Earlier today Nikki Finke posted a nifty, sage little profile of Madelyn Hammond, a.k.a. “Hollywood’s Job Whisperer.” This isn’t where HE readers live, I realize. Well, maybe it is.

I thought James L. Brooks‘ How Do You Know (sans question mark) had been retitled as Everything You’ve Got. Did they switch back again? The 12.17 Columbia release, obviously comedic, is about a romantic triangle between a professional softball player Lisa Jorgenson (Reese Witherspoon), a corporate executive (Paul Rudd), and a slightly obnoxious big-league pitcher and poon hound (Owen Wilson).

L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller‘s The American Dreamer — a 16mm raggedy-ass Dennis Hopper doc — is having a one-time-showing at FSLC’s Walter Reade theatre on Sunday at 6 pm. It follows Hopper around as he cuts The Last Movie and swaggers around his post-Easy Rider glory. “Up close, not so flattering, free-form,” the notes say. “[It] has the goods on the late actor and director in his prime — and you get to be a fly on the wall.”

Here’s Anne Thompson‘s report on a recent screening that happened in Los Angeles.

I’m calling myself a cinephile and I haven’t even seen Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger‘s Black Narcissus (’47). I’ll tell you why. Because I thought I’d gotten my fill of Deborah Kerr in a nun’s habit after seeing Heaven Knows Mr. Allison, and I didn’t want another helping. I’m nonetheless seeing the Criterion Bluray version this weekend. It’s this stunning matte shot that awoke me.

Perhaps the best-known image from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus.

In a wiser and more enterprising world, Michael Keaton would have made history as Ray Nicolette, the not terribly bright FBI agent he played in Jackie Brown and Out of Sight. He could played him in a stand-alone Ray Nicolette movie. Maybe two or three of them. I pushed for this 12 years ago, and now the shot is gone. And too bad. The basic character elements were all there. Keaton would have killed.

Michael Keaton (r.) as Ray Nicolette in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. The actor on the left is Michael Bowen, playing FBI agent Mark Dargus.

I was hoping at least for a Ray Nicolette HBO series. The adventures, disappointments and odd detours of an intellectually challenged FBI guy. Not an asshole per se but a guy who just doesn’t quite have what he needs (or ought to have) upstairs, and yet he keeps on plugging and, being a federal employee, never gets fired. It could have been great with the right producer and writers.

Here’s how I put it in a seven-year-old Movie Poop Shoot column:

“The Nicolette character always struck me as distinctive and even novel in a quietly funny, ploddingly clunky way — a lawman who’s honest and does what he can to put the bad guys behind bars, but never quite manages to figure all the angles and is always behind the eight ball. We all screw up and miss the point every so often. Ray Nicolette is us. Well, now and then.”

The big revelation in yesterday’s DVD Beaver review of the new Psycho Bluray (the all-region British version, that is — the American Bluray won’t be out until 10.19) is that you can now see makeup on Martin Balsam’s face in that one close-up he has. Amazing! I love being able to see stuff that you weren’t intended to see, but which Bluray has now revealed.

Martin Balsam’s “Detective Arbogast” in his very first appearance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Notice the makeup base spread over his upper cheeks and just under his eyes.

I loathe ethereal, dreamily feminine and generally unpunctuated pop music. Gliding along, un-rocked, non-Lou Reed-ish in a Rock n’ Roll Animal sense of the term. Music that seems dead set against making any kind of thump-crunchin’ sound. Music that seems to summon the candy-assed spirit and attitude of Michael Cera, and which the almost seems to exists in order to counteract and nullify the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll music.

According to Jett and Dylan Wells (as well as HE reader George Prager), the leading bands of 2010 that churn out this kind of sound are as follows:

(1) Passion Pit, (2) Phoenix, (3) matt + kim, (4) Downlink, (5) Datsik, (6) Excision, (7) Burial, (8) James Blake, (9) Diplo, (10) Akira kiteshi, (11) bar 9, (12) Dirty Projectors, (13) Grizzly Bear, (14) Panda Bear, (15) Animal Collective, (16) Beach House, (17) Girls, (18) Arcade Fire, and (19) Fleet Foxes.

