incredible Hulk. Quelle surprise! Norton has been getting into post-production scraps off and on for ten years now, starting with American History X. He'll always be a collaborator and never just "an actor for hire" -- and anyone who hires him knows this. Besides -- arguing over a film's final cut is a very healthy way to go. Better that than an atmosphere of complacency and mutual masturbation.

The hard-luck Chapter 27, the killing-of-John-Lennon drama that's been kicking around for two years now, will finally open on 3.28. Jared Leto (as Mark David Chapman), Lindsay Lohan, etc. A screening invitation for New York screenings arrived today; nothing yet for LA. Not in my inbox, at least.

The beginning of this Paul Thomas Anderson mash-up is absolutely rancid, dreadful...I wanted to strangle the guy (going by the name of "barringer82") who cut it. Then it turns into a first-rate thing -- exquisitely cut, thought-through, avoiding the easy jokes. Except, like Magnolia, it goes on too long.

A stern argument against Hillary Clinton's claim that she has passed the "Commander in Chief test," posted today and written by Greg Craig, former director, Policy Planning Office, U.S. State Department.

Showest, the longstanding exhibitor convention, kicks off in Las Vegas today. Exhibitors attend because...I don't know, ask them. It's basically a dog-and-pony show (stars, speeches, product reels). Trade journalists attend for exhibition stories, for the relationship-fortifying schmooze opportunities, and to report on the product reels (or the occasional debut of a new trailer that hasn't gone online yet).

I haven't attended since the mid '90s. I had a perfectly miserable time. Vibe- and energy-wise it felt like the exact opposite of being, say, at a great big-time film festival or even a small cool one...Read More

Ever since Hillary Clinton failed to correctly pronounce the name of Russian president Dmitri Medvedev ("Medvuh.. vuh-devah, whatever") during that Ohio debate, I've been wondering how to say it myself. And now longtime Herald Tribune and N.Y. Times foreign correspondent Serge Schemann has written a piece that includes a phonetic spelling (courtesy of Voice of America): "mehd-V(y)EHD-yehf." Say it over and over (I've done it about 20 times now) and it gradually begins to feel half-negotiable.

Israeli film blogger Yair Raveh (a.k.a., Cinemascope) has posted an mp3 of a song called "One More Word," a tune from a well-regarded low-budgeter film called Strangers. Favorably reviewed after a Sundance showing two months ago by Variety's John Anderson, the film will next be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.

The tune was written by Israeli musician Eyal Leon Katzav but recorded by Once stars and Best Song Oscar winners Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova in the Czech Republic a week or so before the Oscar telecast. Strangers is said to be...Read More

The main point of Chris Nashawaty's big Indiana Jones piece in the current Entertainment Weekly (dated 3.14) is that as we approach the May 21st opening of Indiana Jones and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the tangy, thrill-a-minute franchise is undimmed -- that it still has enormous vitality and fan loyalty.

cover of EW issue #982; Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

But the underlying suggestion in the cover photo, of course, is that the 65 year-old Harrison Ford is still a brawny-studly sex symbol. Which, to...Read More

Imagine if a female celebrity emerged from plastic surgery with her mouth sewn up...no lips, no trace, just skin. The rationale, a friend might tell a tabloid reporter, is that while she can no longer talk, sing, smile, kiss or eat, at least the permanent frown -- the sagging bulldog corners on either side of her mouth -- is now gone, and she's happy about that. The revulsion would be instantaneous, right? Well, look at this. Because it's real. I've never seen anything so deranged, plastic surgery-wise, in my life. (And while you're at it, check out that left hand and the...Read More

A painter I knew in the '80s always referred to Salvador Dali as "Norman Rockwell on acid." And now three Dail biopics with three stars -- Johnny Depp, Al Pacino and Peter O'Toole -- are reportedly being prepared. If I were a potential investor, I would think twice about investing. Movies about eccentric artists tend to piddle along or just lay there. Two exceptions: Ken Russell's Savage Messiah and The Music Lovers.

Cadaques, Spain -- an hour south of the French border

My most profound commnunication with the spirit of Salvador Dali happened when I...Read More

"Disinvited to a Screening, a Critic Ends Up in a Faith-Based Crossfire," a 3.10 N.Y. Times story by John Metcalfe, is about how Orlando Sentinel critic Roger Moore managed to attend a screening of a fundamentalist right-wing documentary called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which Ben Stein does a Michael Moore-ish job of selling the idea of "intelligent design," and how he panned it and so on.

Intelligent design, which President George Bush allegedly believes in, is creationism in new clothes. Anyone who's seen Inherit The Wind, the Stanley Kramer...Read More

Congrats and best wishes to director Phillip Noyce (Mary Queen of Scots, Catch a Fire, Clear and Present Danger) and South African designer Vuyo Dyasi on the birth of their son, Luvuyo William Noyce, born today in London. Noyce and Dyasi met in '05 during the shooting of Catch A Fire in Johannesburgh. Luvuyo means "it is joy" in his mother's Xhosa language.

Wachowski brothers' live-action Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.9) will close the Tribeca Film Festival on May 6th, or three days before the nationwide opening. If you ask me the film is already looking pretty silly due to Emile Hirsch's McDonald's helmet. I took one look at this photo and went "what?" Is this an intentional joke? (Producer Joel Silver's Demolition Man had fun with Taco Bell, after all.)

Emile Hirsch in Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.9)

The Reeler's Stu VanAirsdale is reporting that other Tribeca world premieres are I...Read More

This is Senator Obama's best retort ever to Senator Clinton's "he won't be ready on day one" argument. In fact, it blows it all to hell. She's boxed herself in and there's no way out of this. Plus her management abilities have been called into question in a just-published N.Y. Times story. A one-two punch by any standard or yardstick.

