The second of its kind to be acquired by Paramount Classics, White Planet is an animals-struggling-to survive-in-a-barren-white- wilderness movie. Just because it sounds like a Penguins wannabe doc doesn’t mean it necessarily is. We all know life is rarely a day at the beach, and here are two films — White Planet and The Call of the North — reiterating this emphatically and at the same time stressing the importance of good parenting.

This 2.7 New York Times story about detective Anthony Pellicano‘s latest difficulties with the law (i.e., prosecutors have hit him with a 110-count indictment accusing Pellicano of racketeering and conspiracy, wiretapping, identity theft, witness tampering, and destruction of evidence) says he “masterminded a sprawling wiretapping ring that helped his clients gain an advantage in disputes with opponents including actors, reporters and talent managers.” Uhm, yeah, I know…my phone was tapped by Pellicano (or one of his guys) in the summer of 1993 not long after my Last Action Hero dustup. I don’t know who hired him to do this, but it was a little chilling and I was ticked off at the time,. Amd yet looking back it all seems mildly amusing, like an episode of Mission Impossible. That aside, I’ve come to an opinion about Pellicano, which is that he’s a decent guy. He helped me with some research for an article a couple of years ago, and it made my work easier and the piece ultimately better. I believe in turning pages and moving on to new chapters. He who lives by the sword will die by the sword, etc., but by doing me a favor in ’03 I think Pellicano was making amends on some level for what happened ten years earlier. I think we both kind of knew that, and I felt a kind of symmetry from this.

Another clever guerilla trailer for an ’80s movie in a new context, in the vein of that joke trailer for The Shining that everyone went nuts over last year.

Putting aside the curious matter of James Cameron‘s Battle Angel, which Cameron said last September would be rolling by early ’06 but which he didn’t even briefly mention during an on-stage interview in Santa Barbara the night before last (Monday, 1.6), it’s been revealed in a Business Week piece that Cameron is working on a screenplay called Project 880, which he describes as a piece of “completely crazy, balls-out sci-fi.” If it gets made, Cameron intends it to be a video experience first and a movie second. The article said it would be a “unique interactive experience” that “will be preceded by the opening of a massively multiplayer online RPG √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√É¬Æ a video game in which thousands of Internet-connected players simultaneously interact, compete, and cooperate….before seeing the film at the theater.”

Grizzly Man director Werner Herzog seems to have a knack for encountering (or is it attracting?) a certain odd chaotic energy in Los Angeles. First he came across Joaquin Pheonix in his rolled-over car and helped him get out of the car and get to his feet, only to disappear into the night. Then last week (i.e., apparently within the last few days) he was shot in the lower abdomen with an air rifle pellet while doing a video interview with a BBC Two’s “Culture Show” host Mark Kermode. Here’s Kermode’s video piece. First you see the shooting happen with Herzog flinching in response to the crack of rifle fire and asking Kermode, “What was that?” (Kermode told Slash Film’s Maria Belilovskaya for a story filed on 2.6 that Herzog said “as if it was the most normal thing in the world, ‘Oh, someone is shooting at us. We must go.'”) Later Herzog shows his wound to Kermode’s camera and he’s not only bleeding, and bravely nonchalant about it. “It was not a significant bullet, and I’m not afraid…I’m not afraid of anything,” he tells Kermode. “The poet must not avert his eyes. You have to talk a bold look at your environment, at what is around you…even the decadent things, even the dangerous things. Danger is out there, but so what? I’ve done good battle. I’ve been a good soldier…a good soldier of cinema. And that’s what I want to be.”

The new Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair is on the stands and the cover, shot by fashion guru Tom Ford, features a buck-naked Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson posing with Ford himself. An MSNBC news story says that Johansson’s pear-shaped buttocks are fully viewable in the cover’s fold-out portion. Angelina Jolie is reportedly also bare-assed in the issue, posing in a bathtub. Here’s a B-roll video of the photo shoot, which happened Nov. 11 in Manhattan.

Anthony Breznican‘s 2.6 piece in USA Today says that Kevin Smith‘s Clerks II, which will hit theatres in the fall, “is so audaciously raunchy — one scene is sure to challenge the squeamishness of even the most ardent gross-out comedy fan — that Smith says the film may ultimately make its debut unrated, even if that restricts its availability at some theaters.” He quotes Smith as saying that “in terms of the edginess of the humor, I don’t think we’ve ever gone this far before. People who are really critical of us and dismiss us for making (dirty-joke) pictures: They’re right, they’re not wrong. But at the same time, that’s not all we do.”

