Hey, how come David Jones' Betrayal, a screen version of the renowned Harold Pinter play which came out 25 years ago and never saw life on laser disc in the early to mid '90s, is still sitting on the Fox Home Video shelf?

One indication of the completely buried status of Betrayal is that you can't find any decent online stills from it. This awful shot looks like a screen capture from somebody's TV screen as the grotesque VHS version was being played.

Ben Kingsley and Jeremy Irons' performances (as a cuckolded publisher husband and his best friend, a literary agent) ) are easily among their career best. The luncheon scene alone ("I mean, you love modern prose...probably gives you both a thrill!") is worth the price alone. And the only way to see it, still, is to buy a cruddy VHS version on E-Bay.

I remember to this day going to the 20th Century Fox lot in '83 to catch a screening of this. I had just arrived here from Manhattan and was still finding my feet. The screening was two or three weeks away from release and was quite the thing to see. I remember taking a friend, Kathryn Galan, and discussing it with her in the parking lot.

I've been badgering Fox Home Video about this title for a good eight to ten years, and all they've shown so far is a Ceaucescu-like silence and resistance to the idea.

I've never seen On A Tuesday, a short film about a thirtysomething couple getting married at San Francisco City Hall on a work day. I'm only aware of it because a good friend, Svetlana Cvetko, shot it and a friend of hers (and an acquaintance of mine) named David Scott Smith directed and co-wrote it. But interest has been aroused by an American Cinematographer article (July issue, page 16) about Cvetko's unusual lensing of it.

On A Tuesday dp Svetlana Cvetko

The gist is that Svetlana decided to shoot this intimate little piece in the widest aspect ratio I've ever heard of -- 3.18 to 1. The widest moving image I've ever seen is the 2.76 to 1 aspect ratio of Camera 65 or Ultra Panavision 70, which you can see on the Ben-Hur or Mutiny on the Bounty DVDs. I suppose I just love the perversity of an ultra-widescreen composition being used for a "small" film, or a format not necessarily mandated by the subject matter. Svetlana's reasons were her own, of course, but that's what makes a ballgame.

It's a shame On A Tuesday isn't viewable online. I'd love to see it for this aspect alone. Here's a site with some nice frame captures.

Of course, I don't know how a film this wide could projected on a screen in the right fashion. The screen would have to be fairly large and, I would think, slightly curved to deliver the right composition.

I just love the idea of making a quiet, soft-spoken subject seem exceptional by using some kind of vivid technique. I would have loved it, for example, if David Jones' Betrayal ('83), a 100% pure-dialogue movie based on a highly admired Harold Pinter play, had been shot in the 60 -frame-per-second Showscan format. Unnecessary, of course, but it would've been amazing.

Here's Iain Stasukevich's American Cinematographer article on a page-by-page basis -- page 1, page 2and page 3 .

The boat sailed on this Michael Bay/rejected Dark Knight script parody four or five days ago. It may as well have been posted last May. The world has moved on. But it's funny so here it is anyway. Posted by Jared on www.spill.com.

Why is this "shock the rubes" gay makeout stunt, staged for a sequence in Sacha Baron Cohen's Bruno movie, only being reported now (7.8) by The Smoking Gun when it happened a full month ago? No reporters in Arkansas picked up on this? Asleep at the wheel.

"Lured by $1 beer and the prospect of 'hot chicks' and 'hardcore fights,' thousands of Arkansans were duped last month into appearing as extras in comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's latest staged mayhem," the story says. "Cohen and his confederates organized cage fighting programs on consecutive days in Texarkana and Fort Smith.

"Both cards ended with two male grapplers (one was identified as 'Straight Dave' and wore camouflage) tearing each other's clothes off and, while in underwear, kissing down their opponent's chest. This man-on-man action triggered Fort Smith fans to throw chairs and beer at the ring, according to one cop present at the city's convention center."

It'll only cost $3 to attend Thursday night's screening of Nicholas Ray's King of Kings at the American Cinematheque. Much of this 1961 Samuel Bronston epic is either pompous or tedious -- some of it is painful -- but I'd attend anyway if they would present a 70mm print of it, which of course they're not. Burn me once with a slightly frayed 35mm print of Ben-Hur, shame on them. Burn me twice, shame on me.

The casting of the 37 year-old Siobhan McKenna (37 going on 52) as Mary, mother of Jesus, is ludicrous -- a solemn earthy Irish woman straight out of Sean O'Casey and James Joyce with her clearly lined face, alabaster Irish complexion and faintly suppressed Dublin accent.

There are nonetheless five worthwhile things about this film: (a) Miklos Rosza's score, particularly the overture; (b) Ron Randell's performance as Lucius, the thoughtful, morally conflicted Centurion; (b) Jeffrey Hunter's lead performance during the last third; (d) the shots that show perfect focus in both the foreground and background (which was pretty amazing during a time in which films would commonly rack focus to catch the foreground or background, but never both); and (e) the eloquent narration by Ray Bradbury.

Bradbury is going to show up before the show and talk about his work on the film.

Yesterday's withdrawal timetable statement from Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki -- he claimed he's negotiating a deal with Washington that will set a timetable for a withdrawal of foreign forces as part of a framework for a U.S. troop presence into next year -- couldn't be better news for Barack Obama and couldn't be worse news for John McCain, who's made staying the course in Iraq the centerpiece of his campaign.

Maliki's statement "was the first time that Baghdad's Shiite-led government has made a pullout deadline a condition for a promised new agreement with the United States for a troop presence into 2009." This seems to me like the big defining moment of the '08 Presidential race, the end of the legitimacy of the Bush-McCain hang touch policy, and a Godsend to the Obama camp -- and the news guys are barely paying attention to it. Could I be missing something? If I am, I can't figure what.

Berlin's liberal, openly gay mayor Klaus Wowereit favors the idea of Barack Obama giving a speech at the Brandenburg Gate when he travels to Berlin later this month, although the conservative-minded German chancellor Angela Merkel, famed on this side of the Atlantic for getting a creepy back rub from George Bush in 2006, is against it.

Wowereit, Obama, Merkel

The Brandenburg Gate is the "most famous and history-rich location in Germany," a Chancellery source told Der Spiegel's Carsten Volkery in a piece posted today. "In the past, it has only been used on very special occasions for addresses by politicians, and when, then only by elected American presidents. More clearly stated: Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama would be better off looking for another location in the German capital to hold a speech."

