Underdog enterprise is what this country is all about. When I saw this photo, it made me wish I could be in Somerville, Massachucetts, next Friday so I could go to the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square and buy a ticket and say hello to the folks behind this hand-tooled promotion. These people get it…they’re on it.

HE will be switching bases later this afternoon (Friday, 6.9) from Los Angeles to the Palm Casino in Las Vegas for a few days of Cinevegas, the “world’s most dangerous film festival”. I have, in all sincerity, a place in my heart for “the worst money-grubbing place in the world,” as Albert Brooks called Las Vegas 21 years ago in Lost in America .

I love the sun, the desert dryness, the babes at poolside, the artery-clogging breakfasts, the overwhelming sense of apartness from the real world…a place where Jesus and his disciples would surely feel at home. The image I have in my head is that of Willem Dafoe saying to the good sisters in The Last Temptation of Christ, “You gave me food, drink…a place to rest…you restored me.” What’s “dangerous” about Cinevegas exactly? The reason I’m going is because it’s “safe,” in the sense that Sundance programmer Trevor Groth is making all the calls. Because I feel fairly assured it will present an assortment of well-crafted, presumably disorienting, values-challenging films. Because it has the U.S. premiere of John Maringouin‘s Running Stumbled , an “unflinching family doc” that is repped, not incidentally, by always-in-front-of-the-herd publicist Mickey Cottrell . Because this year’s honorees are Helen Mirren , director Taylor Hackford, Laurence Fishburne, Christina Ricci and Sylvester Stallone (whom I once worked for, technically, as a publicist). And because director Abel Ferrara, Mr. Dangeroso Maximo Ultimo, will show Mary, his best film since Bad Lieutenant. And ecause it’s showing Paul Dinello‘s Strangers With Candy, a sardonic comedy with Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Matthew Broderick, Sarah Jessica Parker and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Because of Matt Checkowski and Kurt Mattila‘s Lies and Alibis, a faux Thin Man concoction with Steve Coogan, Rebecca Romjin, Selma Blair, James Marsden, Sam Elliott and James “sit down and write two letters” Brolin.

A “pretty significant sequence” was cut by director Bryan Singer from Superman Returns that will turn up on the “special edition” DVD. Singer calls it “kind of a fun look into Superman’s journey off the Earth into space.” Big deal.

Merger stories are so damned fascinating. I’m kidding. You have to pay attention and all, but like I wrote last January when I first heard of the planned merger of Lionsgate (it was called Lions Gate back then) and MGM, there’s no cosmic dimension to the mere shifting of funds from one entity to another, no more than the daily ebb and flow of the seas.

If I were a N.Y. Times media columnist with a vanquished drug problem in my past, I’d probably leave well enough alone. It appears that David Carr (a.k.a., “the Bagger”) is made of sterner stuff. He has my respect and interest in what he comes up with.

China does a 180, shuts down The DaVinci Code, lies about why. This plus their reaction to Lou Ye’s Summer Palace during the Cannes Film Festival makes Beijing seem more tilty-quirky than usual.

“I’d been hoping to shadow a writer for a show on a major network, [and] I was looking for some hands-on experience to round out a rather theoretical film school education, and hoped to gain some as an intern on [his] show,” writes Andrea Janes in the N.Y. Press‘s film issue. But this writer would come running onto set screaming, ‘There’s no Diet Coke in the fridge! Hello!? Interns!’ That’s when I questioned what I was getting into by entering this field. I wanted to pay my dues to figure out the industry, but on this particular show, interns’ primary duties consisted of sorting the mail and stocking the fridge.” There is nothing more tedious than an intelligent younger person looking to gain a foothold by interning who doesn’t get it and and in fact gets all surly and offended when people expect him/her to do drone-work. People who get it — who don’t have any problem with shit work because they know the truth of Jean Anouilh’s words in Becket, which is that “honor lies in the man, my prince, not in the towel” — are always the ones who move up. Interns have to be bushy-tailed, period. That’s the job. And if they aren’t…sack ’em!

Sean Penn will always be a fascinating great actor, but a thought hit me this morning as I watched this All The King’s Men trailer (which I first saw in a theatre two or three weeks ago): Penn’s Willie Stark, a ruthless, power-hungry politician, is not charismatic, much less attractive, and if I were a rural Southerner in the 1950s (or whenever) I don’t know that I’d want to vote for the guy. So right away there’s trouble because King’s Men is about a guy who had an exceptional rapport with voters before anything else.

I could feel something vital coming out of Broderick Crawford ‘s Willie Stark in the 1949 version — he wasn’t handsome or smooth, but you could feel he’d been through tough times (a look of pushed-down hurt would pop through every so often), and you couldn’t help but admire his gutsiness and the fact that he wouldn’t be pushed around. I don’t think Penn makes this character work half as well as Crawford did. The way he bellows his words and phrases when addressing voters with his voice sounding so ragged he almost squeals at times, Penn’s not being very tall, the rage contorting his face and making his eyes seem beadier than usual, the street-fighter body language, the constant shine of sweat, the Southern accent that I don’t believe despite its (probably) accurate sound — none of it plays. He’s not in any way sexy (not in terms of inner conviction or eloquence, certainly), and even in a Southern period film that’s how most of us want our politicians to be on some level. I don’t see how this won’t be a factor in how paying audiences respond to Steven Zallian ‘s film when it opens in the early fall. The more I think about it, the more I’m persuaded that Zallian and producer Mike Medavoy erred in going with Penn, and for the very best reasons.

