Before zotzing Picturehouse and Warner Independent, Warner Bros. management "did look at various permutations of keeping the companies in discussion," the Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein and Borys Kit wrote last night, including having Picturehouse chief Bob Berney and WI honcho Polly Cohen co-manage a merged specialty division, "something the execs agreed to do shortly after the New Line absorption was announced, Cohen said."

"The decision to cease operations was made only about a week ago, and many inside the company were caught off-guard -- including Cohen, who said she was having meetings about a merged division with Berney as recently as Friday. She said she was informed about the decision Wednesday, and she dismissed word that the decision was made earlier than then. 'I doubt they'd pull a whole Truman Show on me,' she said with a laugh. 'I've been at Warners so long they say derogatory things about me in front of my face.'

"'It was similar to what happened at New Line. Warners made both of them (Cohen and Berney) jump through hoops for weeks,' says a Berney associate.

"'They said, 'Will you streamline your staff? -- OK.' 'Will you use the Warner Bros. distribution network? -- OK.' With every obstacle they threw at them, they came back with a PowerPoint presentation on how to deal with it. It's almost like they wanted Bob to quit.'

"'Bob wasn't getting a lot of calls from other studios since the New Line announcement was made, but he was getting a lot from people with venture capital,' the colleague added. 'Now the call volume is getting really crazy.'

Did the cautious-to-a-fault John Edwards say "I just voted for him on Tuesday" or "I just voted for 'em on Tuesday"? The man is a hedger, a tap-dancer, a slick operator, an angler-dangler with no balls.

Here, sequentially, are some of the Cannes Film Festival day-by-day highlights:

Wednesday, 5.14: Fernando Meirelles' Blindness (comp.).

Thursday, 5.15: Pablo Trapero's Leonera and Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir (comp.) along with Mark Osborne and John Stevenson's Kung Fu Panda (non-comp), Steve McQueen's Hunger and de Bong Joon Ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry's Tokyo! (Un Certain Regard).

Friday, 5.16: Arnaud Desplechin's Un Conte de Noel and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Uc Mayman (comp.) along with Allison Thompson's The Third Wave (Seance Speciale) and James Toback's Tyson (Un Certain Regard).

Saturday, 5.17: Walter Salle's Linha de Passe, and de Jia Zhangke's Er Shi Si Cheng JI (comp.) along with Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona and de Na Hong-jin's The Chaser (non-comp.), and Daniel Leconte's C’est dur D’etre Aime par des Cons (Seance Speciale).

Sunday, 5.18 Matteo Garrone's Gomorra and Brilliante Mondoza's Serbis (comp.), plus Steven Spielberg's non-comp Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Indiana Jones et le Royaume du Crane de Cristal) at 1 pm, plus Wong Kar Wai's Ashes of Time Redux (Seance Speciale) plus Raymond Depardon's La Vie Moderne and Antonio Campos' Afterschool (Un Certain Regard).

Monday, 5.19: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Le Silence de Lorna and James Gray's Two Lovers (comp.), plus an hommage for Manuel de Oliviera, plus Pierre Scholler's Versailles and Ruben Ostlund's De Ofrivilliga (Un Certain Regard) plus Marco Tullio Giordana's Sanguepazzo, referred to parenthetically as Une Histoire Italienne (Seance Speciale).

Tuesday, 5.20: Clint Eastwood's Changeling and Kornel Mundruczo's Delta (comp.) plus Emir Kusturica's Maradona by Kusturica (non-comp.), plus Marina Zenovich's Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired and Terence Davies' Of Time and the City (Seance Speciale), plus Amat Escalante's Los Bastardos and Jean-Stephane Sauvaire's Johnny Mad Dog (Un Certain Regard).

Wednesday, 5.21: Steven Soderbergh's Che and Lucrecia Martel's La Mujer Sin Cabeza (comp.), plus Jennifer Lynch's Surveillance (non-comp.), plus Quentin Tarantino's Lecon de Cinema (Seance Speciale) plus Bent Hamer's O’ Horten and Matheus Nachtergaele's A Festa da Menina Morta (Un Certain Regard).

That's eight days' worth -- enough for now. I'll get to Thursday and Friday's films (5.22 and 5.23) tomorrow or later today. They include Phillipe Garrel's La Frontiere de L'Aube, Atom Egoyan's Adoration, Charlie Kaufman's Syndoche, New York, Laurent Cantet's Entre Les Murs, Wim Wenders' Palermo Shooting, and Abel Ferrara's Chelsea on the Rocks.

The Cannes Film Festival official screening schedule went up yesterday with the press screening schedule expected to post sometime tomorrow.

The rundown identifies Steven Soderbergh's The Argentine and Guerilla as a single film called Che that runs 4 hours and 28 minutes. Meaning, obviously, that as far as Cannes is concerned, the two-movie concept is out the window in favor of presenting a single epic-sized film with an intermission.

Che is showing to the press on Wednesday morning, 5.21 -- a relatively late berth as the hot-ticket films tend to show at the festival within the first five or six days. Soderbergh presumably asked for a late-as-possible slot in order to give him extra time for final tweaks, as the the film's inclusion at Cannes was in doubt until the last minute due to an editing crunch. The black-tie public viewing will happen that evening at 6:30. With all the introductions and applause moments, it will finish close to five hours later. An after-party will follow.

Thanks to Variety's Anne Thompson for the initial YouTube post/link, and kudos to dialogue (i.e., subtitle) writer and stand-up comedian James Adomian. This isn't as funny as the collapse of HD-DVD video, but it's close.

Hitler/Clinton: "The superdelegates were supposed to trump the fucking voters! And now you tell me those fat fucks are waddling over to worship that dandy Obama, lke he's the second coming of Jimi Hendrix? Meanwhle what do we have to show for the millions wasted on get-out-the-vote? A bunch of old-fuck retirees and illiterate dropouts too stupid to punch a ballot with their fat little fingers?"

"You should't blame the voters," an adviser warns.