Wowereit, however, "appeared unimpressed by the warning from Merkel's office and said during a press conference on Tuesday that he would be pleased if Obama were to address the public at the Brandenburg Gate.

A spokesperson for the local government told Der Spiegel that "the decision over where Obama should make his appearance was in the hands of the city council of Berlin and not the chancellor's office or the federal government.

"Some suspect Mayor Wowereit's remarks may be self-serving," the article says. No!

Jurgen Trittin, deputy floor leader of The Green Party in the German parliament, has predicted that Obama would end up getting his JFK moment at the Brandenburg Gate. "Do you think that Wowereit would miss the chance to appear alongside Barack Obama?," he reportedly asked an interviewer on the German news channel N24. "I believe Wowereit is thinking [Obama] should appear [and] I will come into the picture and everything will be great."

A couple of hours ago Nikki Finke posted an exclusive report concerning Quentin Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards project. She wrote that (a) the script went out yesterday (Monday) to Universal, Warner Bros and Paramount, and to Sony today, and (b) that there's "a possibility" that Harvey Weinstein will be producing (along with Lawrence Bender) but not financing it, which "certainly adds fuel to those rumors that The Weinstein Co is having movie money woes."

The question I would have asked if one of my agent sources had called me about this is "how many pages"? Is it, like, 180 or 200 pages? I ask because of that reported-about interview between original Inglorious Bastards director Enzo G. Castellari and Tarantino on the forthcoming three-disc DVD (out 7.29) of his 1978 film reveals that Tarantino's new version will be a two-parter like Kill Bill. In other words, something that may be leisurely paced, elephantine, long.

If I was running production at one of the four studios, I would insist that everyone reading and making a call about Tarantino's Bastards script should also see Castellari's original 99-minute film, which came out in '78. We all know that Tarantino routinely flavors his scripts with his sassy talky-talk, and that Bastards, though set in World War II, will completely ignore the idioms of G.I. speech at that time in favor of the Quentin music. Which is fine. But I would want to know if the "music" or perhaps the extra plotting is really worth the expense of making and releasing two movies. (If, that is, the script indeed runs around 180 or 200 pages. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe the movie Tarantino talks about on the Bastards DVD is no more.)

It may also be that Tarantino's Bastards has a natural "fighting weight" length of 180 minutes or longer, and no ifs, ands or buts. But I also might insist, depending on the length of the script, that the theatrical version of the film be shot and cut to run no more than 115 to 120 minutes, and that a three-hour version (or perhaps a Part I and Part II) be confined to the DVD market. Because I really wouldn't want to go through any sort of Grindhouse-type experience.

And because I believe that any movie or novel or essay is always a little better if it's been pruned and tightened to within an inch of its life. The Tarantino I've heard about all these years doesn't know from pruning. He is no longer, by most accounts, the guy he was in '92 or '94 or even '97. He seems to be someone who believes in and stokes the fires of his own legend, and who seems to have a sense of his own genius, invincibility and entitlement. Not a mentality, in short, that's likely to produce something lean and mean.

A "predictably glossy screen adaptation of the Abba-scored musical" that uses bigscreen names like Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan for the leads and adds lush Greek exteriors" that are made to look "glitzy" and "over-polished," Mamma Mia! plays out more like an oversized Abba promotional vehicle than a fully dramatic piece," writes Variety's Jordan Mintzer.

His point is basically that the film will make lots of money off its huge female fan base, partly or largely because of the "fun" element that was recently praised by the Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett. But the direction by Phyllida Lloyd (who directed the stage musical) and the screenplay by Catherine Johnson is not, he strongly implies, up to the level of Baz Luhrman, Lars von Trier or Milos Forman.

"The singing-and-dancing work for the basic excitement and energy of a live performance, but an additional boost of cinematic prowess is needed to sustain a similar rhythm on film," he notes. "Johnson and theater-opera vet Lloyd" -- both in their first screen outing -- "can't seem to find the right tone or style for their globally celebrated material.

"Most of the chorus dance numbers -- especially 'Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!' and 'Voulez-vous' -- feel over-shot and over-cut, never allowing for the pleasure of a sustained, well-choreographed performance. Other, more intimate songs -- including the beach-set 'Lay All Your Love On Me' and the cliff-set 'The Winner Takes It All' -- feature a twirling Steadicam that does a better job of depicting the gorgeous coastline than the lip-synching cast.

"Thesping is all-around pro, although some stars, especially the bouncy and rejuvenated Meryl Streep, seem better suited for musical comedy than others, including Pierce Brosnan and Stellan Skarsgard.

"Despite the obvious time and energy devoted to smooth transitioning between studio and location scenes (both are shot realistically yet theatrically by d.p. Haris Zambarloukos), tech work often feels more rushed than mastered. Poor dubbing in some of the outdoor sequences tends to take away from the filmmakers' insistence that we're actually there."

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is tracking the strongest among Friday's openers -- 77, 33 and 15. Journey to the Center of the Earth is at 82, 21 and 7 (fair, needs to do better), and Eddie Murphy's Meet Dave is running at 65, 17 and 2 (bomb).

The Dark Knight (opening 7.18) is running at 85, 65 and 31 overall. The first choice figure among older and younger men is 41, at 25 among younger women, and 19 among older women. Obviously looking at very big business. Mamma Mia, which is opening against Knight, is running 19 for first choice among 25-plus women, but at 8 first choice overall. Older and younger men aren't interested. Space Chimps (also opening on 7.18) is running at 48, 12 and 0.

Stepbrothers, opening on 7.25, is at 66, 37 and 2 -- people aren't focusing at this stage, campaign has some work to do. The X-Files: I Want to Believe, opening the same day, is at 59, 23 and 3.

Mouse at Laurel Pet Hospital -- Monday, 7.7.08, 11:25 am. Oh, here's a third shot.

I wrote a private letter to a publicist friend this evening, but I said a few things that can be passed along for general attribution. The question was about my striking a negative tone with a lot of big-studio product, so I tried to answer it...that's not true about "trying" because it just sort of poured out.

"Look, [name]...here it is. My family lost 40% of its membership within the last four months (my sister and father both died) and I'm feeling nihilistic and fuck-all about things to some extent, and since my column is about what I'm feeling, doing, experiencing, tasting, worrying about, foreseeing, you name it...I'm probably responding to a growing sense of darkness and mortality around me and expressing reactions in a way that follows suit. That's the genuine honest truth.

