Elena Kagan‘s rep as a brilliant and exacting legal mind preceded yesterday’s appearance at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing, and now she has shown herself to be political and gracious and gentle-mannered. It’s also clear that she’s dropped a few pounds and has let her hair grow out so she looks a little less dykey — smart moves. And I love her Zabar’s accent.

I’m hearing that the People’s Republic of China has a really big problem with Phillip Noyce‘s Salt (Sony, 7.23). Not one of those “scenes must be removed before your film is allowed to play in China” problems, but a “sorry, but no amount of edits will satisfy us” problem. Meaning that Salt is apparently cinema non grata in that country until further notice — no theatrical bookings, no DVDs, no Blurays.

Which, of course, means a huge opportunity for Chinese video pirates and a huge potential loss for Sony Pictures.

I don’t know anything beyond this nugget. What is it about Salt that China finds so objectionable? It’s about a possible covert operative (played by Angelina Jolie ) — a kind of Odd Woman Out whom everyone suspects is some kind of sociopath or double-agent ne’er -do-well, or is dangerously disloyal in some way, shape or form. What her character has to do with China or its policies is a mystery to me. And to others, I gather. The shut-out hasn’t been conveyed “officially” but I’m told it’s a done deal.

One of the three big tracking companies has Salt running just a teeny tiny bit behind Inception in terms of the usual categories — awareness, unaided awareness, definite interest, first choice and top-three-choices. Inception is opening a week earlier than Salt, of course, and has been marketing fairly steadily while Salt is just turning the heat on.

Right now Inception is at 56 awareness vs. Salt‘s 54, except Salt‘s unaided awareness is at 3 vs. Inception‘s 2. Salt has a 46 definite interest vs. a 47 for Inception. Salt has a 5 first choice vs. Inception‘s 6. And they’re both sitting at 15 among the top three choices.

One significant factor, it appears, is that Salt‘s definite interest is in the strong 40s among older and younger men and women. (The Angie factor, of course.) I’m waiting for Inception breakdowns as we speak (any minute!), but one presumes that it’s probably tracking a bit stronger among men than women. That Nolan-ish thing. But then presumptions and $1.75 will get you a bus ticket.

I don’t know what to do with this Angelina Jolie interview in the new Vanity Fair. She’s as beautiful as ever with a great pedicure, and I’m looking forward to Salt as much as the next guy, etc. But everything she says here is so gracious and settled-down and serene. What are you supposed to do with a q & a like this? She’s hot, cool and fetching, and I’m not…you know, complaining. But what are you supposed to do with this?

She loves Brad Pitt in any guise, even his Old-Man-River beard. She and he might do a sequel to Mr. and Mrs. Smith. (God.) She’s aware that having too many kids might result in none of them getting enough attention. It’s great to be able to chill and stroll around in Venice and not have to worry about anything.

Why didn’t they have her talk to George Wayne ? At least he would have had the nerve to mention the tabloid stories.

The way Elliott Gould sizes up poker players in this scene makes me chuckle every time. The loose smoky vibe is what sells it. Gould mutters like a jazz musician on hemp, George Segal is nodding sagely and the pretty bartender is chuckling away. Neither she nor Segal are bothered, of course, that Gould is making simplistic assumptions based on cultural stereotypes. That’s actually what funny about it.

The Lyndon Johnson guy with the cowboy hat, the kid who’s seen The Cincinatti Kid too many times, the family doctor who doesn’t take chances, the red-coat guy who used to be a cha-cha dancer, the Ku Klux Klan guy, the Hispanic guy who talks louder than he needs to because he came from a large noisy family, the Oriental prince whose father made a fortune selling egg rolls, etc.

It’s amusing stuff in a shuffling Robert Altman context, or at least most people find it so, but if you were to write something a little bit similar to Gould’s patter in an online column, you’d soon be dealing with some very ornery talkbackers. That’s one difference between 1974 and 2010, it’s fair to say. Not that I would be so idiotic as to mention egg rolls in discussing an Asian-American.

In a piece called “Hush vs. Gush,” Variety‘s Marc Graser and Dave McNary describe the thin line that marketers for semi-secretive, big-budget, hot-buzz movies — like Chris Nolan‘s Inception — have to tread.

The trick is to dispense aroma and atmosphere and a few select details that will make everyone drool, but don’t kill the goose by revealing too much. However, “it’s getting harder than ever to keep a secret in Hollywood,” the Variety guys observe.