Hitler/Clinton: "They are losers...marshmallow-shaped dykes!" Adviser: "It doesn't look good to attack your supporters." Hitler/Clinton: "My supporters are the dumbest fucks in the country! Still bitching about NAFTA. I'm so sick of drinking whiskey with those pigs! What other working-class photo ops do they expect nme to do? Take a shit in a fucking outhouse? The DNC has thwarted my destiny! That faggot-loving Howard Dean blocked my path at every step! I'm the one who said from the beginning we should set Dean up with a hooker sting, like they did to Spitzer!"

Agreeable, moderately talented guitar guy singing well and playing basic chords at Art Land, a friendly and inexpensive hole-in-the-wall joint on East Williamsburg's Grand Street -- Thursday, 5.8.08, 9:55 pm. In the world of New York watering holes and moody nocturnal distractions, paying $4 for a bottle of Budweiser is a very cheap deal.

That "All Things Considered" interview I did with NPR media reporter David Folkenflik two days ago will be linkable online by roughly 7 pm this evening. It's not just me talking -- it's three or four movie critics including, I think, former N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Mathews. The piece is called "Movie Critics Disappearing from Newsrooms."

In early April I wondered if anyone cares enough about Carol Reed's Outcast of the Islands (1951) to put it out on DVD. Those dedicated wackdoodles at the Criterion Collection, say. Well, hail hail rock 'n' roll because Outcast will air on Turner Classic Movies come Friday, August 22. August is traditionally TCM's one-star-per-day month and that day will be devoted to Outcast star Trevor Howard. The complete August schedule (with some other interesting rarities) is viewable here.

After reportedly trying to forge some kind of amicable, foward-looking merger between Picturehouse and Warner Independent, Warner Bros. management has suddenly thrown up its hands and is getting out of the "dependent" business altogether, it was announced about an hour ago.

WB president & COO Alan Horn released a statement that seems to translate, when you boil the snow out of it, into the following: "Sorry, but we've come to realize that running a Fox Searchlight- or Paramount Vantage-type operation just isn't our bag. Our hearts were sort of into this, but now they aren't. Things change. Besides, we've got New Line for the smaller stuff. We're into maximizing revenue and building broad genre franchises, and...you know, making or releasing movies for people who read reviews and enjoy provocative subject matter just isn't worth it to us."

The actual statement reads that "with New Line now a key part of Warner Bros., we're able to handle films across the entire spectrum of genres and budgets without overlapping production, marketing and distribution infrastructures ...after much painstaking analysis, this was a difficult decision to make, but it reflects the reality of a changing marketplace and our need to prudently run our businesses with increased efficiencies. We're confident that the spirit of independent filmmaking and the opportunity to find and give a voice to new talent will continue to have a presence at Warner Bros."

So except for Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino and the occasional lucky-accident movie that may rank as award-worthy, Warner Bros. seems to have basically taken itself out of the quality-driven prestige movie business.

I wonder what really happened? What led to the breakdown of the merger talks?

It turns out that Defamer's Stu VanAirsdale was fairly close to the money when he reported that Picturehouse may soon be shut down, and that Anne Thompson's Variety story about the same situation was less correct, especially in reporting that Picturehouse chief Bob Berney and Warner Independent prexy Polly Cohen are "likely" to accept a bicoastal power-sharing arrangement that will preside over a merged operation," i.e., Warner Indiepicturehouse.

Glenn Kenny, one of the country's finest film critics and a brilliant writer to boot, has been cut loose by Premiere.com. "What this means for this blog is still up in the air," he wrote this morning. "I've got meetings this afternoon in which such things are to be negotiated. In any case, I now join the ever-growing ranks of film critics without staff positions. I very much hope to keep this blog going...and get some good freelance work, quick. Anybody with ideas in this area should contact me at glennkenny@mac.com. Hope to be in touch again soon. Thank you, you're the best goddamn audience a blogger could ever have."

Speed Racer (opening Friday) is running at 90, 29 and 16, which looks to me like $25 to $30 million, at best. (Normally a 16 first choice means $15 to $20 million, depending on the demographic, but the family-trade current will kick this one up.) What Happens in Vegas is running at 87, 32 and 18. David Mamet's Redbelt is going wide this week with 20 general, 24 definite interest and 2 first choice. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (opening 5.16) is at 96, 42 and 14. Sex and the City (New Line, HBO, 5.30) is at 84, 23 and 6, but among over-25 women the first choice is 14, so it'll probably play The Devil Wears Prada.

"In a heated phone call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi late last month, Hillary Clinton supporter Harvey Weinstein threatened to cut off campaign money to congressional Democrats unless Pelosi embraced a new plan by the movie mogul to finance a revote of the Democratic presidential primaries in Florida and Michigan, according to three officials who were briefed on the contents of the conversation." -- filed this morning by CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry.

Yesterday's Grand Wizard award went to Hillary Clinton for blatantly using the term "white Americans" in a USA Today interview written by Kathy Kiely and Jill Lawrence. "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said, citing an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

''Bush may turn out to be the worst president in history,'' W. director Oliver Stone has told Entertainment Weekly . ''I think history is going to be very tough on him. But that doesn't mean he isn't a great story.

Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks as George and Laura in Oliver Stone's W.

"It's almost Capra-esque, the story of a guy who had very limited talents in life, except for the ability to sell himself. The fact that he had to overcome the shadow of his father and the weight of his family name -- you have to admire his tenacity. There's almost an Andy Griffith quality to him, from A Face in the Crowd. If Fitzgerald were alive today, he might be writing about him. He's sort of a reverse Gatsby.''

Again, my reactions to Stanley Weiser's fine script.

I wasn't going to say anything and just wait until the 5.18 screening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in Cannes, but since Ain't It Cool has run a neg review from "ShogunMaster" (and since Hollywood Wiretap has linked to it), the cat is out of the bag and I may as well share something of my own.