"On top of which I'm finding a freer, less inhibited voice these days. It's hard and strenuous, but it feels amazing at the same time. You try writing eight to ten stories a day and see what comes out. After a while you can't do the equivocating, smiley-face, loyal-opposition tightrope dance from the business-as-usual playbook. It's the Wild West with a lot of rootin' tootin' buckaroos and gunslingers out there, and in the midst of this I'm trying to create something that may one day be construed to have had a semblance of value.

"I believe devoutly in writing well. And nobody, trust me, can write well while eagerly fellating the bottom-line, bottom-of-the-barrel corporate sausage factories. So what I'm trying to get into and create on a day-to-day basis isn't the usual-usual. It's more real and down to it, and I'm not so sure that's such a bad thing.

"I've just hated much of what the big studios have put out in the last few months. So what? Who am I, Spartacus? The French resistance? I'm a small businessman trying to stand out and be a special read that you can't find anywhere else, and at the same time make enough ad money to afford to help my kids out and maybe visit them once or twice a year.

"Who gives a shit if I don't like corporate mass-market movies? Who cares if I don't like the crap that the big studios put out in the late winter, spring and summer? Nobody does. I mean, except for the Hummer-drivin' stooges out there who pay to see these movies regardless. Even if we all know they're nowhere near as happy about these films as they'd like them to be.

"You and I know that the big studios are still making more and more crappy corporate product, and since I'm in the business of banging out eight to ten stories a day, what do you want to me to do? Become Leonard Maltin? Even if I wanted to, Leonard Maltin is taken by Leonard Maltin.

"The world is collapsing, descending into chaos, destroying itself with tribal warfare and asphyxiating itself with fossil fuels. And in a certain spiritual way, corporate Hollywood product is a part of this implosion/self destruction.

"You know it's getting worse and worse and not likely to change. Except for this and that fall/holiday exception, the big studios don't make movies for movie lovers like myself. They sorta did before from time to time; now they mostly don't. They make big expensive crap-sausage movies that will hopefully turn a profit, and you know it. They make them for the unwashed, overweight taste-free homies who pay to see movies that go boom, fart, whee! and splat. You know it, I know it -- why play games with each other and pretend otherwise?"

Certainly the most beautiful '65 or '66 Mustang (I'm not enough of a car buff to know the difference) that just happened to be parked in front of my home that I've ever seen in my life. Gun-metal gray, 289 cc engine, buffed and polished to a fare-thee-well, polished-oak steering wheel, factory-new black-leather seats.

Late this morning I asked a guy at a men's clothing store store on Santa Monica Blvd. when the sales of pork-pie hats had taken off big-time, and he said "this year." Boomers aren't allowed to wear pork-pie hats -- they're strictly for GenXers (born from '64 to '80) and GenYers ('80 to mid '90s), and certainly no one older than than middle-aged GenXers like Brad Pitt, who will be 45 this December. For three or four seconds I thought to myself, "Hey, maybe I should wear one of these dorky-looking ass hats?"

And speaking of great-looking classic one-sheets, I've had this color scan of an early Bulworth poster sitting in my office closet for exactly 10 years and three months.

Key poster-at image for Warren Beatty's Bulworth

I remember interviewing the artist-marketer -- the guy who took Warren Beatty's rough idea for a single-image concept and made it into an actual poster that stood on its own two feet -- for my L.A. Times Syndicate column. I think it's one of the greatest movie posters ever, and I can't even find the '98 article or the name of the guy I spoke to. I know he was living in Manhattan when we spoke.

90 minutes were eaten up this morning at the vet (the first of three all-in-one vaccines for Mouse), and then three and a half to four hours were consumed trying to find a place that could do a first-rate scan of a 41" x 18" poster of The Presbyterian Church Wager , the 1971 Robert Altman film that was renamed as McCabe and Mrs. Miller. I finally got it scanned and burned to a CD for $86.87; brand-new poster-sized prints will be ready by tomorrow or the next day.

My Sir Speedy guy couldn't scan full-scale one-sheets; ditto the local Kinkos and a place on Wilshire called Luscen. I went upstairs to an office of an architect named Jackson and asked where they scan their architectural drawings, and one of the office guys directed me to a place on Robertson just north of Olympic called Ford Graphics. Except the Ford guy only does black-and-white scans, and so he sent me over to the West L.A. branch on Military, which handles color.

Mouse, by the way, was with me the whole time and being fairly cool about it -- no crying, sitting on my shoulder, checking things out, etc.

Then as I began to remove the poster from the metal-and-glass frame at Ford we realized moisture has seeped in and the lower-right portion of the poster had stuck to the glass. I had to spend a long 10 minutes slowly slicing the sticky paper shreds off the glass with a razor blade. Then I had to wait for the scan to be done and put to disc, and then I had to go back to my Sir Speedy guy and give him the disc for digital touch-ups and printing.

It all reminded me that copying and restoring old materials is a fragile undertaking, and that you have to treat all the materials with kid gloves. But what a beauty this thing is. Those rich blues and reds, the Victorian-era trim on the perimeter, etc. About as rare as rare-ass movie posters come.

The cursive caption beneath the oval-shaped monochrome photo of Beatty and Julie Christie reads as follows: "Mr. John Q. McCabe & Mrs. Constance Miller -- Town of Presbyterian Church 1902."

Here's an excerpt from a q & a between Film.com's Mark Bourne and Elvis Mitchell, longtime host of KCRW's "The Treatment" and now the host of TCM's Elvis Mitchell: Under The Influence, which debuts this evening at 8 pm and then repeats again at 10:30 pm. An interview with Sydney Pollack starts it all off.

MB: "With the interviews you've done so far for the TV show, and to a lesser extent your radio show..."

Elvis Mitchell: "Oh, thank you, 'a lesser extent'..."

MB: [sudden panic]: "No, no, no, I mean..."

Elvis Mitchell: "Oh, no, okay, this is what got me into therapy, right?

MB: Well, since we're talking about the TV show....

Elvis Mitchell: "Beautifully done."

So 20th Century Fox chief Tom Rothman has hosted 16 episodes of "Fox Legacy,"the Fox Movie Channel show, and there are no YouTube clips to embed? Today's N.Y. Times story by Brooks Barnes reports that Rothman "has developed a cult following for his historical monologues and self-deprecating style. He gets fan mail -- no less a viewer than Steven Spielberg recently dropped him a note -- and more episodes are on order."