“The fast fingers of bloggers (professional and amateur), feverishly documenting every aspect of a film’s development and production on websites and Twitter feeds, have made it nearly impossible for studios to surprise moviegoers these days.”

The Hangover director Todd Phillips states the obvious in saying that “the word gets out very quickly now” and “that quick feedback can make or break a movie.”

A marketing exec comments that Warner Bros, marketing honcho Sue Kroll “was actually forced to veer away from the typical marketing campaign because Inception isn’t the kind of film that can be easily reduced to a single catchphrase, although ‘Your mind is the scene of the crime’ and ‘The dream is real’ certainly try.

“‘It’s really a counterprogramming campaign in the extreme,’ the exec says. ‘The studio knows it can’t position this like another tentpole, even though it is a tentpole.'”

I need to say one thing about Inception, and it has absolutely nothing to do with marketing. We all know it contains a big third-act revelation, but I don’t want to see one in which we’re told that most of much of what we’ve seen happen in Act One or Two has been imagined, as if in a dream. I don’t want any of that Dallas crap — please.

My initial thought was to avoid Eclipse altogether, considering the awful time I had with New Moon last November. But with four sources — Variety‘s Peter Debruge, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt, EW‘s Nicole Sperling and Lynette Rice and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson — claiming it’s the best Twilight pic yet, I’ve decided to catch tonight’s all-media.

The reason for the uptick, they’re all saying, is director David Slade. I was down with Slade’s Hard Candy but not so much 30 Days of Night .

I’m most impressed by Honeycutt’s praise considering the fact — I need to put this delicately — that he can be a bit of a grump at times. (Like someone else I could name.) I’m figuring if a half-grumpy guy says a popcorn franchise flick like this is okay, you can half-trust him. But you can’t trust positive-minded people who smile and laugh and hug their friends and always say the glass is half-full. I’ll trust happy-face people when it comes to smaller films, the theory being that if a person with a relentlessly sunny attitude likes something that’s edgy or thoughtful or darkly trippy then it might have that open-window element that draws people in.

“While Catherine Hardwicke did a strong job establishing the franchise, Slade is by far the best director,” Thompson says. “And the story of Eclipse, adapted per usual by Melissa Rosenberg, is far more satisfying and well-structured than New Moon, [and] the central love triangle, as both men press their suits with Bella, is front and center. All three actors are comfortable with their characters, and Slade finds the right balance of action and romance; the story feels organic.”

The one “uh-oh” is Honeycutt’s line that “the CG wolves, huge creatures whose ferocity fails to mask their tenderness, are very cool.” That’s an ixnay, I’m afraid, if they’re the same size as the New Moon wolves. Those were the silliest-looking beasts I’ve ever seen in a supernatural fantasy film, bar none. And what does Honeycutt mean about “tenderness”? Wolves can’t be tender except to their own young.

Like a Gatling gun, the names of the Seven Dwarfs: Sleepy, Grumpy, Doc, Wheezy, Snoopy, Sleazy, Happy, Dopey, Bashful…wait, that’s nine.

“Gathering several hundred participants [yesterday] under the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, Tilda Swinton led them in a soft-shoe shuffle originally performed by Laurel and Hardy,” reports The Scotsman‘s Emma Cowing. “It was part of an effort to create a ‘flash mob dance’, where a group suddenly and spontaneously starts dancing in a public place.

“The instructions, disseminated online, were simple: watch the Laurel and Hardy clip, turn up at 11am and give it a whirl. The reason, declared Swinton, was “in pure unabashed celebration of doing something as a group and looking like dafties”.

Word Theatre, my favorite non-Broadway theatrical experience, is having another show tomorrow night at Soho House — Monday, 6.28, at 6:30 pm. Jason Butler Harner (Changeling, The Taking of Pelham 123) and Sarah Paulson (Broadway’s Collected Stories, Serenity) will read from Rick Moody‘s “Modern Lovers”, and Vincent Piazza (Boardwalk Empire, Rescue Me) will read from Michael Cunningham‘s “White Angel.” Founder/director Cedering Fox will introduce and handle the q & a.

On June 8th I observed that with the super-sized Inception and Salt opening 7 days apart (on 7.16 and 7.23, respectively), it appeared that Inception has “managed a better job of pre-selling itself to ubers and early adopters…my sense of things right now is that Inception is regarded as something people have to see, and that Salt is something that might be pretty good.”

