A fairly clever aping of the Drudge Report in order to promote Lionsgate’s The U.S. vs, John Lennon (which will hit theatres a couple of months from now, give or take).

The reader comment thing is up and rolling again. There was an awful technical hassle all day with the software having been disabled by the Soviet bureaucrats at Lunar Pages, on top of other issues and things to come. But the problem has now been rectified and everything’s jake…for now.

As a way of honoring the great Barnard Hughes, who died today in Manhattan at age 90, please listen to this sound file of a confession he delivers in Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky’s The Hospital (1971)…a confession about having killed three staffers in a New York hospital, but not by his own hand…not precisely…he merely arranged for the three to need urgent medical attention, and then put them under the care of the hospital’s general staff, thus ensuring their deaths.

HE readers may have noticed over the past several hours that the software allowing comments to be posted at the tail end of each item or article has been disabled. This is the intended deliberate doing of Lunar Pages, HE’s web server out of La Habra, California. Of course, they didn’t think to notify me of the problem (whatever it is) by e-mail as it happened. Naturally I’ve written them about this problem and marked it “triple urgent”, but they sometimes take 24 to 48 hours to respond to e-mails. And of course, they don’t have anyone answering phones at their office after 5 pm Pacific. I don’t have a dedicated line with Lunar Pages, which is the biggest and most secure server they offer, but I pay a somewhat sizable fee for the largest shared server plan you can get from them. All I can tell you is, they’re not reliable and when things go wrong they are always slow as molasses to respond.

Columbia Pictures hasn’t yet put an offer on the table for Vince Vaughn to play heroic FBI guy John O’Neill in Paul Haggis ‘s film version of Against All Enemies, but Vaughn has been reportedly been talking to Haggis about doing it. And a story about this not yet solidified situation was fed to the Hollywood Reporter for what purpose, and with what motive? Vaughn’s O’Neill is a likable supporting character — a good hombre who gets the terrorism picture as clearly as the hero, Richard Clarke (who will apparently beplayed by Sean Penn) does. I’ve read a draft of the script as it existed before Haggis began his “supervisory” rewrite with original screenwriter James Vanderbilt, and I ran a review of it on 3.20, and I can tell you that O’Neill turns up on page 67 and exits on page 123. Tatiana Siegel‘s THR piece says no offer has been made to Vaughn because Columbia Pictures is “fine-tuning the film’s budget.” What is that, a euphemism for “hemming and hawing”, as in “this project scares us…we’re not sure what we should do…if it fails it’ll reflect badly on us…should we wait and see what World Trade Center makes the first weekend before we greenlight it?”

Fox 411’s Roger Friedman has seen Oliver Stone‘s World Trade Center (Paramout, 8.9) and is calling it “an elegant, powerful, moving and genuinely personal document about the horrors that happened inside and outside of the World Trade Center.” He also says that “because of its scope, [it’s] grander than United 93 and perhaps has some loftier cinematic aspirations. And as much as it’s all about the real men and women whose acts of courage nearly got them killed that day, World Trade Center is nonetheless an Oliver Stone film through and through.”

But hold on…Mr. Manhattan (i.e., a guy I know and trust) has also seen World Trade Center and he’s not doing cartwheels like Friedman is.
“It’s easily the most traditionally-shot film Stone has made in some time…no insane jump-cut editing, no bleached film stock,” he begins. “But it’s dull. The basic problem is that the two protagonists — Port Authority policemen trapped in the rubble of the fallen towers — are immobile for most of the film, which isn’t exactly cinematic.
“Stone manages to give a fair sense of their terror and claustrophia, but he’s also decided to make the middle of the film very schematic, cutting back and forth between the buried cops talking to each other, and then to their desperate families trying to get news of their whereabouts. It’s not that intrinsically interesting, and borders on outright soap at times.
“The film only really picks up in the last third, with the rescue efforts, which are pretty detailed and excruciating. There’s also an interesting subplot about an office worker in Connecticut, a former Marine, who puts on his military duds, bluffs his way onto Ground Zero, and is instrumental in rescuing the cops.
“But there are also some unintentional howlers. A short sequence in which one of the parched officers hallucinates Jesus offering him a bottle of water will definitely elicit embarrassed laughter from any audience.
“And a very minor subplot about some Wisconsin firefighters who volunteer their services has you wondering: why these guys? Hundreds of rescue workers came from all over the country. Why pick these guys if they didn’t do anything special? (The only thing they’re shown doing is handing out bratwurst to the rescue workers.)
“The film is sincerely made, well acted, and there’s definitely some emotional catharsis at the end, but Greengrass’ United 93 is far, far better, for, I think, two reasons: the semi-doc style makes it very immediate; and most of United 93 is about how a variety of people and agencies reacted to the day’s events. This macro view seems to checkmate World Trade Center‘s micro viewpoint at every turn.