In a speech today in Mississippi, Obama said, "With all due respect...with all due respect...I've won twice as many states as Senator Clinton, I've won more of the popular vote than Senator...Read More

This Incredible Hulk teaser isn't loading for me, but maybe it's just the traffic.

The same urge that drives men to seek and acquire political power routinely manifests, as history has shown us for centuries, in appetites for the company of women outside the bounds of marriage and Christian propriety. As Norman Mailer once suggested about the incessant catting around attributed to John F. Kennedy, "He probably thought that one wasn't any good without the other." It's very common, very typical, very no-big-deal. Read a history book. Read "Plutarch's Lives." Consider how Europeans deal with such reports when they come up.

Still, the breaking news that New York governor...Read More

Like me, N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd has come to feel that somehow, some way Barack Obama needs to strap on the shootin' irons like Gary Cooper and go out and face the cigar-chomping Ma Clinton and her gang of cutthroat spinners. In ten words, "You can't be elected president unless you prove you're tough."

Jotting #1: "Obama's multiculturalism is a selling point with many Democrats. But his impassioned egghead advisers have made his campaign seem not only out of his control, but effete and vaguely foreign -- the same unflattering light that doomed Michael Dukakis and John Kerry. "

The Bank Job's somewhat disappointing showing this weekend reminded me again how people don't seem to support solid, commendable mid-range movies much anymore. 90% of the creme de la creme Rotten Tomatoes gang gave it a thumb's up, and the impact was negligible. For reasons that may seem to defy precise linkage, this reminded me this morning of Mike's Murder, a haunting James Bridges drama that didn't sell enough tickets either when it opened in March 1984.

And yet it gets better in my head the more I think back on it. Which I do...Read More

Boiled down, the theme of Peter Keough's "The Medium is the Movie," a 3.5 Boston Phoenix piece that I stopped reading two thirds of the way through because I didn't feel a sense of gathering force, is that "reality and truth are fluid, and are dictated by whoever is behind the camera."

I think we all know that. A more interesting idea, to me, is how the constant streams of fluid media are taking over everything...how fewer and fewer of us seem to live or think or create in organic, three-dimensional, tactile ways or realms.

Cowie also quotes a 1964...Read More

10,000 B.C. was projected to earn $32 million yesterday morning, but yesterday's ticket-sale surge has resulted in a slight adjustment -- it's now expected to earn $35.3 million. The completely repulsive College Road Trip is looking at $13.8 million by tonight as opposed to yesterday's forecast of $12.5 million. The Bank Job has notched up also -- projected to earn a weekend tally of $4,980,000 yesterday, it's now looking at $5.5 million. (But it should have done better, being far and away the best-quality film to have opened two days ago.)

HE correspondent Moises Chiullan is raving about David Modigliani's Crawford, which screened last night at Austin's South by Southwest. It's "about much more than the major change felt initially in this small Texas town when George W. Bush first moved there in 2000 a few months before the election," he writes, "and it's more than you get out of a trailer or a quote from a friend. In fact, the municipality of Crawford, Texas itself is a lot more than it may seem like at first.

"This movie is more than a chronicle of events and...Read More

Being a cinematic plebeian at heart, I'm more impressed with the Contempt photo-wall below than I am with Terrence Rafferty's 3.9 N.Y. Times piece about this classic Jean Luc Godard film being revived at the Film Forum (3.14 to 3.27). I've read the piece twice and I can't find that one clean sentence that just lays bare the essence. You know. So the dumb guys can figure it out.

I've had this idea for years that Contempt ('63) was about the rancid nature of the film business and at least partially (subliminally) about Godard's...Read More

Sen. Hillary Clinton got her backside whipped by Sen. Barack Obama in the Wyoming Democratic caucuses today, taking only 41% of the votes to Obama's 58%.

Larry W. Smith/European Pressphoto Agency shot stolen from N.Y. Times website

This doesn't really count, of course, because it wasn't a people's primary in which lunchbucket types could have just hopped into their gas guzzlers and driven down to the polling place to vote for the woman who's tough, has a lifetime of experience to draw upon, knows how to answer that phone at 3 am and can be fully...Read More

Vincent Gallo has the lead part in Francis Coppola's upcoming Argentine drama Tetro, but less than a month ago it was Matt Dillon's role. What happened?

Gallo will play the title character, "a brother in a family torn apart by rivalries and betrayal." (Good God.) Javier Bardem will play an Argentine literary critic, Alden Ehrenreich will play Gallo's younger brother, and Maribel Verdu plays Tetro's longtime love interest.

I'm sorry, but something snapped inside after I saw Youth Without Youth. Before that experience the name Francis Coppola had, in my yearning moviegoer heart, a certain electricity, a creative vibe, a...Read More

"Rebooting the Batman franchise may be behind him, but Dark Knight director Chris Nolan still has to improve upon it," writes N.Y. Times reporter David Halbfinger in tomorrow's paper. "Sequels are always trickier. And now he must also navigate the aftermath of the Jan. 22 death of Heath Ledger."

Nolan says he "felt a "massive sense of responsibility" to do right by Ledger's "terrifying, amazing" performance as the Joker. "It's stunning, it's iconic," he says. "It's going to just blow people away."

Halbfinger notes that "news that the prescription drugs that killed [Ledger] included sleep aids...Read More

Variety's Joe Leydon likes Robert Luketic's 21...great. But after his slightly-too-affectionate Semi-Pro review that ran on 2.28, I don't know. I'm still smarting from that. I feel a little more comfortable with reviewers who err on the side of hostility, or at least snideness.

