"In Jean Luc Godard's 'return to zero' film Le Gai Savoir, a pretty woman is shown reading a poem in front of a wall adorned with large images of Batman, the Hulk and Spiderman. Four decades ago none of those mutated heroes were well known outside culture mongers and kids reading comics. Flash forward to the present and those iconic images are what sell current movies. In fact they're all present this summer if you replace Peter Parker with Bruce Banner...Read More

I know one thing about Pat Dollard and his Young Americans footage (i.e., taken during his adventures in Iraq), which is that it's taken way too long to show up in some format -- TV series, feature doc, whatever. And I'm past believing it's because entertainment-industry liberals aren't being helpful because he's an eccentric rightie who's pro-war. Anything that takes this long to be put before the public has something wrong with it. I tried reaching him once and he couldn't be bothered...hah!

"Critics of ultra-violent video games will not be the only ones watching carefully as the latest installment of the Grand Theft Auto series is released tomorrow," writes the Guardian's Bobbie Johnson. This because "the suits in Hollywood are anxious that it may dent the profits of their summer blockbusters.

"Grand Theft Auto IV, the latest in the 18-rated crime series, which sees players take on the role of eastern European tough guy Niko Bellic...Read More

Iron Man (Paramount, 5.2) boasts a perfect Robert Downey performance and delivers some moderately satisfying summer-movie highs in a right-down-the- middle sort of way, but it's been over-praised. It does a lot more clomping around than dancing or shuffling, and we've all had enough clomp to last a lifetime. This movie doesn't deserve a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 94% from the regulars and an 88% from the elites. It's more a B-plus type of thing. Which is not a put-down.

Iron Man...Read More

Last night I finally saw Recount (HBO, debuting 5.25), and I feel no hesitancy whatsoever in calling it totally crackerjack -- a throughly engaging, first-rate political drama that gets you off. It's also fair to use the word "brilliant," I think. It's no small feat to make a gripping film that's mostly about a bunch of middle-aged political operatives bickering and maneuvering over vote counts, media statements, lawsuits, court decisions, dimpled chads and all that jazz. But director Jay Roach and first-time screenwriter Danny Strong have done this.

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"Lawrence of Latin America," my Huffington Post article about Steven Soderbergh's two forthcoming films about Ernesto "Che" Guevara, went up a few minutes ago. I've said some of the same things in previous postings, but here are two taster graphs anyway:

"If you love epic-styled movies you've certainly seen and loved Lawrence of Arabia, which also means you've been influenced by the great win-lose Lawrence theme. The first half of David Lean...Read More

Nicole Kidman is intending to star in a Dusty Springfield biopic ('60s music, manic perfectionist streak, lesbian longings, drugs and booze, early death) being written by Michael Cunningham. Great, but there's a side issue. It isn't mentioned in this New York "Vulture" piece, but it seems too coincidental for this project to be announced two and a half months after a play about Springfield called "Stay Forever: The Life and Music of Dusty Springfield," played for three weeks last February (2.7 through 2.24) at the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center.

Many industry people caught this show. Read More

After he finishes Mary, Queen of Scots, Phillip Noyce will probably direct The Art of Making Money, a DreamWorks project about Art Williams, a real-life Chicago counterfeiter who printed more than $10 million in fake bills, etc. The guy is currently doing time for this. Screenwriter Frank Baldwin is adapting Jason Kersten's Rolling Stone 2005 profile of Williams.

Mel Gibson isn't Mel Gibson any more. The last time "that guy" appeared in a film was What Women Want. Since the Malibu DUI arrest he's gotten too heavy and thin of hair to be an attractive box-office draw. To me he'll always be the bearded wacko in the flannel shirt with a shave. The upside is that Edge of Darkness, an adaptation of a six-hour BBC miniseries, has been written by the great William Monaghan (The Departed) and the very competent Martin Campbell.

I worked for three hours this morning on a piece about Steven Soderbergh's Che Guevara films, The Argentine and Guerilla, for another website, hence my silence. It feels like a funny thing to write something longish (1700 words) and send it off and then...wait. I've become accustomed to instant gratification.

Come the fall Steven Soderbergh will direct The Girlfriend Experience -- a 14-day quickie about "the world of prostitution from the vantage point of a $10,000-a- night call girl" (according to Variety's Michael Fleming). This will probably be one of Soderbergh's interesting sidelight films, most likely. Soderbergh, who "gets" women, hasn't mined this turf enough.