Last night I heard from a guy I've known for years who's quite friendly with an exhibitor from the southern region, and this guy passed along some comments after seeing an exhibitor screening two days ago. The exhib's taste in movies tends to be fairly generous and populist (enjoyed Iron Man, even liked Speed Racer), but he wasn't especially taken with Indy 4, my friend says.

The most interesting thing my source passed along was his friend's sense that "the only ones who liked it were the older guys." This ties in to an older-younger, march-of-time theme that is certain to seep through. Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones is obviously older, Steven Spielberg is an older guy who is proud of shooting and cutting action films in a somewhat old-fashioned (i.e., classic, non-Matrix-y) way, and now -- maybe -- a hint that the film itself may play older, or on some level embody older-ness. Cool.

A Hollywood screenwriter guy is telling me that "people" -- he didn't say younger or older, but let's presume the latter -- "are really liking it." He claims there was another exhibitor screening last week, and that some feel "it's the best of the sequels." It has, he's been told, a kind of reflective, summing-up quality that has echoes of Temple of Doom and The Last Crusade.

I love this. Especially having been pummelled by Speed Racer last night. I would love it, I mean to say, if Indy 4 winds up providing a window into the Spielberg- Lucas-Jones mindset -- i.e., we're obviously grappling with the world as it is and giving it hell, but we're still older guys and very comfortable, thank you, with doing things in our own tried-and-true way.

Let's leave it alone for now, but the two downbeat responses suggest that a Da Vinci Code-like mauling could happen -- maybe, possibly -- when Mr. Jones turns up at the Grand Palais on 5.18. I'm thinking again about the statement that producer George Lucas gave to USA Today's Scott Bowles, the one about it "not" being "the Second Coming...it's just a movie, just like the other movies."

This may turn out to be a good thing, in a way. If this talk keeps up expectations will be slightly lowered by the time it shows in Cannes (and in domestic media screenings) on the Sunday after next, and the responses may therefore fall under the heading of "pleasant surprise."

Decompressing from Speed Racer at Leow's IMAX -- Wednesday, 5.7, 8:55 pm

"The big question if Clinton stays in the race is this: Just how will she campaign? Yesterday, there were no negative TV ads or attack mailers. But Clinton did stress that she can win the general, implying that Obama might not be able to.

"'I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,' she told USA Today, citing her support with white working-class voters. It's comments like that one that might drive more supers toward Obama pretty quickly. Why? Because they know the math, but they don't want her to spend three weeks making a case that Obama can't win. It will only weaken him.

"Here's what Obama backer Chris Dodd said yesterday, per NBC's Ken Strickland. 'You're going to be asking a bunch of people [in West Virginia] to vote against somebody who's likely to be your nominee a few weeks later? And turn around and ask the very same people a few weeks later to reverse themselves and now vote for [Obama] on election day?'" -- from this morning's edition of MSNBC's First Read.

I admire and respect the moves and the intent of Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.9), which I saw last night at the Leow's IMAX near Lincoln Center. Right away I was saying to myself, "All right, this is out there....infuriating but brilliantly out there." But it offers almost nothing in the way of genuine personal charm (except for the monkey, Chim-Chim) and I began looking at my watch starting around the 45-minute mark. Honestly? More like a half-hour in.

This is a deranged, steroid-cranked family-action movie...the work of madmen -- undeniably brash and looney and, I feel, desperately in need of a quaalude. Speed Racer is a piece of very audacious, high-quality....I was going to say "torture" but it's not. It's extremely nervy filmmaking, clearly, but the Wachowskis are way too caught up in fulfilling their "we're cooler than any of you!" vision and in being at least two if not three giant steps in front of everyone else in terms of creating a new film vocabulary in order to explore and shake the cage while ostensibly telling a story, and a lame-ass one to boot.

The Wachowskis are so zonked by the design dreams in their own heads that they've delivered a new kind of monster-budget insanity. They've made this movie for themselves, first and foremost, and for open-minded (or at least fair-minded) critics, and certainly for film history...but they haven't concurrently "served the corporation" and made a film that people over the age of 8 or 9 can settle into very easily or comfortably. Or even settle into with some effort. I didn't sit there consumed with loathing for this thing. It's too fascinating for that. But it's also a movie that's saying over and over, "Look at us! Look at what we're doing!" It's too breathtaking to really entertain. And as pleased as I was by the verve-and-moxie element, I was dying for it to end.

You have to throw out the rule book and accept that this movie is using an entirely different kind of spaceship and orbiting the earth in a way that is going to vaguely piss you off but at the same time dazzle you. Or certainly intrigue you. The refusal to conventionally cut or fade or wipe from one scene to another -- awesome. But it's not done in a way that gives any sort of familiar, recognizable pleasure, and as square as this sounds, you really do need some of that in a movie. You have to keep feeding and massaging the square guy while introducing the new hipster, and there's very little square-massaging going on in this thing.

Speed Racer certainly isn't pleasurable to sit through, character-, theme- or story-wise. In subjecting their audience to the same old pure-hearted individual contender vs. the corrupt corporation horseshit, the Wachowskis are showing their elitist-sadist colors. If it was good enough for Japanese anime and and other graphic media in its day, they seem to be saying, it's good enough for us right now...and if you don't like it, tough! Watching it is a bondage-and-discipline game -- you feel trussed up and bound with Andy and Larry (or whatever his name is now) applying the cool whip.

But it's more than a little ironic that for a movie that trots out the evil-corporate-mogul business for the 189th time, Speed Racer is drenched in synthetic splendor that's been bought and paid for by corporate cash. And it's way, way too long. It should have been a 95-minute deal, tops, but it goes on for two hours and 9 minutes.

The racing sequences are insane. You never have any idea about what's going on. Shots don't build or match up or pivot off each other. They collide in a kind of surreal cartoon madness. The geometric/spatial relationships between the racing competitors are almost always a complete mystery. Off with the editor's head! And the martial arts combat sequences are nothing -- fatally boring, by my book.

