Charlie and the Chocolate Factory‘s second-weekend take was $27.5 million, a 51% dip from its opening weekend total. That means more than a few who’ve seen it came out of the theatre in a moderately unhappy frame of mind. The second-weekend total of Wedding Crashers, however, was down a mere 24% for a fresh haul of $25.7 million…a lot higher than I predicted on Friday. Happening!

What’s the rumble about Must Love Dogs, the John Cusack-Diane Lane romance that snuck last night? Variety‘s Justin Chang praised Cusack’s performance but called the film “middling.” His lead graph begins, “To properly appreciate Must Love Dogs, one must first love John Cusack…thesp’s maverick turn steals the show.” James Watson, non-pro from Tallahassee, wrote in this afternoon and said pic “wasn’t half bad. The theatre sold out with mostly 30 to 40 year-old women in the audience, and it played extremely well with them. I found it mildly diverting, although it did have a few laugh-out-loud moments. Lane and Cusack have reasonably good chemistry together. Within the constraints of the summer romance meet-cute genre, it’s definitely well above average.”

Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott…together again? That’s what I hear, but that’s all I’ve heard.

You’ve got to keep on your toes if you’re doing an online anything, and especially a gossip column. Take Radar‘s “Paris Review”, which is written by Julie Bloom and Derek De Koff. In Friday’s 7.22 posting they ran a multiple-choice quiz that led with a question about Paris Latsis’ obsession with fiance Paris Hilton, and which included a photo of the couple calling them “the future Mr. and Mrs. Latsis.” Very soon afterwards the Star‘s website ran a story saying the wedding’s off and Paris has flown home from Greece, etc. I don’t know if the Star has it right and I personally don’t give a shit about any of this, but if you were Bloom and De Koff wouldn’t you want to check this out and possibly shuffle your copy around if required, just so it looks like…you know, you’re on top of it? There are no “weekends off” in journalism…not any more.

So the Hollywood Elsewhere team is trying to install a travelling news-ticker thing at the very top of the column, but we’re having trouble with a software that looked very cool at first but has since developed some problems. Are there any software designers out there with a solid reliable news-ticker software that can handle RSS feeds from different sites, maintain the same look and speed on different browsers, and generally be steady and consistent all the way around the block? If you can fill the bill, I’ll not only buy it from you — I’ll tell everyone else how good it is on the site.

Variety‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that the “official” title of Steven Spielberg’s currently-rolling feature about Israel’s revenge on the Palestinians behind the 1972 Munich killing of Israeli athletes is Munich…or at least that the cover page of Tony Kushner’s script “starts” with this word. Fleming repeats the general concern about the film leaning too heavily on a book about the Israeli operation called “Vengeance,” because the book’s veracity “has been widely questioned.” Look…I figured this whole thing out in a piece than ran on March 9th. Read it over and tell me if it doesn’t make sense. The bottom line is that Munich will be Spielberg’s second major-league feature having to do with lethal aggression against Jews, the first being Schindler’s List, and he knows this latest effort will be compared to his 1993 Oscar winner, so he’s got to make it complex, high-minded, morally probing. You can figure that Munich will be some kind of super-charged, early William Freidkin-type thriller about the ultimate futility of seeking revenge, with a theme (as suggested by a published quote from Munich costar Daniel Craig) that says “if we all keep taking an eye for an eye, pretty soon the world will be blind.” This is an actual line from a 1986 TV movie called Sword of Gideon that dealt with the same subject.

In Sunday’s N.Y. Daily News, Elizabeth Weitzman asks if Ben McKenzie, whom she calls The O.C.‘s “resident hunk,” is about to make his mark in the forthcoming Junebug (Sony Classics, 8.5). I’ve seen Junebug and yes, McKenzie’s performance shows “he can do more than brood beautifully,” as Weitzman puts it — it shows he’s extremely convincing at playing a pathetic jerk. Junebug is a nicely handled family relationship drama, but McKenzie’s “Johnny” character is an uneducated, emotionally immature blue-collar dork who treats his wife with callous disregard. (The wife, a very pregnant woman named Ashley, who’s a bit too angelic and myopic to be believed, even by small-town terms, is superbly portrayed by Amy Adams.) Bottom line…and I’m acknowledging this may be a small-minded way of looking at things….but the general rule of thumb is that it doesn’t matter if you’re just inhabiting a character, like any good actor. You can’t get a career bump off a performance in a good film if you’re playing a total asshole, so McKenzie will have to wait.

So there’s Page Six’s account of the circumstances surrounding the canning of publicist Jasmine Madatian at Paramount Pictures, and there’s David Poland’s…the latter having been posted Saturday night after Poland looked into it (he was the first to report Madatian’s sacking) and was told the Page Six version was wrong. I haven’t called around about this myself, but I’m presuming Poland probably has it right. His version is a lot more specific and I know he’s got good sources on the lot.

It’s funny how this always seems to play out, but there’s always been a regional/geographical tendency when it comes to print and online journos reporting stories about Hollywood. London journos are the toughest (the tabs can be merciless and sometimes insane, but London’s serious critics, essayists and documentary filmmakers have frequently been the most candid and piercing and on-target). New York journos are almost as tough and lacerating as the Londoners but somewhat less so because their editors sometimes “play the game,” meaning there’s a now-and-then, depending-on-the-shot tendency to sand down the edges and perhaps be a tad more circumspect. And L.A. journos are, for the most part, the “friendliest” — i.e., frequently the ones with the best information, but also the ones most likely to report their information and opinions in let’s-not-be-overly-harsh terms because they’re right in the middle of the political thicket and want to keep their industry relationships at par. In other words, the determining factors in terms of getting information and reporting it thoroughly are proximity, politics and personal relationships.