But it's a 2929 Entertainment whatsis movie (Mark Cuban, Todd Wagner, HD Net) so let's keep things in perspective. I say this as a huge fan of Bubble, by the way. As far as I'm concerned Bubble...Read More

As Defamer's sum-up points out, Jon Cusack's War, Inc. has gone into the tank after showing at the Tribeca Film Festival. Reviews from N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick, Spoutblog's Karina Longworth and the Hollywood Reporter's Frank Sheck are viewable for all to see. But HE reader Joseph Kay has something interesting to say besides.

Jon Cusack, Joan Cusack in War, Inc.

"Apologies if you've covered/couldn't care less about this, but John Cusack's War, Inc....Read More

The trailer for Tim Burton's original Batman vs. one for Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight. The College Humor guys who put this up are using the headline "why so similar?" Indeed -- these spots are remarkably alike.

Hollywood Chicago's Adam Fendleman is pointing to an ugly, cell-phone video of the new Dark Knight trailer -- shot in a theatre with reddish tints and all the crappy ambient noise that you always get with these things. An official, much better looking version of this trailer will be viewable this Sunday.

The best thing about the trailer is Heath Ledger's voice. He's speaking in a kind of raspy Midwestern twang. Nothing at all that sounds the least bit Ennnis del Mar-ish.

"With all that's gone down between Washington and Hollywood, it's a shame that politicians still don't trust their showbiz supporters," Politico's Jeff Ressner notes, observing that "for the most part, D.C. treats L.A. as a gigantic ATM machine and the movie business as a means to pick up campaign cool points -- while trying to keep potentially radioactive celebrities at arm's length.

"But as candidates exploit moguls and movie stars for cash and cachet, they often reject creative assistance from the artists and executives at Hollywood's dream factories."

Like -- hello? -- Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris...Read More

Barack Obama has finally thrown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright under the bus. A friend said Obama needs to throw Wright under the iron wheels of a subway train -- which I think he's now done. Less than an hour ago Obama said he was "angry," "outraged," "saddened" and "appalled" by "the spectacle that we saw yesterday," describing at one point some remarks Wright said last weekend as "ridiculous."

"At a certain point when a person contradicts what you believe fundamentally, and then he questions whether you believe it in front of the press corps...that's enough...Read More

The Cannes Film Festival has officially announced that Fernando Meirelles' Blindness (Miramax, 9.12) will open the festival on Wednesday, 5.15. Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Danny Glover and Gael Garcia Bernal costar.

Gwynneth Paltow during shooting of Two Lovers

On top of which a third French film -- Laurent Cantet's Entre Les Murs, with Francois Begaudeau -- has been added to the Competition:

An American film has also been added to the Competition slate: James Gray's Two Lovers, a Brooklyn-set romantic drama about a guy (River Phoenix...Read More

Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason is projecting Iron Man, which I saw earlier this evening, to earn $8 million Thursday night and $103 million over the weekend for an $111 million total. Made of Honor, the counter-programmed, female-angled wedding movie with Patrick Dempsey, is looking at a decent $15 to $18 million.

Paramount publicists made the media wait in line to get into Iron Man at the Arclight this evening. Not unheard of, certainly not an outrage...but it doesn't happen very often.

An over-examined subject, agreed, but The Australian's Eddie Cockrell has nonetheless interviewed yours truly, USA Today and Talk Cinema's Harlan Jacobson, and Hopscotch Films' co-owner Troy Lum about the uniform snubbing in this country of all the Iraq War movies. And he's done a good job of mapping it all out in very precise detail. The piece ran two days ago.

Explanation #1: "Iraq war movies have all been guilt-trippers about an ongoing conflict, whereas the Vietnam movies were all made after the last helicopter left the roof of the American embassy." Explanation #2...Read More

"Yet Segel's flaccid member looks pathetic and laughable, especially because it's attached to a body that is doughy and pallid. It can't seriously be accused of being capable of anything, let alone of breaking a taboo. So obviously devoid of sexual intent, it symbolizes not so much his character's abject emotional condition at his girlfriend's rejection of him, but the sorry state of masculinity in American movies today." -- from still another galumph rant, this one by London Times' staffer Christopher Goodwin in yesterday's issue. Straight out of the HE playbook. He gets it, all right.

My political-junkie hunger suddenly faded last week. The get-Obama ugliness being generated by the Clinton campaign, the Republican attack dogs, the Reagan Democrats and the media chattering class has begun to act on my soul like Zyklon B. I'm finding myself starting to just tune it all out. For the time being, at least. After following this damn race for God knows how many months I'm starting to feel physically sick at some of things being kicked around. MSNNC's Chris Matthews...