The performances are okay, but I found more fascination in the face of Chim-Chim than anything the humans came up with. I loved that fucking monkey, and began to really dislike -- hate! -- the Wachowskis for only using him for typical animal-reaction cutaway shots. If they'd only dwelled on his facial reactions for seven or eight seconds at a time (or more!). But no -- over and over they do a quick Chim-Chim laugh cut and then back to Emile Hirsch or John Goodman or Christina Ricci or Susan Sarandon or the mugging, heebie- jeebie supporting players. Fuck! (And I don't like to use profanity unless it fits.)

Ain't It Cool's Drew McWeeny was on the record with his Speed Racer rave yesterday, before David Poland. I should have acknowledged this when I posted my 5.7 piece at 1:19 pm. "I think critics are forgetting that part of our job is to not only say what we like, but to review a film based on the intent of that film," he says. "Comparing Speed Racer to Andrei Tarkovsky or serious adult cinema is a sucker's bet. Of course they don't compare. But it's one of the most outrageous visions in kid's cinema since George Miller's Babe: Pig in the City. A good thing, in my book."

First Showing's Alex Billington also posted positively yesterday.

"I'm actually glad to hear that you mildly enjoyed it," he wrote this morning, "as I was expecting most people to hate it, especially with all of the commentary you had written previously. I really do think it's a hard movie to like if you can't step out of your own age and attempt to appreciate it for the kids movie it is. But then again, it does have its flaws and it's impossible to get around those especially when it brings the movie down in some big ways."

"In his victory speech after the smashing North Carolina results came in, Barack Obama went directly after both John McCain and the media. '[McCain's] plan to win in November appears to come from the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election,' Obama said. 'Yes, we know what's coming. I'm not naive. We've already seen it, the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn't agree with all their ideas, the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives, by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along.'

"In the end, Obama's challenge to the media is as significant as his challenge to McCain. All the evidence -- and especially the selection of these two apparent nominees -- suggests the public not only is taking this election very seriously but is also extremely concerned about the state of the nation and tired of politics as usual. I suspect the public is also tired of media as usual, tired of journalists who put showmanship over substance...as I found myself doing in the days before the May 6 primaries.

"Obama was talking about the Republicans, but he could easily have been talking about the press when he said, 'The question, then, is not what kind of campaign they will run; it's what kind of campaign we will run. It's what we will do to make this year different. You see, I didn't get into this race thinking that I could avoid this kind of politics, but I am running for President because this is the time to end it.'" -- from "Obama's Game Change," a 5.8 essay by Time's Joe Klein.

Come July 9th, this is the guy I want standing on my desk. I'm going to lay out the money right now. Heath Ledger wasn't a friend (hardly) but he always smiled and gave me a "hey" wave when we made eye contact at parties or press gatherings, and he always gave me two or three minutes when he wasn't being swamped. For what it's worth and in a weird sort of way, having this guy on my desk will be, for me, a way of burning a candle for him.

Modest and likable and decent though he may be (okay, is), this is not the real John McCain. Or it is and it's not enough. A charming, low-key guy selling misguided, outmoded, old-school medicine. Nice to talk to, but inwardly snarly and obstinate and, in a decent-American-on-a-Sunday-morning sort of way, blind.

There is nothing wrong or suspect about liking a film that almost everyone else hates. On the contrary, it is the mark of a critic who's probably worth reading ...as long as he/she doesn't go all Armond White on disliked or discredited films too often. That said, it's a bit of an eye-opener (or is it a dark omen?) that MCN's David Poland has given a fairly hearty thumbs-up to Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.9)

With tracking looking dicey at best and a Rotten Tomatoes positive rating of 37% (as of Wednesday afternoon), this animated Wachowski brothers action film needs all the friends it can get. I do know that Poland has been totally in the Wachowski tank from the beginning, and that his enthusiastic and persistent praise for both The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions were divorced from the reality of those films that I came to know. (Yes, I was warm on Reloaded at first, but it faded upon reflection and then the curtains parted when I saw it a second time.)

For all I know Poland is on the money, and again, he has my respect for going against the grain. That said, I had a much better time (as I frequently do) reading Anthony Lane's New Yorker review, particularly this opening paragraph:

"Gluttons for Duck Soup will remember the scene in which Groucho is faced with an official document. 'Why, a four-year-old child could understand this report,' he says. 'Run out and find me a four-year-old child.' My sentiments exactly, as I sat in a cathedral-size auditorium, wreathed in the ineffable mysteries of Speed Racer. This is the latest offering from Andy and Larry Wachowski, bringers of The Matrix, and, if it is about anything, it is about the quest to overwhelm a particular stratum of the masses. A four-year-old will be reduced to a gibbering but highly gratified wreck; an eight-year-old will wander around wearing a look that was last seen on the face of Dante after he met Beatrice. But what about the rest of us? True, our eyeballs will slowly, though never completely, recover, but what of our souls?

"I reckon the M.P.A.A. should use the advent of Speed Racer to revive an old ratings symbol: a big Roman X, meaning 'of no conceivable interest to anyone over the age of ten.'"

Forever partial to the films of Abel Ferrara, the Cannes Film Festival is offering a special screening of his latest, a doc about a certain storied Manhattan hotel called Chelsea on the Rocks. Screening on Friday,. 5.23, it'll include "interviews with residents past and present" such as Milos Forman, Ethan Hawke, Dennis Hopper and R. Crumb, plus vintage music, archival footage and re-enactments of famous Chelsea episodes -- Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious, Janis Joplin -- performed by Bijou Phillips, Jamie Burke, Adam Goldberg, Giancarlo Esposito and Grace Jones.

The press screening is at 11:30 am at the 60th Anniversary Theatre inside the Palais, the press conference is at 3:15 pm, and the official screening is at 7:45 pm. Ferrara, Phillips, Burke and Hooper will attend.

"GOP heavyweight James Baker III and Democratic strategist Ron Klain couldn't have been more at odds than they were during the disputed Bush v. Gore 2000 election battle in Florida," writes Politico's Jeffrey Ressner. "So it's no small irony that as HBO's telefilm Recount (debuting 5.25) was being readied, the two men both signed off on a completely fictional scene in which their characters meet briefly on an airport tarmac."