“I can watch the world through Michelangelo Antonioni ‘s eyes forever. He is the greatest stylist of the modern era, and The Passenger may be my favorite film,” David Thomson has written in The Guardian . “It’s the one I think of offering whenever people ask that question. And they ask a lot.

“No, it’s not in my top ten, but sometimes I think [The Passenger is the one I like the best, by which I fear I mean it’s the film I’d most like to be in, instead of just watching.” Dream-projecting ourselves into films we really like is what many — most — of us do, I think, when we’re really taken by them. And when we’re watching films that we respect or admire but aren’t that into, that’s all we’re doing — watching from our side of the window. Every time I’ve re-watched any of Antonioni’s five or six greatest — La Notte, Blow-Up , L’eclisse, Il Grido, L’Avventura — I’ve felt this exact same urge to dissolve into a spectral cellluloid spirit, and disappear into the world of these films and wander around and maybe never come back. What would it be like to hang around in an Antonioni film after the movie is “over”? Mesmerizing, I would think. But what if a malicious side of this fantasy manifests? This is obviously Purple Rose of Cairo idea (and probably some Japanese horror-film director’s also), but what other films have readers wanted to literally dissolve into? The reason Mia Farrow leaves the physical realm is that she desperately wants to belong to the world of those silver-toned, champagne-sipping sophisticates in the film she’s been watching in that 1984 Woody Allen film, but what if films were to reach out and kidnap this or that audience member at random (or, better, for a reason) and suck them body-and-soul into their worlds, whether they want to be absorbed or not? Complete this sentence: ‘I can think of nothing more torturous than to be forcibly vacuumed into the realm of [the name of the film].” My Personal Worst along these lines: 20th Century Fox’s Dallas movie, with or without Jennifer Lopez in it.

I decided several months ago that Martin Scorsese ‘s The Departed will be his best film since Goodfellas because of the urban grit, cops-and-mob-guys milieu. It should be, I mean, or has the best chance to be, given the home-turf factor. And now along comes this AICN early-bird review, which is a melancholy pan, the guy obviously heartsick about what he feels obliged to pass along. There’s only one thing to do (and it’s not hard), which is to slip into denial about it and stay that way until…

The CAA team is saying adios to the I.M. Pei building that reflected the vision of former agency chief Mike Ovitz, and ICM will soon be gone from that green-stone-and-tinted-glass fortress on Wilshire Blvd…and they’re both moving into new digs in Century City, and not far from each other. All signifying some kind of primal generational need to say “that was then, this is now.” As former agent Lou Pitt tells N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman, “When you pick up and move from someplace, it’s often more than just to find space…when you move, you redefine yourself…it gives you a chance to start fresh.”

This feels like yesterday’s papers, but a source “very close” to Tom Cruise has told Slate‘s Kim Masters that “he’s teetering on the brink of a certain kind of trouble that no star like him has ever been in before.” Cruise’s films always cost a bundle, and “the weak performance M:I3 is enough to give any studio pause,” Masters writes. “Meanwhile, Cruise’s production deal with Paramount expires in a few weeks. Negotiations to renew are not, as yet, under way. Without big, profitable movies starring Cruise, the deal is far too rich to be justified. One marketing executive speaks for many in saying, ‘He needs to go away.’ The idea is that Cruise should stay out of sight for at least a year, allowing time to get over what one prominent agent calls ‘the cootie factor .’ Apparently Cruise does not grasp the cootie factor and has no plans to take a break. And the agent says it would be very hard for his reps, at this delicate moment, to explain the situation to him. ‘He’s in a zone that he’s never been in and it’s their job to make sure he feels the positive light,’ he says. Another source close to the star agrees. ‘You’ve got to be very careful in conversations with him,’ he says. ‘Tom is not ever going to face facts.'” But if he reads Masters’ column, he’ll at least be semi-primed for that dreaded conversation…or so, I gather, went the rationale among Masters’ sources when they decided to lay things bare in a public forum. For what it’s worth I sussed this one out a month ago, and said towards the end of the piece that “if Cruise is smart (and he is), he can damage control his way out of this, to some extent. Just downplay the weirdo stuff and focus on the work, the work, the work. Next up (according to what I’ve read): the Glenn Ford role in James Mangold‘s remake of 3:10 to Yuma, and (according to the IMDB) the role of renegade American pilot Billy Fiske in Michael Mann ‘s The Few. Onward and upward. He’ll earn a bit less, but what’s that? This is a crisis but also a big opportunity for the guy. He’s begun one of those life passages that can lead, with the right attitude, to non-material riches.”