Iron Man gripe #1 from New Yorker critic David Denby: "Without a continuous infusion of visual poetry, digital spectacle quickly burns through one's sense of awe." Gripe #2: "There's a slightly depressed, going-through-the-motions feel to the entire show." Gripe #3: "Apart from Downey's private sense of amusement, the kidding lacks conviction."

Illustration by John Ritter

The only tactical advantage to seeing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in Cannes on 5.18 is that critics there will have a jump on those seeing it stateside by perhaps as little as seven or eight hours.

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One of the best critics in the business, Matt Zoller Seitz, who's recently been doing freelance reviews for the N.Y. Times, has decided to bail on the profession in order to be a filmmaker. His comments about this decision suggest he also wants to absorb life in less neurotic, more open-pored terms. You know...a little of that Frank Capra-esque, final-ten-minutes-of-It's a Wonderful Life quality from time to time.

Matt Zoller Seitz

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I was confused by two Amazon.com statistics regarding Fox Home Video's 5.13 DVD release of Raoul Walsh's The Big Trail (1930). This staid, somewhat cornball John Wayne wagon-train western is immensely watchable due to its being the first Hollywood film to be shot and released in a 70mm widescreen format (which was called "Fox Grandeur"). The problem is that Amazon says the aspect ration is 1.85 when the true aspect ratio is 2.1 to 1. And the running time is given as 212 minutes despite the actual length (according to packaging) being 122 minutes.

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Eliott Gould's allusion to Alan Arkin's Little Murders in that Gothamist interview led me to this YouTube clip of Donald Sutherland's famous wedding-scene soliloquy.

Gothamist writer John Del Signore has posted an interview with Elliot Gould to discuss Richard Ledes' The Caller, a Tribeca Film Festival pick in which Gould costars with Frank Langella and Laura Harring.

"I spoke with Jack Nicholson and told him I didn't want to see The Bucket List," Gould tells Del Signore. "I'm not a big fan of Rob Reiner. I respect Rob Reiner to some degree but, you know, Rob Reiner, whatever. I just didn't want to see The Bucket List. It seemed so formulaic to me.

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Given persistent speculation about the Coen brothers' Burn After Reading being destined to play at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival (9.4 to 9.13), it comes as no surprise that it's now been chosen to open the 65th Venice Film Festival on 8.27. It's a standard tactic for fall films with a modicum of class to do the old Lido-Toronto two-step prior to their commercial debut. Focus Features will open Burn stateside on 9.12. It will preem in the U.K. on 9.5.

When is Focus going to release a decent assortment of stills from Burn After Reading

The only "hmmm" issue that may affect What Happens in Vegas is a cultural- chemical rapport thing, given that the Ashton Kutcher-Cameron Diaz romance may seem to some like an older-woman, younger-guy thing. (Which Kutcher is obviously familiar with in real life.) Kutcher turned 30 two months ago; Diaz is now 35. Thing is, Kutcher looks his age (if not a year or two younger) and she looks...well, like she's almost nudging 40, no? The last time Diaz radiated anything close to a spring-chicken glow was when she costarred in There's Something About Mary ('98).

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I still say Cate Blanchett should have won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her Dylan deal in I'm Not There -- the most riveting, fascinating and feeling-ful peformance of 2007. The woman who did win....I can't remember who that was. Thinking, thinking. It was Michael Clayton's Tilda Swinton but I had to look it up. She was very good, but I think her win was compensation because Clayton wasn't going to win in any other big-five category and the Clayton lovers knew this, so Tilda was the lucky recipient.

I'm Not There

Sean Penn's reason for appearing twice today at the Coachella Music Festival was to announce the Dirty Hands Caravan, a biodeisel caravan that will drive from Indio to New Orleans starting tomorrow Monday and is expected to arrive in New Orleans on May 4th for the city's annual jazz festival.

"I see this as a reckoning," Penn told the Hollywood Reporter's Leslie Simmons. "My generation and those that came before have to recognize the numbing of incentive that we've passed on to the change-hungry, imaginative, smarter-than-us youth of today."

Hillary Clinton "was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an 'unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.' She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn't get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents.Read More

"In his 1991 book The Reasoning Voter, political scientist Samuel Popkin argued that most people make their choice on the basis of 'low-information signaling' -- that is, stupid things like whether you know how to roll a bowling ball or wear an American-flag pin." Or whether or not a political candidate seems like the kind of guy you can relax and have a beer with. I've read that Josef Stalin had a common-man touch. He could relate to Ukranian wheat-growers and their concerns. Not that this mattered in the Russia of the 1930s, '40s and early '50s.