(l.) James Baker; (r.) Ron Klain

I'm glad Strong made it up. The scene isn't confrontational or slam-bam, but it hits the right note. It happens at the finale, and after all the haggling and spinning over vote counts for the previous two hours, the viewer is looking for some kind of reflective sum-up. What you get is a few choice words between rivals -- a formal but friendly hello, a foreshadowing of dark things to come from Klain (Kevin Spacey) and a suggestion by Baker (Tom Wilkinson) that there's no right or wrong and that it all boils down to loyalty.

I enjoyed that director Jay Roach made sure that Wilkinson closely resembles Baker, which is mainly accomplished by his wearing a gray-hair wig. It's a little odd, therefore, that despite the real Klain (above) obviously having a decent head of hair, Roach decided to let Spacey play it with his own sparse follicles, which have been retreating like the French Army out of Russia since the days of American Beauty. Why not wig out if it creates a slightly closer resemblance?

Here again is my 4.30 review of Recount.

Cinemorgue, which features listings and descriptions of thousands of death scenes that are alphabetized by the names of actors and actresses, is grim and exhaustive and...valuable, I guess, but also kind of strange. I'd forgotten how many times Elke Sommer has been gruesomely killed on-screen. Two skiiing accidents, shot three times (machine gunned in 1969's The Wrecking Crew, the Dean Martin-Matt Helm movie), blown up, and bludgeoned to death.

Almost all movie deaths, it seems, are brutal, bloody, sudden, ghastly, traumatic and otherwise unpeaceful. Nod-off deaths -- like Sir Cedric Hardwicke 's passing in The Ten Commandments -- have been few and far between over the last 40 years. Is real-life death ever smooth and easy? Only if you do yourself in with pills. James Toback said during a phone chat, which is that (paraphrasing) "almost none of us are going to die as pleasantly as we'd like to...it's always under circumstances we can't foresee, much less plan for, and sooner than we'd like."

Note: all present and future mentions of cinemorgue.com are permanently indebted to Movie City News because Poland linked to it earlier today or last night.

"The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti- Reverend Wright...campaign, they are simply going to fail." -- a declaration made yesterday by (believe it or not) Newt Gingrich on Human Events, a conservative website.

The DVD of the original 219-minute cut of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate has been available for more than eight years, but even those who mostly despise the film (myself among them) will concede that seeing an allegedly "restored" print on a big screen in a first-rate house like Santa Monica's Aero is definitely the preferred way to go. Kevin Thomas will introduce the 5.22 Aero screening, which will start at 7:30 pm.

History long ago noted that renowned critic F.X. Feeney is primarily responsible for recasting Heaven's Gate as a film deserving of revisionist respect. I never bought into this but Feeney's efforts in this regard are a reminder of what a genuiinely caring and impassioned film critic can do when he/she puts his/her mind to it. Or at least was capable of doing in the old days.

I hated Heaven's Gate when I first saw it 17 and a half years ago, and I couldn't stay with it when I tried it a second time at home about five years ago. I therefore feel it's still worth quoting the famous quip from N.Y. Times critic Vincent Canby that Heaven's Gate "fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect."

I attended the second critics screening at the Cinema I on November 17th or 18th (one of those) and stood at the bottom of the down escalator as those who'd seen the afternoon show were leaving. I asked everyone I knew what they thought on a scale of 1 to 10. I'll never forget the gray, deflated expression on the face of journalist Dan Yakir as he muttered "zero."

Lionsgate has decided to open Frank Miller's The Spirit, an adaptation of Will Eisner's heavy-noir comic strip, on Christmas Day 2008 instead of 1.16.09. Pamela McClintock's 5.6 Variety story, quoting Lionsgate theatrical films chief Tom Ortenberg, says the decision to shift the film to 12.25 "came after the project was presented to fans at New York Comic-Con."

Scarlett Johansson as "Silken Floss" in Frank Miller's The Spirit

Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha (Hanway Films), which is playing at Manhattan's Film Forum from now through 5.20, is arguably the best Iraq War foot-soldier drama to have been released thus far. Mostly because it uses the POV of all the sad victims in this wretched episode and presents the particulars in a way that straddles the line between judgment and lament.

Shot in purposefully ragged docu-drama style with non-actors and deserving, I feel, a solid 8 on a scale of 10, Haditha will certainly be avoided en masse by those brave citizens who don't want to know from that conflict, and who will absolutely dodge a dramatization of the infamous November 2005 Haditha massacre in which 24 Iraqi men, women and children -- 15 of whom were confirmed non-combatants -- were slain by U.S.Marines on a revenge bender.

As the Wikipedia page explains, it has been alleged that the killings were retribution for the attack on a convoy of United States Marines with an improvised explosive device that killed Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas.

I won't strenuously argue with the belief of Salon's Andrew O'Hehir that it's "the closest thing this conflict has produced to a Paths of Glory or an All Quiet on the Western Front" or Robert Koehler's view that it summons memories of Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers." It does visit similar tragic turf, and does, for the most part, offer a convincing simulation of the hell fires consuming that cursed country right now as well as those that propelled several regular guy GIs to do what they did two and a half years ago.

The only serious beef I had after seeing in Toronto last September was that "the improvised dialogue feels a little too blunt and on-the-nose at times," although I said without qualification that it's "absorbing, bracing stuff." But because of some of the actors' delivery and my resistance to some of the dialogue, I wasn't completely swallowed by it and so the the emotionality didn't quite kick in.

Coming Soon's Ed Douglas has posted a straightforward q & a he did with Broomfield a few days ago.

Interested New Yorkers might want to catch tonight's 8 pm show at the Film Forum, as it will be followed by a q & a between Broomfield and actor/former U.S. Marine Elliot Ruiz.

