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“I’ve been attending Comic-Con for at least ten years now (being a local allows this on a threadbare budget) and this is the first time in a lonnng time that the vibe’s been different,” writes Joe Maniquis of San Diego. “I can’t quite pin it down and I don’t have numbers to back it up but the crowds seem lighter, the exhibit hall less frenzied and there seems to be no big-time buzz about anything, and everybody’s presence there felt perfunctory. It got so bad that we ended up skipping out on Sam Jackson and his Snakes show and getting sloshed early at The Field. I’m wondering I’m alone in this or if you or others are having the same thoughts about the whole thing.” Comic Con sure as hell seemed crowded to me yesterday, but if anyone has any reactions…

Samuel L. Jackson having the time of his life during yesterday’s Snakes on a Plane presentation in Hall H at Comic-Con, about five minutes before an Animal Planet fan asked if Jackson thinks that the snakes in the film really deserved to die, to which Jackson replied, “Hell, yeah, they deserve to die!…and I hope they burn in hell!” — 7.21.06, 6:40 pm.

(a) Big Comic-Con crowd exiting San Diego Convention Center following end-of-the-day Snakes on a Plane presentation — Friday, 7.21.06, 7:10 pm; (b) Edward Speleers , 18 year-old star of 20th Century Fox’s Eragon (12.15), answering questions during 20th Century Fox’s Comic-Con presentation early Friday afternoon — 7.21.06, 2:20 pm; (c) The Fountain director-writer Darren Aronofsky (l.) and the film’s composer Clint Mansell (r.) at small party following Fountain screening at Pacific plex on San Diego’s Fifth Street — Friday, 7.21.06, 11:05 pm; (d) Two Superman directors — Richard Donner and Bryan Singer — during Warner Bros. ComicCon presentation — Friday, 7.21.06; (3) Warner Bros. feature publicity exec Orna Zadeh (l.) and friend/colleague at Friday night’s Fountain after-party — 7.21.06, 11:15 pm; (4) Snake cake inside New Line headquarters at San Diego Convention Center — Friday, 7.21.06, 5:20 pm; (5) The Reaping star Hilary Swank (l.), costar AnnaSophia Robb (not a typo — the first name is “AnnaSophia”) and director Stephen Hopkins during Warner Bros. presentation at Hall H for Comic-Con — Friday, 7.21.06; (g) Snake-wrangler for Snakes on a Plane shows off 250-pound Anaconda to Comic-Con crowd during New Line/Snakes presentation — Friday, 7.21.06, 6:20 pm.

Don and Walt of Steely Dan send an open bitch letter to Luke Wilson, although the letter is mainly about Owen Wilson and his sell-out movie You, Me and Dupree. Don and Walt’s main point is that the writers of Dupree (and maybe Owen also, since he produced the film) ripped off the idea behind their Grammy-wining song “Cousin Dupree” (read their letter…they go into the whole thing). They want Owen to fess up in some kind of friendly way or else theyr’e talking about going to their lawyers and making trouble.

I know absolutely nothing, but I’ve been told by two tipsters that Heath Ledger may be negotiating to play the Joker in Chris Nolan‘s upcoming Batman Begins sequel, which will come out sometime in ’08. The reason it may be true is that Ledger likes to play edgy rascally characters, and a role like this fits right into that template. Otherwise the tip may be pure fantasy.