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N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply has written a light-hearted, semi-whimsical piece about the persistence of big-business villains in modern movies -- whatever. The odd thing is that Speed Racer producer Joel Silver declined to be interviewed for it. One images the reasoning: "Please...no light-hearted N.Y. Times articles about corporate villainy...leave us alone....the article might be slanted against the film!" The Wachowski brothers, true to form, also declined to be interviewed.

As noted three days ago, tracking is indicating that uncertain box-office prospects are facing the Wachowski brothers' Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.9) due to interest levels for the kid-friendly film being strongest among the over-25 set. Out of this has come a notion that What Happens in Vegas, the Ashton Kutcher-Cameron Diaz comedy that opens the same day, could elbow Speed Racer aside and become the weekend's #1 film.

Diaz, Kutcher in What Happens in Vegas

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In the wake of my similarly-worded 4.23 item, the Hollywood Reporter's Stephen Zeitchik wrote on 4.25 that expectations persist that Fernando Meirelles' Blindness will be shown under some aegis at the Cannes Film Festival, possibly as the opening-night attraction.

"The opening- and closing-night films haven't been officially announced," he reports, "and several sources said that Meirelles' profile and the film's scope (as well as such stars as Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo) make it a prime opening-night candidate. Even if it doesn't end up in that showcase slot, it could go in ...Read More

"Iron Man is a mixed bag. Slick, snappy, wonderfully witty, and at times more of an irony-man than just plain Iron Man. ('It's actually titanium-alloy man,' says Robert Downey's blase Tony Stark). Yet at times it's also a routine action movie with no real inventiveness, plot-wise," says Israeli blogger Yair Raveh's in his review on Cinemascope. Uh-oh...the first sign of Iron Man political backlash!

"Politically it tries to be liberal-minded at first," Raveh says, "putting the blame for wars on profiteering by arms manufacturers -- but in fact this is a conservative old-fashioned picture...Read More

This Bill Maher "New Rules" clip is only nine days old -- is that so bad? Yes, yes...I should have posted it earlier. But the riff about class and elitism that Maher delivered at midpointabout the Barack Obama/Reagan Democrats "bittergate" scandal is, for my money, gospel. Best line: "You know who is bitter in America? I am. Because shit-kickers voted twice for a retarded guy they wanted to have a beer with, and everybody else had to suffer the consequences!"

I can't believe I'm planning to pay money out of my own wallet -- the fruit of extremely hard and grueling day-to-day effort -- to see Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (New Line, 4.25) sometime later today. I know what I'm in for. It's going to make me want to to kill myself Khmer Rouge-style with a blue plastic bag. But I missed the damn press screening and I need the ammunition that will derive from being able to know and say "yes, I've seen it."

Especially knowing what I do about Kal Penn, which is that he's an Read More

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick recently caught a Tribeca Film Festival screening of Brian Hecker's Bart Got a Room, and was pleasantly surprised. "I didn't have enormous expectations," he writes, "for this autobiographical story about a teenager trying to find a prom date in a south Florida town with the help of his newly-divorced parents, played by William H. Macy (in a Jewfro!) and Cheryl Hines.

Macy, Kaplan in Bart Got a Room

"But it's hilarious, quick-paced (80 minutes!) with lots of smarts and heart and a terrific lead performance by newcomer Steven KaplanRead More

Too many photos from M. Night Smyamalan's The Happening (20th Century Fox, 6.13) show the principals -- Mark Wahlberg, Zoey Deschanel, John Leguizamo -- either (a) staring with stern but alarmed expressions at a TV screen, (b) staring with stern but alarmed expressions at some piece of physical evidence that indicates something strange is going on, or (c) staring into space with stern but fatigued (or numbed out) expressions. The Fox publicity team needs to hand out stills that are more varied, less predictable. I'm starting get bored. (Latest photos are posted at JoBlo.com)

Adding to my dissenting view of Guillermo del Toro's official contracted commitment to spend four years making two Hobbitt movies for New Line/ Warner Bros. and the oppressive poobah Peter Jackson, Salon's Andrew O'Hehir yesterday riffed and elaborated about the regret many are feeling about a great filmmaker preparing to lie down with dogs.

O'Hehir's best score is quoting Del Toro from a 2006 Cannes interview he did with the guy, to wit: "I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don't like little guys and dragons, hairy feet...Read More

Former Rolling...sorry...Hitsville's Bill Wyman, a former NPR and Salon arts editor, has posted a strong argument against Errol Morris's payment of interviewees for Standard Operating Procedure (Sony Classics, 4.25), largely in response to this morning's N.Y. Times story.

