Thanks to the good, gracious and supportive readers who’ve tossed me some loose change over the past three or four days, in response to my request for help (see upper left ad box) in getting through a proverbial bad patch. For those of you who can’t pitch in, don’t sweat it…your steady readership is what really counts. For those thinking of doing so …well, whenever and whatever. But thanks again to everyone.

The fanboy community freaked last week when 20th Century Fox announced their decision to hire Breet Ratner to direct X-Men 3. Ratner will of course degrade the franchise. Not in any thuddingly obvious way but in a hundred little ways. One of these is his decision to add more laughs. “Not jokes for the sake of jokes,” Ratner said in a recent interview, but “jokes that come from character humor, that come from characters and that come from the situations.” This sounds to me like a guy saying he doesn’t entirely get (much less get off on) the X-Men mythology or metaphor, and that he’s a tiny bit bored by it so why not throw in some more gags? As Red Dragon was to Silence of the Lambs, X-Men 3…we know how this sentence ends, dont we? X-Men 3 will begin shooting in Vancouver in mid-August.

Did I miss the news about Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Esrada finding a U.S. distributor, or are Jones and his producer Michael Fitzgerald still hunting around for the right match? The latter, apparently…but shouldn’t this obviously worthy drama (several reviewers in Cannes called it a great Sam Peckinpah film) have found a distributor by now? It’s a fairly safe bet it’ll be an award nominee (Jones took the Best Actor prize in Cannes, on top of Guillermo Arriaga winning for Best Screenplay) if it comes out in October or November. It’s probably the usual-usual (producers asking for more money than distribs feel it’s worth, etc.) but if anyone knows anything solid, please get in touch.

There are two things that scare me just a little bit about the upcoming movie version of Rent (Columbia, 11.11), the phenomenal mid ’90s Broadway musical that was based on Puccini’s “La Boheme.” The first is that Joe Roth’s Revolution Pictures produced. Roth has shown such lousy instincts and has built such a terrible track record that the word “Revolution” is, in a Hollywoood context, pretty much synonymous with stinker. The second concern is that Rent was directed by Chris Columbus, a nice-enough guy who likes to sentimentalize and sugar-coat everything he shoots. If there’s a way to overly-sanitize and prettify and otherwise screw up a musical as good and vibrant as Rent, Roth and Columbus are just the guys to manage it. That said, the Rent trailer is awfully good. It’s mainly the cast (Rosario Dawson, Adam Pascal, Taye Diggs, Idina Menzel, Jesse L. Martin, Wilson Jermaine Heredia) singing the beautiful “Seasons of Love” as we’re given a standard montage of sad-joyful scene clips and a slight taste of the sad-joyful storyline. Even with Columbus behind the camera, it made me wonder — it planted the idea in my head — that this might be as good as Milos Forman’s Hair. If nothing else it reminded me what a good song “Seasons” is.