It took me a total of six hours earlier today to get a new passport on a “rush” basis…six hours and $137 bucks…and I have to go back and pick it up.

Another major-daily news story with another United 93 story that begins with the words “too soon.” Written by Joe Neumaier in the N.Y. Daily News. Unbelievable.

The Da Vinci Code marketing and publicity team is apparently planning things so that the advance-peek crowd — U.S. critics and reporters, the entertainment press at the Cannes Film Festival, etc. — will see the film at roughly the same time, particularly since the Ron Howard film will open day-and-date worldwide on 5.19 . So it may (I say “may”) boil down to an all-media stateside showing three or four days before opening and nothing before that. (Except for those elite critics and reporters who always manage to see big-deal films a bit earlier than other media types…you know who I mean.) Of course, Columbia would naturally want to keep DaVinci under wraps until the last minute with the so-called “Christian counter- offensive” getting read to take issue with or discredit the film sight unseen.

To get those Poseidon numbers up, sneak it next weekend (4.28 or 4.29)…both nights even. Sneaking it the following weekend against Mission: Impossible III would diminish the impact, and it opens on the 12th so it’s next weekend or never.

J.J. Abrams, a geek director, has succeeded with M:I:3…fine. So now Paramount wants him to revive the Star Trek franchise because the Trekkies are still out there and hungry for another feature set on the Enterprise, especially one directed by a guy who understands geek attitudes and geek love. What a bummer…a total downer.

A fairly dismissive piece on Tom Cruise (and one extremely disdainful of Scientology) by the N.Y. Post‘s Sara Stewart. A little HE plug in the middle of it, but there’s no links in these stories so I don’t know. The other shoe in this story, of course, is J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III, which doesn’t improve after a second viewing (it kinda drops a little) but is still better plotted and more action-filled than the original Brian DePalma M:I and better than John Woo’s M:I:2 sequel.

N.Y. Times freelancer Ross Johnson on the sexually-enticing double-track that is Black Snake Moan (Paramount Classics), a new gritty-southern-atmosphere film from director-writer Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow). It’s about a bearded, older-looking Samuel L. Jackson trying to cure a blonde, hot-looking Christina Ricci of sexual addiction or nymphomania (or something in that realm). The reason people will pay to see BSM , of course, will be the “ooh-ahh” interracial-sex angle, which the title (which seems like a reference to a line in Full Metal Jacket when Dorian Harewood unbuttoned his G.I. fly and spoke of the “Alabama black snake” hiding inside) obviously refers to. Johnson describes a scene from the film: “…a gold-toothed Jackson growling out a profane rendition of the blues classic ‘Staggerlee’, recorded live in a raucous Memphis juke joint…[and] Ricci, her torn lip a welt of red, her dirty blond hair tossed from side to side, grinding her sweat-drenched body against black men and women on the dance floor as Jackson looked on from the stage.” And if it comes out in the fall or early ’07, it’ll be Jackson’s second film in a row with the word “snake” in the title.

Not much happening in the movie world today, so how about this? Slate‘s Mickey Kaus has spotted an error in a 4.23 N.Y. Times profile of billionaire Ron Burkle‘s chummy relationship with Bill Clinton. The Times story traces their relationship back to the L.A. riots in ’92, when then-candidate Clinton, touring around the damaged areas of L.A., noticed that some supermarkets were untorched. This was “because the owner, Mr. Burkle, treated his customers and employees fairly,” the ,em>Times story says. Kaus did a NEXIS search and learned that Burkle’s markets, operated by his company Food4Less, “sustained some $25 million to $ 30 million in riot-related damage [togroceries]” and that “at the height of the riots, 44 of its stores had been shut down.”

The best thing I’ve seen today (Saturday, 4.22) is this 4.18 “CNN Showbiz Today” video interview with Neil Young about his new album “Living With War,” and especially a song called “Let’s Impeach the President.”

