Jeffrey Wells

“The title was what got my attention,” Samuel L. Jackson tells USA Today‘s Susan Wloszczyna in the last and final Snakes on a Plane story of the spring. “I got on the set one day and heard they changed [the title], and I said, ‘What are you doing here? It’s not Gone with the Wind. It’s not On the Waterfront. It’s Snakes on a Plane!’ They were afraid it gave too much away, and I said, ‘That’s exactly what you should do. When audiences hear it, they say, ‘We are there!'”

It appears that those Tom Cruise Parade poll results were rigged. Question is, by whom? Parade.com recently asked readers to opine about whether Cruise was responsible for his wackzaoid public image last year or if it was mainly the media painting him that way. As I reported a few days ago, 84 percent blamed the press. But Parade publicist Alexis Collado has told “Page Six” that “we…found this a little bit fishy, so we did some investigating. We found out more than 14,000 (of the 18,000-plus votes) that came in were cast from only 10 computers! One computer was responsible for nearly 8,400 votes alone, all blaming the media for Tom’s troubles. We also discovered that at least two other machines were the sources of inordinate numbers of votes. It seems these folks (whoever they may be) resorted to extraordinary measures to try to portray Tom in a positive light for the Parade.com survey. There is even a chance they wrote a special ‘bot’ program for the sole purpose of skewing the results, rather than casting the votes by hand on a computer.”

A nice page of graphic steals from the opening credit sequence of Jason Reitman ‘s Thank You for Smoking. And here’s the credit sequence itself. Composed by an outfit called Shadowplay Studio, the titles draw from the look of classic cigarette packaging.

The Tom Cruise-eating-baby-placenta quote was a jape that was misinterpeted by a clueless writer, Patrick Mulchrone, in a story for the Daily Mirror. Based on quotes from a brand-new GQ interview by Lucy Kaylin , it has Cruise saying he intends to eat his newborn baby’s placenta right after birth. Cruise was goofing around with Kaylin and Mulchrone took it straight, but still…more weirdness at this point doesn’t help M:I:3. Cruise knows he’s got negatives because of last summer’s hijinks, he knows he’s on the ropes, he’s most likely heard about that Roger Friedman item (true or not) about an audience clapping during an M:I:3 scene when he gets beaten up, and he knows some people are saying that Phillip Seymour Hoffman is the draw and not him….and so he goes out and jokes about placenta-eating. I haven’t bought the new GQ yet but here’s the exact quote as passed along by the Mirror story: “I’m gonna eat the placenta. I thought that would be good. Very nutritious. I’m gonna eat the cord and the placenta right there.” Reader Mark Smith says during a recent interview with Diane Sawyer Cruise “tried to make a joke about the nutty, exaggerated things people were saying about the Scientology-supervised birth ritual…and then he made some joke about eating the placenta. It wasn’t funny and from his mouth it sounded creepy, but I have the feeling that ‘eating the placenta’ is his new deflection-phrase.” So it’s a put-on…fine.

Having a baby is not a walk in the park. It’s not like meditating. I’ve been there, and to me all that delivering-the-baby-in-silence Scientology crap that Tom Cruise has been talking about is deranged. If you’ve been there in the room during birth (as I have, twice), and you know what a mother goes through, the notion that loud vocal exclamations are bad for the baby’s spirit is totally diseased. Cruise has been quoted as saying that “scientifically it is proven…now there are medical research papers that say when a woman’s giving birth, everyone should be quiet.” He apparently told GQ magazine that Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard determined making a noise had a “negative spiritual effect” on someone giving birth. And yet he allowed that partner Katie Holmes will be allowed to scream. “It is really about respecting the woman,” he said. “It’s not about her screaming.” Let me understand this correctly. Cruise has given permission to Holmes to shout out during childbirth…right? Wow. That’s damn decent of him.

Director John McTiernan pleaded guilty today in federal court in Los Angeles to lying to the FBI when questioned about dealings with Hollywood wiretapper Anthony Pellicano. The Die Hard helmer faces five years in the can, probation and fines, etc., but he almost certainly won’t be punished too hard because he’s said to be cooperating with investigators. When is something going to happen in this case? The readers are restless and I can hear the jungle chant: “We want Brad…we want Brad…we want Brad.” No, the other one.

The word on John Lasseter‘s Cars (Disney/Pixar, 6.12) still ain’t good. That or the old Showest buzz is still banging around. “It’s okay but it doesn’t really work…it’s not The Incredibles …nobody bats 1000,” etc. Is anyone over the moon about this thing? I mean, someone who isn’t on the Disney-Pixar payroll?

According to New Yorker critic Anthony Lane, Paul Weitz‘s American Dreamz (Universal, 4.21) is “physically horrid to behold.” On top of which “any attempt to defend [the film] for its political venom, or for the surfeit of its surreal conceits, is doomed to founder on a single, obstructive fact: this picture ain’t funny. I winced three times, and gave a couple of short laughs, but that was it.”

