Sometimes there’s no explanation — not a simple, easy to-digest one, anyway — why a certain song seeps through and resonates at a given time. Maybe if the word “Talk” was substituted for the word “Write”…I don’t know. I’m also hearing “Jeepster”, a T-Rex/Marc Bolan track that Quentin Tarantino uses in Death Proof, over and over. Mainly because it’s good.

Forget that projection about TMNT doing close to $35 million or even cracking $30 million — it’s being projected to earn $27,492,000. (Obviously not a shortfall, but the guy who projected a possible $35 million take was feeling his oats.) 300, a Hollywood Armageddon movie that too many people are refusing to hate, will come in second with $19,352,000, off 41% from last weekend. And the third-place Wild Hogs will earn $14,328,000, off 25% from the previous round.

Shooter will come in fourth with about $13,682,000. The Hills Have Eyes 2 is next with $10,131,000. The fact that (a) we live in a sophisticated moviegoing society and (b) that Sandra Bullock fans live in a very myopic and diseased world of their own are two reasons why the unquestionably bad Premonition, in its second weekend, is expected to make a little more $2 million more than Reign Over Me, or roughly $9,494,000.

Even The Last Fucking Mimzy did better than Reign, with a weekend gross of $8,977,000.

Reign Over Me wasn’t shunned, but it will nonetheless finish in eighth place with about $7.611,000, which means if it holds decently it may end up with a little more than $20 million.

This being a very busy weekend is one reason why Pride, a not-bad competitive swimming movie with Terence Howard and Bernie Mac, tanked with only $3,719,000. Dead Silence did slightly worse with a tenth-place showing of $3,522,000.

A preview trailer for the final Sopranos season, including a line I’ve known was coming for many years — “Mr. Soprano, we have a warrant for your arrest.”

Half of Grindhouse (Weinstein Co., 4.6) — okay, 55% or 60% — gave me a kick that I haven’t gotten from a mainstream film in a long, long time, and I owe 100% of that pleasure to director-writer Quentin Tarantino, who is definitely back in the saddle with this one and going yippie- ki-yay.

Everyone knows that Grindhouse is a double-feature movie — a pair of late-’60s style exploitation flicks intended as a jaunty tribute piece. Created by Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, it’s a film that samples and comments upon a long-dead genre without really “being” anything itself except for a showcase of hip-rich-guy attitudes. But for a film that runs just over three hours (i.e., 184 minutes) it’s a live-wire, better-than-okay ride. The problem is that it starts with a semi-dud (Rod- riguez’s Planet Terror) that you have to sit through in order to get to the really good one, which is Tarantino’s Death Proof.

Planet Terror is a tired, gloppy and mostly groan-worthy zombie movie except for Rose McGowan‘s pistol-hot action scenes with her prosthetic machine-gun leg. But Death Proof , the Tarantino film starring Kurt Russell, is a sexy, sassy hot-chick flick boasting one of the most exciting car-chase sequences in cinema history…seriously.

And no fake-ass CG footage! Every last frame in Tarantino’s car chase, shot on windy roads in the golden sloping hills north of Santa Barbara, is apparently 100% real and totally pedal-to-the-metal, and therefore on par with the car chases in Bullitt, the original Gone in 60 Seconds, Vanishing Point, Ronin, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry and any other contender you can name.

My favorite Grindhouse one-sheet

But the fundamental thing is that Grindhouse is a beautifully recreated atmospheric revisiting of the world of scuzzy B movies of the ’60s and ’70s, complete with scratches, dirt, sound pops, cheesy trailer lead-ins, and all the low-rent touches that make you feel as if you’re watching the film in some sorry-ass cave in some skanky section of Oakland or Cleveland or Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1971. It’s a high-tech recreation of an analog, low-tech movie world that no longer exists.

Plus it has three (or is it four?) fake trailers for three or four other fake-scuzzy films, directed by Rob Zombie, Shawn of the Dead‘s Edgar Wright and I forget who else.

