Just for clarity’s sake, Alejandro Amenabar’s undeniably touching right-to-die drama with the Oscar-calibre Javier Bardem performance is called….wait a minute, I’m not sure. The Spanish title, Mar Adentro, translates as Out to Sea, but that wasn’t used because it had already been taken by a 1997 Jack Lemmon film. So New Line Cinema, the distributor, announced a new title: The Sea Within. Then they changed their minds (or were forced to reconsider) yet again, and now it’s called The Sea Inside. Which, of course, shoudn’t be confused with Lions Gate’s Bobby Darin biopic Beyond the Sea, which will open on 11.24.04.

“I’m off to catch Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban one last time on the big screen before it dons its celluloid invisibility cape and disappears for good.” So declared the extremely bright, super-knowledgable L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas in last week’s issue. Whew….whatever. As intriguing as Alfonso Cuaron’s influences were upon Azkaban, it’s still a friggin’ Harry Potter film, and that means you’re in a kind of jail as you watch it. I felt hopeful when I saw it in Paris last June. I said to myself at one point, “This is is the best Potter ever, and so nicely composed…and best of all, it’ll be over in less than an hour.”

Good to hear that Alexander Payne’s Sideways, which my friends at Fox Searchlight have agreed to let me see early next week, is a winner, or is perhaps even, as David Poland declares, “the first true masterpiece of 2004.” At the very least I look forward to savoring the four main performances by Paul Giamatti, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh and Thomas Haden-Church. But the use of the word “masterpiece” scares me a bit. A wait-and-see attitude seems prudent.

The truth is that Wired is the new Word column, and I can already tell after writing it for a couple of days that I’m going to refresh it a lot more often, while I haven’t added a new item to the Word in a couple of weeks now. So the hell with it. Off with the Word ‘s head, I say…but what to put in its place?