“Now that Peter Jackson’s King Kong has been released as a two-disc DVD, enterprising fans will undoubtedly find a way to upload the 188-minute film and trim it down to a more dynamic running time,” writes DVD/Laser Newsletter editor Doug Pratt. Please! If someone does this soon, I will provide a link and do my part to bring viewers to it. Jackson’s Kong is the ultimate example of a film that plays pretty well the first viewing (exciting after the 70 minute mark!…that fun dino run!), and gets weaker and weaker the more you think back upon it. Repeat after me — Jackson has no discpline, has no discipline, has no discipline. “As it stands, the film plays like Jackson had gotten confused in the production rush and released the ‘DVD Director’s Cut’ to theaters by mistake,” says Pratt. “Jackson achieved a pinnacle of motion picture art with his extended DVD editions of the three Lord of the Rings films, but he appears to have lost touch with the realities of moviemaking in the process. A good hour of King Kong, and maybe even more, does not belong in the theatrical release of what should have been a brisk, spectacular romp.” And who else to blame? Stacy Sher and the other executive cowards at Universal who saw Kong relatively early and said, “Great!”…instead of, “Peter? We love you and your film, but you need to trim that first 70 minutes down to 30 or even 20 minutes.”

Film critic Manohla Dargis has been been submitted by her N.Y. Times editors as a contender for a Pulitzer Prize, and someone “whos worked with her there” trashes her, saying “by no means do you ever hear that [Dargis] is the best critic [the Times] has…she’s known for synopsizing and giving stuff away. You’re not supposed to read her if you don’t want to know what’s going to happen.”

Universal Pictures has agreed to hand over 10% of the opening weekend grosses of United 93 (opening 4.28) to the Flight 93 National Memorial. The proposed $30 million memorial will be located in a field near the spot where Flight #93 crashed on 9/11, near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. This seems like a good move, right? The Universal donation, I mean.

With Basic Instinct 2 arriving this Friday, here’s an amusing piece about unwanted sequels by L.A. Daily News critic Glenn Whipp. One of the the misbegotten is Oliver’s Story, a 1978 sequel to Love Story. I remember this film’s poster fondly, or rather a dialogue- added variation. I saw it on a New York subway station wall just after the film opened in December ’78. The graffiti dialogue made me laugh, and I’ve told people about it for years and they’ve laughed, so I’ll try it out on the readership. This isn’t a family column, but I’m going to use polite language anyway because it won’t be very funny if I use the original terminology. Consider the image on the poster and that famous “love means never having to say you’re sorry” line from Love Story. The dialogue balloons had O’Neal saying to costar Candice Bergen, “I’m sorry but since we’re already in this position may I have sex with you in a way that’s guaranteed not to get you pregnant?” Bergen answered, “I’d prefer another method of sexual congress that’s just as much of an assurance in that regard.”

Hollywood Elsewhere’s technical ally Jim Stanley has constructed a special search engine that’s aimed at only the WIRED section. He’s eventually going to put up a regular link to this on the main page, but in the meantime here it is.

Many people have written in and asked if I’ve seen Dylan Avery and Korey Rowe‘s Loose Change (2nd edition), a documentary that lays out a lot of suspicious maybes, intriguing indications, and clues of different shapes, weights and sizes to support a premise that neocons in the U.S. government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks for their own political benefit. A lot of readers think it’s at least a disturbing piece (smart, disciplined, well-ordered), and probably the most famous member of this club is Charlie Sheen. Anyway, I’ve seen it and thought about it, and I know a lot of bright people who seem genuinely jazzed about it, but I just don’t accept — okay, won’t accept — the notion that this kind of demonic, cold-blooded Machiavellian plotting could emanate from the Bushies. Evil is necessarily a matter of dedication and passion, but deep down it’s most often about selfishness and greed and the willingess to look the other way. Like Louis Malle, I think evil is banal. It can be advanced by bureaucratic diligence and systematic planning (i.e., Nazi concentration camps or the Khymer Rouge slaughter of the mid ’70s), but I have never believed in evil manifested through the application of daring super-schemes requiring the utmost secrecy at the highest levels of government among a cabal of black-hearted right-wing fuckheads. The perpetrators of evil acts are almost never as brilliant as this documentary asserts. And I don’t believe that upper-level neocons are in possession of the necessary monstrous, heartless, Ernst Stavro Blofeld mentality to arrange for a slaughter of this magnititude, no matter how much their friends in the defense industry have benefitted, or how greatly the general neocon faction in the government would have benefitted. There are more than a few interesting claims and puzzling unexplained occurences brought up by this film, but with all due respect to Sheen and others who feel it just might be on to something, I have to respectfully pass. I just don’t buy it for the reasons stated. I guess I’m more of an Adam Curtis/The Power of Nightmares type of guy. But Avery and Rowe are smart guys, and it’s cool that they’ve turned as many heads as they have thus far.