I wrote a column last July complaining about Fox Home Video having failed to put out a DVD of Lamont Johnson‘s near-great, largely unsung The Last American Hero, a moonshine-smuggling and race-car movie with Jeff Bridges, out on DVD. And now, almost seven months later, Fox Home Video has put it out on DVD. Pauline Kael loved this film, and Johnson (whom I called last summer) is alive and well and with a lot of stories to tell, so of course, naturally, FHV has put out a bare-bones DVD without any kind of making-of doc or a commentary track from Johnson or Bridges. (I told Bridges about the release of the Hero DVD last weekend prior to the screening of the Harry Nilsson doc, and he didn’t even know about it.) The Last American Hero “was the only high-velocity ’70s redneck film that was any good, and it wasn’t even a redneck film,” I wrote on 7.15. “It was a scrappy piece of backwoods Americana about a young guy on the wrong side of the law who went on to become a famous stock-car racer, a movie that was actually loved by critics and was also an unfortunate financial disaster. For me, this is the super-daddy of redneck movies, the one that got it right with unaffected realism and a kind of dignity by not dealing in the usual cliches and showing respect for its characters, and by being intelligent and tough and vivid with fine acting. Hero was loosely based on Tom Wolfe’s legendary 1965 Esquire article about one-time moonshine smuggler and stock-car racer Junior Johnson. Wolfe’s piece was called “The Last American Hero is Junior Johnson. Yes!” As movies steeped in rural southern culture go, The Last American Hero had roughly the same levels of honesty and sincerity as Coal Miner’s Daughter, which came out in 1980.” Read the Wolfe article, and please, please buy or rent the DVD. (I’m more than a little surprised that none of the leading DVD sites and columnists are even mentioning it, much less reviewing or recommending it. The New York Times‘ usually on-top-of-it DVD columnist Dave Kehr has ignored it entirely, or did in today’s column at least. And you can’t even find the Hero DVD when you do a search on www.dvdtalk.com)

I’ve been a Crash fan all along, but I was impressed and taken aback, even, at how incisively New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, writing in a reader q & a column, has explained why the Academy loves this film as much as they do. “First, Los Angeles, where most of Academy members live, is a profoundly segregated city,” she writes, “so any movie that makes it seem like its white, black, Asian and Latino inhabitants are constantly tripping over one another has appeal. If nothing else it makes Los Angeles seem as cosmopolitan as, well, New York or at least the Upper West Side. Second, no matter how many times the camera picks out Oprah Winfrey on Oscar night, the Academy is super white. Third, the Academy is, at least in general terms, socially liberal. You see where I’m going, right? What could better soothe the troubled brow of the Academy’s collective white conscious than a movie that says sometimes black men really are muggers (so don’t worry if you engage in racial profiling); your Latina maid really, really loves you (so don’t worry about paying her less than minimum wage); even white racists (even white racist cops) can love their black brothers or at least their hot black sisters; and all answers are basically simple, so don’t even think about politics, policy, the lingering effects of Proposition 13 and Governor Arnold. This is a consummate Hollywood fantasy, no matter how nominally independent the financing and release. I also think it helped the film’s cause that its distributor sent out more than 130,000 DVD’s to the industry, insuring easy viewing.”

Here’s another Dargis riff (from the same column) that got to me, this time about why she likes Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain: “I’ve almost always liked Ledger, but I didn’t think he had anything going on as an actor until Monster’s Ball. But while he was amazing for the 10 seconds he was in that film, I wasn’t prepared for Brokeback, where he creates a world of pain with a tight mouth and a body so terribly self-contained it’s a wonder he can wrap his arms around another person. But here’s the thing — and this is the part that’s hard to explain √¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬ¨- I don’t just admire the performance on the level of craft, I am also deeply moved by it, just as I am by the film.”

Two days ago (on Sunday, 2.5), Variety posted a Nicole LaPorte piece that went after internet news and gossip sites (she named Defamer, David Poland‘s Movie City News, MediaBistro.com’s “FishBowlLA” and Zap2It.com) running unconfirmed, un-fact-checked, apparently untrue scuttlebutt about two alleged developments — (a) Universal’s Stacey Snider looking to bail on her job and take a top post at Paramount, with Par’s president Gail Berman getting whacked to make room for her, and (b) ICM and Endeavor looking to merge. Poland’s response has been to note that LaPorte’s story “fails to report the many times that Movie City News has scooped Variety while falsely associating MCN standards [in her piece] with those of self-labeled gossip site Defamer” and to note that despite the touting fact-checking she “failed to contact [MCN] before making self-serving proclamations.” Anyway, that happened last weekend and yesterday. And now here’s another good retort by MCN’s “The Reeler.”

Since taking over Paramount Pictures last year, Brad Grey has cemented a reputation as the Maximilien Robespierre of studio chiefs — a guy who’s a lot better at chopping off heads and creating an atmosphere of terror than bringing about the kind of inspired changes that might lead to the bolstering of Paramount’s stock through the making of really superb films. The whispered verdict around town is that Grey is (I need to put this delicately) (a) a lightweight , (b) out of his depth, and (c) not a man of commanding insight, vision or wisdom as far as the basic building blocks are concerned. Here’s a Sunday (2.5) Laura Holson N.Y. Times piece that seems to recognize what people are saying and what may be going on in Grey’s head, but at the same time seems to equivocate here and there.