Planet Terror is a bloody, gutsy slime-gore piece about zombies stalking and devouring a small Texas town. It’s Dawn of the Dead with gobs and gobs of yellow pus and karo syrup and animal guts, but without the class or the wit or the quiet character moments. It doesn’t advance the zombie genre one iota — it’s a total cheeseball retread. In a post-millenial context I guess I’m a confirmed 28 Days Later type of guy — I believe in muscle-bound, red-eyed zombies who run a mile in under 200 seconds, and I get no kick from the old zombie-shuffle of yore.

I’m being as nice as I can in saying that this plate of Rodriguez ghoulash is barely tolerable. For me it was mostly icky, pussy, coarse, tedious, gross, sloppy and (after 25 or 30 minutes) borderline dull. I loved the hot-chemistry attitude that McGowan and costar Freddy Rodriguez bring to their battling-ex-lover roles, but not enough to change my basic feelings.

Take away the car-chase finale and the Tarantino flick is almost all sublime, groovy-chick dialogue. This is Tarantino amblin’ country, all right — a place where very cool people (i.e., ’70s “street” archetypes) talk and talk and say it just right while sipping a Corona or smoking a Red Apple cigarette or eating a Big Kahuna burger. And yet Death Proof is not, to put it mildly, concerned with notions of unity. It’s a scattershot thing that’s basically two short films in one. Two separate moods or tones and two separate female ensembles linked by Kurt Russell’s “Stuntman Mike” character.

It starts out as a cruising-chicks-in-a-muscle-car movie, then it turns into a hanging-around-an-Austin-juke-joint, Eugene ONeil/The Iceman Cometh piece with Stuntman Mike putting the zen moves on a Hispanic hottie (Vanessa Ferlito) as her friends (Sydney Tamiia Poitier and I forget who else — the press notes should have photos to go with the cast bios) offer snappy commentary. Then it suddenly shifts into a supernatural-psycho-killer-after-hot-girls movie ending in a major wipe-out/head-on collision sequence (with individual death-and-dismember- ment shots thrown in), and then finally a hot-chicks-get-even film ending with that balls-out country car-chase.

It’s a foxy, half-crazy, smirky B-movie wallow with nary a thought or a theme of any kind, but it’s a complete fuck-all pleasure to just rock and ride along with, and the car-chase finale (the star of which is New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who stunt-dubbed for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill) is the absolute shit.

No question about it — Tarantino really adores and understands women on a certain level, and nobody right now writes better tough-chick dialogue. Death Proof is junk, but it’s a tasty, revved-up thrill — a real fast-car, hot-chick high with back- country blacktop thrills a’plenty. Russell rules (although he’s much cooler in the beginning, when he’s a settled, contented barroom smoothie, than when he’s called upon to turn fierce and psycho — a shift that makes zero sense) but Zoe Bell is the break-out star.

The reason I decided the other day that the final Sopranos season is comprised of ten episodes instead of the actual nine — yes, the tally is definitely and officially nine — is because of seemingly contradictory information in Bill Carter‘s 3.22.07 N.Y. Times story.

The article states that the series, called “Made in America,” starts on April 8 and that “the final scene of The Sopranos” will air on June 10. The series will run, in other words, for ten weeks….only it won’t have ten episodes. Yes, I’m confused.

Go to a calendar right now and count off the weeks. The Sopranos airs on Sunday night, of course, and there are four Sundays in April — 4.8, 4.15, 4.22 and 4.29. There are also (I’m very willing to be tedious) four Sundays in May — 5.7, 5.13, 5.20 and 5.27. Unless my recollection of third-grade artihmetic is faulty or my calculator has an Asian virus, eight fresh Sopranos episodes will therefore be seen in April and May. That leaves the prickly month of June, which has its first two Sundays on 6.3 and 6.10. Let’s see, eight plus two is…hold on…ten!

So with nine episodes due to play, there’s going be either a repeat or a “dark Sunday” between April 8 and June 10…right? There’s information missing from the puzzle. If anyone knows what it is, please inform.

Is it the least bit bothersome to anyone (except for the conservatives who read this column) that Adam Sandler is an alleged Rudy Giuliani supporter, and is otherwise regarded as a Bruce Willis-type supporter of right-of-center candidates and causes? I don’t think it’s such a bad thing for a Hollywood guy to be a Giuliani man. It’s a little weird, but far from criminal. I just don’t want to hear anything about Sandler supporting Bush/Cheney/Rove or the Iraqi adventure. (Note: Apologies for misspelling Giuliani’s name — I’ll never get it wrong again.)

