In celebration of today’s three-years-sober anniversary of Jason Mewes, the Marlon Brando of suburban stoner “attitude” comedians, Clerks 2 director-writer Kevin Smith looks back at their decades-long friendship, with a focus on Mewes’ past drug addiction. Smith says it’s “turned into something kinda cool” becaise he’s “been getting tons of feedback from folks who can identify with it because people in their lives (or they themselves) have been through similar struggles.” Here’s the Wednesday, 4.5 installment..the last one is due today.

I’m very sorry to report the death of the very witty film critic and entertainment reporter John Voland, 47, who died in his sleep from a heart attack on Monday, April 3rd. Voland had most recently worked as a writer-consultant in the video-game world. He was a staff reporter and reviewer at the L.A. Times from ’85 to ’88, pop music editor at the Houston Post from ’89 to ’90, senior film reporter and critic at the Hollywood Reporter from ’90 to ’92, did various freelance gigs in the mid ’90s (LA Style, Entertainment Weekly, Esquire), and had a staff position at Variety from ’97 to ’98. I hadn’t run into John for a good ten years, but he was a very sharp dude…always with a sharp quip or observation. He’s survived by his ex-wife, the publicist Bonnie Voland , and their daughter Hayley, 14, along with his mom, Jean, and brother Mark.

The reported decision by Cannes Film Festival bigwigs to screen Brett Ratner‘s X-Men: The Last Stand (20th Century Fox, 5.26) seems a bit odd. Nobody knows how this third X-Men film will play, but everyone has had their suspicions since Fox hired Ratner to direct it. Are there any cinematic standards at all being sought by Cannes programmers these days, or can any big-studio tentpoler be shown as long as it’s been offered and big stars have agreed to walk up the red carpet and the European distributor needs the hoopla?

The first tracking figures are in on United 93 (Universal, 4.28), the Paul Greengrass 9/11 film that’s been catching the wrong kind of heat due to stories about negative reactions to the trailer, and it has a very high “definitely not interested” figure — 14%. The “definitely not interested” responses “are usually 2% to 3% to 4%…usually in the case of a slasher film or a very skewed teenage film,” a marketing veteran explains. “This is much higher…one of the highest I’ve ever seen.” The public’s general awareness of United 93 is 32% — two thirds of those polled don’t even know about it — and 22% are saying they have “definite interest” in seeing it. How can anyone walking around and going online and paying at least some attention to life’s unfolding drama have not even heard ofUnited 93 by this stage, especially with all the attention it’s been getting in print publications like Newsweek and the New York Times ? Easy. Two-thirds of the public is more or less living in a fog. Statistics usually show that most people never hear about a film until the ads start running on the tube.

Derek Elley is reporting that Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German (Warner Bros.), his black-and-white, presumably Third Man-ish, post-World War II Berlin drama with George Clooney and Cate Blanchett, may not be ready to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival. That’s a shame from my perspective. I was really looking forward to seeing it there. Probable translation: either Soderbergh (who has a co-editing credit on the IMDB under the name of “Mary Ann Bernard“) and his editor David Kirchner aren’t entirely happy with the current edit, or Warner Bros. distrib execs aren’t entirely blown away by it, and there are the usual concerns about possibly tainting German‘s rep by showing a version that’s not quite “there.” So the conservatives are saying why not play it safe and give the editing a little more time and show the film at September’s Toronto Film Festival instead? (If German turns up in Cannes after all, great…and I will humbly apologize for running this imagined scenario.)