Take no notice, none whatsoever, of anyone telling you to see John Hillcoat‘s The Proposition (First Look, 5.5), under the guise of it being one of the year’s best films. It’s an exercise in grungy outlaw sadism. What gives it a certain dignity is a moral undercurrent about compromise and making bargains with the devil and doing terrible things in the name of personal freedom. But the real subject, for me, was about how grueling it is to watch an Australian period western in which you don’t give a shit about the characters because all you can think about is how they all need a bath and a shave. (The women included.) This is one of those films in which the actors all have rotten teeth and look like they’ve been covered in chicken grease and had animatronic lice put into their hair. It’s a visually distinctive film, yes, but in the way that a rotting dead horse lying in a glaring desert sun with flies buzzing around is distinctive. I blew off The Proposition last September at the Toronto Film Festival (the word was on the dismissive side) but caught up with it at the American Cinematheque three or four months ago. That is, I wanted to catch up with it, but before the showing I was told by a distributor who was a friend of the producers that unless I promised not so write anything I would be thrown out. “But everyone saw it in Toronto,” I replied, not really caring one way or the other (I was assuming it was probably a problem movie). But now that it’s coming out on DVD next month (following a brief theatrical release on 5.5) and now that certain parties have praised it to the heavens, I think it’s fair to say that after watching The Proposition for 30 minutes I was thinking seriously about leaving. I stuck it out (and it was agony) only because the producers and that distributor guy were sitting near me and I didn’t want to worsen relations by walking out. There’s a moral to the story (the screenplay is by Nick Cave) but I didn’t want to hear it. Will the grimy and unshaven Pearce take the deal offered by the filthy and unshaven Ray Winstone to kill his outlaw brother, the extra-grimy and grease-covered Danny Huston, in order to gain his freedom? More important to me was my own. I wanted to escape that theatre but I was stuck…no way out. Then another half hour passed and I couldn’t take it. I felt as if those flies were flying right off the screen and into the Egyptian and settling on me. So I left, and I haven’t felt as good about leaving a film since I walked out of Eight-Legged Freaks. No need to worry about Pearce, Winstone, Huston or costar Emily Watson…their careers will be okay. Hillcoat and Cave will most likely be fine too, especially with certain critics saying what a great film it is.

Silent Hill, the weekend’s #1 film, is projected to do about $20,965,000, having earned over $8 million Friday night. And Paul Weitz‘s American Dreamz in projected to finish in ninth place with a $3,503,000 haul…forget it, opened-and-closed. Scary Movie 4, the likely 2nd place finisher, will do around $17,738,000…off 57%. The Sentinel , the Michael Douglas-Keifer Sutherland film, will do about $14,602,000 for a third place finish. Ice Age 2 will come in around $13,109,000, The Wild at $7,692,000, Benchwarmers at $7,507,000, Take the Lead at $4,207,00, Inside Man at $3,606,000, then American Dreamz and then Friends with Money in tenth place with about $3,503,000.

A funny Defamer thing: quoting ABC-TV film critic Joel Siegel‘s remark that “the summer’s best counter-programming is The Devil Wears Prada [being] set for release the same weekend as Superman Returns,” the assumption being that “no one in America wants to see both movies.” But [while] Hollywood’s demographic marketing research and fancy spreadsheets may spit out nonsense suggesting there’s no audience overlap, anyone who has ever engaged their hair colorist in conversation knows [that] Superman and Prada are the two must-see homo movie events of the summer. Fox may find itself disappointed after Prada’s opening weekend, when it loses a sizable chunk of the core audience that would typically show up for a Meryl Streep- channeling-Anna Wintour black comedy to the giant-screen adventures of Brandon Routh‘s Superbulge.” (Which, in case you haven’t read, involves “some enhancement” according to Routh. “To be honest a lot like a baseball player’s protection or football players wear protection for that area,” Routh told zap2it’s Daniel Feinberg. “That’s pretty much what it is except softer because I didn’t have to worry about getting hit in it.”