Do the top people who make a film take on the look and mood of same? Or does the film take on the look and mood of these top people? Consider this photo of Mamma Mia writer, director and co-producer Catherine Johnson (l.), Phyllida Lloyd (center) and Judy Craymer (r.), which was used for a 7.6 N.Y. Times profile by Sylviane Gold. What does this photo tell you (or at least suggest) about the character and tone of the film?

Johnson, Lloyd and Craymer

Someone has finally said something a wee bit contrary about The Dark Knight -- amazing. Variety's Anne Thompson feels that the 152-minute film (a) goes on about a half-hour too long, (b) is "overwhelming" and made her feel "over-pixellated," (c) "starts to go off the tracks" with its handling of Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent character, and (d) doesn't spend enough time with Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne/Batman. Here's Justin Chang's Variety review, also up today.

A brief salute to 16 year-old Nick Plowman, a pretty good writer who runs a nice-looking film site called fataculture. (Whatever that means.) He's from Johannesburg, South Africa, has been blogging for a year now, and is a member in good standing of the South African press. He even attended last May's Cannes Film Festival. He says he has "big dreams to come to the US some day and continue my film journalism there."

It's always cool to see a 16 year-old getting down to it and...you know, slamming away like he's 26 years old with rent and car payments and utility bills to cover each month. I wish I'd been doing something like this when I was 16 instead of just getting sloshed with my friends. My son Jett, of course, wrote a weekly column for this site when he was 16 and 17, which I naturally admired.

People's Julie Jordan and Karen Snyder had obviously heard that relations between the engaged Robert Rodriguez and Rose McGowan weren't all that smooth, which is why they called around before the July 4th holiday. "Sources" told them the director and actress are still together, and McGowan's rep said her client will star in three of her fiance's upcoming projects -- Barbarella, Red Sonja and Woman in Chains! -- "despite reports to the contrary."

It is written on stone tablets that a lovestruck director will hold on to his actress girlfriend/wife as long as he "does" for her. If the projects they team on don't happen or don't make money, sooner or later she'll push on to the next guy. It's that simple. Fiercely ambitious, marginally talented actresses are not human, of course, and I'm not the only one to have detected the whiff of an idea over the years that McGowan is a bit of a Jezebel. So it's really just a matter of fate and time. Life is hard then you die.

That said, the project I'd most like to see is the chicks-behind-bars movie. As long as there's a little lezbo action and as long as McGowan and a couple of fellow prisoners escape at the end of Act Two. Barbarella could be cool, but some studio suits reportedly don't believe that McGowan is enough of a star to justify a big special-effects budget. Red Sonja didn't work the first time around so why go there?

I've always been amazed that a line of dialogue this clueless and old-farty was used for a mass-market, right-in-the-swing-of-things entertainment that opened in December 1964. The author was either Richard Maibaum or Paul Dehn. It would have been out of character, yes, for Sean Connery's James Bond to have been a Beatles fan, but to have him speak of listening to their music with earmuffs on! Astonishing for a pop hero figure to have blurted this out at that time in history.

In March 1970 a career achievement Oscar was given to a beloved, well-known actor. At the end of his speech the 66 year-old recipient expressed great excitement at "the astonishing young talents that are coming up in our midst...I think there's an even more glorious era right around the corner." Cary Grant had that exactly right, didn't he?

Asked by Tim Appelo to name his favorite all-time books about Hollywood, author Peter Biskind -- who is still laboring on his Warren Beatty biography, which may (I say "may") be released sometime next year -- has named seven books. Presumably off the top of Biskind's head and obviously less than comprehensive, but here they are:

Peter Biskind

David McClintick's "Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street," Stephen Bach's "Final Cut: Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven's Gate," Julia Phillips' "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again," John Gregory Dunne's "The Studio," Leo Braudy's "The World in a Frame," Thomas Schatz's "The Genius of the System" and Lillian Ross's "Picture."

Appelo has allowed two wrongos to slip by, I'm afraid. Bach's book is not called "Heaven's Gate: Dreams and Disasters in the Making of Heaven's Gate." And the author of "Picture" (i.e., not "The Picture," as Appelo has it) is Lillian Ross, not Roth.

I would add the following to the must-read list: Otto Freidrich's "City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s", Julie Salamon's "The Devil's Candy," Mark Harris's "Pictures at a Revolution," Jack Brodsky and Nathan Weiss's "The Cleopatra Papers," David Thomson's "Suspects" and "The Whole Equation and "The New Biographical Dictionary of Film," William Goldman's "Which Lie Did I Tell?" and Biskind's own "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" and "Down and Dirty Pictures."

Original link provided by Variety's Anne Thompson.

As Religulous producer-star Bill Maher or "God Is Not Great" author Chris Hitchens will tell you, anything that undermines any religious myth is cause for popping open the champagne. So Ethan Bronner's 7.6 N.Y. Times story that calls into question the legend of Jesus of Nazareth's resurrection after three days in the tomb is a big whoopee in this regard. Cue the heartland Christian preacher types who will try to deny and spin this thing for all they're worth.

The gist is that "a recently discovered three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles...because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days. If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time."

It's been a couple of weeks since Patrick Goldstein's Big Picture blog started up, and it's still hard to find the damn thing. Plus it looks too much like Goldstein's regular "Big Picture" column. Why haven't those doofusy LAT tech guys created a separate look and identity for the Goldstein blog? The dead-tree column and the blog are next to indistinguishable.

My understanding of the L.A. Times' online entertainment coverage is that The Envelope is the main portal. Except there's no clear, easy-to see link to either Goldstein's dead-tree column or his blog. Shouldn't there be links to both? And shouldn't there be an unmissable link to the blog on the dead-tree column and vice versa? Go to the L.A. Times' main search engine and all you get...ahhh, forget it. Who has the patience for a site that can't provide simple comprehensive direction?

The Envelope does, however, have a clear, easy-to-see link to Pete Hammond's "Notes on a Season" 5.27 column about the Cannes Film Festival.

So where's the footage or at least a still of Hitler's decapitated head? Or at least one of his headless body, slumped over the desk at Madame Tussaud's of Berlin? A good moralistic story like this happens and there's no money shot?

This trailer for the currently-playing Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (HDNet/Magnolia) is so well-cut, smartly condensed and plugged into the Thompson essence that -- I need to say this carefully -- it's almost a better thing than the 120-minute doc it's selling. Almost, I say.