Good for Nicole Kidman, Blossom Films and her new first-look deal at 20th Century Fox, but the three films she currently has in development sound awfully mainstream, and two sound like sexy spritzy formula stuff….tripe for the girl who reads Cosmopolitan. There’s an adaptation of The Bachelorette Party by Karen McCullah Lutz (who shared screenplay credit on Legally Blonde…this should give you a hint) and a “Bourne Supremacy -style” spy thriller written by Simon Kinberg (Mr. and Mrs. Smith ) which will star Kidman as a female assassin….good God. (Nothing including worldwide nausea seems to get in the way of Hollywood’s fascination with professional assassins, a totally exhausted mainstream cliche if there ever was one.) No clues regarding Headhunters, written by writer-director Jez Butterworth (Birthday Girl), but obviously the underlying thinking behind the mission of Blossom Films is something along the lines of “this is a girls-only company, and we like sexy giggly glamour. Let’s stay away from anything too reflective of day-to-day life, and let’s keep the scripts breezy and commercial, and above all let’s try to help Nicole make lots of money. She’s already got her Oscar so we don’t need to mine anything too serious, and besides she’s pushing 40 and we all know what that means.” Per Saari, who previously worked for Robert Redford’s Wildwood Enterprises, will run Blossom out of an office on the Fox lot.

I can’t hear the damn thing for lack of the right software, but about 7 minutes into this KCRW/”Which Way LA?” sound file is an 18-minute conversation about the where the Anthony Pellicano investigation is now (4.4.06) and where it’s going. Ross Johnson, hardcore legal reporter and master of an excellent site called L.A. Indie, tells me “it’s the most sober analysis of Pellicano” — does he mean the man or the scandal? — “you’ll ever hear.” Warren Olney is the host; Johnson and Loyola Marymount law professor Laurie Levenson are the guests. Stay with L.A. Indie: later this week Johnson is going to reveal public documents that may leave certain prosecutors squirming over their past relationships with Pellicano.

Now wait a minute…wait a minute: in stories reporting the decision of attorneys Howard Weitzman and Dale Kinsella to leave Greenburg, Glusker, Fields, Claman, Machtinger & Kinsella to form their own entertainment law firm, Variety‘s Janet Shprintz and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Jesse Hiestand both softballed it when it came to explaining why. They both reported assertions (from Weitzman and Greenberg Glusker managing partner Norman Levine, respectively) that the departure has nothing to do the Anthony Pellicano wiretapping mess that Bert Fields, the head of Greenberg, Clusker, is in right now. You can bet it does have something to do with the Pellicano thing, and most likely to do with fines, lawsuits and other monetary woundings that may be suffered by Greenberg, Glusker due to the ongoing mucky-muck. Here’s Nikki Finke‘s take on the evacuation, which she likens to rats leaving a sinking ship.

Two expensive period films have had a scheduling face-off, and the less heavily-budgeted of the two has retreated with its tail between its legs. The July ’06 shoot of Ridley Scott ‘s American Gangster, a ’70s-era crime film that will costar Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington, has delayed a planned September start of a 1930s period drama to be directed by Baz Luhrman and costar Crowe and Nicole Kidman.

Following his detour into soul-stirring otherness in Richard Kelly’s apocalyptic Southland Tales, Seann William Scott is back to playing bozos in formula crap films. His next, Gary, the Tennis Coach, is about a high school janitor coaching a group of misfits to the Nebraska state championship…zzzzz. Pic will roll this summer under director Danny Leiner (Dude, Where’s My Car).

“If you want to keep your argument so narrow as to say the United #93
passengers didn’t enter the cockpit and/or manually force the plane into the ground, and therefore weren’t quite the heroes so many of us believe they are…fine. But whatever strategy the hijackers had in mind, it was not to kill squirrels in a Pennsylvania field . Whether they made it to the cockpit or not, United #93 crashed as a direct result of the passengers revolting against the hijackers. It seems quite clear that everyone on that plane had decided and accepted they were already dead, and that they weren’t going to be taking anyone else with them. I think that field in Pennsylvania is every bit as sacred as the Civil War battlefields that dot the east coast. And frankly, I think the people who say it’s ‘too soon’ are cowards; you don’t have to see the film, but my God…what makes these people think they can speak for the rest of us?” — Michael Andry , San Antonio, Texas.

This is Vivien Leigh as Blanche (Blanche!…Blanche!) Dubois in Streetcar, giving her “don’t hang back with the brutes” speech. Substitute the behavior of Stanley Kowalski, whom she refers to in the early portion, with today’s ape-cage downmarket movies, and…well, something to mull over, I think. I liked this Tennessee Williams play quite a lot when I first saw it in my late teens, but I love it now… especially the second half, starting with that scene with the visiting newspaper boy.