There’s qualifying, there’s hedging and then there’s cotton-balling, and it seems like Variety‘s Nicole LaPorte and Chris Gardner went for option #3 when they used the word “may” in their story about Paramount deciding whether or not to renew its deal with Cruise-Wagner Prods. If Par re-ups with C/W, they said, the deal “may not come with the same points as it did before.” Everyone knows C/W is a devalued entity due to the antics of Nutter Tom, despite his highly respected and shrewd partner Paula Wagner. Nothing personal — it’s the money. For a guy whose aura is in the process of imploding , which resulte in M:I:3 only making $132,556,364 million domestic, and for a company that produced the unsuccessful Elizabethtown and Ask the Dust (both of which should have worked — I read both scripts a couple of years ago and was convinced both were at least semi-golden), C/W Prods. simply costs too much. So from the perspective of Paramount honcho Brad Grey, the negotiating slogan is probably something alone the lines of “take a markdown or find another home, guys.”

A plaque hanging just outside of one of the mixing studios inside the Howard Hawks stage on the 20th Century Fox lot — taken Monday, 7.10, 3:10 pm as myself and three other guys waited to see Miami Vice. My review will be up by late morning, but I can certainly reveal that Hawks’ wisdom has been found its way into the story and textures of this intensely instinctual film, by way of director-writer Michael Mann.

I read this David Poland/Hot Button piece about Michael Bamberger‘s M. Night Shyamalan book late yesterday afternoon. It’s a solid, thorough and perceptive take on a fascinating, at times recklessly out-there confessional.
My differing view is that while the reactions have indeed been “a bit too harsh” so far, the value of the book — and the state of Shyamalan’s reputation — should not depend on whether or not Lady in the Water makes it as critical or commercial hit. Shyamalan’s bravery (even if you want to call it a form of manipulated spin) in allowing himself to be portrayed in such vulnerable, emotionally fragile terms deserves respect.
I said a day or two ago it’ll be no tragedy if Lady in the Water ‘s reception (we’ll know this story soon enough) forces him to become a lower-budget art-house director or go the director-for-hire route…no tragedy at all. The man has to free himself from the Sixth Sense penitentiary he’s been living in these last few years; maybe deep down this is the way he’s decided to accomplish that.

You, Me and Dupree (Universal, 7.14) may or not be “the funniest movie of the summer” (here’s what the Hollywood Reporter ‘s Kirk Honeycutt and Variety‘s Justin Chang have to say), but I need to strenously argue with Mark S. Allen‘s assertion that it’s “relentlessly honest.” I’ll explain why in a day or two.

“I’d go easy on the sympathy angle for Night,” a guy has advised me. “I’ve seen Lady in the Water and it’s an utterly fascinating portrait of a man’s fragile, out-of-control ego. As a story, it’s worthless. As a director, Night used to be able to create a sense of apprehension with the best of them. Now, he can’t even summon that.” Hold up…I didn’t say anything about the film, or my support or sympathy for it. I said I respect Michael Bamberger‘s book about Night, and Night’s courage in exposing himself so nakedly. “[Disney chief] Nina Jacobson nailed everything wrong with the movie and Night did nothing to fix it,” my correspondent continues. “When you cast yourself as a writer whose ‘great thoughts’ will be ‘the seeds of change,’ that a young man will hear these great thoughts and become president and lead a great reform, then you are setting yourself up for ridicule. And when you make the movie’s bad guy a film critic, a man who would be ‘so arrogant as to assume the intent of others,’ you are setting yourself up for a stake-burning. But then, he will be able to delude himself that the critics have it out for them because he dared to agitate them. And I say all this as someone who wanted to like the movie. God knows Hollywood needs original voices telling original stories. But, clearly, Night needs to listen to other voices besides the ones rattling around in his head.”