"A flashy fictionalization of an extraordinary true-life story about college kids who counted cards to win big in Las Vegas, [it's] is a better-than-even-money bet to be an important player in the spring B.O. tournament," Leydon says. "Pic shrewdly shuffles together attractive young leads (Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Aaron Yoo, Liza...Read More

Clinton-McCain, clear choices, two lifetimes of experience. No containing the repulsion...sorry.

"A contender for the Democratic nomination, praising the Republican nominee as preferable to her Democratic rival," Yale lit professor David Bromwich has written, "was a rash act and probably unprecedented. Joe Lieberman did something like it, but only after he declared himself an 'independent.'

"In the same session with reporters, Senator Clinton glowed at the thought of herself and John McCain together. 'Both of us will be on that stage having crossed that threshold,' she said. And again: 'I think you'll be able to imagine many things Senator McCain...Read More

10,000 B.C. did $12.5 million yesterday and will wind up with close to $32 million by Sunday night. (It may do slightly better than this, but the word-of-mouth is far short of ecstatic.) Martin Lawrence's College Road Trip, a piece of shit according to Rotten Tomatoes, will do about $12.5 million and $4000 a print.

The almost completely dreadful Vantage Point actually came in third and will do about $7.6 million for the weekend. What kind of idiot would pay to see this a film of this calibre on its third weekend? Wlll Ferrell's Semi-Pro has dropped 51% for a likely...Read More

Trailers always distort to this or that degree and sometimes even unwittingly undermine the feature they're trying to sell, but a voice is telling me that this trailer for Jon Avnet's Righteous Kill (Overture, 9.12) is doing a straightforward job of telling us what this cop thriller basically is. It could be an okay sit but you can also tell right off the bat that it sure ain't Heat. The adjectives that come to mind are "second-tier," "crude," "flip" and "paycheck job for Robert De Niro and Al Pacino."

I decided it was a piece...Read More

"Fear is a bad adviser. We make bad decisions when we're afraid." -- Samantha Power, former foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, speaking on the Charlie Rose Show about her book, "Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World," sometime in mid to late February. Something for voters to consider, of course...but will they?

Amazon.uk as well as DVD Active, another British site, are announcing a two-disc The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford coming out on March 31st for 20 pounds (along with Blu-ray and HD-DVD editions plus a regular single-disc edition). No Warner Bros. publicists were around this afternoon to answer why this two-disc package hasn't been offered to the American market.

The second disc offers a documentary, called "Death of An Outlaw," that examines the life and death of the real Jesse James and also includes interviews with all the key cast...Read More

A 3.7 Huffington Post article by Cinematical's James Rocchi draws analogies between Juno backlash (or frontlash) and Hillary hate. As amusing and well-written as the piece is, it would feel slightly more vital if it had come out before the Oscars, or when the Juno backlash was really strong in late January to early February. I think most of us feel Juno-ed out at this stage.

Jonathan Chait's 3.6.08 New Republic piece, "Go Already! -- Hillary Clinton, fratricidal maniac" -- begins with a reasonable judgment that "Clinton's path to the nomination is pretty repulsive. She isn't going to win at the polls. Barack Obama has a lead of 144 pledged delegates. That may not sound like a lot in a 4,000-delegate race, but it is. Clinton's Ohio win reduced that total by only nine. She would need 15 more Ohios to pull even with Obama. She isn't going to do much to dent, let alone eliminate, his lead.

"That means, as we all have grown tired of hearing,...Read More

The situation facing Barack Obama right now is not dissimilar to the one facing Grace Kelly's character, Amy, in High Noon (1952). As everyone knows the Illinois Senator has been a proponent, in a manner of speaking, of non-violent campaigning. But the clock has struck twelve, the train has arrived and the Clinton gang, clearly committed to the low and the dirty, is making its way down Main Street and looking to fill him with hot lead. In such a situation, can a pacifist stay a pacifist?

Just as Amy makes it clear early on to Gary...Read More

In her review of Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job, N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has written a flattering graph about costar Saffron Burrows, describing her "Martine" character as "a pulpy femme fatale who's been sensitively shaded."

Safron Burrows

Noting her modelling background, Dargis describes Burrows as an "angular, melancholic beauty [who], after making the usual independent rounds -- Mike Figgis directed her in his screen adaptation of the Strindberg play Miss Julie -- [has] slowly and somewhat unexpectedly emerged as an actress to watch.

"Sadness clings to Ms. Burrows: it hoods her eyes, tugs...Read More

Responding to Robert Downey's upcoming portrayal in Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder (DreamWorks, 8.15) of an Oscar-winning actor who gets a massive makeover in order to play an African American character in a war film, a complete boob posted the following yesterday on Just Jared: "I'm not black and I find it offensive. Are there not any talented enough black actors out in the world that they feel the need to hire a white guy to do a black guy?"

Two portions of yesterday's Anne Thompson 3.6 Variety column about the legacy of Bob Shaye and New Line Cinema caught my attention. One is a statement that Bob Berney's Picturehouse "is likely to merge with the floundering Warner Independent Pictures," which seems to confirm suspicions that Warner Independent may be done as a stand-alone unit. (I've made calls about this, etc.) The other is her observation that "there was always an aura of the dysfunctional family around New Line." I wrote about this very aspect a few days ago in my own looking-back-at-New Line article.

There are plans afoot to make a movie based on the Color Purple musical on Broadway that closed two months ago, starring Fantasia Barrino. I never saw it but I probably would have refused an offer of free tickets. This is no reflection on the show (which was said to be quite good), but recollections of Steven Spielberg's film of the same name.