As I wrote last month, Alex Gibney's doc tells the full lopsided tale about a brilliant journalist who produced great stuff for maybe 11 or 12 years (mid '60s to mid '70s) and then wallowed around in drug-fueled lassitude for almost the next 30. Gonzo is a good film -- thorough, inventive, humorous -- but it drives you mad with a sadistic '60s soundtrack made up of songs that classic-rock stations have been torturing their listeners with for the last 30 or 35 years.

The trailer hits every basic point delivered in the film but without the music. Which makes it, in a way, better. At the very least, it gave me an idea of what Gibney's film might've been without having to be swamped with the sounds of Janis Joplin, Jesse Colin Young, et. al.

Sidenote: Time's Richard Schickel has written that Gonzo "seems to me a very sad story about an essentially minor figure. Thompson's was not a life to celebrate (and Gibney, to his credit, does not do so). But there is an implicit approval in this film that makes me uneasy. But then, irrationality always make me uneasy. All artists -- and nominally, Thompson was an artist -- need a touch of the lunatic about them. But only a touch. In the end they are obliged to produce. And they are obliged not to succumb to, or to excessively encourage, their own myths."

Gas station at San Vicente and 26th Street -- Saturday, 7.5.08, 4:55 pm. We'll be at $5 bucks a gallon by Labor Day.

"What I find really hard to take is the way the media behave. They seem to pick on Barack much more readily than they do on McCain. They suddenly say he's this kind of politician, he's not what we thought, dah-dah-dah-dah. They say, 'We're not supposed to take a side, we're supposed to just give the news,' but they don't just give the news, and they don't tell the truth...excuse me? I only listen to Keith Olbermann. To hell with the rest of them. I'm an MSNBC type now." -- Lauren Bacall speaking to the S.F. Chronicle's Walter Addiego. Somehow the idea of that "put your lips together and blow" lady from To Have and Have Not being a BHO fan feels delightful.

David Gilmour's "The Film Club" is nominally about his decision to permit his 15-year-old son, Jesse, to drop out of school as long as he agreed to watch three movies a week of Gilmour's choosing. That's it? No requirement to write about them afterwards? No digesting and reprocessing them in some creative way (like shooting a short-film tribute)? Just watching three films a week doesn't seem like enough to engage a 15 year-old. I would insist on at least four or five.

Douglas McGrath's 7.6 N.Y. Times article about the book reminded me, in any case, of that i-Village article I co-authored with my son Jett about three years ago that covered...well, vaguely similar ground. The title was "Kazan for Recess? Kubrick for Snack? How to create a passion for film in your kids."

The underlying point, now that I'm thinking about it, was that unless a movie-fanatic father saturates his kids with first-rate films early on (and I mean starting at the toddler stage), any effort to implant or encourage a sense of taste in movies will be an uphill one, and may well prove fruitless.

Kids are off into the wild blue yonder by the time they hit 15. Friends, school, burgeoning sexual urges, media distractions...forget it. The spiritual divorcement process actually begins sometime in their late tweens. You have to reach them early on, when they're still soft clay, or you're spinning your wheels. Even if you've gotten to them early they still go away in their mid teens. But if you've done your work they'll come back after three or four years.

I love two Gilmour lines that are excerpted in McGrath's article. The first is a statement that Peter Yates' Bullitt "has the authority of stainless steel." The other, as McGrath writes, "captures the reality-altering magic that movies cast." After seeing Bullitt as a kid, Gilmour recalls "emerging from the Nortown theater that summer afternoon and thinking that there was something wrong with the sunlight."

In response to a somewhat dithering, self-regarding Emily Gould piece called "How Your Emily Gould Sausage Gets Made" (posted 7.3.08 on her Emily Magazine blog), Some Came Running's Glenn Kenny wrote the following: "Um, not to put too fine a point on it -- and believe me, I know this is going to sound 'mean,' but there's just no way around it -- but could you do the rest of humanity the favor of, like, throwing yourself in front of a bus or something? Thanks."

Glenn Kenny; Emily Gould

I had read elsewhere that Kenny had suggested Gould should off herself, but this is not that. By the use of the term "bus," which is universally preceded these days by the words "throw under the," Kenny is telling Gould to dispense with a certain late June/early July attitude or psychology that she's currently working from, or which (if you want to be forgiving or magnanimous) has enveloped her.

As we all know, those who get thrown under a bus are being punished for something they've recently said or done -- discipline, not execution. What Kenny is actually suggesting, I think, is that Gould should change or refine or alter or somehow upgrade her...whatever, Brooklyn blogger shpiel. (Not that I have any such issues with Gould myself. I've always liked her prose and considered her a pretty cute kitty.)

The proof is in the pudding of Kenny's actual sentence. The word "like" and the words "or something" are obviously softeners (as in fabric) which emphasize a meaning that is 90% metaphorical.

Last night I was watching clips of a couple of Jezebel writers, Tracie Egan (brunette, teetering towards a certain fullness of face) and Moe Tkacik (redhead, thinner), on Lizz Winstead's Shoot the Messenger, a weekly talk show. Their appearance was taped on 6.30.08. If you haven't spoken to any sharp, urban twentysomething femme fatales lately, you may want to watch this.

Mostly I was going, "Okay..." Sassy but not classy, and certainly not very curious about anything outside their realm. Is there anything more attractive than the exhibiting of genuine curiosity? Is there a bigger turn-off than people who don't seem to know the meaning of the word? Although I admire their sexual fearlessness, or the pose of same.

Egan and Tkacik are obviously tickled to be passing along intentionally nervy and contrarian attitudes about sex, date rape and sloppy contraception (i.e., having the guy pull out). Clearly they're being themselves, but that also means deriving a certain delight in pissing off older women who are veterans of feminist battles over the last 30 to 40 years by talking about how...well, listen to them.

Definitely fascinating, although a voice is telling me there's something degraded going on as well. Something in their "you know, whatever" way of talking -- blase urban Valspeak -- tells me that certain aspects of the universe are being overlooked by these two. I'd be willing to bet they've never read anything by Alan Watts.

Lauren Lipton's 5.4.08 N.Y. Times profile of the Jezebel crew reads as follows:

"The Jezebel blog was founded last spring by Gawker Media as a smart, feisty antidote to traditional women's magazines (or 'glossy insecurity factories,' as Jezebel describes them). It quickly developed a loyal following and has seen an influx of new visitors, after being name-checked on the official blog for Gossip Girl, the prime-time soap opera.

