It’s 2:18 pm…I guess I’m going to run down to a nearby theatre and see how opening day for The Omen is coming along . I somehow can’t see people taking long lunch hours to see a noontime or 1 pm show, or skipping the second half of the work day, etc.

On top of the not-too-terrific Omen tracking and the 30% Rotten Tomatoes rating is an apparently crucial matter of 6.6.06 not being the correct Lucifer date. “When Christianity took over the Roman calendar, in the 4th Century, the monk who compiled the dates got it wrong,” according to Australia’s Catholic Film Office chief Dr. Richard Leonard. A piece in the The Australian, quoting Leonard, says “historians backdated to confirm the timeline of activities in 1582, and it was discovered the dating was four years out. Leonard said the mistake had not been corrected and that going by the original dates, 6/6/06 had been four years ago.” Leonard adds, “We assume that Satan knows that the sixth day of the sixth month in ’06 was in fact the 6th of June, 2002.”

It’s very rare for a trailer to capture the tone and spirit of a comedy as lovingly as this one for Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26). Trailers almost always accentuate the most primitive aspects of a film in order to grab the broadest demographic — this one doesn’t. My respect to whichever Fox Searchlight exec made the particular determination, plus whichever in-house editor or outside agency did the work. (Everyone was lunching when I called.) The trailer assumes that the audience is hip enough to get the jokes, which are all about character and family conflict (i.e., not one pratfall or fart joke), and yet the humor is clearly funny in a vulnerably human way, and you can tell right away that the acting is supple and non-schticky. Sunshine is not a snide-attitude blue-state movie — it’s about a typically disshevelled middle-class family with the usual issues — but watch the regional revenues when it opens. I’ll bet you anything the hee-haws are going to respond cautiously no matter how many rave reviews it gets because it feels indie-ish and the stars aren’t big enough (Gregg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin, Alan Arkin) and so on. Just you wait. Whenever a really sweet and hilarious and beautifully measured film comes along (and mnark my words, this will prove to be one of the best films of the year), the reds always go, “Hmmm…should we see this?” I’ll bet that the pretty woman I spoke to yesterday who loved the The DaVinci Code (see the following item) will also drag her feet.

I spoke to a 40ish woman on my Jet Blue NYC-to-Burbank about Dan Brown‘s “The DaVinci Code” (which she loved, couldn’t put down), “Angels and Demons” (an even bigger fan), Ron Howard‘s film version (really loved it) and so on. Just for fun, I showed her Anthony Lane‘s capsule review in the New Yorker (which compared The DaVinci Code to the plague). Then I asked if she’s seen, or plans to see, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. She was noncommital so I let her read David Denby’s New Yorker review (“detailed, deep-layered, vivid, and terrifying…every school, college, and church group, and everyone else beyond the sway of General Motors, ExxonMobil, and the White House should see this movie”). She read it, handed me the magazine, and said with a chuckle, her eyes dropping to her lap, “Some people aren’t comfortable hearing about this.” The curious thing, I told her, is that it’s touching and never boring. She didn’t disagree with the urgency of the Gore’s message, but we both knew what she meant when she said “people.” It seemed obvious she considered Davis Guggenheim’s film a bringer of unpleasant vibes. Are all DaVinci Code fans similarly persuaded? Obviously a simplistic read, but a voice tells me that a good portion of them probably are . People who love airport fiction usually don’t have a driving interest in history, biographies, documentaries, etc. I think we all know that…don’t we?

Announcing a very special Hollywood Elsewhere Nacho Libre promotion! With the HE “Hollywood sign” logo hand-woven into the forehead area and my own head shot sewn into the occipital, back-of- the-head area, it’s a very timely, enticing-to-women cabeza accessory for fans of Jared Hess and Jack Black‘s Nacho Libre (Paramount, 6.16). Ideal for wearing to hot parties, hot clubs (i.e., particularly the hard-to-get-into kind that charges 12 bucks for a glass of crappy Chardonnay), baseball games, political rallies, Mexican restaurants, Russian steam baths, etc. Priced at only $24.95 plus shipping — order today! There may be some at this point who believe this is a straight-from-the-shoulder HE promotion done in concert with Paramount’s marketing department. And (I hate being this literal) it’s not. Watch someone write in anyway and say, ‘Hey, man…cool idea!” Wait a minute…maybe it is a cool idea? This just hit me. Frankly, I would half-enjoy owning a Hollywood Elsewhere nacho mask.

