The Tom Cruise pile-on is getting merciless. I know he brought all this upon himself, but still…whew. Here are some pals who expect to do business with Cruise down the road — Paramount honcho Brad Grey, Universal chief Ron Meyer, C/W partner Paula Wagner — looking to take some of the sting out of that USA Today/Gallup poll that showed Cruise’s favorability rating has dropped 23 points since last summer.

We’ve been culturally “disaster”-ing for the past couple of weeks — new Poseidon out Friday, old Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno just out on DVD, two 9/11 disaster movies in theatres (one now, the second in August). And nobody ever seems to mention or remember in articles about ’70s disaster flicks that only one, Richard Lester’s Juggernaut (1974), was truly satisfying. This modestly proportioned British-produced film was ten times the film that The Poseidon Adventure tried to be. The irony is that the producers thought they were paying for just another piece of schlock (or so I read somewhere), but Lester managed to make something fairly good and clever and adult and underplayed.

The premise of Used Guys is fairly clever, with honest-to-God social observation and metaphor behind it. Set in a matriarchal society in which male clones are bought and sold like used cars…wait a minute, this sounds like The Island. The story revolves around two guys (Ben Stiller, Jim Carrey) who somehow cut themselves loose from the assemby line and try to sort out what being a man has come down to. Emily Mortimer will costar as Stiller’s love interest. (Carrey is going stag?) The only cautionary — okay, disappointing — note in this 20th Century Fox pic, which stars shooting in June, is that Jay Roach (Meet the Fockers/Parents, the Austin Powers films) is directing. That means Used Guys is guaranteed to be right down the middle. It’ll be hip and smart, and it may be funny or very funny or even marginally touching, but it’ll be right down the middle…you know what I mean.

“Wolfgang Petersen‘s Poseidon is a ruthlessly stripped-down update [of the 1972 original]…a slice of delicious cheese, it’s also a brutally efficient machine . Keeping only the original film’s immortal setup — a luxury liner topples over one New Year’s Eve — Petersen sends a ragtag band of outsiders scurrying onward and upward toward the hull. Only this time there’s the added incentive that the ship happens to be sinking at an alarming speed, so every second counts. In recent years we’ve grown accustomed to endless, bloated back-stories and pointless subplots in big-budget movies of this size, so it’s downright jarring when a rogue wave knocks over the S.S. Poseidon less than 18 minutes into the picture. Not counting closing credits, the film runs barely an hour and a half. In other words, if you started watching this movie and Titanic at the exact same time, Poseidon would already be over long before anyone in Mr. Cameron’s opus even spotted the iceberg.” — Sean Burns, Philadelphia Weekly

Objective: relying on a tried-and-true tone of smirky pseudo- sophistication, inject a note of contemporary cultural resonance into the selling of a forthcoming cable broadcast of 34 year-old disaster film. Solution: Link to a movie (and more particularly the public persona of a certain movie star) that is not only here-and-now but, in a manner of speaking, somewhere between gasping for breath and sinking beneath the waves. Watch this AMC promo spot for a Thursday night (5.11) airing and you’ll see what I mean.

Funny, but the most visually arresting aspects of Poseidon in IMAX are the early dialogue-exposition scenes. They’re the most fully lighted and therefore the most detailed and pleasing to the eye. I have never seen blue eyes that look more liquid Technicolor than Josh Lucas ‘s — they’re so vivid in the IMAX print they almost look like some kind of CG visual effect.

Once the upside-down, swimming-around stuff begins the light levels go down and there’s less to feast on because it’s all water and shadows and source lighting and flashlight beams. It’s startling how brisk and to-the-point this $160 million film is, in a way — 98 minutes. It’s a well-jiggered ride that forbids even the slightest dilly-dallying. Not much is provided in the way of poetry or soul or echoes, but the way it unfolds is certainly a tribute to the German-engineer efficiency of director Wolfgang Petersen. I detected a fairly satisfied vibe after last night’s Leows Lincoln Square IMAX screening ended. There was a guy who was half-laughing and half-moaning to his girlfriend about the most startling scene, which I will get into in my coming spoiler piece this weekend about the rules of disaster-movie deaths. (This is the second warning.) The “money” line in this scene is stunning in its heartlesness. It’s the one that everyone will mention when they talk about Poseidon over the next week or two — “Shake him off!”

“Interesting to read about Scientologists buying tickets in bulk for Mission: Impossible III. I spoke to a theater manager in Three Rivers, Michigan — the kind of town where something like M:I:3 should be doing solid business — and he said he and his staff couldn’t believe how poorly the film did last weekend. ‘I don’t know where they made that 48 million,’ he said, ‘because we never had more than 30 or so people at any one show.’ He said the movie made ‘maybe’ $3000 for the weekend. Although everyone he talked to who saw it enjoyed it, he had also heard from many people who said they were ‘sick of seeing [Cruise]’ and under no circumstances would they be going. The poor guy — the theatre manager — is now crossing his fingers and hoping for a box-office lift this weekend from Posedion and Just My Luck.” — James Sanford

Being a fan of director Roger Michel and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, who last collaborated on The Mother (2003), I’m quite interested in seeing their latest, Venus. It costars Peter O’Toole (who’s said to give an elegant and spirited performance in it), Leslie Phillips, Richard Griffiths, Vanessa Redgrave and Jodie Whittaker . Miramax has the U.S. distrib rights for the London-based drama, which is being described as “a wry, affectionate coming of very-old-age story.” (It’s partly about active libidos among the over-70 set.) Venus is being test-screened in Manhattan Thursday night but I’m going to have trouble making that one, so I wrote McDonald + Rutter, the London p.r. firm, and asked about any Cannes market screenings that may be happening. “We don’t know of any market screenings” and “it’s still in post-production,” I was told. Of course, if ,em>Venus ios being test-screened in New York City two days from now and they’ve already test-screened it in Covent Garden in late April, it’s very close to being finished and of course they’ll be be showing it at a market screening or two in Cannes. If anyone can tell me about any happening during the festival, please get it touch.

The strangest news of the day is that of all people, F.X. Feeney, easily one of the most brightest and most insightful film critics of our time (as well as a top-grade screenwriter and all-around human being), has provided feature-length audio commentary on the just-out DVD of The Towering Inferno. I love many aspects of this film (I’m especially fond of Steve McQueen’s performance as “the fireman,” as well as the scene when Jennifer Jones falls to her death) but it’s odd for a guy of Feeney’s depth and cinematic compassion to be doing this. Why is he talking on a Fox Home Video DVD of a crass Irwin Allen film that’s basically focused on people burning to death or falling to their deaths from an absurdly high skyscraper? Feeney “rambles amiably and very informatively throughout all 160 minutes of the flick’s running time, and he focuses on everything from the cast to the FX to the controversies, stopping occasionally to point out something clever about the film’s editing style or production design,” says DVD Talk’s Scott Weinberg, who says that “this is one of the best ‘historian tracks’ I’ve heard in the past few years…great, great stuff.” Congrats to F.X., but he should be riffing about films of greater substance.

The view on the street — my temporary street in Brooklyn, I mean, where men and women of proletariat substance hang out and shoot the shit — is that David Blaine is a man of honor and astounding bravery, even though he technically failed in his breath-holding stunt yesterday. Blaine is said to be upset that he let his audience down; he didn’t.

A piece by Jacques Steinberg in the N.Y. Times about the mostly subtle alterations that have been made to The Sopranos for its upcoming basic cable run on A&E. But who in their right mind would prefer to watch this classic series on A& E rather than simply rent or buy past seasons on DVD and watch them at will? I don’t get it.