Jezebel.com staffers as of two months ago (l. to r.): Tracie Egan, Maria-Mercedes Lara, Moe Tkacik, Jennifer Gerson, Anna Holmes, Dodai Stewart and Jessica Grose.

"But as Jezebel's first anniversary approaches on May 21, its readers and editors are learning a lesson right out of high school: popularity has its pitfalls, and mean-girl behavior is hard to quash.

"Some readers, in comments on the site, have accused editors of political bias and misogyny. Readers have called one another, by turns, immature, boring and cliquish. This spring the editors responded by banishing certain commenters and putting others 'on notice' for being nasty or, worse, not funny."

I know the name of that tune. Nothing gives me a feeling of greater pleasure than the banning of brutish big-mouths who spew personal venom on the HE threads. I slap those bitches down like dogs, and then boot their ass into the snow.

How do you pronounce Moe Tkacik's last name? Obviously you drop the "t." What is it...Kassik?

I shrugged at this Harvey Weinstein-Joe Roth "please fire me" tape, which made its way around earlier this week. This is how colorful swagger types whose success partly depends on their ability to convince people every day that they fear nothing and no one....this is how guys like that talk. The bluster and the clubby attitude and vague air of entitlement. Most of them swear like sailors, and it's kinda funny when they do.

I don't live in these realms on a daily basis but time and again I've been in the room when such conversations have taken place. Twas ever thus.

It pains me to report this, but Hancock did a lot better yesterday than anyone was expecting -- $18.8 million -- and is now looking at $67 million for the weekend and $109 million cume for the five-and-a-half day July 4th holiday. It's still not a major wowser -- if Hancock was an earthquake-level hit it would be looking at a five-day haul of at least $120 or $130 million -- but the $109 million cume means, as my numbers guy said this morning, "they got out alive."

Dammit. I wanted to see Will Smith, Akiva Goldsman and Peter Berg punished (i.e., by seeing Hancock come up short in terms of expectations) for creating one of the all-time worst third acts in motion picture history.

Yesterday's reporting about Thursday's figures being flat encouraged me to think, "Okay, people are actually saying no to a bad film...the ticket-buying public is showing a little judgment here!" Not true, it turns out. Smith is such a big star that people will pay to see anything he's starring in, including a film that sends you out staggering and gagging. They're going for those first two acts, I suppose.

Who am I to talk, right? I paid to see it last Tuesday night.

I don't know what Barack Obama is doing now except making clear that he's not a movement leader or a left-wing ideologue, but a crafty politician trying to appeal to the shmoes as well as the faithful who've been with him since '07. He's basically a liberal-minded centrist. He doesn't seem to believe he knows everything or is absolutely right all the time. He seems to respect the idea of looking at things anew once in a while, to see how things may have changed or shifted around. That said, he'd better not overdo this move-to-the-center thing or he'll piss off the lefties and then the press will start beating him up.

In his review of Guillame Canet's Tell No One, a superb French thriller that I finally saw this afternoon, New Yorker critic David Denby writes that he "realized I was very happy that everyone was speaking French. The reason is simple: an American version of this material would have had too many explosions and far too much violence in general, and it would have been similar to 30 other thrillers made here during the past ten years."

Tell No One director Guillame Canet (left, holding steadi...excuse me, a mojocam) shooting chase chase sequence with Francois Cluzet (right).

Truer words have rarely been spoken. It's not that Tell No One, which involves murder, thugs, cops, gangstas, shootings, chases and the like, lacks thrills and intrigue. But it doesn't brandish the cloddish brute machismo that you have to accept with if you're going to watch a thriller made in this country.

American crime pics are about their stories and characters, sure, but they're also about topping the last successful thriller in terms of visceral impact or stylistic panache. Their producers don't want 15 year-old kids telling each other, "The shoot-out scene in that movie last month was a lot cooler."

Tell No One is aimed at viewers who've had a year or two of college, read a book occasionally and have made it past the grand old age of 25. It plays its own game and sets its own standards. A little quieter, a lot smarter and much more riveting than...now I'm trying to think of a recent American murder-mystery I've really liked. It's been a while.

Tell No One is based on an American mystery novel by Harlan Coben, but director Guillaume Canet, working with the screenwriter Philippe Lefebvre, "has set Coben's material in a realistic social and working world where good-looking, intelligent, and articulate people find one another interesting," as Denby notes. "La belle France! This emphasis on sociability is not unusual in French commercial filmmaking, but it's virtually unknown in genre movies made here these days. There is violence -- some of it startling, all of it significant -- but that's not what the movie is about."

It's also interesting as hell because the lead actor, Francois Cluzet, is almost a dead ringer for Dustin Hoffman, or rather Hoffman as he looked around the time of Rain Man, Family Business and Dick Tracy. It's like watching Hoffman's twin brother since he has a similar acting style, keeping the tension tucked inside but always radiating intelligence and paying close attention, etc.

It's doubly fascinating that Canet puts Cluzet through a terrific foot-chase sequence in Paris, since it recalls the nocturnal running-through-Manhattan scene that a bare-chested Hoffman performed in Marathon Man.

Five years ago Paramount Home Video put out a DVD of the "authorized restored version" of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and everyone was happy. Here, finally, was the version film buffs could buy and take to bed. "At last we have the movie every would-be cinematic visionary has been trying to make since 1927," said N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott.

No longer. A near complete version of the film has been found in Argentina after a quarter of the film was believed lost for 80 years, a German film foundation announced two days ago. The extra footage runs an extra 25 minutes, and the 2003 DVD runs 124 minutes, so this new and presumably final version of Metropolis will presumably run 149 minutes, or just shy of two and a half hours. This is excellent new, of course, but I've seen Metropolis twice and I've never felt the absence of any vital narrative thread. I'm not a Lang scholar so what do I know?

In this National Post piece about movie-theatre manners, author Michael Reid fails to mention one of the worst offenses out there -- i.e, people claiming that nearby seats are saved without territorial jungle markings. Under-20s are the primary culprits. They'll point to three, four or five seats and say, "Sorry, these are saved." Not without markings they're not!

As I explained last summer, everyone needs to adhere to "a basic Animal Planet view that you can't 'save' seats without marking them like dogs and wolves and coyotes mark territory by urinating on the ground, or the way Alaskan gold miners stake claims with little piles of rocks in Henry Hathaway films.