The trick in giving your kid a really cool name is to avoid dull pokey names like Pete or Mike or Ted, but don’t make it too cool or strange. You know…don’t fix it so the kid is guaranteed to have a hard time at school with their classmates because his first name is Pilot Inspektor (the believe-it-or-not first name of Jason Lee‘s son) or Moxie Crimefighter (real name of Penn Jillette‘s son) or Moses (sired and condemned by Gwynneth Paltrow and husband Chris Martin). When Pilot Inspektor turns 22 or 23, he’s going to find his father sittin’ at a table dealing stud’ with a bunch of other actors and say, “My name is Pilot Inspektor! How do you do! Now you’re gonna die!” And then they’ll tumble to the floor and into the street, a kickin’ and a gougin’ in the mud and the blood and the beer.

A pretty tasty piece by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman about the temporary downfall of Amanda Scheer Demme. The widow of director Ted Demme ran the two hottest clubs in Los Angeles, Teddy’s and Tropicana Bar, at the Roosevelt hotel on Hollywood Blvd. That is, until Stephen Brandman, honcho of Thompson Hotels, which manages the Roosevelt for the owners, gave her the boot about two weeks ago. Demme’s clubs were very cool and attracted big stars, which made Demme herself a kind of star, and she certainly acted like one and so did other people who came to the clubs. (Anything goes!) But eventually the fuddy- duds just couldn’t roll with the shrieks and disturbances and that was the end of it. The lesson of the story is that if stars are royalty then the people who cater to their whims are very close to that royalty, and that often means they feel they should be allowed to live and work as freely and irreverently as the stars do. One motto to take away from this downfall-child story is “don’t fuck with the Godz!” Another would be, “You can push the fuddy-duds around and make fun of them behind their back, but if you push it too far they’ll come after you with knives in their fists and ice in their veins.” You’ll find the whole story alluded to in Charles Bukowksi’s poem, “The Genius of the Crowd.”

The 79th Annual Academy Awards will happen a bit earlier next year — on Sunday, 2.25.07. Nomination polls will close on 1.13.07 with the nominations set to be announced ten days later — Tuesday, 1.23.07. Final ballots will be mailed a week later (1.31.07) and final polls will close at the end of the day on Tuesday, 2.20.07. It’s been suggested that these earlier dates may make it appear as if the Broadcast Film Critics Association and their Critics’ Choice Awards are influencing things a bit more than their nearest competititors, the Hollywood Foreign Press and the Golden Globes. It’s obvious that the BFCA is as much into ass-kissing and whoring itself out as the HFPA, but the former apparently has hunkies on the first weekend (or the first workable Monday) after the New Year’s holiday weekend, which means the HFPA has to choose between Sunday, 1.14 or Sunday, 1.21, to stage the Golden Globes. Either way the HPGA won’t appear to be exerting much in the way of Oscar influencing, it’s being argued, because 1.14 is one day after Oscar polling closes, and 1.21 is just two days before Oscar nominations. But c’mon…take two steps back and smell the Starbuck’s. Many people feel that the Academy pretty much wiped Oscar off the map as the statuette with the Biggest and Classiest Pedigree…as any kind of vaguely legitimate barometer of serious cinematic distinction when it gave the Best Picture Oscar to Crash. So if you ask me the whole “Oscar, Oscar, Oscar” hoo-hah will be somewhat less important this year as a result, and it may keep going that way. The Globes are the Globes, the BFCA’s are the BFCA’s, the critics are the critics…everything is everything, baby. The Oscar Award show is on the ropes and closer than ever to irrelevance, and if you ask me nothing can be done to save it until the Academy fires producer Gil Cates.

Rudy Youngblood, who plays the lead character (called “Jaguar Claw”) in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (Touchstone, 12.8), has his own site. And on the main page he writes about how he’s unable to say anything about his part in Gibson’s bloody action film about war among the ancient Mayans: “I have had an amazing year and a lot of things have happened for me in my life,” Youngblood relates, “[and] I wish I could talk about where I am right now, but contractually I can’t.” In a piece about Apocalypto in the current Esquire, Luke Dittrich writes about an unauth- orized visit to the set in Mexico, which was somewhere south of Vera Cruz. On page 104 Dittrich offers a synopsis of the plot, which is basically “about good Mayans vs. bad Mayans,” he writes. Youngblood’s “Jaguar Claw” is “a Mayan prince who lives in a peaceful village,” but then Mayans “from a less peaceful but more powerful tribe invade Jaguar Claw’s village…raping, pillaging, burning. They kill many of Jaguar Claw’s friends and family and take others, including his pregnant wife, prisoner. The prisoners are hauled off to a city of massie pyramids, where they are to become sacrificial fodder. Jaguar Claw organizes the remnants of his tribe [and] trains them in the art of war” with the goal of “wreaking vengeance and liberating their people.” Basically, Dittrich concludes, Apocalypto is “Braveheart in the jungle.”