“I know everyone knew Norbit was going to be a piece of shit, but I saw it last night and it’s worse than you think. It’s not just stupid and pandering — it’s borderline incompetent. I can’t recall a film I’ve seen in theaters that trumps it for badness — a hyperbolic statement, I realize, but I’ve wracked my brain and I really can’t.

“I saw it in a completely fully 500-seat theater in Baltimore, and even it’s target audience barely chuckled through it. The 6 year-old boy sitting behind me seemed to enjoy it the most. I would think maybe this was a little bit below the Wayans brothers, but as many terrible movies Murphy has made, I could never imagine he’d do something as piss-poor as this.

“Spoiler: The evil-because-she’s-fat villain Raputia gets her comeuppance by having the Chinese character (also played by Murphy) scream ‘Whale Ho!’ and throw a harpoon at her asshole.

“I hate to jump on Wells’ spiteful bandwagon, especially because I think Murphy was very good in Dreamgirls (though nowhere near as good as Jackie Earle Haley), but I think this more than merits him losing the Oscar.” — Pan The Faun

I didn’t ask Benicio del Toro at last night’s Three-Amigos-minus-one party about his intention to play “Lawrence Talbot” in Mark Romanek and Andrew Kevin Walker‘s The Wolfman, but we got into a couple details about Steven Soderbergh‘s two Che Guevara films — The Argentine and Guerilla — in which he’ll play the lead.

Shooting on the two Spanish-language films will begin (or so I recall reading) sometime in May or June. But first Soderbergh has to finish post-production on Ocean’s 13 (Warner Bros., 6.8.07). I think Benicio said something about the plan being to shoot Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s story in sequence — Argentine first, Guerilla second — but I can’t swear to it. This would make sense, of course.

I was later told by editor Stephen Mirrione — Oscar-nominated for his work on Babel, currently cutting Ocean’s Thirteen, hired to cut Guerilla — that Soderbergh has already cut together a sequence reel (he called it a “kind of trailer”) made from the footage of Benicio-as-Che visiting New York City in 1964, which was taken last year. Man, would I love to see this. It would also be great, naturally, to get hold of the Argentine and Guerilla scripts.

I asked Mirrione if Ocean’s Thirteen, which Clooney and others have said is a revenge piece, will resemble The Sting. Not that much, he said. The guy that the gang takes its revenge upon, he made clear, isn’t Andy Garcia‘s “Terry Benedict” character but Al Pacino‘s “Willie Banks.”

The L.A. Times finally runs its own official Eddie Murphy takedown piece, separate from the stuff Tom O’Neil ran last week in The Envelope. It happens to be in the form of an article about how much damage Norbit (which a friend saw and hated last night) is doing to Murphy’s chances of winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his pretty-good-but- that’s-all performance in Dreamgirls.

“Every time I pass that billboard, it makes me sick,” a veteran Oscar consult- ant tells Times staff writers Greg Braxton and Robert W. Welkos. “I think his performance in Dreamgirls‘ is so fabulous” and deserves to win the Academy Award. But, he added, Murphy’s latest comedy offering “doesn’t help.”

To paraphrase a line that Charlton Heston says in Ben-Hur, “When and if Murphy loses the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, a cry will rise up throughout the land.”