For all my tussles with David Poland, attention and respect should be paid for his having declared on 5.27.04 that Rachel McAdams “may be the next huge female movie star”…just after he saw The Notebook. I was bored by The Notebook and didn’t care for Mean Girls, so I didn’t get on the McAdams bandwagon until Wedding Crashers and then Red Eye last summer. (And she’s excellent again in The Family Stone.) We have to give the devil his due (and that’s not an inference, just an expression)….Poland called it way before me, before anyone.

It sure is exciting news that NBC/Universal might want to buy DreamWorks after all, and if they don’t maybe Paramount will.

If I was 17 and into seeing a movie with my girlfriend and didn’t care about anything except cheap thrills and maybe getting some action? I’d take her to The Fog, the weekend’s #1 film with a projected $13 or $14 million haul. In Her Shoes is #4 and on track to make $6 million-plus, amounting to a 40% drop from last weekend. I spoke last night to a married movie buff in his 50s who’d just seen The Fog and thought it was shit. I asked if he’d seen In Her Shoes and he said no but he’d like to. (I could tell he wasn’t that into it.) He said his wife wants to see Elizabethtown, which will come in second, by the way, with $11 or $12 million.

Check out this 30 year-old trailer for Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, which Sony Pictures Classics is re-releasing on 10.28. The stuffed-shirt narration sounds so stuffy and forced it’s almost funny. The Passenger is an intriguing, sometimes fascinating film but honestly…? It’s never been in my Antonioni pantheon. L’eclisse, L’aventura, Blow-up and Il Grido are much better films. It’s a notch or two ahead of Zabriskie Point and Red Desert. I haven’t seen it in ages, but part of the problem was casting Maria Schneider opposite Jack Nicholson. On the other hand, there’s that awesome final tracking shot that starts in Nicholson’s hotel room and the moves toward the window…slowly, slowly…and then through the window bars and into the street.

Columbia’s Amy Pascal’s claim in Sharon Waxman’s N.Y. Times piece (10.15) that Daniel Craig, the new 007, “is the same size as Sean Connery” is hooey. I’m not calling Craig a shrimp, but he’s a good two inches shorter than me. I’m 6 foot 1/2 inch, and I’d say he’s about 5 foot ten and a half inches, give or take…maybe 5′ 11″. (I stood next to him after we did a Layer Cake interview in Park City last Janaury during the Sundance Film Festival.) And I’ve stood next to Connery, and he’s at least 6’1″ or 6’2″. The website www.celebheights.com says he’s 6 foot and 1 and 1/2 inches. The site has Craig at 5’11”.