“After reading the postings to your blog, I think the folks who have already seen this film are (a) way too young to know anything about the Vietnam War, or (b) utterly insensitive to the film’s racism and reactionary politics. I saw the picture months ago. It’s extremely well-made, but I was also appalled that it glorifies a guy who was on a secret, illegal bombing mission inside Laos when he was shot down. In addition, the movie’s view of the locals is almost unreservedly racist, in that almost everyone is portrayed as sadistic, venal, corrupt…you name it.

“There’s very little acknowledgement that the guards might be acting so brutally because guys like Dieter the pilot (Christain Bale) have been napalming their villages and destroying their crops. About the only time this comes up, in fact, is when Our Boys have to move up their escape plans because the guards, driven desperate by hunger, plan to kill the prisoners and go back to their villages, where they will hopefully find food. But this situation, essentially caused by the American bombing, is only viewed through the lens of the prisoners’ escape attempt.

“Interestingly, the film opens with footage of a bomber napalming Laos from low level, but never really follows up on this. It’s all well and good to make a movie about one man’s will to survive (and Bale is really terrific in the film), but leaving out the context means Herzog’s film is practically an apologia for American war crimes during the Vietnam era.” — hotshot Manhattan entertainment journalist Lewis Beale

Wells to Beale: I’ll forward this to Werner Herzog — maybe he’ll answer you. O rmaybe I’ll just ask him when he shows up to talk about his work between screenings at Santa Monica’s Aero Theatre.

I thought I’d start playing around with running short video clips from time to time. I’m thinking it’ll be especially cool from the Cannes Film Festival and other such destinations. I know MPEG is the easiest loading, most accessible format (I’m buying some video-converting software as we speak), but I’m wondering how difficult it is to view less common video files. I’ve loaded two — an avi file from my Canon PowerShot A540 and a video clip shot by a Treo 700. I’ll be converting to MPEGs, for sure, but can anyone view these inane driving clips with any ease or comfort?

“Question: Can a film symbolically contain all the elements of a vast, complicated and enigmatic tragedy within the microcosmic story of a single individual accidentally caught up in the ghastly mess of — for convenient example — the Iraq war? Short answer: No, not normally.

“Longer answer: A modestly mounted, but curiously poignant little documentary called The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, which somehow — quietly, devastatingly — shows and tells you more than you may perhaps want to know about the dehumanization implicit in the mighty, blighted Iraqi adventure.” — from Richard Schickel‘s Time review of Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein‘s documentary, posted 3.23.07.

“It was like watching a killer whale launch itself with barely a splash completely out of the water. Instead of the usual roar of the engines, the airliner seemed to sigh, as if there were no tension in its wings, which support 811,000 pounds during the demonstration flight. Whoa, the whale can fly! And wait a sec, I’m on the whale.” — Time‘s Coco Masters on a recent special promotional flight of the Airbus 380.

TMNT (Warner Bros., 3.23) is surging now with adults, even — 97, 29 and 9, It’s still a $25 to $35 million equation. I don’t know where 300 will fall (in second place?), but The Hills Have Eyes 2 will be right after the turtles among the newbies — 77, 30 and 11. Antoine Fuqua and Mark Wahlberg‘s Shooter will probably come in third — 64, 36, 10. Reign Over Me has been upticking over the last two or three weeks (it’s now at 64, 30 and 8), but it’s only managed a 69% Rotten Tomatoes rating. That said, L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas — a good, graceful writer who can be tough, snide and obstinate when so inclined — is eloquent in praise of it.

TMZ is reporting that the Miami New Times is reporting that Lily Tomlin has joked about that YouTube video showing her in a profane spat with director David O. Russell on the set of I Heart Huckabees. Except she didn’t joke — she sounds chagrined to me. “I’ve never seen it,” she said to an interviewer. “Is that when I’m sitting in the seat and really going nuts? Oh my God, I’m gonna die when I see that.”