Myself and a few other online know-it-alls — Defamer‘s Mark Lisanti, MCN’s David Poland, Tom O’Neill, MSN’s Gregory Ellwood, Oscar Watch’s Sasha Stone — share predictions with L.A.Times writer Deborah Netburn about the summer films most likely to be the biggest hit, the biggest flop and the biggest sleeper. My calls (in that order): The DaVinci Code, Poseidon and Snakes on a Plane.

One of the reasons I wasn’t able to put very much up yesterday (Wednesday, 5.3) was that I was doing an early pre-Cannes interview with Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu (21 Grams, Amores perros) out at Studio City Radford, where he and his team are working on the final sound mix before delivering a finished print to the Cannes Film Festival, where it will screen on or about 5.23.06.

Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu on Wednesday, 5.3, 1:15 pm, outside mixing studio in Sherman Oaks

A tightly sprung, hauntingly composed drama on the page (I’ve read Guillermo Ariagga’s script, but I haven’t seen the film), Babel costars Brad Pitt, Gael Garcia Bernal and Cate Blanchett, although many other actors are part of the mix. It’s about intertwining fates and has four concurrent storylines that unfold in three countries — Tunisia, Japan and Mexico. I’ll run the Innaritu interview feature just before the festival begins, but I may let go with a few excerpts between now and that date, which could be Monday, 5.15, or about 10 days from now.

Another reason I was behind the grind on Wednesday is that I was running around like a chicken with its head cut off as part of my preparation for flying last night to Boston. My Jet Blue flight left Burbank around 8:50 pm. I got into Kennedy around 5 ayem, took a shuttle flight to Boston’s Logan airport and MTA’ed out to Brookline around 7:45 am. I worked a bit, piddled around and then crashed on the couch for three hours.

Aspinwall near Harvard Ave. in Brookline — Thursday, 5.4.06, 12:25 pm.

When I woke up the May weather was transcendent. The air smelled like honesuckle or hot dogs or fantastic coffee…a combination of all three, most likely. The blue skies and bright sunlight made the neighborhood look like something out of a 1952 Vincent Minelli film. The trees are budding, the flowers are bustin’ out all over and it was heavenly to just walk around and breathe it all in. A fragrant spring day on the east coast can cleanse your soul like few other stimulants or epiphanies.

It’s taken him years, but George Lucas has finally capitulated to the middle-aged Star Wars purists (i.e., fans who were tweeners or teeners in May 1977, when the installment later known as A New Hope first opened) who hated the “Greedo shoots first” revision and some of the other add-ons.

“Going somewhere, Solo?”

On 9.12.06, the original theatrical versions of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi will be released as part of a new DVD package that will also include the 2004 digitally remastered versions. Only an insulated Jabba who lives in his own realm would have neglected to offer the original versions a long time ago in DVD. It took Lucas way too long to come around, but at least he came around. It’s possible that the making of large crateloads of money was a major factor in the Lucasflm’s decision to release these versions, but what can you expect from Lucas, the new “I love the indie camp” guy or, if you prefer, the new Gregg Araki.

I’ve called around for some backstory on why Warner Independent chief Mark Gill has been relieved of his duties….zip. All we know for sure is that March of the Penguins weren’t enough to make things right. David Poland says that WIP’s business model amounts to “fiscal folly.” Variety says it’s because Gill’s style “was said to clash with that of Warner production prexy Jeff Robinov, [who] said in a statement that Gill “has done a very good job of establishing Warner Independent.” The inference (it’s always what’s left unsaid that tells the true tale) seems to be that Robinov doesn’t think Gill has done a good job of maintaining or growing the division. Anyway, it’s too bad. I mean, it’s always a bit of a bummer when relationship don’t work out. Variety says Warner Bros. exec up of production Polly Cohen is in talks to fill Gill’s shoes. I mean, in a manner of speaking.