My view of this, posted last Tuesday, is that "notebook reporters can't pay for information -- that's completely out and always has been -- but documentaries are a different matter, I feel. As long as what the subject says to the documentarian can be verified to be a portion of absolute truth...

When I first spotted Jon Favreau in his semi-hilarious breakout role in Doug Liman's Swingers ('96), it was obvious he'd be looking at weight issues later in life. Sure enough he gradually went there as the years went along, finally achieving Orson Welles-ian proportions two years ago when he appeared as Vince Vaughn's best friend in The Breakup. But recent photos from Iron Man, which Favreau directed and costars in, as well as interview footage show that he's obviously gotten religion.

(l.) Favreau as currently constituted; (r.) as he looked during filming of The Breakup

Four days after an initial revealing by And The Winner Is editor-columnist Scott Feinberg, N.Y. Times reporters Michael Cieply and Ben Sisario have finally posted a story about Errol Morris having either paid or covered expenses for some of his interview subjects in his Abu Ghraib doc Standard Operating Procedure (Sony Classics, 4.25).

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Baby Mama will win the weekend with a projected $18,538,000 by Sunday night. Runner-up Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay will earn about $14,558,000. Forgetting Sarah Marshall will be third with $10,900,000 -- a drop of 38% from last weekend (a semi-decent hold), a Sunday-night cume of $35 million, and a resonable bet to finish with $60 million, give or take. The Forbidden Kingdom, suffering from word-of-mouth, will be off 51% from last weekend for a $10,398,000 haul.

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Buncha stuff to do today requiring organic physical movement (driving, signing things, shaking hands, eyeballing people and movies) so that's it for a few hours. But before I take off, there's this apartment at the Hotel Miramar in Cannes -- right on the Croisette, possible Mediterranean view, two buildings down from the Carlton -- that sleeps four festivlalgoers (questionable) and, from 5.13 to 5.24, is going for "only" 4600 euros, or close to $7000 U.S. dollars. Or so I was told yesterday.

The $7000 rental, not mine

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Ewan McGregor's apparent decision to play "a powerful Vatican insider" in Ron Howard's Angels and Demons, the sequel to The DaVinci Code, is the latest in a long series of straight-paycheck roles for this once-adventurous actor.

On 4.16 I asked "what's happened to McGregor over the last five or six years? It's almost as his soul was poisoned by playing Obi Wan Kenobi three times for George Lucas (The Phantom Menace in '99, Attack of the Clones in '02, Revenge of the Sith in '05). He's become Mr. Paycheck -- a young Read More

In a mostly rote summer-preview piece, Wall Street Journal reporters Lauren A.E. Schuker and Peter Sanders devote two interesting graphs to New Line's upcoming Sex and the City flick:

"These women are the ultimate female superheroes," says exec producer Michael Patrick King. The original HBO show "was made to correct the myth that if you were single at a certain age, you were a leper. Its four characters are heroes to a lot of women; they run around New York, or Gotham -- but they have fancy shoes instead of capes."

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Like many others I've spoken to, Variety's Todd McCarthy is impressed with Jon Favreau's Iron Man, which he saw at Paramount studios on 4.18. Here are two choice graphs from his 4.25 review, which went up 25 minutes ago:

"It's refreshing, for a start, that the character suddenly endowed with superpowers isn't a dweeby teen, but rather a pushing-middle-age genius who is himself entirely responsible for the advanced means he acquires to combat his adversaries; even more than the latest incarnation of Batman, he's a self-made superman...Read More

The best thing about this segment is Richard Lewis's off-screen "oh, come on!" as an MSNBC video report relays a John McCain comment that Barack Obama "doesn't get what we're about," or words to that effect.

From this morning's MSNBC First Read: "Two new Indiana polls are out that show the race there to be as close as we have expected it to be. Per a South Bend Tribune/Research 2000 poll (conducted April 21 to April 24), it's Obama 48%, Clinton 47%. And an Indy Star/WTHR poll -- conducted (April 20 to April 23) by Ann Selzer, who famously got Iowa right -- has it Obama 41%, Clinton 38%.

"The biggest surprise in the Selzer survey is Obama's strength against McCain -- he leads him...Read More

The problem with Baby Mama is that Tina Fey should have written it instead of director Michael McCullers. I say this presuming that Fey wrote some of her own dialogue (just as I know she wrote "bitch is the new black" for that SNL Hillary skit), but the film, I suspect, would have been at least 50% better if McCullers, who directs Baby Mama with the steady but cautious approach of a 68 year-old chess player, had just removed himself period. The writing feels reined in, conservative, middling.