Fantasia Barrino

Exceptional trauma burns into one's consciousness and remains like a scar. I saw this Oscar-nominated fiasco in a Burbank screening room 23 years ago, and it's like it happened...Read More

From Peggy Noonan's latest (3.7) "Declarations" column in the Wall Street Journal: "What do I think is the biggest reason Mrs. Clinton came back? She kept her own spirits up to the point of denial and worked it, hard, every day. She is hardy, resilient, tough. She is a train on a track, an Iron Horse. But we must not become carried away with generosity.

"The very qualities that impress us are the qualities that will make her a painful president. She does not care what you think, she will have what she wants, she will not do the feints, pivots...Read More

Samantha Power, described as a "key foreign policy aide' to Barack Obama, told The Scotsman that Clinton "is a monster....she is stooping to anything. You just look at her and think, 'Ergh'. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."

Power was forced to resign for understandable reasons. One of the most fundamental rules of public relations is that you can't bluntly say what...Read More

The spirited Hector Elizondo did a q & a following last night's Aero screening of Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham 123. Elizondo plays the coarse, dryly menacing "Mr. Gray," one of four disguised men who hijack a subway train in this 1974 classic. I didn't know Elizondo would be visiting until I arrived, but it was a real pleasure to absorb his humor and energy and rascally wit.

Born in 1936 and raised in southwest Harlem, Elizondo gives off a kind of sophisticated street schwing that feels highly infectious. His basic attitude is a combination...Read More

"How is it that Clinton became the one who's perceived as more equipped to answer that 3 a.m. call than the unflappable Obama? He, with the ice in his veins, who doesn't panic when he's losing or get too giddy when he's winning, who's as comfortable in his own skin as she's uncomfortable in hers. There have been times in this campaign when she seemed so unhinged that I worried she'd actually kill herself if she lost. Every day, she reminds me more and more of Adele H., who also had an obsession that drove her insane." -- Larry David in a...Read More

The Toronto Star's Peter Howell has passed along a clip of the only completed footage of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the 2000 Terry Gilliam project with Johnny Depp that folded after a week of shooting. It runs about six minutes: Neither Howell nor myself are sure if this ended up in Lost in La Mancha, the '02 doc about the aborted attempt to make this movie, but neither of us remember it.

"It becomes theatrically important, after you die, what your last few days are like.

"For me, it was just like any other weekend in my life. I didn't eat a last meal, I didn't jerk off any more or any less, I didn't climb a mountain or end up swinging from a noose with Mozart's Requiem in the background. But suddenly it's important exactly what I did, because they are the last few days, and what you do in the last few days, down to your last lunch, becomes a fairy tale.

"If you force me...Read More

Now we're hearing it was somebody from the Clinton camp, and not Obama's, who said to take their candidate's anti-NAFTA speeches with a grain of salt. Water under the bridge, right?

McCain lite is a pretty good retort to Hillary right now. So is "what the hell did she really actually do during the '90s that involved 3 am courage"? So is "where are her tax returns"? For anyone with a modicum of perspective, the fact that Clinton is not only willing but eager to play it butt-ugly and burn the house down in order to take the Democratic nomination is ample damnation.

[Photo montage borrowed from Huffington Post]

The dynamic will change -- it's already changing -- but I can't shake this godawful sensation I have...Read More

Having recently dealt with a somewhat similar situation myself regarding a family member, I'm very sorry for poor Patrick Swayze, his family, and his friends and colleagues. Obviously a hell of a thing to deal with. I'm very, very sorry.

I missed a buried lead in Variety's Anne Thompson 3.3. item that seemed to debunk that strange IMDB posting that has the Coen brothers Burn After Reading playing the Cannes Film Festival on 5.14.

Thompson wrote that (a) while Cannes honcho Thierry Fremaux "will want it [although] he hasn't screened it yet" and (b) Working Title says "it probably won't be finished in time." Wait a minute -- a movie that began shooting last August and wrapped sometime in late October -- over four months ago -- isn't in some kind of viewable form yet? Given the announced September...Read More

The guys at West L.A.'s Laser Blazer told me today that while regular DVDs of Into The Wild have sold fine since arriving two days ago, not a single copy of the HD-DVD version has gone home with a customer. Not surprising, but aren't there hundreds if not thousands of Los Angeles residents who own HD-DVD players?

What this suggests, obviously, is that they're thisclose to throwing their players into the garbage dumpster and heading out to buy a Blu-ray player. I saw a 46" high-def flatscreen on sale at the West L.A. Best Buy yesterday...Read More

One reason I've been slow to post today is that I'm scanning old articles for the "Yellowing With Antiquity" section that will be viewable on the newly designed Hollywood Elsewhere, which will hopefully be live by the end of the weekend. In any event, I just scanned my only surviving copy of a 1992 Movieline piece I wrote called "Ten Interviews That Shook Hollywood" and realized to my horror that I'm missing the final two jump pages.

In the unlikely event that some packrat out there has old Movieline issues sitting in their garage, please get...Read More

Newark Star-Ledger critic Stephen J. Whitty, writing in an e-mail, feels that Phil Villarreal's 10,000 B.C. revew "is funny but too kind. A lot of the photography, especially in low-light situations, is rough and grainy." He also feels that Villarreal's take is "kind of blind to just how offensive the movie is." In a culturally reflective, racial-commentary sense, he means.

"I mean, a bunch of nice pretty Northern folks (who speak English) lead a coalition of the willing (include several African tribes, who didn't know what to do until a white guy show up) against a lot of evil hook-nosed Southern folks...Read More

Roland Emmerich's 10,000 B.C. (opening Friday) is tracking at 84, 42 and 27....very heavily male (particularly younger male), rated PG-13, has to do at least $30 million. No one trusts tracking after after last weekend's Semi-Pro debacle, but trust me -- a 27 first choice means that that all the young animals will be out in force.