Huge exhale and good riddance. Barack Obama wailed in North Carolina and lost Indiana by a nose hair, and that, ladies and gentlemen and undecideds, is finally the end of Hillary Cinton. Tim Russert said this morning that every political player now accepts that Obama will be the party's nominee in Denver. Politico's Mike Allen wrote this morning that Obama "won't push her out -- he'll let her get her coat, and walk to the door. But he's talking to the whole country now -- not just to Democrats, and not to individual states."

In the wake of this morning's breaking news that Clinton has loaned her faltering campaign another $6.4 million on top of the $5 million loan she admitted to earlier this year, her perplexing determination to push on (clearly obnoxious, arguably sociopathic in nature) will only hurt her future prospects. As Politico's Roger Simon wrote late last night, "She has options, but only if she manages her endgame carefully. If she becomes known as the candidate who was willing to destroy her party in order to gain the nomination, she is likely to lose not just the nomination but also her political future."

In the meantime, here's irrefutable proof of the validity of my earlier suggestion that a Dumbass Amendment be added to the Constitution requiring states to give prospective voters short written quizzes to make certain they're at least somewhat knowledgable and semi-intelligent before being granted a voice in choosing the nation's leadership.

Chicago Sun Times reporter Lynn Sweet has reported that yesterday morning "about 50 people were eating breakfast at [the Four Seasons] restaurant in Greenwood when Obama walked in at 7:40 a.m. He went from table to table, chatting briefly with patrons about the economy and gas prices before sitting down to breakfast.

"One of his first encounters went poorly. He approached a man sitting alone at a table and was waved away. The man told me afterward he had no interest in meeting Obama. 'I can't stand him,' he said. 'He's a Muslim. He's not even pro-American as far as I'm concerned.'"

Cue John Mellencamp's "Ain't that America?"

Forced to simulate indications of seasoned intelligence and sensitivity during a recent visit to Keith Olberman's "Countdown," Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo star Kal Penn was, by any fair standard, fairly convincing.

National Public Radio news media reporter David Folkenflik following an interview we did in NPR's 42nd Street studio this morning about the dwindling, dying profession of dead-tree film criticism. The piece will also include comments from other authorities (including, I'm told, former N.Y. Daily News film critic Jack Mathews), and will air sometime Wednesday afternoon. The online link will be clickable on the NPR site Wednesday evening.

Happy bubbleman at corner of Broadway and Prince Street

Jones Square, 42nd and 7th Avenue, facing east.

Possibly as a result of catching yesterday's Oprah tribute, Sumner Redstone has amended his position on Tom Cruise (or told his wife to stop kvetching) and has been laying down a welcome mat in hopes that a Mission: Impossible 4 might happen down the road. (S.R. and Cruise dined together in March, it says here.) "I consider Tom Cruise a great actor and a good friend," Redstone said during a business conference in South Korea. "And if Paramount decides -- and they will make the decision -- to move ahead with him, I will not object."

The Swedish Hancock trailer is supposed to be ruder than the American one? The beginnings and middle of both are pretty much the same. I'm not sure about the final thirds.

First, those stories about Heath Ledger/Joker dolls fetching $50 a pop on e-Bay don't appear to be valid, as this e-Bay page makes clear. Second, 6" Joker dolls are for eight year-olds. Serious collectors prefer the more detailed 12" or 15" tall models with their much better facial likenesses.

Either way, this is the first action figure I've wanted to own in a long time. I'll admit it -- it's partly the macabre aspect of a dead actor being sold as merchandise. I have a James Dean doll at home. I've also had four Universal-crafted classic monster dolls on my desk for the last three or four years -- the Wolfman, Dracula and two Frankensteins (one modelled on Boris Karloff's appearance in the original 1931 film, the other a copy of his look in James Whale's Bride of Frankenstein).

No article has filled me with more trepidation and suspicion about Hancock than last Sunday's N.Y. Times piece by Michael Cieply. It's supposed to be about a superhero flick that pushes limits in terms of the main character's behavior, but all I got out of it were a bunch of pretending-to-be-concerned-or-thoughtful comments from a lot of smug over-paid people who ride around in pricey cars.

I really don't like that photo of producer Akiva Goldsman laughing uproariously while standing next to Will Smith. Too many people laugh in that man's presence. Smith himself,now that you mention it, laughs and smiles too much also. I just don't like the vibe coming off this film. The trailer was half-appealing, but Cieply has killed the vibe.

The Indiana/North Carolina basics: "At stake are a total of 187 pledged delegates -- 115 in North Carolina and 72 in Indiana. Polls open in North Carolina at 6:30 am and close at 7:30 pm. In Indiana, most polls open at 6:00 am and close at 6:00 pm, but because some parts of the state are in the Central Time Zone, the official poll closing time is 7:00 pm eastern.

"And just to give you a sense of where the candidates think they're the strongest, Clinton will hold her Election Night rally in Indianapolis, while Obama will hold his his in Raleigh, NC. Interestingly, however, Clinton seems to be on the upswing in North Carolina, and Obama seems on the upswing in Indiana. Yet both are likely to win on their 'home' demographic courts.

"So what would the Vegas lines be today? Our guess: five points in each state, which should already be considered a perception victory for Clinton. But given the closet superdelegate support Obama seems to have, he's been given the benefit of the doubt with some if he simply wins North Carolina by, well, about five points. You'll know it will be a mediocre to bad night for Obama if his campaign has to talk about who won the most delegates tonight, rather than by how much they won each state." -- from MSNBC's "First Read" rundown, which arrived in my inbox at 9:14 am.

Indy 4 director Steven Spielberg recently told N.Y. Times contributor Terrence Rafferty that "he tries to cut as little as possible" in the Indy action sequences because "every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel there's something wrong, that there's some cheating going on." Precisely. Too many movies feel like visual cheats from the get-go. So Spielberg's goal is "to do the shots the way Chaplin or Keaton would, everything happening before the eyes of the audience, without a cut."

