Hollywood Elsewhere has a new chat room called “Poet’s Corner” — currently up and running. It’s on the navigation bar — please sign up (or don’t sign up… it’s your call) and let fly. I’ve also gone live with the first Dispatches column, which has been written by Shall We Dance? director Peter Chelsom. And come Friday Kim Morgan, former film critic for Willamette Week and The Oregonian and a radio talk-show host for four years, will be be joining the fray with a new column.

So the Bond producers have lowered their sights sufficiently to allow for the hiring of Dougray Scott to play 007? (Whatever the accuracy of this story, it recently acquired the legitimacy of a printed account in London’s Sunday Mirror.) Bond casting has always been about the “it” factor. It’s obvious to me that Scott (check him out in Enigma or Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game) almost has it, but not quite. Clive Owen had it in those online BMW “drive” commercials, but “it” seemed to have deserted him when he turned up in King Arthur. And forget Eric Bana. The Scott hiring is said to be about Bond producer Barbara Broccoli wanting to return to a “brooding” Bond in the vein of Sean Connery. Sheer delirium. The Bond franchise needs to die, not reproduce itself. And it needs to die with dignity, which is a total impossibility with Broccoli and producing partner Michael G. Wilson at the wheel.

Kevin Spacey “absolutely can sing,” says Roger Ebert, but Beyond the Sea, Spacey’s Toronto-screened biopic of Bobby Darin, “follows a fairly familiar formula.” It also “has some problems,” he says, “including a strange structure involving Darin as a child commenting on his own adult life, but it also has real qualities, including musical numbers that really deliver. The movie has many songs in it, and Spacey sings them…damned well. It takes nerve to put yourself on the line like that, but he knew what he was doing.”