The Rotten Tomatoes’ positives for Poseidon are in the same range as President Bush‘s approval rating — 31%. The creme de la creme rating is 27%. Everyone just hates it, hates it, hates it…and it’s really not that bad. I mean, providing you don’t go looking for some multi-tiered, character- driven Ship of Fools. It’s fast, it’s fairly thrilling at times (that seriously claustrophobic crawling-through-the-air-duct scene is a near-classic), the effects are above-average (okay, the rogue wave looks more than a little fake), and thank God it doesn’t try to acquaint you with, much less try to make you care about, the characters. And Josh Lucas, who used to play nothing but scumbags, plays a hard-charging hero and likable good guy here. And praise God again that there’s no fat Shelly Winters character in this thing.

I disagree with the absolute derision in the pan of Poseidon written by Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Morgenstern, which I can’t link to because the WSJ is cheap with its freebies. But I find it perversely enjoyable nonetheless: “A $150 Million Wreck…Shallow Story, Flat Acting Sink Remake of Poseidon…[it’s] a deeply dreadul movie — no, a shallowly dreadful movie — that’s too unpleasant and repetitive to be entertaining.” I swear to God he’s being overly harsh. This is not a hateful flick. It’s nothing, but it’s not that bad. It’s an intentionally empty big-budget disaster movie, and I don’t think it’s fair or porportionate for a seasoned critic to walk up to a huge pile of horse manure and say, “Eeewww, this is awful…it smells like horse manure!”

My brother Tony, with whom I stayed last night at his modest home in Norwalk, Connecticut, lives in Dial-Up Nation, and you don’t want to know what dial-up is like these days. Actually, it’s not bad for a while until, all of a damn sudden, God decides you’re suddenly not going to find any more URL’s or send any more e-mails…sorry.

I don’t know why, and I can’t imagine that anyone reading this would care very much one way or the other so let’s just drop it , okay? I’m late to the table because I had to pick up my rental car late this morning and then drive over to a Wi-Fi Starbucks in Westport, Ct., which is where I’m sitting right now. Southwestern Connecticut is damp and drizzly all over . I feel as I’m harboring a dark and dreary November in my soul. I walk down the street and I feel like knocking people’s hats off.

Two readers — Roy “Griff” Griffis and a guy named Daniel — have both made an excellent points about the ricochet between 9/11 and Poseidon. “Do you think that 9/11 has, for a while at least, put a stake in the heart of old-school disaster movies?,” Griffis wrote. “Since we’ve seen real disaster, lived with its fallout and watched people falling to their deaths…maybe a film like Poseidon just seems too far removed from a reality that was made all too real.” Daniel added, “Part of my problem with Poseidon was that, having just seen United 93 a few days earlier, Poseidon seemed to have even less gravity and the piles of dead bodies seemed even less real and even more hollow. There just didn’t seem to be a point in any of it.”

Just to bend over and be fair, Cahiers du Cinema has put Sofia Coppola‘s Marie-Antoinette on the cover of its latest issue, and critic Jean- Michel Frondon is calling it “a delicious miracle.” There’s also a fairly lengthy interview with Coppola.

I trust that Southland Tales director Richard Kelly ‘s passport problem is resolved at this stage, three or four days before the start of the Cannes Film Festival. I ran a fast item about this a week ago, and then I took it down when it was suggested that it might cause some difficulty. But Hollywood Wiretap had already picked up on it, and then the IMDB’s Johnny-on-the-spot WENN news service ran it a few days later…and now Harry Knowles is on the soapbox.

I’m searching around for news about who will write the script for The Winter of Frankie Machine, an aging-mafia-hitman flick to be directed by Martin Scorsese and star Robert De Niro, to be produced by De Niro and Jane Rosenthal. Whether this film actually happens or not, the source material is a book by Don Winslow. (Haven’t read it, but of course the name “Frankie Machine” was Frank Sinatra ‘s in Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm.) If anyone knows anything…

For the third time in recent months, a respected old-media film critic has been downgraded or shown the door at a major daily: the word broke two or three hours ago that Jamie Bernard ‘s contract will not be renewed at the N.Y. Daily News , and I’m very sorry. A tough break, but print regulars are probably going to be dealing with turbulent upheaval for months and years to come. It’s shake-up time, sorry to say. I took a train to Connecticut around 3:30 this afternoon and ran around a bit, and when I finally got online I read the news about Bernard.

I’ll know a bit more tomorrow morning, but I’m projecting right now that Poseidon‘s opening weekend take may be possibly as low as $15 million but will probably not be higher than $20 million, even with winds favoring. I mean, it looks that way now. Undeservedly, I would add, but them’s the breaks.

This is not a parody cover of The Advocate. It’s “real world”, and it’s on the on the Advocate site right now. (I’m not sure about the newsstands.) The piece, written by arts and entertainment editor Alonso Duralde “looks at superheroes and their appeal to gays and lesbians,” the blurb says. I’ve never detected anything intrinsically or suggestively gay about the D.C. Comics’ Superman character, and you know Superman Returns director Bryan Singer wouldn’t begin to think about pulling a Joel Schumacher move…not with all the pressure on him and the film.

Douglas Carter Beane‘s The Little Dog Laughed , a Second Stage production that opened last January, is about the problems of a sexually conflicted movie star. It was rumored to be based upon — suggested by — impressions of Tom Cruise and his relationship with former publicist Pat Kingsley. (The third character is a gay hustler whom the actor is involved with.) Anyway, I’m told the play will be moving to Broadway in the fall, and when it does the storm over Cruise — peaking now, but certain to die out in a week or two — will rev up again. Here’s what N.Y. Times critic Ben Brantley said in his 1.10.06 review: “What has garnered the most advance attention for Little Dog has been the promise that it would be about a closeted gay actor who knows his homosexuality is incompatible with being a matinee idol. Sure enough, the character of Mitchell (Neal Huff) is suggestively familiar enough that certain contemporary male stars (names withheld in view of possible litigation) should probably stay away from this show if they want to avoid sleepless nights.” The Kingsley character, Diane (Julie White) “muses wonderingly on her client’s naive idea of taking his mother as a date to an awards ceremony ‘so that no one will know he’s gay.’ Certainly the play’s basic plot hinges on the professional problems of such secrecy, after Mitchell begins an affair with a young prostitute named Alex (Johnny Galecki) while visiting New York. Diane has secured the film rights to a play in which the lead male character is gay. And as she observes, ‘If a perceived straight actor portrays a gay role in a feature film, it’s noble, it’s a stretch. It’s the pretty lady putting on a fake nose and winning an Oscar.'”

I’ve been running around Manhattan with my head down but the first breather moment that comes along I’m grabbing that double-disc DVD of Munich — i.e., Steven Spielberg‘s Quills — and popping it into my Netflix portable player. The problem is that I tried watching it for a second time last December and it didn’t play.