Bus stop poster on Hollywood Way just outside Burbank Airport — Monday, 6.5.06, 9:05 pm.

Landed in Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport last night around 8:10 pm, and the first movie image to catch my eye — at a bus stop on Hollywood Way — was the chick-flicky one-sheet for Superman Returns. This is the best poster image WB marketers have come up with for this film yet. If I were gay or female I could see being really intrigued, but it has a cross-gender pull. It should have been the teaser poster way back when. The first Superman Returns junket screenings begin later this week, so there’s no reading how well the chick-flick angle plays but there would be irony, surely, if it winds up connecting with more females than Warner Bros.’s The Lake House (6.16), which is clearly more of an overt appeal to the XX quadrant. I’m wondering because of the rumble over this one, but let’s hold off on that for now.

For Jennifer Aniston, “The Break-Up follows a terrible professional run. In the last year she has appeared in two high-profile movies — the disappointing thriller Derailed and the stink-bomb comedy Rumor Has It — and the smaller Friends With Money, in which she was the least convincing member of an ensemble. The characters in these films are wildly different, but Ms. Aniston’s performance isn’t. She projects the same high-maintenance Jennifer Aniston style — the trademark sleek hair, the natural-looking makeup, the body so toned you wonder how many hours a day a person can spend with a trainer. [Plus] she exudes coolness and self-possession even when the part calls for warmth or vulnerability. She did warm and vulnerable winningly in the cult movie Office Space (1999). But lately all her characters uncomfortably resemble the one who made her rich and famous, the feather-brained Rachel on Friends, who thought being pretty was her full-time job. It’s as if she has substituted a movie-star pose for acting.” — Caryn James on Aniston’s career slump in the 6.5.05 N.Y. Times.

Sofia Coppola‘s Marie-Antoinette “may also be [her] most personal film to date, not because she is herself the scion of a royal Hollywood family, but rather because she came of age during her father’s lean years, when the palace of Zoetrope was set upon by angry creditors and King Francis was forced into working as a director-for-hire just to pay the bills. This is a movie made by someone who knows firsthand what it means to watch a once-glorious empire crumble .” — L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas in his sum-up piece on the Cannes Film Festival.

Spring Street and Crosby, looking west — Monday, 6.4.06, 11:50 am.

(a) Straight up Crosby, facing north — Monday, 6.4.06, 11:52 am; (b) Spring Street facing east — Monday, 6.4.06, 11:55 am; (c) This Starbucks (Spring & Crosby) has an especially friendly, unforced, study-hall vibe, on tyop of the wi-fi and that Wild Orange tea.

I’m sitting at a small round table at a Starbucks at the corner of Crosby and Spring Streets, and I feel icky and look like hell but I don’t care because I’m not feeling quite as sick and submerged as I have since Saturday night, which was when a Paris virus invaded my blood. Constant fatigue, nausea, fever, aching muscles, weakness, sweat-sleeping …awful.

After a second night of ache and torment at my brother’s place last night (i.e., Sunday), the damn virus seems to be losing steam. I tried plugging in this morning at 4 ayem (I’m on Paris time, naturally) but the new AC adapter I bought in Paris suddenly wasn’t working, so I shlepped back to Manhattan on the 7:23 out of Norwalk and found an electronics store on Fifth Ave. and 39th. A pale-faced, yarmulke-wearing salesman took a look at my Paris-bought adapter (which cost me 80 Euros) and determined that only half of it wasn’t working, and he sold me a plug-in that fixed everything for only $10. On a plane back to LA at 4:45 today…

Okay, now I really have to go…plane’s leaving…back online Stateside sometime this evening, at which time…well, who knows?

Aaahhh…the beautiful, most sensuous, immaculately studied “nothingness” in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, especially in his early ’60s period. The Italian master’s career will be on view in a three-week retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rose Cinemas starting Wednesday, 6.7.