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I don't know what this is about or what the shot is, but Ted Kotcheff's First Blood ('82) is going to have a special nationwide one-time-showing at dozens of first-rate theatres on Wednesday, May 15th. Following the film, the alternate "Rambo dies" ending will be shown plus an "exclusive, never-before-seen interview with Sylvester Stallone on First Blood, the new film and the iconic Rambo series," etc.

The time has come for Barack Obama to throw Reverend Jeremiah Wright under the bus and walk away and wash his hands. Wright is an arrogant egotist and -- I'm sorry but it's true -- a major asshole who doesn't give a damn about Obama's presidential candidacy. If he did he would never have succumbed to the ego stroke of a Bill Moyers Journal interview and said what he said, which is that -- in Wright's own words! -- Obama is a politician who feels or believes one thing and says another.

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Mark Urman has been named president of ThinkFilm, replacing the recently departed Jeff Sackman. (What's the story behind this, I wonder? There's always a story.) A co-founder of the company, Urman had been chief of theatrical distribution since the company's launch in September of 2001. Urman will continue to work out of the company's New York City offices, which is the new ground zero. Congratulations to a very bright and shrewd fellow.

The totally expected deal for Guillermo del Toro to direct The Hobbit in two parts has been signed, sealed and delivered. It'll be a New Line-MGM joint production that will eat up four years of Del Toro's life. Obviously a good gig, obviously an excellent choice, and congratulations to a beautiful human being on a very fine score.

But if you ask me there's a downside to this deal. It means that Del Toro, a truly gifted director with the power to be a 21st Century Luis Bunuel...Read More

Because four guys working for Quantum of Solace, the currently rolling James Bond film, suffered three accidents over a five-day period -- the Aston Martin accident last Saturday, another car accident on Monday, and a third one yesterday involving a near-fatality -- the producers have shut down production?

Why -- to wait for the curse to lift? To give the producers time to bring in a Catholic exorcist? Either the drivers were drinking, they don't know how to drive, or it's just bad luck...Read More

Deception isn't very good and will probably tank ($5 million give or take) when it opens this weekend, but 20th Century Fox is releasing it anyway it was produced by and costars Hugh Jackman, with whom the studio has a good relationship with a future (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Australia). This, in a sentence, is the gist of John Horn's 4.24 L.A. TImes story about this unfortunate (for audiences) dynamic.

I'm commenting on this 4.24 New York "Vulture" piece about "Which Superhero Movie Will Suck?" because the art they created for it looks cool and I wanted a reason to re-size and re-post. Otherwise I would have ignored the post altogether. Nobody has any reason to believe that Ironman, The Dark Knight or Hellboy 2 are going to be problematic. At all. Not a whiff. A 75% dead story.

The word on Ironman so far has been strong, and there's no reason to even intuit that Chris Nolan and Guillermo del Toro...Read More

Except for the cartoonish, over-the-top CG, I don't have a problem with this Hancock tailer. So I don't get the disdain and skepticism voiced yesterday by the New York "Vulture" guys. As long as the story is tight and the other basics (acting, dialogue, character, attitude) are nicely finessed, there's a place (even in my sometimes sour universe) for good, empty, rambunctious fun by way of Will Smith, Charlize Theron and director Peter Berg.

Hancock (Sony) opens on 7.2.08 -- a nice long holiday weekend, and a good empty fit. It could, as EW has predictedRead More

This spirited exchange between Vanity Fair Daily's Elizabeth Hurlbut and MCN's David Poland about repeated schlong exposures in Judd Apatow movies -- and particularly Jason Segel's trifecta in Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- is the most thoughtful and fully-considered exploration I've read anywhere.

HE regulars are sick of my posts about Segel's physicality, but I may as well remind everyone that there's a reason why Terry Southern sometimes used the term "gross animal member." Wang shots are tolerable, depending, as always, on the how and why. My problem with Segel's Marshall...Read More

For Republicans out to smear Barack Obama, no tactic is too low or slimey, as Floyd Brown's new Willie Horton ad attests. Brown created the original Horton ad that was credited with being one of the two big things that sank Michael Dukakis's candidacy in 1988. (The other was the video of Dukakis riding in that army tank wearing a Rocky-the-squirrel helmet.)

Jerzy Skolimowski's Four Nights With Anna will have its world premiere in Cannes as the opening film of the 40th Directors' Fortnight showcase, according to Variety's John Hopewell.

Oddly (or perhaps not so), the IMDB doesn't even list Anna on Skolimowski's page (although it does list an '08 project called America, a period drama written by Eyes Wide Shut's Frederic Raphael that's based on a Susan Sontag work).