It appears likely that The Expendables will win the weekend, although I would be stunned if it didn’t experience some kind of significant Saturday fall-off, given the likely word-of-mouth. “I was talking to a friend last night, and he told me the Stallone flick is like a Michael Dudikoff movie from 1986!”

As I wrote yesterday morning, Eat Pray Love, which will most likely come in second, is a far less disappointing film. The big surprise would be Scott Pilgrim vs. the World taking the second-place slot, although I don’t see this happening — this is strictly an Ed Douglas smarty-pants geek film. Yes, it made me contemplate suicide but I got over that. It signifies the end of transcendent cinema culture as I’ve known it all my life, but now, at least, I’ll be more willing to accept death when it comes.

Make no mistake that the best film opening this weekend is not Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Eat Pray Love or The Expendables. The best film opening this weekend is David Michod‘s Animal Kingdom, which currently has a 93% Rotten Tomatoes rating, which is nearly 15 points higher than Scott Pilgrim‘s.

Here’s the main reason why it’s rather foolish to believe in an afterlife, and I say this as someone who would be ecstatic & glowing if I had reason to believe there was one. Who wouldn’t be? The main thing you have to do is get past the comical notion that human beings are special cases in the grand scheme because of their small brains, their ability to contemplate their mortality and their ability to generate religious beliefs and feel reverence for certain divine wise men like Yeshua of Nazareth.

There is, of course, a perfect order and an undeniable flow-through harmony — some kind of exquisite mathematical order and inter-connectedness — to the universe. But imagine, just for comedy relief’s sake, that there is an actual great and grand and reasoning entity with a white beard (or clean shaven…whatever) and freshly-pressed white robes called God.

This grand fellow, trust me, would not be nearly as enamored of homo sapiens on the little speck of terra firma called earth as we are. He would be respectful of what we’ve achieved and felt and created and the songs we’ve sung, but because we are so far down the evolutionary scale (and that is indisputable) he would not be saying, “Whoa…hold on…these guys are special. I mean, if any life form in the entirety of the universe deserves to be given eternal life through a spiritual afterlife consciousness that would include an awareness of an eternal cosmic playground and a sense of continuance, these homo sapien guys qualify! Because they have the ability think and reason and place faith in me. I mean, Me! Me Me Me Me Me! So…you know, that makes them pretty damn special from my perspective!”

Utterly delusional bullshit.

No, God would perhaps regard us with a certain fondness or love, but primarily as just one of many millions of expressions of life. Perhaps one or two levels of development up from animals (which we obviously are) and nothing more, and several…make that dozens of levels below Him/Her. In short, Mr. Cosmic Kingshit wouldn’t afford us any kind of special dispensation as far as afterlives are concerned. No more than he would grant an afterlife gift to dogs, worms, grasshoppers, ants, electric eels, birds, whales, cats, otters, fleas and other life forms that live and die on this third stone from the sun. Because in the cosmic eyes of a mythical God, we’re really not significantly different than these creatures whom we regard as lessers. Somewhat, obviously, but not in a way that would greatly impress, say, the beings behind the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Would that we possessed the ability (or willingness) to regard the grand scheme from a truly cosmic perspective. Hah! But we don’t. I mean, I do along with several thousand other perceptive souls, but most people don’t. Especially doctrinaire Christians from the heartland, whom I personally regard as the most arrogant and malicious humans on the planet, and not just right now but for the last several hundred years (considering the blood that has been shed over the centuries in the name of God’s will or God being on “our” side). Along with Islamic fundamentalists, of course. It’s a toss-up as to which group is more self-aggrandizing. Should we call it even? I don’t want to get bogged down in tribal loathings. I’m trying to say something bigger here.