Sounding a little bit like Werner Herzog, Spielberg explained that "the idea is, there's no illusion; what you see is what you get. My movies have never been frenetically cut, the way a lot of action is done today. That's not a put-down; some of that quick cutting, like in The Bourne Ultimatum is fantastic, just takes my breath away. But to get the comedy I want in the Indy films, you have to be old-fashioned. I've studied a lot of the old movies that made me laugh, and you've got to stage things in full shots and let the audience be the editor. It's like every shot is a circus act." Brilliant. I love this. No more Spielberg bashing until further notice.

"That's a fragment of something Andrei Tarkovsky said. He said that art is different than life because art is a representation of life and therefore it doesn't contain death. Life contains death. So making art is life-affirming. So even if the art is tragic, it's still optimistic. There can never be pessimistic artists, there can only be mediocrity." -- from John Del Signore's 5.5 piece for the Gothamist about Lou Reed and Julian Schnabel discussing Berlin, a film about Reed's 2006 revival performance of his 1973 album at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn.

Berlin will open in Manhattan at Film Forum on July 18th. (Who's the publicist? I'd love to be able to see it this week sometime.) The Schnabel-Reed sitdown concluded the Tribeca Film Festival's "Conversations in Cinema" series.

A movie is only as good as its weakest creative link -- as clever or knowing or visually alive as the stodgiest, most old-fashioned, least-hip person in the inner creative circle. So if it turns out that there's something a little bit wrong with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -- something a wee bit underwhelming about the story, something rote or cornball or ill-considered -- we all know who the big Blame Guy is probably going to be. This is so widely understood I don't even feel the need to say his name. I presume it's obvious I'm not talking about Steven Spielberg or screenwriter David Koepp.

Speaking of the fight scenes in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Harrison Ford has told The Australian's Chrissy Iley that "we didn't shoot it like a Matrix style where if you hit somebody they end up in this big space and you didn't feel the hurt, you don't feel the fear. I feel you very quickly lose emotional connection with the character if it's like that. We are more old school."

Exactly. The thing I've always disliked about martial-arts fight scenes is that nobody ever gets hurt. We all realize, of course, that martial arts fights are intentionally stylized and not operating under a realistic tent. But the patience ceiling for this sort of thing is low. (For me, at least.) It is the essence of boredom to watch guys slamming each other without end. All ballet and no wincing or groaning makes Jack a dull boy. Totally ignoring the fact that the human body is vulnerable and that duke-outs always bring pain and woundings is a short route to the grotesque.

The blame for this tedium, of course, lies entirely on the shoulders of Asian martial-arts films. I remember bitching about this when I saw my first Bruce Lee film in the early '70s, and here it is 35 years later and the form is pretty much unchanged. The worst fight scene of all time in this vein? The battle between Neo and all the Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded. And I say that having loved some of the fight scenes in the original Matrix.

The shoe has just dropped. The page has just turned. Martial-arts combat scenes have taken a bullet in the chest. They may continue, but they'll never have the same punch from this moment on. A voice is telling me this. And we have Harrison Ford to thank for leading the charge, or at least sounding the trumpet.

This teaser for Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Disney, 9.26) obviously promises a spirited family entertainment. Chihuahuas are Mexican dogs, of course, and Mexico, of course, was the seat of ancient Aztec and Mayan culture many centuries ago. But what could this have to do with a present-day story about a rich Beverly Hills chihuahua named Chloe (voiced by Drew Barrymore) getting lost during a Mexican vacation and looking for a way home? Obviously she gradually gets past being a spoiled and arrogant bitch by connecting with her ancestral roots, etc.

I'm being too literal-minded, I realize, but I really don't get it. If little chihuahuas can make head-dresses and put them on their heads, that means director Raja Gosnell and the Disney animators have also given them all kinds of human-level abilities and skills. They can weave fabric and lay adobe bricks and throw spears and make swords so they can stage the occasional sacrifice ceremony. (Remember all those bouncing bloody heads in Mel Gibson's Apocalypto? And the fact that it was released by Touchstone, a Disney distributor?) Except we all know what chihuahua paws look like so how can they grip anything? See where I'm going with this? If the dogs weren't shown wearing the Aztec-Mayan head-dresses I could deal with it.

I love that the Disney marketers felt the need to provide a pheonetical pronounciation -- "chee-WOW-wa." They're clearly wondering if pronouncing "chihuahua" might be over the heads of the people they're trying to sell tickets to. What does that tell us? The voices of Salma Hayek, Jamie Lee Curtis, Piper Perabo, Edward James Olmos, Andy Garcia and Cheech Marin costar.

I feel horrible about what may happen tomorrow in Indiana and North Carolina. Terrified. It could all finally start to be over (please!) if Barack Obama finishes slightly ahead of the Hildebeest among the Hoosiers and takes her, say, by eight or ten points among the tarheels. But it could go badly too, and the agony could well continue. Just ignore it, I've been telling myself today. Or at least don't fret. At least until tomorrow.

Then I came across this 5.4 Kurt Andersen piece in New York ("About That Crush on Obama") that perfectly describes everything I've been feeling and sensing over the last three or four weeks, and somehow this has brought some comfort. If a modest but decisive Obama triumph is not in the cards for tomorrow, there is at least solace in knowing that the relatively recent news media animus towards Obama, the never-the-twain-shall-meet attitudes that starkly separate Hillary and Barack supporters and the standard loathing I've been feeling for the Hillary hinterlanders for months has been well captured and understood.

Please read the whole piece -- it hits it dead center -- but here's the best part:

"Yet the flip side of all this is why Clinton's demographically determined constituencies haven't felt the Obama magic, why for them he's an acquired taste, like espresso. It's not only that the people who create and run the media -- and who love Obama -- occupy the social and cultural upper rungs. The world depicted in 'the media,' broadly construed -- not just straight journalism but everything we watch and read and hear -- is overwhelmingly a bright, shiny, upscale, youngish world.