The Polish-born Skolimowski will turn 70 on May 5th. I will always revere his direction of Deep End ('71), The Shout...Read More

The marketing team for Speed Racer (Warner Bros. 5.9) is facing an ironic challenge. It's basically "a kid's movie," as a critic friend recently confided, but the tracking, according to Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason, says the biggest interest levels so far are with the over-25 crowd who grew up on the animated versions in various media.

The closer Barack Obama gets to the Democratic nomination, the uglier this thing is getting in racial terms. That Republican-funded North Carolina TV attack ad I saw today that tried to "Willie Horton" Obama was nothing sort of breathtaking. When was the last time in which the racial-attitude cards from the hunkered-down regions were laid more plainly on the kitchen table? The early to mid '60s? As one MSNBC commentator said today, there are people out there who "made up their minds about [voting for an African-American candidate] back in 1957."

Illustration by Tom Tomorrow

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This isn't much, but the new trailer or Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is done and should be debuting with Iron Man (Paramount, 5.1) if not before. I presume it will turn up online concurrently. The exact running time is 1 minute, 49 seconds.

Older guys can be ornery. They can be grumpy, irascible. Sometimes they lose it. My father, well into his 80s, has succumbed to this syndrome recently. Whatever it was that was bothering Peter Falk, running a story like this is predatory journalism at its worst.

Nobody in the world -- nobody -- throws brilliant, super-analytical lightning bolts from his own incredibly fickle and ferocious orbit like New York Press critic Armond White. Judgment! Judgment! He's immensely readable, fearless, provocative. Film criticism today would be in a much poorer and less observant state without him. But he's so alone now. He's so up there and out there that he's barely seems to be breathing the same common air or standing on any kind of recognizable terra firma. Not as currently constituted. You know what I mean by that.

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5:02 pm Update: Fernando Meirelles' Blindness was missing from this morning's official Cannes Film Festival lineup. And yet it was reported as a definite Cannes possibility by Variety's Todd McCarthy, the Hollywood Reporter's Stephen Zeitchik and Agence France Presse last month.

I gather it will be shown at Cannes under some aegis. I haven't been told this in so many words, but a person in the Blindness camp has written that this morning's official Cannes list, as we all know, omitted "a few key announcements that are yet to be made." The implication seems clear.Read More

Warner Bros. recently decided to bump Ken Kwapis's He Just Not That Into You, a thirtysomething relationship drama produced by New Line, from 8.1.08 to 10.24.08. This is not that big of a deal. Tremors are not shaking the china.

Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Connelly, Kevin Connolly,Bradley Cooper and Justin Long costar. Set in Baltimore, overlapping storylines, all the lonely people. Probably not a masterpiece but there's something very alluring about that title (which is based on a book by Greg Behrendt). Other costars are Ginnifer Goodwin, Wilson Cruz and ...Read More

"The movie in the main Cannes competition line-up that's supposed to be fantastic and amazing is Lucrecia Martel's new film La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Girl Who Lost Her Head). She's the one who made the extraordinary La Cienaga and La Nina Santa (The Holy Girl). I hear this one blew all the Cannes selection committee people away. We'll see. I just thought i'd pass along some info as it comes from a great source." -- from a good fellow.

apparenlty a still from Lucrecia Martel's La Mujer Sin Cabeza

The HD version of the trailer for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (Disney, 5.16) looks a lot better than the one here. Decent-looking special effects, I must say. Seems to have that old Mark Johnson schwing.

Love the poster and teaser for Frank Miller's The Spirit (Lionsgate, 1.16.09). You know going into a Miller film that every frame will be luscious and immaculate (especially if you're a fool for anachronistic noirish monochrome stuff, particularly when intense reds are thrown in for accentuation's sake). You also know or strongly suspect that the story and the dialogue will probably feel cliched and shopworn and ho-hummish. I would be a shameless Miller groveller and a kiss-ass if he would only put half the energy into story and dialogue that he puts into visual composition.

So what exactly is Sean Penn intending to do on-stage at the Coachella Music Festival on Sunday, 4.27 from 2:10 pm to 2:40 pm? If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that Milk director Gus Van Sant wants to shoot Penn (in Harvey Milk guise) giving a speech to a big crowd. He doesn't play in a band. Stand-up comedy?

The Tribeca Film Festival (4.23 to 5.4) "has always suffered comparisons to it's older, more important siblings," writes the N.Y. Observer's Sara Vilkomerson.

"It doesn't have the old-world glamour of Cannes, the international marketplace hagglings at Toronto or Berlin, the late-night frenzied dealings and celebrity swagfest of Sundance or the elegant prestige found at Lincoln Center. It hasn't even had a central location, what with theaters all over the city hosting screenings, and downtown itself a strange labyrinth of high-end restaurants and hotels.

