This is among the most Quixotic and futile things I’ve ever said in this column, but I genuinely believe there are metaphors of rot and doom and a swirling toiled-bowl fate contained in the popularity of the Scary Movie series, with the latest permutation having made just over $40 million this weekend. I know what I sound like in saying this, but will somebody who’s seen this latest bucket-of-urine, dumb-ass David Zucker movie please explain what it says about the kids going to see it that betokens any interior traits other than smugness, intellectual sloth and a profound aversion to anything the least bit exotic? What is a Scary Movie experience, sight unseen, other than an iron-clad guarantee that (a) you’ll be made to laugh or snicker every so often, (b) the movie will keep the subject matter in a totally safe, utterly familiar, channel-surfing vein and (c) it will throw audiences absolutely no curve balls whatsoever? More than anything else, Scary movies promise sameness and safety. If that doesn’t give you concern about where a lot of younger people are at these days then I don’t know what. Living in a membrane of smugness, material arrogance, and intellectual laziness is as much of a social malady as heroin, speed or alchohol addiction. They all indicate an attitude that says, “Leave us alone, dude…have a tub of popcorn and chill…we don’t know want to know.” I don’t know anything one way or the other, but I wonder what percentage of the kids who went to see Scary Movie 4 this weekend have personal discipline issues? Or have parents who drive big fat SUVs? I wonder what percentage of these kids are likely to see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth when it opens in May? Two percent? One percent? Less? Everyone seeing Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette next fall will be asked to consider the parallels between the arrogant, insulated attitudes of those living in the rarified environs of the palace of Versailles in the 1780s and those rolling in affluence today and the faux– Paris Hilton attitudes and personalities that always arise from this. Most people who see Coppola’s film are going to wave such thoughts away (if the parallels in fact occur to them), and you know who will be the first in this group to do so.

“I wrote a story last summer [for the Toronto Star] about Tom Cruise that sparked a lot of email and walk-up conversations from women. Every single one of them, young and old, said they no longer liked Cruise. Many expressed the belief that he’d gone crazy. It was surprising to me how firm and how consistent they were in their opinion. I’ve talked to many women since, and their view of Cruise hasn’t mellowed one iota. He’s damaged goods as far as women go, while men never had that much time for him anyway. I find off-the-cuff reactions from people to be a much better judge of things like this than so-called experts or bogus surveys.
It’s that magical thing called ‘buzz,’ and it cuts both ways.
It’s going to be very interesting to see how M:I:3 does. It will have to attract a sizeable number of women — those guys all need dates — if it is going to do socko numbers.” — Peter Howell, critic and feature writer, Toronto Star

So what’s the deal with the extremely low profile apparently being sought by the makers and promoters of The Celestine Prophecy (Celestine Films), which is opening on 4.19 in San Francisco, and then in Seattle, Austin, Boulder, Berkeley and other mid-size cities later in the month? Based on James Redfield‘s famous best-seller, directed by Armand Mastroianni and costarring some good and respectable actors (Matthew Settle, Thomas Kretschmann, Sarah Wayne Callies, Annabeth Gish, Hector Elizondo, Joaquim de Almeida, Jurgen Prochnow), Celestine is a film about spiritual matters, to go by the trailer. It may be a piece of shit, but you’d think it would appeal to the people who liked What The Bleep Do We Know?. It’s not a hardcore born-again or Jesus flick in the Passion of the Christ vein, or even one about conventional faith or religion, but it’s clearly one of the many films coming out this year that are aimed at spiritually-minded moviegoers. And yet it wasn’t even mentioned in Scott Bowles‘ 4.14 USA Today piece about these films, nor was it mentioned in the sidebar that listed all the spiritual-religious films opening this year. Publicist Corinne Bourdeau of 360 Degree Communications says that a specal Celestine Prophecy screening will happen in Los Angeles on May 2nd, and that film will eventually play in New York. She says that “quite a few distributors wanted it but we wanted to go a non-traditional route,” meaning, in part, that “we haven’t reached out to reviewers.” The likely translation is that they know they’ve got a movie that’s going to get creamed by the big guns so they’ve decided to play to all the New Agers out there and, for now, bypass mainstream entertainment journalists and the the usual New York/Los Angeles launch strategy. Bordeau says the film is “going to speak to a broader audience” than the kind who usually read the New York Times or the trades or smarty-pants online columnists like myself. Celestine had a showing not too long ago in Los Angeles, she says, at the Agape International Spiritual Center in Culver City. This smells like a huge problem movie because even if you’re looking to reach people outside of the L.A.-N.Y. axis there’s no downside to opening in those cities unless (a) you’re broke or (b) there’s a likelihood your film is going to get critically butchered. I’m interested in this film because I know Settle, having sat down with him for a long chat once in ’04 at the Farmer’s Market about a short film I’d written.