Roger Donaldson's The Bank Job (also this weekend) is running at 42, 32 and 8. A general awareness rating of 42 is extremely weak for a film opening in two days (Owen Wilson's Drillbit Taylor isn't out until 3.21 but has a general awareness level of...Read More

"Watch 10,000 B.C. with the right mindset and you can appreciate it as a fairly effective comedy," writes Arizona Daily Star film critic Phil Villarreal. "As funny as Juno, even. [And] the picture quality is excellent. Beautiful, even. The only problem is whenever it talks, you get really annoyed and want to cover your ears and scream for it to stop. But overall the movie isn't that bad for a bunch of cavemen, who were much stupider than all of us living today.

"The one way 10,000 B.C. and Juno differ is a small story...Read More

Tina Fey bad, Tom Hanks good. Except for his line about being bored by the election and that he wishes it was over. So do a lot of other people, but did Henry Fonda and Ward Bond talk about how bored they were when the Indians were climbing over the walls of the fort in Drums Along the Mohawk?

The Reeler's Stu VanAirsdale reported this morning that the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler comedy Baby Mama (Universal, 4.25) will open the Tribeca Film Festival on 4.23. It's about the blue-collar Poehler becoming the surrogate mother of the affluent Fey's child...whatever. Maybe it'll rock, and maybe it'll be a feast of "heh-heh" humor.

Tina Fey, Amy Poehler

I need to be upfront and confess that unfair as this may sound, a certain part of me would like to see Baby Mama go down as a kind of karma payback for Fey's Hillary shilling. It's a small-time...Read More

My transmission collapsed early this morning, so I had the car towed all the way to Santa Monica Motors. Two days from now I'll be $1050.00 poorer and back on the road. I've been filing all morning from a Starbucks at Olympic and Sawtelle, which is one long block up from Tomy's on Pico, where I had breakfast this morning. Off to Best Buy soon to get a scanner so I can digitize '90s articles for "Yellowing with Antiquity."

"Given the nature of the material, which comes to a climax with half of London's criminal and Secret Service personnel chasing the baffled thieves, you would expect The Bank Job to be played as farce, or perhaps as a satire on the manners of the upper class," writes New Yorker critic David Denby. "That's the way Richard Lester or the Boulting brothers would once have told such a story.

"But Roger Donaldson, the Australian-born director who, in recent years, has become the kind of solid pro that Hollywood developed in the nineteen-thirties and forties, has...Read More

I've been shown data indicating that in terms of delegates chosen at last night's caucuses, Hillary Clinton may not have won Texas. Maybe. The final counts aren't in. But what I'm looking at seems persuasive.

With an official Texas website tally of delegates that began to be counted last night in the caucuses, otherwise known as Texas Democratic Party Precinct Conventions, Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Moises Chiullan, who paticipated in a caucus last night in Austin, is telling me that if trends continue Barack Obama is going to emerge as the overall Texas delegate winner.

Look at the 31 Senate districts in...Read More

[Update: This story was accidentally deleted during an iPhone edit yesterday afternoon. I re-posted it around 6 pm last night but all the reader comments were lost.] I drove out last night to the TV Academy theatre on Lankershim (which is way out there, about halfway to Palmdale) for a chat with The Bank Job director Roger Donaldson. He was waiting for a screening of his well-reviewed British crime film to finish so he could do a stage chat with moderator Pete Hammond.

Roger Donaldson -- Tuesday, 3.4, 8:35 pm

The Bank Job isn't a whammy-chart action...Read More

All Barack Obama supporters feel badly this morning about New Hampshire redux. The distinguished and vetted Hillary Clinton threw the sink, the plumbing and whatever globs of fecal matter she was able to scoop out, and enough of it stuck to the wall or pushed buttons or whatever. And now the concern is that come April 22nd the fearful, insufficiently educated lunchbox proles in Pennsylvania (along with that state's insufficiently educated white women over 50) will probably give her another win.

Even though Obama's delegate lead is truly insurmountable, and despite the almost certain fact that things will go his way...Read More

"I've long lived quite dangerously myself, and so, anxious to share my desperate man-tits with an audience beyond Chelsea, I gleefully agreed to star in an homage to an homage: Musto as Lohan as Marilyn. That's three generations of loveliness, and I prepared for it by not shaving or waxing a thing, just letting it all hang in the wind as both a nod to history and a means of reclaiming control.

Just like with Marilyn and Lindsay, people have always grabbed at me, wanting a piece of my piece and a slice of my soul,...Read More

"Forget Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park, an unfocused, meandering and even dreary look at how a Portland skateboarding teenager (Gabe Nevins) doesn't deal with his complicity in an impulsive accidental homicide. It's another atmospheric exotic-youth-culture piece with a minimalist plot, but nowhere near as striking or stylistically distinguished as Van Sant's Elephant and Last Days.

"I'm calling it his first not-very-good film since Gerry. I'm sorry to say this given the respect I have for Gus, but you can't hit it out of the park every time." -- written from the Cannes Film Festival on 5.22.07. IFC is opening Paranoid Park...

Let's hear some affection for poor Gary Gygax, the co-creator of the iconic Dungeons & Dragons -- literally the father of modern role-playing gaming -- who died today at age 69 from heart troubles.

