This ran yesterday as I was packing up and leaving Santa Barbara, but since I ran a Chris Penn item when he passed I need to put a cap on it. The primary cause of death was “nonspecific cardiomyopathy [plus] an oversized heart that weighed 700 grams with the effects of multiple medication intake,” according to a coroner’s statement. Promethazine with codeine “featured predominantly in his death,” according to coroner investigator Craig Harvey, who called his passing “an accident.” That’s b.s., of course. Penn committed slow improvised suicide through overeating and too much booze and too many drugs.

“A lot of the Gail Berman complaints listed by the woman who wrote to you (see the ‘Scent of Toast’ story) are bogus. The woman who sent it to you is pissed because all her projects got dropped. This always happens when a new administration comes in although they usually do it more slowly, so the pain is more protracted. I know what it’s like to work on something for years and then have it abandoned — it makes you crazy, the way you feel when a relationship you’ve invested in has come up empty. You’re mad and want to blame someone. I just lost a project at another studio because the exec was fired and this was after two years!!! Berman was told to dump everything by Grey because of the Dreamworks merger as well, so Gail is the bad guy. Yes, she’s brusque…but somehow it shows more because she doesn’t try to be a cute girl or a charming gay man or even a suave suit like most of the guys running these joints. Some studio heads are the most charming people in town — they love everything — so when things don’t move forward they don’t get blamed. Gail is honest and intelligent and talented and it would be a shame to lose her to some schmoozer that jerks people’s chains for the hell of it.” — Literary agent and producer

Whether you’re for editorial free speech in the form of those Danish cartoons that offended so many European Muslims or against it, some kind of editorial bravery medal ought to go to LABAF for shooting and posting this video (largely footage of a 2.11.06 “manif” in Paris). I mean, in view of the cowardice shown by so many news organizations in reporting about this culture- clash story, with none being willing to show the cartoons that offended so many in the first place. Ater watching it a friend wrote in and said “when it comes to this controversy, all I can say is this: Fundamentalist religion is totalitarian in nature. And if the 20th Century taught us anything, it’s that you should never give in to, or try to accommodate, the totalitarian impulse.”

That Italian director-screenwriter whose name escaped me while typing that photo caption in the story about those Santa Barbara Film Festival panels was Cristina Comencini — my apologies to her and for forgetting that Giovanna Mezzogiorno, the star of Comencini’s new film Don’t Tell (Lionsgate, 3.17), won the Best Actress award at the 2005 Venice Film Festival. I’ll be seeing the film Thursday evening (or on DVD…haven’t yet decided), and after that there’s a swanky dinner reception for Comencini and lah-dee-dah. My apologies again.

An anonymous online petition to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which so far has been signed by 4,313 people in Israel and abroad, is calling upon the academy to withdraw Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now from the list of nominations for Best Foreign Film. The real purpose of the petition, of course, is to tarnish the film’s rep among Jewish Academy members so they’ll vote for another foreign-language film and thereby lessen the odds of the acclaimed drama winning the Oscar. The petition argues that Paradise Now legitimizes mass murder, and portrays the murderers themselves as victims.” Uhm, okay….and disenfranchised Palestinians aren’t victims?

George Clooney said a day or so ago in Berlin that he doesn’t expect to win any Oscars on March 5th. I don’t know about that. He’s such a good politician and schmoozer and so well liked that he might just take the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his acting in Syriana…for putting on weight, growing a beard and looking vaguely bewildered and lost, or in other words for not playing a variation of that same guy he’s been playing over and over since One Fine Day. The Oscar should go to Cinderella Man‘s Paul Giamatti, but the momentum is swinging toward George…I think.

So Washington, the third installment of Lars von Trier‘s America trilogy, is on “indefinite hold” (is that another term for scuttled because nobody wants to sit through another one of von Trier’s talky, preachy, Swedish sound-stage, chalk-on-the-floor dramas after Manderlay?), and he won’t be premiering his next film, The Boss Of It All, in Cannes.

“From the start, Walk the Line was pegged as a solid, unspectacular film propelled by two dynamite performances. And whaddya know — the two performers got [Oscar] nods, and that’s about it. Now get ready for a month of stories from people in my business about how Crash is gaining momentum with voters because it’s about Los Angeles, where most Academy voters live. But don’t get suckered in. Brokeback is gonna win. The media is just bored.” — Newsweek’s Devin Gordon trying to alleviate his own boredom in the current issue.

Bottom line: if John Turturro‘s Romance and Cigarettes worked a little better it wouldn’t be “collecting dust at Sony Pictures, which inherited the movie as part of April’s Sony-MGM transaction,” as this John Horn story in the L.A. Times reports. I saw it at the Toronto Film Festival and liked the opening number sung by James Gandolfini and the madman chutzpah displayed by Christopher Walken, but the karaoke thing started tio feel more and more underwhelming and it didn’t seem to rock ‘n’ roll and kick it out with the right kind of primal energy. Diverting but not delicious.

So-so responses may be looming for Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion…if Peter Brunette‘s Screen Daily review out of the Berlin Film Festival is anything to go by. He calls it “a reasonably entertaining film [that] nevertheless falls quite short of the achievement of such Altman ensemble masterpieces as Nashville, M*A*S*H and Short Cuts.” And yet he calls Altman’s homage to America’s favorite radio show “a largely spirited affair, despite a few sagging moments. Paradoxically, it may play better in Europe and other territories than in North America, where its central plot of a soulless corporation overtaking a beloved, if superannuated, cultural institution may be seen as a bit shopworn.” The best parts involve the perform- ances, or mroe particularly Altman’s seamlessly blending of real variety acts with cornball fictional ones such as The Johnson Girls (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin) and the singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly ) and when the singing gets a-goin’, the Fitzgerald theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the show is broadcast live, starts jumping.” The other cast members are Keillor himself, Lindsey Lohan,
Kevin Kline and Virginia Madsen.

I don’t want to see this movie because I don’t want to spend any prolonged time with the balding, red-haired, dorky-looking guy in the photo. If I saw this guy coming towards me on a sidewalk …forget it.

A guy named “El Mayimbe” has posted a script review on Latino Review of the currently shooting Casino Royale with Daniel Craig as James Bond. Observation/opinion #1: The script is a contemporary origin story (i.e., doesn’t take place during the cold war in the early 1950s) and is “really cool.” Observation/ opinion #2: “The first four pages before the main title sequence shows us how Bond got his double O ranking — his first two kills of MI6 Section Chief Dryden (for selling secrets) and Dryden’s contact in Pakistan.” Observation/opinion #3: “The
carpet- beater scene [from the original Ian Fleming novel] is in it, and very painful to read. For those of you who didn’t read the novel — Bond is tortured and they go to work on a body part only men have. Ouch! The filmmakers have balls (no pun intended)…kudos to [director] Martin Campbell and [screenwriter] Paul Haggis for keeping it in there.” Observation/opinion #4: “This story shows us why Bond is the way he is, the chip on his shoulder, and the origins of the super secret agent to be. For sure, the edgiest of the Bond films because this is Bond at his most edgy. For sure, the Bond that Fleming intended and the fans have clamored to see. Overall, a fantastic read.”