"All you have to do is put something on the seat -- a jacket, a magazine or an L.A. Weekly page, even a folded paper napkin. But you can't just point to three or four seats (or six or ten seats...there has to be a limit) and say, 'These are saved.' Certainly not when the lights are going down. You can try this with one or two seats, maybe, but not with three."

The next 17 year-old kid who says "sorry, these are saved" without markings is gonna have to lay it out with me.

HE reader Alejandro Aldrete of Monterrey, Mexico, is angry that Disney/Pixar has sent only dubbed prints of WALL*E to local theatres, in contradiction of the usual-usual. I'm guessing that the Mexican distribution exec has probably decided that subtitles aren't necessary for a kid's film, and would certainly hurt business -- brilliant.

"WALL*E arrived today in Mexican cinemas all over the country, and I believe in most of Latin America," Aldrete writes. "I don't know about the other countries, but apparently, even though today in my city of Monterrey, with nearly 5 million people and counting, and with WALL*E in hundreds and hundreds of theatres playing every hour from 10 am to midnight, I can't find one single print of this film that isn't dubbed into Spanish.

"Dubbing is common on Latin American television, but for the theatre run most films are subtitled. Only kiddie films get here dubbed to cinemas, and usually with one or two prints with subtitles. Yet in the last few years, animated films have stopped coming here with subtitles. Last year it was the same situation with Ratatouille, and even common people around here know it's a crime against any film of that caliber to not be able to get seen as it is intended in it's original version.

"My problem with Disney/Pixar on this is that they damn well know Pixar films have a special appeal to adults and film buffs. In the past with The Incredibles and Finding Nemo, I would go to a subtitled showing of those films and have a great time because I knew I was watching something ten times better than any dubbing they could come up with, and also because subtitled showings tend to have less kids fucking around and making noises. So it was a nice deal.

"I personally feel insulted and not taken into account as a loyal costumer of Pixar that they have decided to not bring here one single copy of WALL*E in it's original form with original audio. Is it too much to ask that they send a bunch of subtitled prints to Latin America for the film buffs? The ones that will keep buying their films in 30 years? I mean really, how greedy can you be to think that you're losing money by giving us one print in a hundred?"

Meryl Streep is not going to be Oscar nominated for her performance in Mamma Mia!. Okay, possibly a Golden Globe nomination or win...maybe. But forget the Academy. However good or wonderful Streep may be in this upcoming ABBA musical, AMPAS members will stick to the straight and narrow and nominate for her Doubt, if they nominate her at all.

My perception is that Mamma Mia!'s reputation went south with the hip crowd once the Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett flipped for it. That was it -- the death knell. Those actresses playing the girlfriends of Amanda Seyfried going "oh...my...God!" were just icing on the cake.

In his 7.2 piece about William Holden and the ongoing Holden retrospective at Lincoln Center (which goes until 7.15), Michael Atkinson hits the nail on the head in discussing the brusque anxiety and rattled melancholia that always simmered in the characters Holden played -- there, obviously, because they defined Holden himself.

"Truth be told, Holden's character-role capacities ranged only from narcissistic American jerk to self-loathing American lug," he writes, "but his best movies are implicit inquisitions into that personality -- like Sunset Blvd., Sabrina [and] Mark Robson's The Bridges at Toko-Ri.

"By the time of David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), a big-budget production looking for a disillusioned American Everyman sickened by his own lack of heroism needed only go to Holden.

"As Holden aged, his richest vein was the bitter personification of the costs of progress and the loss of frontier -- he became, almost inevitably, the angry Old Guard facing melancholy supersession by the young, by modernity, and by the press of time."

And yet Atkinson doesn't mention Holden's performance as Frank Harmon, a cynical L.A. real-estate agent in Clint Eastwood's Breezy ('73), which is part of the retrospective. Atkinson obviously thinks little of the film but his "angry Old Guard" comments about Holden fit Harmon to a T. Breezy is just pretty good -- mature, straight, measured -- but Holden's acting lends a solid gravity force in every one of his scenes.

Except that this 1940 title card has...I don't know, a vibe. The starkness, the shadows, the monochrome sheen, the deco moderne lettering, the odd sideways markings on the road, the fake authenticity of it.

Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason is reporting that even though Will Smith, Akiva Goldsman and Peter Berg's Hancock was "flat" from Wednesday-to-Thursday with an estimated $17.1 million and a 2 1/2 day cume of just over $41 million, it's nonetheless on target for $100 million over the 5 and 1/2 day holiday weekend. But I say no to that.

The truth is that Hancock's ticket sales yesterday should have been more than its Wednesday business, which was estimated at $17.3 million. Instead it did $17.1 million -- flat-ass. A movie that's really happening with the public would have jumped to $19 or $20 million yesterday. This tells you the word on the street (i.e., that the third act is an out-and-out disaster) is probably catching up with it.

July 4th is always a dead day, so Saturday's business will tell the tale. But I'm figuring Hancock will do $80 to $90 million by Sunday night. And if this happens, anyone who reports that figure as an absolute box-office triumph will be less than honest in their assessment. Not that $80 to $90 million is anything to sniff at. It's just that you can't expect sales to be rocket-ship historic if the dogs don't like the dog food. If you make a movie that goes completely insane and blows itself up in the third act, sooner or later people will realize this and respond accordingly.

Kit Kittredge, sad to say for Picturehouse/NewLine, is a flat-out disaster. It did about $1.1 million on Wednesday in 1700 theatres, averaging $600 a theatre. And it $900,000 on Thursday for a $500 per theatre average. Complete wipe-out. Mason pussyfoots by saying it's "unlikely to top $10 million" by Sunday night. Gee, do ya think so?

Seeing Hellboy II the other night reminded me that the films of Guillermo del Toro are as good as it gets in the fantastical horror realm. They've got first-class effects, wit, invention, soul, visual economy, emotional gravitas. The monsters are beautifully particular, the performances have warmth and authority, and the camerawork and the cutting are grabby and fast but this side of hyper.

The problem is this, and it's not so much Guillermo's fault as the action-fantasy genre: I'm sick to death of watching stuff getting wrecked and smashed and shattered and blown into a million pieces. I hate the rigid big-studio FX formula that insists upon confrontation and chaos and ruination happening ever 20 or 30 minutes, like some stupid whammy chart. Windows exploded, buildings decimated, cars doing aerial triple-flips, fire hydrants spewing tons of city water, industrial clutter everywhere....what the fuck is this? It's the same shit in every movie, and it vacuums your soul.