Dungeons & Dragons was first marketed in '74. I was never a gamer and didn't know or care about D & D until Henry Thomas's Elliot character mentioned it in E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. (I was too old and too hormonally-driven to focus my energies on anything that didn't involve girls, clubbing, playing music, etc.) The game was basically "about players creating magical and...Read More

A Washington Times story by Stephen Dinan reports that "Republicans like Sen. Barack Obama nearly as much as they like Sen. John McCain, according to a new Fox 5/The Washington Times/Rasmussen Reports poll. The survey determined that a quarter of self-identified Republicans rated McCain most likable, but nearly as many -- 23 percent -- chose Obama as most likable. And among all adults surveyed, Obama was rated likable by more people than Sen. Hillary Clinton and McCain combined, underscoring the Illinois senator's appeal to voters across the political spectrum."

The great Leonard Rosenman, a two-time Oscar-winning composer who wrote the truly magnificent score for Elia Kazan's East of Eden ('55), has passed on at age 83. Roseman also composed the scores for Nicolas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (also '55) as well as such Pork Chop Hill, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Fantastic Voyage and A Man Called Horse.

Leonard Rosenman; James Dean in "East of Eden"

Listen to the overture and main-title music from his Eden score. Listen especially to the strange psychological spasm music that happens at the 1:01 mark...Read More

Obama has won Vermont (except no one has posted numbers or voter profiles) and Matt Drudge is saying that exit polls indicate a deadlock in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island. Really? That would be great except no one believes exit polls. Twelve minutes until the first inklings of Ohio voters will be reported. I need some chill-down herbal tea. 7:30 pm update: MSNBC is saying the Ohio race is too close to call. The Page's Mark Halperin says that in Ohio Obama and Clinton "are tighter than the lug nuts on '55 Ford."

In Alessandra Stanley's just published Vanity Fair piece about women comedian ("Who Says Women Aren't Funny?), she describes Sarah Silverman thusly: "In her stand-up act and on her Comedy Central show, Silverman is as crude and cruelly insensitive as any male comedian, but with a sexy, coquettish undertone -- a Valley Village version of Brenda Patimkin, the Jewish-American Princess in Goodbye, Columbus. In one scene, Sarah calls her sister 'gay,' then apologizes to her two gay neighbors. 'I don't mean gay like homosexual,' she says sweetly. 'I mean gay like retarded.'

Gams, gams, gams -- Kristen Wiig, Maya...

The Bullitt car chase on Google maps, the most specific and photo-rich Bullitt location rundown I've ever read (including specifics about the car chase), and the YouTube clip that I posted and few weeks ago. (Note: I first saw the link the Google maps thing on Movie City News, which means that David Poland has worldwide territorial rights as far as all things Bullitt are concerned, not just now but from here to eternity.)

I'm so frazzled about what I'm afraid may be dispiriting numbers in Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island that I'm having trouble paying attention to movie stuff, much less banging stuff out. Things will start to happen at 7 pm eastern, when Vermont polls close, and then the 7:30 poll closings in Ohio.

Focus Features and Working Title will give a wide release to the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading on Sept. 12 because of it's funny (I've read the script) and has two big names (George Clooney, Brad Pitt) along with John Malkovich, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton. But how wide? Somewhere between 1500 and 2000 theatres? More? Pamela McClintock's Variety story doesn't mention a Cannes opening, but the IMDB has it down as a Cannes selection (with a date even -- 5.14).

Yesterday a Huffington Poststory posted paparazzi bikini shots of Kate Hudson in Miami last weekend, the story being about her possibly being pregnant. So what, right? There was a click-through to other photos, and so I did that and this happened. That's all.

One of those insufficiently educated over-40 guys, interviewed by Steve Croft two days ago on 60 Minutes. When Croft tells him that Barack Obama-is-a-Muslim rumor isn't true and asks if he realizes that, the guy kind of half-smiles and more or less holds his ground. Charming. America the beautiful.

"No matter how you cut it, Obama will almost certainly end the primaries with a pledged-delegate lead, courtesy of all those landslides in February," writes Newsweek's Jonathan Alter in a piece that went up this morning.

"Hillary would then have to convince the uncommitted superdelegates to reverse the will of the people. Even coming off a big Hillary winning streak, few if any superdelegates will be inclined to do so. For politicians to upend what the voters have decided might be a tad, well, suicidal.

"For all of those who have been trashing me for saying this thing is over, please...Read More

Hollywood Elsewhere has been re-designed and will go "live" with the new look sometime this weekend. The architect is the brilliant Brian Walker, who's been with HE since the August '04 launch. A few things are being modified, tweaked. I'm going to add a feature in the archive drop-down menu called "Yellowing with Antiquity" that will feature scans of print articles I wrote for the L.A. Times, Entertainment Weekly and other outlets in the early to mid '90s.

The delegate situation is very good for Barack Obama, but today's electoral drama feels dicey to me. As HAL 9000 said to Dave Bowman some forty years ago, "I can feel it...I can feel it."

Security moms have bought the "3 in the morning" TV ad bullshit, I fear, and the other anti-Obama hits -- the Muslim Manchuran Candidate myth, Hillary's "as far as I know," NAFTA/Canada confusion, Somali garb in '06, Reszko mist -- have sunk in among closet racists looking for an excuse to vote against him, and, as always, among...Read More

How can this new DVD release of Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (out tomorrow) be called a "50th Anniversary Edition" when its U.S. theatrical debut was 4.13.57? Just don't consult the information on the Amazon page, which doesn't mention the voiceover and the two featurettes. This a new high-def transfer that looks a tiny bit better than the previous versions with slightly more visual information in the frame. If you're a freak about this film (as I am), it's probably worth getting.

U.S. News political analyst Michael Barone "took a Washington Post-ABC Poll showing Hillary Clinton with a seven-point lead in Ohio and tried to figure out what that would mean in terms of the delegate breakdown," reports the Cincinatti Enquirer's Howard Wilkinson.