“There have been three actors in Hollywood history that I can think of …Douglas Fairbanks, Burt Lancaster and Jackie Chan…who’ve done their own stunts, but they all had either a natural facility or training of some kind. I think that for Tom Cruise to announce that he’s doing his own stunts on Mission: Impossible 3….for a movie star of his calibre to do this, that can only come from a wild insecurity on his part.” — “name” guy who likes anonymity

This sound file is taken from the opening five or six minutes of HBO’s Too Hot Not to Handle, a global warming doc that will debut at 7 pm on 4.22 — “Earth Day.” It’s smart, absorbing…a very thorough rundown explaining how bad things have been getting, and how much worse they’ll get if we don’t do something about C02 emissions and greenhouse gases.

Mel Gibson‘s Apocalypto (Touchstone), an ancient-history metaphor piece about a civilization destroying itself, has abandoned its August 4 release date and will now open on December 8. So either Gibson and Disney distributors have decided Apocalypto has year-end awards potential, or they didn’t like the idea of opening in the same late-summer period as Oliver Stone‘s World Trade Center and Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of our Fathers, or they decided they need a lot more time to get it ready.

I guess I misheard that insider’s analogy between the Chicago Tribune‘s first-string film critic Michael Phillips and the recently deposed (i.e., downshifted to second-tier position) Michael Wilmington, so let’s try again. Phillips “is indeed an elegant writer, but I don’t think he and Wilmington are coming from the same aesthetic place. Wilmington runs hot and enthusiastic. Phillips runs cool and measured . Wilmington has lived and died for flickering lights in dark rooms his whole life. Phillips is more detached and analytical and a converted theater critic, albeit one with previous experience with movies as well, and is therefore more likely to reference real life than a Renoir film .”

Scary Movie 4 is estimated to do around $44,379,000 for the weekend, or $12,320 per print. Seriously…what does it say about American culture that this dumb parody film did as well as it did? How unhip do you have to be to really enjoy this? Ice Age: The Meltdown is off 41% from last weekend and estimated to earn $19,059,000. Benchwarmers is down 50% for a $9,797,000 haul. The reportedly very expensive Disney animated film The Wild, directed by Steve “Spaz” Williams, is a fourth-place disaster…$9,094,000 at $3180 a print. Take The Lead is down 38% for earnings of $7,490,000. Inside Man is being projected to bring in $6,505,000, off 29%. Lucky Number Slevin , a very tedious film, is down 30% and earning $4,508,000 for the weekend. Thank You for Smoking added 705 situations for a total of 1015, and will take in about $4,435,000.

“I think United 93 takes away the detachment of media reports, as well as the passage of time, and puts you directly into these situations. By doing so, the Hollywood-influenced concept of heroism that invariably exists in our mind is replaced by something more visceral and potent. Paul Greengrass is giving us a modern version of You Are There. David Poland ‘s being a contrarian and not rising up to the concept of being challenged by what is right there on the screen. He wants dramatization and fiction.” — L.A.-based director-screenwriter who saw United 93 before the press screenings started.

Hollywood Elsewhere’s main page is going to be changed, I decided today. In a week or two it’ll become just a series of paragraph blocks — the beginnings of WIRED items mostly, along with the beginnings of regular features. Bang-bang, rat-a-tat-tat. Each paragraph will have jumps taking readers to a page where either the WIRED item of the feature story will appear in their entirety. And yet the current format of the main page will continue; the difference is that it’ll be called “Hollywood Elsewhere Classic” and you’ll have to click on a Nav Tab bar on the top left to get to it. I’ve been fairly happy with the main front page all along, but enough people have told me they’d prefer something a bit different. And so the change. I’m okay with all this because (a) I’ll get more page views and more ad action, and (b) I’m not destroying what the site is now — I’m just adding to it and shifting things around.

Government prosecutors apparently still regard Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey and former CAA honcho Mike Ovitz as witnesses in their probe of Anthony Pellicano‘s wiretap activities, and not targets. But New York Times reporters David Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner are reporting in Friday’s edition that Grey and Ovitz “had far more direct dealings than they have acknowledged publicly with [Pellicano] at the center of a rapidly expanding wiretapping scandal, according to govern- ment evidence.” And “the government’s questioning of the two Hollywood executives…shows that authorities [are] circling the heavyweight entertainment lawyer Bert Fields, who worked for both.” The Times basically says that Grey has been giving the FBI different accounts about the extent of his dealings with Pellicano. In other words, according to my reading of the story, he’s been doing a bit of fibbing. And so has Ovitz.

Does Columbia Pictures’ decision to release the delayed All the King’s Men (the original release date was 12.16.05) on 9.22 mean it might turn up at the Toronto Film Festival? No matter how much it gets talked up by friends of producer Mike Medavoy or director Steve Zaillian, Men is regarded as a damaged-goods movie that, fairly or unfairly, has something to prove. I’m sorry but last December’s delay left a mark, and Columbia knew that pulling it would create one. If it’s as good as the “friends” say it is, Columbia publicity should start screening it early….no later than July…to let the word get around. Written and directed by Zaillian, it’s essentially a remake of Robert Rossen‘s 1949 Oscar-winning film (which was based the novel by Robert Penn Warren), and it stars Sean Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslet, Patricia Clarkson and James Gandolfini (whose performance is especially good, according to the “friends”).