Jeffrey Wells

Research is saying that audiences aren’t that interested in Vince Vaughn playing a quasi-romantic lead, which is what he’s trying to be in The Breakup. They prefer him as a non-romantic hound- dog motor-mouth, as he was in last summer’s Wedding Crashers. I think most of us knew that going in.

A friend told me the other night that Paul Bettany had thought up a simple way to keep papparazzi from taking his picture…or any celebrity’s picture if, say, they’re at a film festival or staying in some small vacation village and they want to be left alone. Wear the same outfit every day. Photographers won’t snap you two days in a row if you’re wearing the same clothes because it’ll look the photos taken on day #1, and editors won’t run them. Brilliant! The hitch, of course, is that humble selfless types like Angelina Jolie and/or Jennifer Aniston wouldn’t be caught dead wearing the same duds two or three days in a row.

A sidewalk observer described Poseidon star Josh Lucas as looking “bloated” the other night in Manhattan, according to N.Y. Daily News “Lowdown” columnist Lloyd Grove . Lucas “was with a group of guy friends [and] looked like he was out for a night on the town, and like he’d been out quite a few nights in a row.” This is a sign, a harbinger…an indication of Poseidon sentiment among the media.

Catherine Zeta Jones: a capitalist first and foremost, and an actress, wife, mom and everything else second.

Seventeen reviews so far of United 93 and it’s got a 92% positive and a 100% creme de la creme ratings. Will RV, which is apparently opening in a lot more theatres, do more business than United 93 this weekend? Quantitively, possibly. (And that in itself is depressing enough.) But if it does more on a per-screen basis…I don’t want to go there.

Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper on United 93…very well said. Ebert: “All the time the military is looking for authorization and trying to find the President, trying to find the President. And I don’t know about you but all I could think about was that moment in Fahrenheit 9/11…” He means that footage of Bush sitting on a chair in front of the grade-school class, reading from “My Pet Goat” and basically doing nothing while crucial minutes ticked by.

“United 93 costar Christian Clemenson, an excellent actor, [has invoked] Tolstoy’s conviction that the aim of art is to state the question clearly — not to provide answers . I’m not sure what that question is in United 93. There’s the obvious one about why communications broke down. There’s a question about what these hijackers looked like, how they saw themselves. And there’s the central question: With more fictionalized 9/11 films to come, including one by Oliver Stone, is it too soon? My answer is that if they truly help us — as the brilliant, tightly focused, and momentous United 93 helps us — to fill in the gaps in our knowledge and to pose more incisive questions, then it is not soon enough.” — New York magazine film critic David Edelstein in the current issue. (Edelstein believes that World Trade Center is “fictionalized”? My understanding is that the script is substantially about what more or less happened. Maybe Edelstein meant “dramatically embroidered“?)

Dispatch from last night’s all-media screening of Barry Sonnenfeld and Robin Williams‘ RV (Warner Bros., 4.28): “RV is no Benchwarmers, I can tell you that! What’s shocking to me is that there have been about 12 pictures that haven’t been advance-screened for the press this year. Silent Hill, I think, was the 12th. And so this is the trend so far…they’re not screening lots of films for the obvious reason…and they turn around and screen RV? What were they thinking? The critics are going to hate it. This film is not funny. The people in the cheap seats — people they brought in on the hope they would probably laugh more than the critics — were laughing here and there, but nobody was laughing in the critics’ section There were long periods where there were no laughs anywhere…no laughs at all. There’s one good riff in the entire movie when Robin’s son is being taunted and he makes fun of ‘hood rap with the taunters. Poor Robin Williams has inherited Chevy Chase’s career, and it’s like the poor guy is in a straightjacket. It’s definitely a family picture, and that poster image of the RV teetering on the mountaintop…they actually have that scene. And there’s one with vicious racoons invading the RV. And one with a septic tank that explodes and lands all over Williams and he’s covered in shit. Look back on the last 15 years and I think Sonnenfeld’s peak was Get Shorty, and after that the Men in Black films. On the credits there’s a guy whose title was “consultant to Barry Sonnenfeld.” What was his consulting about? Telling Sonnenfeld that this crap is funny?”

Another brilliant “My Life, My Card” American Express ad, this one by Wes Anderson. Clever, dryly amusing, beautifully choreographed, a cast of dozens (including Jason Schwartzman and Anderson’s producer Barry Mendel) and obviously shot in France, where Anderson has been living and working over the last several months. Obviously very Wessy in terms of style, tone, attitude…in the same way that M. Night Shyamalan‘s AmEx ad, which I mentioned on 3.7, is very much his own. Theere’s a self-mocking thing going on (in the piece, Wes pretends to be a spoiled, relentlessly-catered-to, extremely-full-of-himself director on the set of an action film) but the undercurrent, frankly, is that Wes kind of is this guy…on some level. You tell me.

I didn’t leaf through each and every page of the “L.A. People” section in the current L.A. Weekly because the hand-held version looked too page-heavy and time-consuming, so I shined it when it came out last Thursday. But the insightful, extremely shrewd and ever-gracious Laura Kim — the Warner Independent marketing vp who co-authored of I Wake Up Screening with Jon Anderson — is briefly and affectionately profiled by Ella Taylor here, and it’s my lazy-ass fault I didn’t pay attention sooner.

And this one about publicist Mickey Cottrell, a crafty and diligent hombre who knows the right people, always manages to push the right buttons, has excellent taste as far as the films and filmmakers he represents, and is a mensch on top of all that. And he’s a pretty good actor besides. (In theatre productions, I mean.)

It’s kinda too bad Jack Black and Stanley Kubrick will never work together. Something in this Nacho Libre clip tells me Stanley K. would have made an effort to know Black and possibly cast him in something. The rolling-eyebrow thing aside, Black’s clear lack of interest in trying to be even half-funny in this clip, or even somewhat energetic, spells, to me, the mood of a fuck-you genius. (I realize that “genius” is a bad word…it’s a Larry King word …but I know it when I see it….”genius” is fuck you, leave me alone, I don’t give a shit…genius is always feeling bothered and unsettled about something.) Kubrick would have seen this, I think, because he knew and worked with a guy known for deranged genius moves in Lolita and Dr. Strangelove . (I should have had this and other postings up yesterday but I was at the damn passport office for six friggin’ hours .)