We are capable of writing books and building temples and writing songs and making magnificent films and making life seem pretty damn glorious when we want to, but in the cosmic perspective we are little more but leaves on a grand tree, enjoying the sun and life’s glorious bounty and blah-dee-blah. Which is pretty damn wonderful on its own. One day we will fall from our particular tree branch, and we will float to the ground and turn brown and gradually become mulch, and there isn’t a lot more to it than this. Sorry.

Nobody would love to really believe more than myself that we HAVE been granted some kind of special dispensation by God, that we indeed HAVE some kind of divine pass that affords us a shot at cosmic immortality in some kind of blissfully serene after-realm. I love reading about reports from people who have temporarily died that they felt enormous serenity and bliss upon being released from their bodies. I love that stuff. Really. But alas, I think those visions are a result of some kind of send-off enzyme that the body releases upon the moment of death that we all experience in order to de-traumatize our dying moments. Sorry — I wish it were otherwise.

Be Here Now. Be grateful for the gift of life. It’s pretty damn wonderful. But show respect for yourself by throwing out all those childish beliefs and superstitions that the masters of past cultures felt obliged to push in order to keep the riff-raff in line.

L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein caught a screening of Clint Eastwood‘s Hereafter (Warner Bros., 10.22) last Tuesday. “And though it’s too early for a mini-review,” he wrote on 8.12, “let’s just say that Eastwood, who turned 80 this year, is still The Man when it comes to making movies, showing off a range and depth that puts him right up there with John Huston, Robert Altman and the other old masters.”

After being in a career cul-de-sac for several years, Ben Affleck is suddenly back in a big-time way. There’s The Town, which he directed and stars in, and which will play the Venice and Toronto film festivals, and which, I’m told, is “better than Gone Baby Gone,” according to a guy who recently saw it. And now, totally out of the friggin’ blue, there’s a just-announced lead in a new Terrence Malick feature in which he’ll costar with Rachel Weisz. Filming will reportedly begin in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in October.

TheWrap‘s Jeff Sneider has confirmed the Weisz’s casting while Affleck’s reps didn’t return.

The project, says Sneider, “was announced at the Berlin Film Festival, where it was described as a “romantic drama” and a “powerful and moving love story.” (As opposed to what? A weak and not terribly moving one?) Christian Bale, Javier Bardem, Rachel McAdams and Olga Kurylenko were announced as the initial cast members, but it seems that Affleck will be replacing Bale in the picture.

Glen Basner‘s Film Nation is financing the film, and Bill Pohlad will produce.

A day or two ago TulsaWorld.com published a report that Affleck and wife Jennifer Garner “were spotted at a local store buying fishing supplies,” and that Affleck reportedly “told a store employee that he was filming a movie in Bartlesville, and would be playing a fisherman.”

A fisherman in Oklahoma? What, in ponds and lakes around Bartlesville? Sounds kinda boring. “What are you up to, man?” “Oh, I’m just going fishing.” Affleck won’t be playing a Hemingway-like fisherman, that’s for sure. No Marlins or Swordfish. Maybe he’ll play a fisherman who digs up some dinosaur fossils…forget it.

Malick has exhibited a faint tendency to take screenplays he wrote a long time ago and rework them, as he did when he took Q and made it into The Tree of Life. So let’s imagine for a second that the Affleck-Weisz-Bardem-McAdams flick is (a) a reworking of Malick’s The English Speaker or (b) perhaps a new version of Hungry Heart, which itself was a reworking of Robert Dillon‘s Countryman, which Malick wrote for Ned Tanen at Universal in the ’80s as a kind of modern-day Grapes of Wrath.

I couldn’t bring myself to attend any showings of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at the Film Forum over the past week. The 7-day engagement ends tonight. You can’t watch a 1953 Technicolor film in one of those dinky little theatres with the 85-inch screen. You have to catch a film like this inside an old swanky movie palace with a really large screen, or at least at the Academy theatre on Wilshire and La Peer or…you know, some place like that.