Dylan Baker, 48, is one of our very best character actors. He’s performed in 79 features, TV movies and series episodes over the last 20 years. I’ve greatly enjoyed his performances in The Road to Perdition, Thirteen Days and Happiness, but the best thing he’s ever given the world has been “Owen,” the tobacco-spittin’ hayseed in Planes Trains and Automobiles, which was only his second acting job.

Can someone explain why the new double-disc DVD of Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining, which comes out on 10.23, runs 119 minutes while the old 2001 single- disc DVD runs 143 minutes? The film’s IMDB page says the running time is 119 minutes” but also that the “normal USA version” runs 143 minutes. I’m confused. What’s going on?

On top of which the 2001 DVD was presented in 1.33 to 1 (in line with Kubrick’s vision, I love all that extra head space) and the new double-disc version is matted at 1.78 to 1.

The film’s IMDB page also notes that the “original” version — the one with the final scene in the hospital between Shelly Duvall and Barry Nelson — ran 146 minutes. I saw this version at a plush Warner Bros. screening room in Manhattan a few weeks before it opened. Kubrick cut it out after some complaints came in.

This, according to a Mammoth Advertising announcement, is the official one-sheet for Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Miramax, 11.30). You’ll have to search long and hard to find a poster that misrepresents the content of a film more flagrantly. That said, I would probably try something like this if I were in charge of Miramax ads. They can’t sell what the film actually is. Like Diving Bell‘s main character, they have no choice but to dream and fantasize.

Despite Schnabel’s rich imagination and a masterful technique, despite Diving Bell‘s longings, passions and immaculate compositions, this is a landmark bummer film — a movie about being paralyzed for life and having nowhere to go or nothing to do except blink your left eyelid.

Give me a loaded .45, please. Take it off safety, place it under my chin and pull the trigger. Sorry for the mess but thank you. Now I can be with the angels.

Schnabel’s sad, bittersweet drama deserves respect. Those who have praised it are not wrong, although I can’t for the life of me understand how anyone could recommend it to a friend without saying, “It’s really great — you get to experience what it’s like to be totally paralyzed for two hours. Naturally, this leads into all sorts of observations about the things that make life joyful, delightful, eternal…worth cherishing. You do have to sit in that French guy’s body for two hours, though. You need to understand that. Clearly.”

It is the lamentable but necessary task of Miramax marketers to obscure this aspect of the film. I don’t blame them for trying. And I hope that people who, unlike myself, have the spiritual constitution to watch Schnabel’s film and truly enjoy it without suffering from a claustrophobic panic attack will check it out. I’m in the minority here, after all. 76% of the Rotten Tomatoes gang has gone for it hook, line and sinker.

This First Assembly of God sign was created by yours truly with an engine provided by Church Sign Generator. The problem is that the template photos aren’t large or dense enough. Either the guys who threw this site together aren’t hip enough to realize this defect, or they’re cheapskates.

I have to see a film at 12 noon…back in the trough by 3 pm or so.

A journalist friend agrees that the Love in the Time of Cholera trailer “sucks, but hold your judgement. It’s a decent shot at a difficult book, and two guys I know — real men, I should add, not wussy types — actually found the film quite moving. So maybe it will play to manly men, if their wives or girlfriends can convince them to see it.” I repeat yesterday’s question: if New Line marketers thought they could get regular guys to see this thing, why did they send out a trailer that almost begs them not to?

“Keeping your BlackBerry on isn’t just acceptable, it’s a life-affirming action,” Nicole LaPorte declared in a 10.14 L.A. Times piece about industry cell-phone status, etiquette, penetration. “To turn off your BlackBerry is to be dead,” she says. Which means, of course, that notions of biological, genetic or spiritual identity are passe. In short, “you are your phone.”

If it’s a bare-bones model with no e-mail capacities, you’re an embarassment…a Luddite. If it’s BlackBerry Curve, “you’re someone who lives in the moment and ‘gets’ it, as opposed to those still stuck with the BlackBerry 8700,” LaPorte says. “Treo (any model)? You’re an amateur, I’m afraid, not to mention living in 2006. IPhone? An artiste with vision, as long as you weren’t suckered into buying it at $599. BlackBerry 8830 World carrier? See you in Cannes!”