"He concluded that if Clinton won Ohio by seven percentage points, she'd probably end up with only nine more delegates here than Barack Obama -- not enough to cut significantly into Obama's lead in the delegate count."

And yet John C. Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, said that "while a Clinton win by a small margin...Read More

I was on a night flight touching down at Dulles airport a few years ago, and I could tell as we got close to the runway that we were settling into extremely thick fog. Too foggy for the pilot, it turned out. Before we hit the tarmac he gunned it and soared back into the blackness above. Good man. May have saved my life.

I was also on a small jet in '98 that was going faster and faster down the runway at Aspen airport, almost at liftoff speed, when the...Read More

The more boutique-y and quality-oriented the Oscars become ("quality" being in some cases synonymous with being less emotionally engaging or accessible), the less popular they will be with the "just looking to be entertained" serf class. That's where it's all heading so can we please, please stop with the analysis pieces sounding the dark gong about how much less the Oscars mean these days in terms of generating box-office punch?

"The Oscar bounce has all but disappeared," N.Y. Times media guy David Carr wrote in a 3.3 column. "In part because the awards have been moved up in the year and...Read More

If you need further proof that Hillary Clinton's campaign personality is vile and reprehensible, consider this charming observation she passed along last weekend about rumors that Barack Obama may be a Muslim: "No. No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know. On the basis of what he says."

Susanne Bier's Things We Lost in the Fire -- a film I went nuts over last October, largely but not entirely because of Benicio del Toro's landmark performance as a recovering heroin addict -- will be out on DVD tomorrow from Paramount Home Video.

In honor of this, here's (a) my original review, (b) a highly perceptive, beautifully written assessment of Del Toro's performance by the Houston Chronicle's Josh Rosenblatt, and (c) my explanation about why Fire or Del Toro's performance never got any awards-season traction.

"There can there can be no...Read More

In '85 and '86 I worked for New Line Cinema as a freelance publicist on both coasts. A little Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, a little Critters, a little in-house p.r. writing. I worked out of my home in Los Angeles, and worked at New Line's offices on Eighth Avenue for a period after that. In one sense it was a warm and familial place to be (my co-workers included a very young Mike DeLuca and producer Janet Grillo), and in another sense it had a dark neurotic vibe.

I grew up...Read More

I tried reading David Halbfinger's 3.1 story in the N.Y. Times about the second-tier wtinesses scheduled to testify at Anthony Pellicano's racketeering/wiretap trial, which begins next week, and I couldn't even scan it without getting bored. This story is so dead you could wrap fish in it.

As Halbfinger notes, "The investigation captured Hollywood's imagination when Mr. Pellicano's office was raided in 2002 and his dossier on industry heavyweights was seized. But the case has fallen well short of earlier expectations."

F. Scott Fitzgerald is alleged to have written that "in the deepest and darkest regions of the soul it's always three in the morning." For 15 minutes I've been trying to find the exact source of this quote, and failing. If anyone knows for sure and can prove it with a link...

A "sweded" Once trailer from Ireland has been sent by Wesley Dolan. Glen Hansard, he writes, "has been hailed as a conquering hero since he returned home to Ireland [after the Oscars]. He's in all the newspapers; he and Marketa Irglova were interviewed on Ireland's leading chatshow. And 'Falling Slowly' is in heavy rotation on Irish radio stations. As Once flopped in its initial Irish release, it's nice to see it finally having a moment in the sun."

Today Variety's Dave McNary and Tatiana Siegel ran a story about the collapsing of New Line Cinema that said "the emerging consensus is that at least 75% of the slots will be axed in the coming months while a bare-bones staff stays on" and "that New Line will vacate its New York office and its West Hollywood HQ and move operations onto the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank."

Last Thursday I ran a quote from a guy who knows the way of things about the likely fate of NL employees and their Robertson Blvd. headquarters. It said that Warner Bros. "is...Read More

What '08 films at this time next year will almost everyone be sick of talking and writing about due to their having recently won the top five Oscar awards? Right now eight are considered the most likely Oscar contenders, but what are the dark horses that no one's spotting right now? There are always three or four sleepers that seem to suddenly arrive and catch on big-time.

Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman in Baz Luhrmann's Australia.

The top eight, I suppose, are (1) Baz Luhrmann's Australia (20th Century Fox) with Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman; (2) Steven Soderbergh's...Read More

A British Broadcasting Corp. documentary airing tomorrow will report that Mick Jagger escaped an assassination plot in late 1969 by the Hells Angels. The Rolling Stones singer "had vowed not to use Hells Angel members as bouncers following the death in December 1969 of an 18-year-old fan at a notorious free performance at Altamont Speedway in Northern California" so gang members decided to kill Jagger at his holiday home in Long Island, the BBC show reportedly claims.

So what happened? The Angels lost their will to kill? They couldn't get past Jagger's security people? Something...Read More

I can't put my finger on it, but I'm getting this vague sense of slight Barack Obama slippage. Something along the lines of what happened in New Hampshire. Women rallying 'round, yahoos buying into the red-phone bullshit, the hate, the beginnings of the '08 swift-boating. I'm not saying Hillary Clinton will take Texas (Obama will almost certainly finish with more Texas delegates, no matter how the vote tips) but Hillary's possible winning margin in Ohio -- 5% or 6%? -- is starting to scare me. And if she stays in and it goes to Pennsylvana the old James Carville definition of...Read More

I can't offer a link, but somebody (Joe Leydon?) recently quoted Pauline Kael as having said that she could tell if a movie blew by watching the first ten minutes. I've always been able to tell in less than five. Like with people, there are dozens of ways that movies give the game away early. In House of Games Joe Mantegna called them "tells."