Oh, and by the way: the allegedly brash nude footage of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct 2 isn’t that brash at all. I guess Columbia had to trim it down to satisfy the MPAA. All I know is that is that your eyes barely have a chance to feast before the editor cuts back to David Morrissey. It’s basically blink-and-you’ll-miss-it. There’s a nice boob shot that lasts maybe four or five seconds, and I don’t know what that New York guy was on about when he told “Page Six” that “the only thing worse than the dialogue were Sharon’s implants,” one of which seemed “lopsided.” Bullshit — they’re fine. And they’re not over-sized, which is what’s wrong with 95% of the tit jobs out there.

Paul Greengrass‘s United 93, the 9/11 thriller hitting theatres on 4.28, will open Manhattan’s Tribeca Film Festival on 4.25. Tammy Rosen’s press release says that people whose family members died on Flight 93 will be there. Also attending will be “other 9/11 groups and family organizations and first responders whose lives were forever altered on that day.” (After I read this last sentence to a friend, he asked, “Will they be flying them in on United?”) It’s obvious why this downtown Manhattan film festival is looking to show United 93, but I sense a vague strategy in the presence of the victims’ families. There almost seems to be a selling-point message in this: “If these people who really suffered that day can roll with this film, all of you folks out there saying ‘no, no…too soon’ should be able to roll with it.” There are always going to be squeamish types saying “too soon,” etc., but artists have never waited for the hoi polloi to take a vote and announce, “Okay, we’re finally ready to see a film about a recent tragic event that touched us all.” It happened, life moves on…get over it.

David Fincher‘s Zodiac is absolutely going to be called that. Chronicles is just what it was called during casting and shooting, apparently…as a ruse. Movies do this sometimes. Just yesterday a breakdown came out for Transformers under the name Prime Detective.

Columbia had an all-media screening last night of Basic Instinct 2 (Columbia, 3.31) at the new AMC Century City plex. The hope was that it might be Showgirls bad…something deliriously awful…so bad it would make middle-aged men squeal like pigs. Alas, the verdict is that it falls short. At best, it’s Catwoman bad, which is what gossip columnist George Christy said to me after the show. But of course, that movie wasn’t bad enough either. The New York Post‘s “Page Six” reports that people laughed at some of the BI2 dialogue at Monday night’s premiere screening in Manhattan. Two or three times, I noticed, the L.A. crowd chortled at activity that seemed intended to elicit just that response. (Although you know something’s not quite working correctly when they giggle at a guy taking two slugs in the chest.) The usually accomodating Liz Smith wrote the following in her N.Y. Post gossip column today: “And though a number of people seemed impressed by the film, I feel it would be best if [Sharon Stone] now allows her character Catherine Tramell to rest on her laurels and her rumpled bed. The script, the harsh cinematography, the clothes and the hairstyle — not to mention Sharon’s decision to play the part with an unrelenting aggressiveness [and] no shadings at all — do her little justice. To be honest, I felt Sharon had come full circle in paying homage to her predatory screen past in Catwoman. I thought she brilliantly walked away with what there was to walk away with in that movie. I had hoped BI2 would provide the hothouse camp of Showgirls. It did not.” The upside is that I saw it with an actress pal, Fabiola Cayemitte, and she was okay with it. “I think it’ll go,” she said afterwards. You mean it’ll open the first weekend? “No, two weekends,” she said. “I think people are gonna be okay with it…have some fun.”

It’s not just David Fincher‘s Zodiac (Paramount, 9.22) that’s probably going to run about three hours, but also Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., October), which stars Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard and Sam Rockwell. I don’t know anything rock-solid, but it seems fair to deduce that the James film will run long because Dominik’s script is a whopping 210 pages, whereas James Vanderbilt‘s Zodiac script runs about 190 pages…do the math. Here, by the way, is a well-written appraisal of a 2004 draft of the James script, posted six days ago by novelist and historian Frederick J. Chiaventone, a Missouri resident who’s been interviewed for an “American Experience” documentary about James.

Here are two edited reactions to Julia Roberts‘ stage debut in the very first preview performance of Three Days of Rain in New York on Tuesday night, 3.28: Guy #1 has written that Roberts “appeared nervous in the beginning but hit her stride in the second act. Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper [were] both outstanding. A standing ovation came at the end (of course), but Julia appeared very happy to get this one out of the way. A few lines were flubbed, but the show is in good shape considering it was the first preview.” Guy #2 wrote that the show is “good, not great…but that’s the play’s fault, not the actors’. All three were very good, although Cooper stole the first act as his character is very alive and confident. Julia really got to shine in the second act. There were several flashes of that smile and laugh but they worked for the character and weren’t just throw ins. There were two minor flubs — Cooper’s fly was half open for his first few minutes onstage, but he finally realized it and zipped up. (I love live theatre.) And in the second act Rudd dropped a plastic tomato and it rolled onto the stage prompting Julia to lose it for a second and laugh, which of course made the audience laugh. She was a bit nervous at first but got into it and by the second act was a natural. She’s a very good actor and reactor, and sitting in the second row I could really watch her eyes and facial expressions. The actors were about 10 feet from me — that made it worth the $101.00 ticket. I liked [the play], didn’t love it. Julia has proven she can do both stage and screen, but I would have liked to have seen her in a better play for her New York stage debut.”