"What Tribeca has had is a lot...Read More

I don't care how old this is...

Yesterday Just Jared ran pics of Evan Rachel Wood and Larry David shooting scenes for Woody Allen's latest, which marks a return to Manhattan home turf. Here's a shot that suggests Allen may be considering a slight plug for Tom McCarthy's The Visitor (as he did in Match Point with a shot of a London marquee announcing the showing of Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries).

"Despite some criticism, Pastor Roger Byrd says that the message will stay on the sign. He took the issue before his congregation Sunday night, and they decided unanimously to keep it." There's a small-screen video report that accompanies the WYFF news story.

The official 2008 Cannes Film Festival announcement went up just after 3 am this morning, and the ambiguity about Steven Soderbergh's two-headed Che Guevara drama -- The Argentine and Guerilla -- has been removed. It will definitely play there (possibly with The Argentine in some kind of not-quite-finished form, but whatever) and glory friggin' hallelujah!

Once again it feels as if the festival will have an ambitious centerpiece -- a long-haul piece de resistance...Read More

The Reel Geezers hit it out of the park again with this review of Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

I'm in hell...we're all in hell tonight with the Hildebeast having won Pennsylvania by a solid 10%. I know Obama's seeming flirtation with Adlai Stevenson-ism is frightening to many of us (it certainly has been to me), but the two bedrock reasons for the persistence of the Clinton campaign are, face it or not, (a) gender loyalty among the less-well-off, somewhat less-educated women who can't let go of the momentousness of a woman making a super-serious run for the presidency, and (b) primal tribal resistance...Read More

Variety's Todd McCarthy reported at 9:30 pm this evening that Clint Eastwood's Changeling (Universal, 11.8), a 1920s mystery drama with Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Amy Ryan and Colm Feore, will compete at next month's Cannes Film Festival.

With the official Cannes announcement due tomorrow morning, McCarthy also revealed three other surprises:

(a) Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which stars Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem, "will appear in Cannes after all, with Allen attending the fest over the initial weekend."

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Due respect, but Michael Cieply's 4.23 N.Y. Times story about Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner's Valkyrie -- twice-delayed and presumed to be troubled -- adds next to nothing to the story.

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I was disappointed after missing a screening of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, a French- produced James Bond/Austin Powers spy satire, at the Seattle Film Festival in June 2006. It had opened to great reviews and strong business in France two months earlier, and it seemed like all the rage. (As far as a French- made film can be said to be the rage of anything.) A year and a half later it played at the St. Louis International Film Festival.

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Is there any guy in the civilized world who wouldn't feel at least a slight twinge of concern if a woman he's just met has confessed she doesn't use deodorant?

5:52 pm Update: First it was "too close to call," then "too early to call" and now Pensylvania has been called a Clinton win with -- right now -- a 10% margin, 55% to 45% in her favor. If the margin of victory doesn't go down to 5% or 6% or 7%, it'll be a bit of an Obama bummer. Were those exit polls indicating a 4% margin between Clinton and Obama -- 52 to 48 -- anywhere near accurate?

Answer the following after watching this trailer for The Wackness (Sony Classics, 7.3). Josh Peck obviously does well at playing young urban white guys who talk in a street argot that is part imitation "black" and part whatevuh but in any case suggests a total inability to convey an air of refinement and higher education. But answer me this...

Is there any circumstance in which any...Read More

If I were totally alone in my galumph-aversion to Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Jason Segel, would Universal have taken his face off the film's posters? Segel told David Letterman last Friday night that "they tested posters with my face on them and there was an unfavorable reaction to my face. I'm not quite good-looking enough to be the good-looking guy, but I'm not bad-looking enough to be the hilarious guy." Obviously there's a silent majority out there that feels the same pain.

Any film about sexual obsession and kinky-deranged inclinations has to have attractive actors -- no ifs, ands or buts. That means you keep things within....how to say it?...somewhat conventionally appealing limits, which means steering clear of dweeby-looking actors with boney bods, pale freckly skin and red hair with that "just arrived from the Planet Uranus" look in their eyes. In this respect, Julianne Moore as the notorious Barbara Daly Baekland works just fine, but Eddie Redmayne as her totally weird son Antony does not.

Here's the trailer.

The IMDB keywords for Tom Kalin's...Read More

The Pennsylvania polls close at 8 pm. All right-thinking people are hoping that the Hildebeast margin of victory will be kept to within 5% to 7%. A winning margin below 5% will be cause for champagne in the streets.