Owen Wilson in Drillbit Taylor

Sometimes I can smell trouble from an opening-credit sequence. Any comedy or relationship movie from a big studio that opens with a helicopter shot of a major city (you...Read More

An absolutely idiotic notion is cleverly illustrated here. If Star Wars had been released in 1957 instead of '77 and if George Lucas had hired Saul Bass to do the main titles, this is how it would have looked. Right. Bass would have ignored the celestial adventure aspects and sought to invoke an urban jazzy vibe, going in the exact same direction as the main title sequences for The Man With the Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder.

I'll admit that in its own nonsensical way...Read More

Two days ago, the Hollywood Reporter's Carl DiOrio reported that Semi-Pro "looks like it could be a full-on hit," predicting that it "will open at least half as well" as Talladega Nights did on its opening weekend, i.e., half of $47 million being about $23.5 million. DiOrio also said that "with solid interest among men and women, something closer to $30 million isn't out of the question."

As we all know, Semi-Pro did around $15.4 million. DiOrio's numbers were whackier, yes, than my prediction that it would take in an "easy" $25 million, but they were nowhere near as loop-dee-loopy as...Read More

Last night's Saturday Night Live Ohio debate-parody sketch was curiously partisan -- a hooray-for-Hillary! thing that was unfunny, repetitive and tepid to boot. (And seemingly inspired by Hillary supporter Tina Fey's "Weekend Update" performance last week.) The guy doing Brian Williams (spent several minutes trying to discover his name) was pretty funny, though. And the real Hillary Clinton's appearance at the end (supplying "editorial response") was appealing. But SNL has, in a sense, slit the throat of its own comedic integrity with this piece.

And this vote-for-Hillary ad is...Read More

Is there any newspaper publisher more deserving of a negative expose than Wendy McCaw, the owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press who is roundly despised for showing a profound lack of respect for journalistic barriers and ethics? Citizen McCaw, a documentary about how McCaw's arrogance led to the gutting of a once-respected newspaper, will screen at Santa Barbara's Arlington Theatre on Friday, March 7th, at 7:30 pm, to be followed by a discussion.

Here are two articles about McCaw's reign -- one in the American Journalism Review, another in the L.A. Weekly....Read More

On Thursday, 2.28, the 35 year-old Eli Roth posted the following paragraph at the end of a longish passage on his MySpace blog, to wit:

"I was having drinks with a friend at the Beverly Hills Hotel the other night, and Lindsay Lohan walked by our booth with a girlfriend, checking us out. She then went out to the bathroom, turned around, came back and walked by us again, and mumbled to her friend 'too old' and kept walking. Now, she's absolutely correct but it was still pretty fucking hilarious. Especially since we were in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly...Read More

Stanley Kubrick "died almost exactly nine years ago and his shadow still looms large over cinema," says the Guardian's Andrew Pulver. "For me, Kubrick's central achievement is a still unmatched 10-film run of masterpieces, between 1955's Killer's Kiss and 1987's Full Metal Jacket. No other director -- not Ford, Scorsese, Truffaut or Fellini -- has such a strike rate, and it's even less likely that someone will ever again produce cutting-edge work in four consecutive decades.

"In my opinion -- and it is only an opinion -- I only discount Spartacus which, though ambitious, is dated and kitschy, and his final...Read More

"We Are The Ones," the new will.i.am Obama video. More of a stadium-chant thing than a "Yes We Can" spiritual mantra whisper piece, but in synch with the heavier drumbeat of the moment.

I've just been told of a Saturday morning box-office shocker as far as tracking data is concerned. Will Ferrell's Semi-Pro (New Line) is now looking like it'll earn only about $15,184,000 for the weekend, according to a rival studio's estimate. That's over $25 million less than what Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason predicted just yesterday.

This isn't a typo -- the basketball comedy did only $5,384,000 yesterday.

Semi-Pro was looking like a modest-to-decent opener last Tuesday until a big surge in tracking data two days ago, which led Mason to predict a weekend tally of $40...Read More

After speaking with refugees during a recent trip to Iraq, Angelina Jolie has written in an opinion piece for the Washington Post called "A Reason to Stay in Iraq" that the surge -- the reinforcement of U.S. troops -- is working by creating the beginnings of a haven that will allow humanitarian programs to take effect.

Jolie has done two things with this editorial . She has advanced an idea that the stay-the-course military strategy and goals of the Bush administration in Iraq are synonymous with basic humanitarian goals to help refugees. And she has,...Read More

Responding to a question from N.Y. Times reporter Jacques Steinberg about charges that journalists have covered Barack Obama more fairly or affectionately than Hillary Clinton's, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter said "that the attempt by the Clinton camp to weigh various stories represented a kind of 'silly, even-Steven-itis.

"'People got it into their head that if you say something good about a candidate, you [also] have to say something bad about him, and if you don’t, that’s not fair. What the Clinton partisans wanted was for us to create a phony balance that was at odds with what our eyes were telling us. That’s...Read More

No surprise that Paramount would cancel HD-DVD versions of Bee Movie (due 3.11), Sweeney Todd (4.1) and There Will Be Blood, given the defeat of that format by Blu-ray. But it seems odd that they wouldn't have worked out release dates for those titles to come out in Blu-ray.

Everyone knew HD-DVD was dead late last year when word began to get around that Warner Bros. would join forces with Blu-ray. (The announcement came on 1.4.08.) It would have been a mark of dereliction if PHV execs hadn't heard the rumblings about this last fall and begun to make plans.