Sunday is travelling day…back to NYC and Brookline, where my son Jett is ceremoniously graduating from high school, so no posts until late tomorrow, at best. And maybe none at all…we’ll see. It’s 9:48 pm in Paris and still only dusky so far…good night and good luck.

Okay, I’m eating my words about the goddam Break-Up tracking (i.e., what I wrote about it being toast) during the Cannes Film Festival. I was wrong and intemperate and rash, and I made an effing mistake, and I hope I’ve learned a lesson from all this. It’ll sink big-time next weekend, of course (50% or 60%), but from today’s perspective this is a very impressive, based-on-an-almost-total-bullshit-ad-campaign opening (the Tonya Harding joke notwithstanding)….

The Break-Up is a bigger hit than expected, so let’s hear it for Universal’s Big Con marketing! The Vince Vaughn-Jennifer Aniston drama-with-laughs is projected to do about $37 million this weekend, having done about $13.7 million last night. It’ll be off about 50% to 60% next week once the word gets out that it’s not hah-hah funny, but that was the plan all along. X-Men 3 is off radically. Last night’s take was down 77% from the Friday before…a huge drop. The experts are projecting $34.9 million for the weekend, which will amount to roughly a 60% to 65% drop from last weekend’s haul. (People may have liked it okay but weren’t through the roof about it.) Over The Edge is looking at an $18 million dollar weekend, off about 32% from last weekend. The DaVinci Code is looking at roughly $15 million, down about 53% from last weekend. Mission: Impossible III will take in about $4.3 million, off 40%. Its expected to eek out $125 to 130 million total. It’s basically dead at this stage and a fairly big disappointment. Poseidon will take in about $3 million, off 45%…a disaster with an expected cume in the low 50s.

“Although Pauline Kael knew comparatively little about how movies got made, she was unbeatable at taking off from what she had seen. But beyond that, she would take off from what she had written, and there was a new theory every two weeks. A lot of her theories had to do with loves and hates. She thought Robert Altman was a genius. He can certainly make a movie, but if it hasn’t got a script, then he makes Pret-a-Porter . That’s one of the most salutary lessons of this book: what makes the movie isn’t just who directed it, or who’s in it, it’s how it relates to the real world. That principle really starts to matter when it comes to movies that profess to understand history, and thus to affect the future. Several quite good critics in various parts of the world knew there was something seriously wrong with Steven Spielberg’s Munich, but they didn’t know how to take it down. If they could have put the lessons of this book together, they would have found out how. Munich might have survived being directed by someone who knows about nothing except movies. But it was also written by people who don’t know half enough about politics.” — Clive James reviewing “AMERICAN MOVIE CRITICS: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now” — edited by Phillip Lopate (Library of America) in Sunday’s N.Y. Times.

Patrick Gagne and Elena Timofeeva, waiters at Cafe qui parle who’ve been very kind and gracious in letting me sit and work in their free wi-fi establishment for hours on end — Saturday, 6.3.06, 3:40 pm.

(a) A couple who sat next to me and producer Tricia van Klaveren last night at Safari, an Indian restaurant on rue Risseau — Friday, 6.2.06, 10:05 pm; (b) At a local vegetable-fruit market this morning — Saturday, 6.3.06, 9:55 am; (c) ditto.

Catch-a-Fire director Phillip Noyce has attracted the ardent interest (if not the actual signatures on a contract, piece of paper or napkin…yet) of Heath Ledger and Rachel Weisz for the eventual filming of an Autralian-based marital discord drama called Dirt Music. The film will be adaptation of Tim Winton‘s novel by Pip Karmel and respected playwright Justin Monjo. Variety‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that the financing hasn’t been quite put together either, but with Ledger and Weisz on-board that shouldn’t be much of a problem. Noyce is also reportedly working on a sailing-race movie called Sydney to Hobart with producer Lynda Obst.

I’m getting blasted by readers for revealing an alleged fatherhood angle in Superman Returns. All I did was link to a Roger Friedman Fox 411 column that was up for all to see, and then a guy wrote in and said the son was the sire of Lois Lane and James Marsden ‘s Richard White character (which may be the case…haven’t seen the film), so I ran a commment from a guy who claimed to have read the Superman Returns script and who said the Friedman item was accurate. I wouldn’t have revealed the possible paternity issue on my own, but when a well-read columnist has written about someting it’s out there and that’s that.

It’s not “Page Six” editor Richard Johnson‘s DUI charge as much the fact that he was driving at all in Manhattan that surprises me. There is no point in driving your car around Manhattan…none. It’s one of the greatest places in the world to keep your weight down from walking your ass off all the time, or at least for highly-absorbing people-watching in the subway. Cars are bad for the soul because they insulate the senses and amplify the ego. If you don’t walk you’re not living a Manhattan-type life…it’s that simple.

“As a generation of top critics move into their 50s and 60s, newspapers are chasing the same young demographic as advertisers and studios. Just as film distribution and marketing are adapting to the rise of digital delivery, the internet is altering the face of film criticism. [As] daily newspapers are losing circulation, [so are they losing] Hollywood advertising and their influence over moviegoers. As publishers struggle to hang on to their readers via online content, blogs and podcasts, some are replacing experienced critics with younger, less expensive models.” — Anne Thompson in yesterday’s (6.2.06) “Risky Business” column, which obviously captures a portion of what’s happening, although a moviegoing world without the usual array of older, seasoned and richly expressive print brahmins would be extremely distressing to me personally. The older dug-in writers can be 91 or 79 or 66 years old…age being immaterial unless the writer for emotional or biological reasons decides to start thinking and behaving like a somewhat older, less-open-to-the-here-and-now observer. Obviously the general ad-bucks swing away from Old Media towards New Media is real, etc., but the older writers can get into the groove if they want to…just start writing more, forget for the most part about “deadlines” (except when it comes to serving the print versions) and just keep it coming on a daily-hourly-nonstop basis….whatever feels right, whenever it surfaces.

Anne Thompson‘s article is one of a string of pieces along these lines. A couple of days ago I spoke to New York magazine’s Stu VanAirsdale about pretty much the same subject, which I gather will be online on Sunday or Monday. VanAirsdale had an idea that somehow Manhattan-based critics, who are presumably more in thrall to the aesthetic legend and criteria of NYC-based critics like Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, Stanley Kaufman, James Agee and Otis Ferguson than, say, critics from New Mexico or Iowa might be, are somehow being affected more profoundly by the incursion of New Media writers and the aesthetic downgrading, editorial malleability and youthifying of cineaste culture that is apparently happening here and there.

“The man is a liar and a murderer, and I say that with all due respect.” — a line from Woody Allen‘s Scoop (Focus Features, 7.28.06), in which Hugh Jackman (to go by the trailer) appears to be the above-described, which seems like a red herring. The descriptive term that applies to the film seems to be “ frothy comedy“. Costarring with Jackman are Scarlett Johansson, Ian McShane, James Nesbitt, Jim Dunk and Allen himself. The trailer tells it, but the plot’s about a London-visting college journalist (Johansson) who happens upon “the scoop of a lifetime.”