Over the last few days that view has shifted to one in which Chris Nolan‘s boldly imaginative mind-fucker is being talked about as possibly too smart for the room while the word-of-mouth on Phillip Noyce’s spy thriller is getting hotter and hotter. I’m hearing things here and there and sensing this with my insect-antennae. A few days ago a SAG member who’d attended a recent research screening told a journalist pal it’s an audience-friendly wowser. “It’s really good…Angelina meets Bourne,” the guy said.

The shift began after a 6.23 review excerpt from Peter Travers‘ Rolling Stone review implying that Inception may not reach Joe and Jane Popcorn on their levels. “Trusting the intelligence of the audience can cost Nolan at the box office,” he wrote. “How to cope with a grand-scale epic…that turns your head around six ways from Sunday? Dive in and drive yourself crazy, that’s how.”

Two days later a piece on filmsactu, the French entertainment website, ran a piece by Arnaud Mangin that seemed to echo the Travers meme. The headline read “Inception: un film trop intelligent pour le public?” A translated passage reads that “one finds [in the film] more the Christopher Nolan of Memento than of Batman Begins. Memento is an excellent film, therefore so much the better, but it’s not famous for the simplicity of its intrigue and whose commercial stakes were definitely less important.”

Sorry, but that sounds pretty good to me. Being a huge fan of Memento, I’d be delighted if Inception delivers along similar lines.

What’s changed in three weeks? Inception is still the movie that everyone has to see — figure a $70 million opening weekend — but the word on Salt is building into “very good,” “really works,” “yeah!” and so on.

At the tail end of her 6.25 story about the convulsing fortunes of MGM, Lionsgate, the Weinstein Co. and Apparition, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson dropped a grenade blast: “Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life may not make it to the Venice Film Festival after all, I hear.”

Another delay?

After being buzzed for Cannes 2010 and then dropping off that radar screen four or five weeks before the festival began? Despite having begun filming in the spring of ’08 and Malick having been in editing for…what, at least 20 months? Despite assurances last April from a post-production source that Malick had recently “screened it to an audience of about thirty, and it’s literally 97% done…our boss was able to see it, and called it the best film of [Malick’s] since Badlands” and that “it will not make Cannes [because] the visual effects aren’t done…the reason for the delay in post is because of the amount of detail [that] IMAX 70 mm requires.”

The idea was for The Tree of Life to have its preem at the Venice Film Festival and then the Toronto Film Festival, followed by a theatrical debut in November. And now there’s a possibility that Malick may blow off the early September film festival triumvirate of Venice, Telluride and Toronto? Doesn’t a possibly challenging film like this (a dysfunctional domestic drama mixed with a dinosaur sequence) need the acclaim of film festival critics to start the ball rolling? They can’t just open it with trailers and TV ads and hope for the best.

Ten months ago I wrote the following:

“I was talking about the dino aspect with a journalist friend a couple of weeks ago, and we were both shaking our heads and acknowledging what a bizarre mind-fuck Tree of Life sounds like. On paper at least. And it’s not like I’m blowing the dinosaur thing out of proportion because there’s some kind of Tree of Life-related IMAX dinosaur movie due in 2010 that will augment or expand on some theme that’s expressed within the parameters of the Sean Penn-Brad Pitt story. Right? I’m just trying to sound like I have a clue.

“All I know is that it’s one hell of a transition to go from a story of angry, pained, frustrated people in the 1950s as well as the present and then to somehow disengage the spacecraft and travel into another realm entirely (like Keir Dullea did in 2001: A Space Odyssey when he soared through Jupiter space), and somehow float into a world that is pre-historical and pre-human, and have this time-trip somehow add to our understanding and feeling for the sad/angry/bitter people in the Pitt-Penn realm.

“I mean, if someone like me is scratching his head and going ‘what the fuck…?’ over the unusualness of a ’50s domestic drama mixed with footage of prehistoric beasts , imagine what Joe Popcorn is going to think or say. Don’t even talk about the Eloi.”

Two days ago I under-estimated the five-day haul for Knight and Day. I feared that the three-day weekend figure might be less than $15 million, but fortune wasn’t so cruel. It wound up taking in $20.5 million Friday-to-Sunday and earning $27.8 million for the five days.

Still nothing to write home about — a fairly crappy figure, all things considered — but it’s no Jonah Hex.

Toy Story 3 led the weekend with $59 million — a very significant haul for a film in its second weekend of release — and Adam Sandler and Dennis Dugan‘s Grown-Ups pulling down $41 million…Jesus!