I went looking on Craig’s List last week for somebody who could fix it so I can access my Verizon account with an iPhone, instead of having to start up a whole new account with ATT/Cingular. There are hackers out there who do this for a fee, but nobody responded. When are the iPhone techies going to open up their device to other carriers? And when is the iPhone 2.0 model coming out?

I’m still refining and cross-checking the numbers, but late last week American Gangster, which was three weeks away from its 11.2 release date, was tracking better than The Departed did two weeks from release. Thursday’s numbers (i.e., two days from now) will probably show a bump, but the huge numbers aren’t just from the male sector. Women, a bit surprisingly, are showing higher-than-normal awareness and interest levels. The definite interest is roughly 50% across the board, and in the vicinity of 60% for over-25 males.

Translated, this means the opening weekend should be in excess of $30 million. No scientific readings required — it’s merely the combination of eyeball-to-eyeball Denzel, bull-in-the-china-shop Crowe and the title. A portion of critics are respectful of Gangster but unsure of its Oscar prospects because it didn’t make them cry; presumably there are Academy and guild people who feel the same way. But reservations of this sort tend to melt away when big money is being made. Gangster‘s tracking, of course, doesn’t indicate “big money” — it promises a big opening weekend.

Manhattan hot-shot entertainment journo Lewis Beale says “it’s a terrific film, it has the best title ever, and if the crowd I saw it with at 84th and Broadway was any indication (very urban, very mixed demographically), it’s gonna get great word-of-mouth. If this isn’t a $100 million film, I don’t know what is.”

Who is the biggest piss-head critic around today? Somebody whose writing suggests that they scowl a good deal and are stingy with affection, who always seem to dissing this or that film for some arcane reason, whose views are so contrarian that you’ve almost come to hate him/her….and yet you read them anyway out of some perverse craving for adversarial drama?

N.Y. Press critic Armond White used to be the most flagrant in this regard, certainly the quirkiest and most strange, but I think the piss-head crown may have been snatched away by Slant‘s Ed Gonzalez. Are there others? Which critics seem to be levitating in a realm of their own creation with their backs arched like serpents, and which seem the most plain-spoken and least pretentious? I guess I’m asking for votes. I guess this is a kind of half-assed poll.

Listen for five or six seconds to the treacly, deeply patronizing narration in the trailer for Mike Newell‘s Love in the Time of Cholera (New Line, 11.16), and you know right off the top that Gabriel Garcia Marquez‘s respected romantic novel has been turned into something florid, unsubtle and aimed at women who didn’t graduate from college.

Javier Bardem in Love in the Time of Cholera

I’d been told it doesn’t quite work, but I still wanted to see it out of respect for Marquez’s reputation and for the great Javier Bardem, who plays Florentino Ariza. Then I saw the trailer and said to myself, “No way, not for me.” Why do marketing guys deliberately do this? Is it really necessary to turn off males in order to appeal to females? Here’s a pan by Slant‘s Ed Gonzalez, but Gonzales is a sourpuss — he always seems to be sneering at this or that film — so you can’t really trust him.

Meryl Streep will be honored at the 35th annual Film Society of Lincoln Center Gala Tribute on 4.14.08, or roughly 30 years after she first punched through with a strong supporting performance in The Deer Hunter. Streep occasionally perform in a dreary film, but she’s generally shown superb taste in picking films. Which is why I still find it mystifying that she’s starred in a film version of Mamma Mia, the Broadway hit musical that has has been a huge favorite of rube tourists since opening in 1999, selling well over 30 million tickets. Laurence Olivier needed money when he agreed to play “Zeus” in Clash of the Titans. What’s Streep’s excuse?

Director Susanne Bier, whose Things We Lost in the Fire opens this Friday, knows she’s not average or aspiring. She’s on it and she knows it. She didn’t say anything when we spoke this morning that betrayed this feeling, but I knew it was there. All serious artists have a fairly high opinion of themselves, and of course it’s the mediocre people who always say, “Who do they think they are? God?” The result is that when you talk to a serious artist, they’re always fountains of modesty.

Talking to this side of them is fine and relaxing, even as a voice tells you that the real creator — the miner, the re-arranger, the painter, the songwriter — is somewhere else. The cell phone Bier was talking from had crackly reception. I asked about attending the premiere (which happens sometimes this week) so I could take some pics, but the Paramount publicists were unresponsive. I’ll survive.