I’ve been at Comic-Con for six hours and I’m I was so uncomortable from the relentlessly frigid air-conditioning that my body finally couldn’t take it anymore and I had to leave right in the middle of the 20th Century Fox presentation. Not that this felt like any terrible loss. Fox’s first presentation was four or five minutes of fresh footage from Stefen Fangmeier‘s Eragon (opening in December), another Star Wars-y, Dragonheart, Lord of the Rings CG epic about a young man from a medieval netherland called upon to fulfill his destiny as a warrior-leader by taming a dragon and swinging a sword and defeating evil. There was appreciative applause from the Comic-Coners in Hall H but really, c’mon…how many times is Hollywood going to make this same movie? How many years, decades, millenia will fans of big-myth movies turn out for this stuff? Can’t the geeks spot a wannabe when they seen it? Edward Speleers, the young actor who plays Eragon the blond hero, showed up and took a bow and answered some questions along with Fox 2000 chief Elizabeth Gabler. Speleers’ Eragon costars are Sienna Guillory, Jeremy Irons, Djimon Hounsou, John Malkovichand Robert Carlyle. Next was a presentation for Pathfinder…you don’t want to know. Suffice that I chose that moment to duck out and walk the five or six blocks to the parking lot where my car is parked so I can get my jacket and not have to freeze to death during New Line’s Snakes on a Plane presentation later this afternoon.

“The two taboos in Hollywood are child abuse and the killing of animals,” a source tells N.Y. Daily News columnist Lloyd Grove. “In this movie, both things happen.” Actually, Grove reports, the script for Hounddog , described as “a dark story of abuse, violence and Elvis Presley adulation in the rural South,” calls for a character to be played by Dakota Fanning, 12, “to be raped in one explicit scene and to appear naked or clad only in underpants in other shots or scenes.”

Hold up…I think this issue should be handed over to Kathy Griffin…no? Hound- dog, which will reportedly cost less than $5 million to shoot, will be directed by Deborah Kampmeier (Virgin), who also wrote the script.

A second smart-guy-and-accomplished-writer — Nerve‘s Bilge Ebiri — defends Lady in the Water.

Slate‘s Kim Masters on the alleged Spielberg- Cruise rift, or perhaps the Capshaw-Cruise rift is putting it more accurately.

Oren Aviv, the former Disney marketing prez who’s now production president in the wake of Nina Jacobson‘s firing three days ago, has told N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson the following: (a) “I want to make movies like The Pacifier,” (b) that he was “surprised when Disney chairman Dick Cook asked him last weekend to succeed Jacobson”, and (c) that he “never asked for this job.” It’s a safe bet that Aviv will indeed be looking to make more Pacifier -type films, and of course that third statement is a totally honest one. People who move up the corporate ladder never do so through lean and hungry scheming.

“What makes Clerks 2 both winning and (somewhat unexpectedly) moving is its fidelity to the original ,em>Clerks ethic of hanging out, talking trash and refusing all worldly ambition. If anything, the sequel is more defiant in its disdain for the rat race, elevating the white-guy-doing-nothing prerogative from a lifestyle choice to a moral principle.” — N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott.

A defense of M. Night Shyamalan by Slate‘s Ross Douthat. Key passage: “While Shyamalan may be a narcissist with delusions of grandeur, he’s also a filmmaker of rare talent and creativity (these are hardly mutually exclusive categories, after all), and however lousy Lady in the Water proves to be, he deserves to survive this summer of embarrassment and live to film again. He’s not a Dylan or a Disney, to pick just two names from the roster of ridiculous comparisons that [Michael] Bamberger fastens on, and his potential has often gone frustratingly unfulfilled in the nine years since Haley Joel Osment told Bruce Willis about all the dead people he kept spotting. But Shyamalan’s missteps have been interesting, his mistakes worth a second look, and his obsession with the integrity of his own artistic visions, however irritating, has distinguished him from nearly all his young-Hollywood competitors.”

“It was just around the time when the giant eagle swooped out of the greater Philadelphia night to rescue a creature called a narf, shivering and nearly naked next to a swimming pool shaped like a collapsed heart, that I realized M. Night Shyamalan had lost his creative marbles. Since Mr. Shyamalan’s marbles are bigger than those of most people, or so it would seem from the evidence of a new book titled ‘The Man Who Heard Voices’ (and how!), this loss might have been a calamity, save for the fact that Lady in the Water is one of the more watchable films of the summer. A folly, true, but watchable.” — N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis