It’s too early and it may seem a silly notion, but it may be time for all good people to rise up and band together in order to stop Johnny Depp from winning the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Sweeney Todd. If anyone wants to launch a website to help amplify this feeling and (who knows?) maybe nip this one in the bud, I’ll contribute $100 bucks…seriously. He’s the one bad guy in the bunch who, I feel, really doesn’t deserve to win. Surely others feel this way?

Okay, bad joke. But there’s this guy who wrote earlier today that he “believe[s] now that Depp is a 95% bet to be nominated for Best Actor as the title character in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in a very, very crowded field of 2007 male movie performances…and an 80% chance to win.” No offense, but it kinda rubbed me the wrong way.

Obviously nobody’s seen Sweeney Todd. (I saw the excellent Patti Lupone stage revival in New York least year.) Tim Burton’s film could blow everyone away, and Deep might out-do his work in Edward Scissorhands…who knows? But we all know it’s basically going to be another odd-baroque Burtonesque production-design trip — lots of exaggerated leers, period atmosphere, arterial blood, white smocks, Sondheim and straight razors. Maybe there’s a heart element in the stage play that I’ve forgotten about. I suspect the film will be mainly be about classy, high- toned, eye-catching perversity — the imaginative world of Tim Burton’s navel.

And while I realize I’m in the minority, I feel that Depp is going to have to be awfully damn good in Burton’s musical to overcome the resentment effect from having starred in those three “entertaining” but infuriating Pirates of the Caribbean films. Director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer are the perpetrators, I realize, and even I was okay with Depp’s japey attitude in the first installment. But Dead Man’s Chest was too long and a very rough sit, and I’d be lying if I said I was looking forward to At World’s End. (I can only say for sure that Keith Richards wears too much scuzzy makeup.)

All I know is that when I see Depp, I think about Cpt. Jack Sparrow and having a little touch of revenge. I don’t dislike Depp at all. It’s just that when I see him I think of all the money he made for the Pirates film and all the hours I’ve spent sitting in a theatre watching them so far, I think to myself, “A little payback might be fun.” By which I mean justified.

I’m not saying anyone else feels this way. It’s just me, it’s only February but I’m just sayin’ just for fun. It would be great if Sweeney Todd turns out wonderfully. Let’s hope for that. But if it doesn’t….

Though Walt Becker didn’t write Wild Hogs, its early progress is similarly angled, with much ‘ewww!’ mileage eked from the ways in which William H. Macy‘s sensitive-guy nature sometimes make him seem ‘gay,’ plus a randy cop (Scrubs‘ John C. McGinley) who misreads the traveling male quartet’s bond. Studio product once ridiculed homosexuals outright — now it goes the more insidious route of milking the straight characters’ ‘hilarious’ revulsion whenever they come in contact with or are mistaken for gay people.” — from Dennis Harvey‘s 2.24 Variety review.

Here’s what Zodiac costar Jake Gyllenhaal said to Newsday‘s Lewis Beale yesterday regarding David Halbfinger‘s N.Y. Times article about Fincher’s obsession with multiple takes (which Mark Ruffalo also commented upon in Devin Faraci‘s CHUD interview): “It is positive, whether or not I was willing to admit that at the time. It’s like working with a great teacher or coach — you hate them while you’re doing it, and then you win the game, and you’ll talk about that for the rest of your life. And the complications of that relationship are what make it so special. We did a lot of takes, but David wants something. He knows when something’s honest, and people have different ways of getting there.”

That was San Francisco Chronicle writer Leah Garchik who passed along buzz about that recent screening of Francis Copppola‘s Youth Without Youth, and not Tom Luddy.

“I always call international the new south, ” says House Party director Reginald Hudlin (also the current entertainment president of BET Networks). “In the old days, they told you black films don’t travel down South. Now they say it’s not going to travel overseas.” — from Michael Cieply‘s N.Y. Times piece about the legend of films with African-American casts, backdrops and storylines being weak overseas. It’s a situation that “may” be changing, Cieply says.

During an on-stage interview at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade theatre last December, Alan Arkin said the job he wants more than anything else is to be in a big-studio franchise movie, the kind of film in which he’d have to gesture wildly in front of a green screen and go, “Look out, the thing is coming!”

I don’t know if Arkin’s winning of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine had anything to do with this, but his agent has gotten him what he wants — the role of CONTROL in a big-screen version of Get Smart with Steve Carell in the Don Adams/”Maxwell Smart” role. It’ll be crude and common, of course (Adam Sandler protege Peter Segal is directing), and Arkin — who knows the difference between smart, sophisticated comedy and coarse, low-rent crap — will be delighted with the paycheck, especially if they make two or three. But inwardly he’ll be mortified.

Termite art — that ‘s the best term I’ve heard so far (taken from a recent review by the Village Voice‘s Nathan Lee) that summarizes the aesthetic essence of Zodiac. And when you talk to Robert Graysmith, the author of the two Zodiac books (“Zodiac” and “Zodiac Unmasked“) that served as the basis of “Jamie” Vanderbilt‘s script, you get the idea that he’s a kind of termite himself — a relentless eater and chomper of information.

Graysmith is the main character in the film (wth his name used and everything), and he’s played by Jake Gyllenhaal in exactly this mold — a guy who can’t stop absorbing and gathering data. Graysmith sure as hell was that guy when he was on the Zodiac set and watching Fincher make the film. He wrote a book about it calling “Shooting Zodiac” (Berkeley Books) but he’s ambivalent about having it published, for some reason. He’s guessing, I suppose, that the attention given to the film over the next few weeks will surge sales of his two “Zodiac” books and his editor doesn’t want a third Graysmith/”Zodiac” book confusing anyone.

The book will probably come out concurrent with the Zodiac DVD, which is going to be a mother in terms of extras and docs. The DVD’s production budget, Graysmith says, is around $1.5 million.

I mentioned my opinion that the end of the film should perhaps have ended like Vanderbilt’s screenplay did, with “Graysmith”/Gyllenhaal delivering an eight- or nine-page soliloquy that reviews all the persuasive evidence in support of Graysmtih’s belief that Arthur Leigh Allen was the Zodiac slayer.

On the page, this scene works as a kind of crescendo-climax. It’s not entirely satisfying but it gives a semblance of half-assed completion and finality, even if Allen was never arrested for the killings. Fincher’s chose, however, not to try and deliver any kind of ending along these lines, even an intellectual one. Graysmith says that Fincher told Vanderbilt at one point, “Jamie, we’re not trying to convince the audience [of Allen’s guilt]…,that’s not what the movie’s about.”

“We’re satisfied that it was Allen,” Graysmith says. “There was all kinds of evidence…footprints in the garden…I think he was deliberately pitting the police departments against each other…I think it’s this guy.”

Graysmith will be at Thursday night’s Zodiac premiere on the Paramount lot, at which time I hope to take a picture or two. The above jpeg was provided, believe it or not, by his publicist.

I like this riff on the film by Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman:

“Explaining a mystery is an act of reassurance. It makes us feel that chaos has been defeated, and the forces of order restored. Zodiac, David Fincher’s vastly intricate and dazzling drama about the hunt for the serial killer who terrorized the San Francisco Bay Area starting in 1969, offers no such soothing closure, and that’s part of what’s haunting about it. It spins your head in a new way, luring you into a vortex and then deeper still, fascinating us as much for what we don’t know as what we do.”

The Bucket List‘s IMDB synopsis says it’s about two terminally ill older guys — Jack Nicholson, Morgan Freeman — who “escape from a cancer ward and head off on a road trip with a wish list of to-dos before they die.” I’m not going to make any negative assumptions because Rob Reiner is directing. Just because North, Ghosts of Mississippi, The Story of Us, Alex & Emma and Rumor Has it bit the dust is no reason to think rashly.

The problem, for me, is this: Nicholson looks too well-fed to play a dying cancer patient. I’ve looked at a lot of online photos of people with chemo baldness and they’re not all emaciated or even thin, so I can’t say Nicholson’s appearance is necessarily inaccurate. But I’ve seen or run into several late-stage cancer patients with concentration-camp bodies in my time. Plus Nicholson has always radiated a certain boisterous life force, and it seems you’d have to do more than shave his head to make look like a man withered by cancer and facing death.

If he had dropped 30 or 40 pounds for the role a la Christian Bale, then I’d be on board. But Jack can’t do that. Jack has his pleasures, his lifestyle…Jack has to be Jack. So a grinning, hale and hearty, roly-poly dying cancer patient will have to do.

The Bucket List (Warner Bros.) is due to come out in November, but the IMDB says it’ll open in Argentina on 9.20.07.

This Radar Online report about the National Enquirer running fake Anna Nicole Smith body-bag photos is icky and surreal. If once a magazine indulges itself in running faked Photoshop images, very soon the editors will come to think little of running intrusive and sometime sloppily reported stories about celebrities; and from that to paying low-life sources and running photos of celebs in their out-of-shape bodies at the beach, and finally to general obnoxiousness and tackiness.

“An even greater challenge to both newspapers and broadcast networks is the growing power of the internet as a news distribution platform,” reads an online summary for News War, a four-hour PBS Frontline special examining the political, cultural, legal, and economic forces challenging the news media today.

Jeff Fager, executive producer of 60 Minutes, says “we haven’t seen the model for how broadcast journalism is going to end up on the Internet, but it has to go there. I mean, you don’t see anybody between 20 and 30 getting their news from the evening news; you see them getting it online.”

An even more seminal quote comes from Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos, one of the country’s most popular blogs and a reportedly receiver of 3 to 5 million visitors per week. “People want to be part of the media,” Moulitsas tells Frontline. “They don’t want to sit there and listen anymore. They’re too educated. They’re taught…to be go-getters and not to sit back and be passive consumers. And the traditional media is still predicated on the passive consumer model — you sit there and watch.”

Screengrab’s “Ten Best Nude Scenes of ’06” piece amounts to two goodies — Gretchen Mol‘s outdoor nude scene in The Notorious Bettie Page and Sophia Myles in Art-School Confidential — and eight so-sos.

Nine days ago this foreign-shores guy listed the 10 greatest speeches and monologues, and every last one was an AFI cliche that nobody wants to be reminded of ever again.

He even gets the Trainspotting speech wrong, which he excerpts as follows: “Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family, Choose a big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends… Choose your future. Choose life.”

That’s okay, but nowhere near as good as the rant that plays at the very end, to wit:

“So why did I do it? I could offer a million answers, all false. The truth is that I’m a bad person, but that’s going to change, I’m going to change. This is the last of this sort of thing. I’m cleaning up and I’m moving on, going straight and choosing life. I’m looking forward to it already. I’m going to be just like you: the job, the family, the fucking big television, the washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electrical tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure-wear, luggage, three-piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing the gutters, getting by, looking ahead, the day you die.”