Another major-daily news story with another United 93 story that begins with the words “too soon.” Written by Joe Neumaier in the N.Y. Daily News. Unbelievable.

The Da Vinci Code marketing and publicity team is apparently planning things so that the advance-peek crowd — U.S. critics and reporters, the entertainment press at the Cannes Film Festival, etc. — will see the film at roughly the same time, particularly since the Ron Howard film will open day-and-date worldwide on 5.19 . So it may (I say “may”) boil down to an all-media stateside showing three or four days before opening and nothing before that. (Except for those elite critics and reporters who always manage to see big-deal films a bit earlier than other media types…you know who I mean.) Of course, Columbia would naturally want to keep DaVinci under wraps until the last minute with the so-called “Christian counter- offensive” getting read to take issue with or discredit the film sight unseen.

To get those Poseidon numbers up, sneak it next weekend (4.28 or 4.29)…both nights even. Sneaking it the following weekend against Mission: Impossible III would diminish the impact, and it opens on the 12th so it’s next weekend or never.

J.J. Abrams, a geek director, has succeeded with M:I:3…fine. So now Paramount wants him to revive the Star Trek franchise because the Trekkies are still out there and hungry for another feature set on the Enterprise, especially one directed by a guy who understands geek attitudes and geek love. What a bummer…a total downer.

A fairly dismissive piece on Tom Cruise (and one extremely disdainful of Scientology) by the N.Y. Post‘s Sara Stewart. A little HE plug in the middle of it, but there’s no links in these stories so I don’t know. The other shoe in this story, of course, is J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III, which doesn’t improve after a second viewing (it kinda drops a little) but is still better plotted and more action-filled than the original Brian DePalma M:I and better than John Woo’s M:I:2 sequel.

N.Y. Times freelancer Ross Johnson on the sexually-enticing double-track that is Black Snake Moan (Paramount Classics), a new gritty-southern-atmosphere film from director-writer Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow). It’s about a bearded, older-looking Samuel L. Jackson trying to cure a blonde, hot-looking Christina Ricci of sexual addiction or nymphomania (or something in that realm). The reason people will pay to see BSM , of course, will be the “ooh-ahh” interracial-sex angle, which the title (which seems like a reference to a line in Full Metal Jacket when Dorian Harewood unbuttoned his G.I. fly and spoke of the “Alabama black snake” hiding inside) obviously refers to. Johnson describes a scene from the film: “…a gold-toothed Jackson growling out a profane rendition of the blues classic ‘Staggerlee’, recorded live in a raucous Memphis juke joint…[and] Ricci, her torn lip a welt of red, her dirty blond hair tossed from side to side, grinding her sweat-drenched body against black men and women on the dance floor as Jackson looked on from the stage.” And if it comes out in the fall or early ’07, it’ll be Jackson’s second film in a row with the word “snake” in the title.

Not much happening in the movie world today, so how about this? Slate‘s Mickey Kaus has spotted an error in a 4.23 N.Y. Times profile of billionaire Ron Burkle‘s chummy relationship with Bill Clinton. The Times story traces their relationship back to the L.A. riots in ’92, when then-candidate Clinton, touring around the damaged areas of L.A., noticed that some supermarkets were untorched. This was “because the owner, Mr. Burkle, treated his customers and employees fairly,” the ,em>Times story says. Kaus did a NEXIS search and learned that Burkle’s markets, operated by his company Food4Less, “sustained some $25 million to $ 30 million in riot-related damage [togroceries]” and that “at the height of the riots, 44 of its stores had been shut down.”