What kind of cretin do you have to be to find this stuff interesting after it's been repeated 25 or 30 times? How many times can the dumbest moviegoer out there go "whoa!" after seeing a super-hero wallop a slime-covered monster and send it flying several hundred yards into a building or a wall of glass or a concrete bunker, or vice versa? How many times can the hero take a severe beating to the extent that it looks like he's finished? How many times can a slithering disgusting alien creature try to eat or invade or flatten the heroes? How many times can a moron with a extra-large tub of popcorn in his lap be impressed with loud aural thumpings on the soundtrack?

Guillermo does everything he can to add feeling and humor and humanity to Hellboy II, and he succeeds nicely from time to time, but he's working within a genre that insists upon showing the same shit over and over, no matter what and no end in sight.

I never thought I'd say this, but in this context I'm a Barry Manilow type of guy. I mean that I loved (okay, liked) the sequence in which Ron Perlman's Red and Doug Jones' Abe Sapien drunkenly sing along to Manilow's "Can't Smile Without You." And I'm a pretty big fan of Tecate beer. And I liked the bit with Perlman protecting the baby from the madness and other stuff along these lines.

I'd much rather see a televised dramedy series starring Red, Abe, Selma Blair's Liz Sherman, Jeffrey Tambor's Tom Manning and all the rest of the Del Toro freaks and eccentrics, and made into a kind of Everybody Loves Raymond type deal with monsters showing up maybe once every five or six episodes. If that. Because I really can't stand watching shit being blown up any more. How can people can sit through the same demolition derby in film after film, over and over, year after year? It's insane.

Guillermo knows that I'm much more of a Chronos/Devil's Backbone/Pan's Labyrinth/The Orphanage type of guy and that I just can't roll over for the big-studio stuff. It's always been a big problem for me.

One technical beef: when the giant land-squid monster picks up a Mercedes Benz and squeezes it to death, we should see gallons of gasoline gushing out. Are we supposed to think that the car had no gas in it? I didn't believe it. Maybe Guillermo can fix this effect for the DVD version.

I can't remember the last time I've taken such an instant dislike to an actor as I have to Josh Peck, star of The Wackness (Sony Classics, 7.4 in N.Y. and L.A.) It's lazy to do this, but I can't express it any better than I did last April: "Peck obviously does well at playing young urban white guys who talk in a street argot that is part imitation 'black' and part whatevuh," I wrote last April, "but in any case suggests a total inability to convey an air of refinement and higher education.

"Is there any circumstance in which any casting director, no matter how whacked, would use this guy to play a small-town cop in Oregon, an assistant to a U.S. Senator, a young suburban dad, a used-car salesmen from Cranford, New Jersey, or anything other than a what-up homie who sells tabs of ecstasy and dilaudid in Tompkins Square Park?

"In other words, Josh Peck is basically Leo Gorcey. Nothing wrong with that, exactly, except that he has one trick and one rap and thassall."

I can't embed this Channel 4 promotional ad for a series of Stanley Kubrick films they'll be showing, but it's ingenious -- a carefully choreographed, superbly designed and exquisitely cast tribute to The Shining. The sets, the haircuts, the mood of it...perfect! Except I can't find the actor playing Kubrick or Jack Nicholson. I guess I need to watch it a few more times. (If it's embedded somewhere, please send along the code.)

"Channel 4 has painstakingly recreated the set of Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining," the story reads, "complete with look-a-likes of the crew and cast members including Shelley Duvall, for a TV ad to promote a More 4 season of the director's films.

"The 65-second promotional spot has been filmed as a one-take tracking shot through the recreation of The Shining.

"Viewers get Kubrick's point of view as he walks through the set, ending up in his director's chair as the crew prepare to shoot the famous scene of Danny Torrance, the son of Duvall and Jack Nicholson's characters, riding round and round the deserted corridors of the Overlook Hotel.

"The promo, filmed as a single tracking shot with a cast of 55 actors, was meticulously researched to 'remain as faithful as possible to the period in which it was shot and the culture of the British studio in the late 1970s".

I'm sorry, but Meryl Streep's use of the word "miasma" in the previous story reminded me of the character named "Miasmo" in Peter Yates' The Hot Rock ('71), and that led to finding this scene on You Tube. Hands down, it's the best acted and most convincing dumb hypnotism scene in the history of American cinema.

In an interview with The Guardian's Stuart Jeffries, Mamma Mia! star Meryl Streep has more or less said that the reason she's starring in this new movie musical is because of the roundabout influence of Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. More particularly because of the effect that a matinee performance of Mamma Mia! on the Broadway stage had upon a group of 10 year-olds, including her daughter Louisa, not long after the attacks.

Mama Mia! star Meryl Streep; Osama bin Laden.

I knew there was unusual left-field reason why Streep would star in a movie version of an ABBA stage musical! I knew it and now it makes sense.

It was seven years ago and Streep "was in a bit of a pickle," Jeffries writes. "She had to dream up an excursion for some friends of Louisa, the youngest of her four children by husband Don Gummer, the sculptor to whom she has been married for the past 30 years. Only one problem: it was October 2001 in Manhattan.

"'Everybody was really dimmed spiritually after 9/11,' Streep relates. 'I thought, 'What am I going to do with the kids?' So I took all these 10-year-olds to see a matinee of Mamma Mia!. They walked in and they sat there with their heads in their hands. Dimmed is the word. They were sad all the time, you know?

"'The first part was really wordy, and then 'Dancing Queen' started up. And for the rest of the show they were dancing on their chairs and they were so, so happy. We all went out of the theatre floating on the air. I thought, 'What a gift to New York right now!' She sent a thank you letter to the cast."

And that opened Streep's emotional receptivity door and down the road she was offered the part. In other words, Streep became a Mamma Mia! fan for the same reason that some journalists fell big-time in love with Amelie at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival -- i.e., because it was shown right after the attacks and put them in a much better mood. Another way to put it is that Streep joined the Mamma Mia! team for the same reason that Ron Silver became a Republican. Oh...my....God!

"Isn't this role beneath you?" Jeffries asks. "I'm not strategizing my career moves at all," Streep replies. "I haven't got a career that I'm building. When I swim my 55 laps, I try to remember the movies I've been in order, and I can't...the past is just a miasma. There's no career path.

"I just want to do things that are valuable to introduce into the culture,. This film [Mamma Mia!] is a valuable thing. I knew it when I saw it."