A brilliant move on the part of the ad guys who put together the new Casino Royale trailer: they start it off in black and white, thus signifying this 007 flick won’t be following the usual pattern. And yet the snippets of high-octane action and sex scenes that follow suggest that it will be, more or less, the same old thing…so who knows? Daniel Craig‘s James Bond, described by Judi Dench in the trailer a “a blunt instrument,” seems like the most Sean Connery -like of all the Bonds because he has within him (and particularly in his boxer’s face and buff physique) shades of the primitive brute. At the same time I think we all recognize that Jason Bourne has overtaken James Bond as the definitive espionage-action figure of our time. Matt Damon‘s Bourne is cybered and fibered into the here-and-now; 007 has always been (and always will be) a throwback to the martini-sipping sexual ethos of the early to mid ’60s.

If this Screen Daily review is indicative of general critical reaction, poor Ed Burns has struck out again as a director-writer with his latest film, The Groomsmen. Apparently a kind of I Vitteloni-ish, stag-party psychological meltdown drama, it costars Burns, John Leguizamo, Britanny Murphy, Jay Mohr, Matthew Lillard and
Donal Logue. Burns’ continuing failure to re-generate or improve upon the dramatic gravity in his debut film, 1995’s The Brothers McMullen, has become a cliche, as these final two lines from reviewer Dan Fainaru suggests: “A decade or so ago [Burns] was regarded as a possible suburban answer to Woody Allen, albeit younger and better looking. But while he is certainly more handsome than his model, it is not quite enough.”

As I did in my review, Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has remarked how under-utilized Phillip Seymour Hoffman is as the big baddie in Mission: Impossible III. “Hoffman’s involvement hasn’t been fully exploited [as] this picture denies Hoffman a chance to fully express his character’s personality, to show a little nuance, a mentality behind the evil, some humor or self-awareness behind the malevolence, or to toy with Ethan beyond the simple threat…if you have an actor like Hoffman on board, you’d think it would behoove the writers to cook up at least one big scene to let the man loose to really do his thing.” One wonders if Hoffman might have had one or two such scenes in the shooting script, only to see them trimmed in order to favor the star. As I put it on 4.19, “[Hoffman] kicks ass with the lines and scenes he’s been given, but somebody wanted this to be Tom Cruise’s film.” Threatening second leads have been put in their place before. I’m told by a friend who was close to the backstage action on Sydney Pollack‘s Absence of Malice that Sally Field‘s role as a ruthless journalist was modified and/or reconfigured when it became apparent that she was generating more wattage than star Paul Newman. It also allegedly happened to Jennifer Jason Leigh when her performance in Barbet Schroeder‘s Single White Female seemed to be overtaking that of the presumed star, Bridget Fonda.

I guess there must be a lot of Southland Tales to tell because, as the official Cannes Film Festival website proclaims, Richard Kelly ‘s apocalyptic drama-supplemented-with-music-by-Mobey runs two hours and 40 minutes. That in itself implies sweep, longing, ambition. Ron Howard‘s The DaVinci Code, which is showing out of competition at the beachside festival, runs eight minutes shorter, or 152 minutes.

Merissa Marr‘s Wall Street Journal piece about how Tom Cruise has lost his footing with women fans (and what his people are doing to tryin and get some of it back) echoes what the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell told me a while back, which is that women went cold on Cruise last summer, which was perhaps due more to his attack on Brooke Shields over post-partum depression issues. “At that moment, he moved from the realm of acceptable eccentricity to something scary and cruel,” comments Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center, in Marr’s piece. “It’s easier to forgive his joking about placenta than what is perceived to be an attack on a vulnerable woman’s real problem.” Marr comes to more or less the same conclusion I came to in an earlier piece about Cruise’s image problems, which is that they aren’t bad enough to hurt Mission: Impossible III in a serious way, but they may be bad enough to shave at the profit margins. Enough so that Paramount number-crunchers may slide their glasses down to the bridge of their nose and go, “Hmmmmm…yeah.”

Stephen Colbert‘s Bush-lacerating address before the recent White House Correspondents’ Association dinner — an extremely dry riff on the power and persistence of denial — is worth a looksee.

Thanks for the supportive, encouraging comments about the newly designed main page, which is simultaneously a default home page as well as a kind of parallel-universe home page, since “Elsewhere Classic” — or the good old Hollywood Elsewhere — is alive and kicking and just a click away. The next move is to create a click-thru “comments” template that would link to each item. In fact, I’m trying to figure how to set this up right now.