Disney/Pixar/Lasseter’s Cars is being forecast to pull down something in the mid to high 60s this weekend. It’s kinda funny that before The Omen‘s $12.5 million Tuesday opening, the tracking guys were all projecting six-day (Tuesday to Sunday) cumes in the high 20s. The mellowest, friendliest, most good-timey opener of the weekend’s three openers — Robert Altman‘s A Prairie Home Companion — is playing in fewer theatres and skews older, and is expected to pull in about $3.4 million.

This is awful, really ghastly. Watch it at your peril.

This is an indication of what’s right and agreeable about Robert Altman‘s A Prairie Home Companion in the manner of Altman’s best films, but the way costar Meryl Streep puts it….well. Here she is, talking to the Washington Post‘s Michael O’Sullivan: “‘Usually you know immediately, if the screenplay announces its tone, its darkness, its — you know — you can sort of predict, from the first 15 pages, when things are going to blow up physically or metaphorically, and how it’s going to resolve, and the whole schwing of it, and what the feel of the whole thing is. The gestalt just kind of announces itself. [But] this one was just such an odd little creature. It just sort of danced along, seemingly on the surface of things, and had some laughs and some poignancy and some sweet characters and some odd things and some dirty jokes, and I didn’t know’ — here the actress pauses dramatically before shouting into a reporter’s ear — ‘what they were doing.'”

In an interview with Now Playing‘s Scott Collura, Running Scared director Wayne Kramer (a good hombre) examines what went wrong with New Line’s marketing of the film, why critics hated it, and why he pretty much hates critics.

I saw Superman Returns last night, but I agreed not to run a review until opening day. If I left it there some of you might draw conclusions, so let me add without hesitation that Warner Bros.’ caution is misplaced. I need to say at least one thing: I’ve echoed in this space the general interpretation of WB’s decision to open Bryan Singer‘s film on Wednesday, 6.28, instead of the originally announced 6.30 debut, as a desire to maximize the holiday take before the dreaded onslaught of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest the following weekend. This view was, in hindsight, partially misleading because it suggested that a better pure-entertainment, bang-for-your-buck element would be coming from Pirates. That will obviously be a matter of perspective as the days advance, but it seems highly unlikely (I almost wrote “inconceivable”) that Pirates will surpass Superman Returns in terms of emotionality and embodying a resonant, fully developed theme. I was watching an interview yesterday with the late Don Simpson on the new Crimson Tide DVD, and at one point he repeated the old maxim that a good movie “can’t just deliver action or theme-park pizazz or laughs or big stars….it’s gotta be about something.” No critic is going to argue that Superman Returns doesn’t fulfill that demand, and if I owned a house I would bet it on the expectation that Pirates will be about two things and two things only — good pizazzy fun (action, humor, attitude, production values) and a total lack of regard for Simpson’s Law. The other thing is that I don’t get is the Advocate– cover idea that SR would have some kind of homoerotic subcurrent. They were dreaming — this is a film about purity of spirit. One final thing: Superman Returns is opening simultaneously in IMAX theatres on 6.28, and about 20 minutes worth (i.e., “selected scenes”) will be show in IMAX 3D. The press was shown a preview of how the 3D footage will look last night after the main screening, and it’s mindblowing. There’s an airborne action sequence in particular that delivered, for me, the greatest sensory thrill I’ve ever experienced from a mainstream movie in my life. There’s no question that anyone within reach of an IMAX presentation of this film HAS TO SEE IT THIS WAY. (Singer has worked out a green light-red light system that will tell moviegoers when to put on the glasses just before a 3D section begins.) Trust me, catching it this way will be an absolute knockout.

Underdog enterprise is what this country is all about. When I saw this photo, it made me wish I could be in Somerville, Massachucetts, next Friday so I could go to the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square and buy a ticket and say hello to the folks behind this hand-tooled promotion. These people get it…they’re on it.

HE will be switching bases later this afternoon (Friday, 6.9) from Los Angeles to the Palm Casino in Las Vegas for a few days of Cinevegas, the “world’s most dangerous film festival”. I have, in all sincerity, a place in my heart for “the worst money-grubbing place in the world,” as Albert Brooks called Las Vegas 21 years ago in Lost in America .

I love the sun, the desert dryness, the babes at poolside, the artery-clogging breakfasts, the overwhelming sense of apartness from the real world…a place where Jesus and his disciples would surely feel at home. The image I have in my head is that of Willem Dafoe saying to the good sisters in The Last Temptation of Christ, “You gave me food, drink…a place to rest…you restored me.” What’s “dangerous” about Cinevegas exactly? The reason I’m going is because it’s “safe,” in the sense that Sundance programmer Trevor Groth is making all the calls. Because I feel fairly assured it will present an assortment of well-crafted, presumably disorienting, values-challenging films. Because it has the U.S. premiere of John Maringouin‘s Running Stumbled , an “unflinching family doc” that is repped, not incidentally, by always-in-front-of-the-herd publicist Mickey Cottrell . Because this year’s honorees are Helen Mirren , director Taylor Hackford, Laurence Fishburne, Christina Ricci and Sylvester Stallone (whom I once worked for, technically, as a publicist). And because director Abel Ferrara, Mr. Dangeroso Maximo Ultimo, will show Mary, his best film since Bad Lieutenant. And ecause it’s showing Paul Dinello‘s Strangers With Candy, a sardonic comedy with Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Because of Matt Checkowski and Kurt Mattila‘s Lies and Alibis, a faux Thin Man concoction with Steve Coogan, Rebecca Romjin, Selma Blair, James Marsden, Sam Elliott and James “sit down and write two letters” Brolin.