"Uneducated white people, residents of the so-called C and D counties, and the elderly -- in other words, Hillary Clinton voters -- are seldom allowed into the mass-media foreground, and when they appear it's usually as bathetic figures, victims or losers. (And working-class black pop culture is considered part of the sexy mainstream in a way that working-class white pop culture is not.) The shocking eclipse of Hillary (an eight-figure net worth, maybe, but at least she's got a normal American name and a Wal-Mart shopper's bad hair and big bum) by this fashionable (black!) media darling is one more slap in the face for the people chronically excluded from the pretty mediascape version of America, one more damn new thing that they don't really get. It makes them...bitter, and the bitterness makes them cling to the Clintons.

"The media didn't see this coming. Back in February, when the new prince was gliding thrillingly up and up toward nomination, a part of the thrill for the media was their happy astonishment that they were no longer cosmopolitan outliers but finally (unlike in 1984 with Gary Hart) in sync with America: Regular folks, white people in Iowa and Virginia and Wisconsin, were actually voting for Obama!

"That was then. With the ten-point loss in Pennsylvania, the latest Reverend Wright eruption, and the shrinkage of Obama's leads in the polls, the media are feeling lousy, and not just because their guy is taking a beating. If Obama is deemed to be an effete, out-of-touch yuppie, then the effete-yuppie media Establishment that's embraced him must be equally oblivious and/or indifferent to the sentiments of the common folk.

"Uh-oh. As the cratering of newspaper circulations accelerates (thousands a week are now abandoning the Times) and network-news audiences continue to shrink, for big-time mainstream journalists to seem even more out of touch makes some of them panic. And...so...it's all...his fault, that highfalutin Obama! Certain journalistic stars these last few weeks (hello, George Stephanopoulos!), instead of copping to the 'elitist' sensibilities they obviously share with him (and the Clintons and McCain) -- we travel abroad and read books, we have healthy bank accounts and drink wine; so shoot us -- reacted by parroting the Clinton campaign's faux-populist talking points about Obama's condescension toward the yokel class.

"But pandering to the yokels, pretending to share their tastes and POV? That goes pretty much unchallenged. If the wellborn New England Wasp George W. Bush (Andover '64, Yale '68, Harvard '75) could be successfully refashioned as a down-home rustic, why shouldn't Hillary Clinton (Wellesley '69, Yale '73) be talkin' guns and drinkin' Crown Royal shots and droppin' all the g's from her gerunds whenever she speaks extemporaneously these days? Naked disingenuousness apparently isn't as off-putting as, say, failing to pin a tiny metal American flag to one's lapel.

"For all I know, the Clinton voters find Obama's spazzy bowling and Jay-Z referencing just as irritating. Like I said, the Democratic race has become for many of us an intense playoff simulacrum, and fans love their team and curse the opponents blindly and faithfully. I can't quite believe that I have been driven to baseball-geek analogies...but here I find myself nevertheless, feverishly hoping that the story ends not in the fashion of last year's awful, amazing Mets, but like the Yankees in 2000, when they nearly blew their big lead in the season's final weeks before straightening up and winning the World Series."

One and a half tablets of Tylenol PM resulted in four hours of sleep on a totally crammed 767 that left LAX last night around 11:50 pm. Groggily took the E train out of Jamaica, forgetting that I should have taken the A or the C which would have stopped at Broadway Junction, where you get the L train. A slow hellish ride ensued, the train poking along at an average of 12 mph through endless dark tunnels under Queens.

Caught a G train connection down to Lorimer and then three stops on the L line to Montrose. It takes a little practice to get back into the eye-contact avoidance that is required behavior on all New York subways. And then finally the ordeal of lugging three bags that felt heavier than sand up two steep staircases.

But all was right after a shower and a change of clothes. Now there's only the immense peace that comes with an excellent wireless connection and a clean, clutter-free apartment. Blue skies and much sunlight and the warmth of a friendly neighborhood are just outside. Had a perfect slice of pizza with green onions and goat cheese, and a can of cold orange soda. (A strange urge to not eat healthily always overtakes me when I'm here.) I haven't been in this neighborhood for over a year but the dry cleaning guy remembered my last name. That's New York for you.

Oprah Winfrey aired a Tom Cruise interview last Friday, and today she's running a tribute show about his 25 years of stardom. Cruise's big career kick-off, of course, was Risky Business, which opened in August 1983. It strikes me as odd, as it has to Roger Freidman, that neither Cruise nor Winfrey thought to invite the film's director-writer, Paul Brickman, to take part in the show. By any fair standard this seems like ingratitude and bad manners.

The reason for the blow-off, I'm presuming, is because Brickman didn't become a powerhouse director in the wake of Risky Business's huge success and therefore isn't flash enough to share the limelight with Cruise admirers like Will Smith, Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hofman, etc. But Cruise owes Brickman big-time. Risky Business was the springboard that led to everything else. Without it Cruise probably wouldn't have been cast in Top Gun, which in turn led to The Color of Money, Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July -- the three late '80s films that firmed his rep as a serious actor as well as a hot-ticket movie star. If I were Cruise I would have insisted on Brickman being included. Right is right.

I'm also recalling how Brickman's film was actually the vehicle in which Cruise gave his second stand-out performance, the first being Curtis Hanson's Losin' It. Shot in late '81 for $7 million and released four months before Risky Business, it was treated as a minor thing by audiences and (as I recall) most critics. It may have seemed like just another wild-weekend-in-Tijuana teen comedy, but I remember deciding early on that Losin' It (which had a tender emotional element in Shelley Long's performance as a housewife on the brink of a divorce) was a cut or two above. I remember telling myself that Hanson was a director to watch. It costarred John Stockwell and Jackie Earl Haley.

I gather that the Winfrey-Cruise tribute is ignoring Losin' It as well. To be honest I haven't seen it since my first and only viewing 25 years ago, but writing this has sparked interest in the DVD. I wonder if it still plays. I'm presuming that it does.

"By seeking to tear down opponents and pander to voters, the Clinton campaign is playing just the kind of politics that Americans say they detest. We need a president who can forge consensus and compromise among ideological foes. Barack Obama is that kind of Democrat; Hillary Clinton is not." -- from the Chicago Tribune's 5.4 editorial "Indiana, Go With Obama."