It sure is heartening news that Eileen Newman has been named as the new exec director of the National Board of Review, following reports by Fox 411’s Roger Friedman of internal dissent and discord. Is this supposed to signify that the NBR’s annual awards (which are always the first out of the gate) might one day be considered as something more than a mild news snort, an anecdotal diversion…a joke?

For no reason other than a strong belief that all remnants of Danny Kaye should stay buried six feet under, last summer’s news about Owen Wilson planning to star in a new version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty seemed like a dreadful prospect. Which is why yesterday’s Reuters report that the Mitty project has gone into turnaround feels like a very good thing. Mark Waters (Just Like Heaven, Mean Girls) was to have directed; the screenwriter is/was Richard LaGravanese (The Horse Whisperer). The inability to find an actress to fill the Virginia Mayo role “seems to have been the main reason for the project’s collapse,” said one report…although Scarlett Johansson had been mentioned as a lead contender, blah, blah. Doesn’t matter — dead is (hopefully…please!) dead.

The latest Lewbowski Fest happened in NYC about ten days ago, on 10.20 and 10.21, and it just hit me: why was there no documentary about this home-grown phenomenon on the just-out The Big Lebowski Universal Home Video DVD (released 10.18)? They issued two different special editions (a regular-regular and an “achiever’s” edition, which cost $34 and change) and obviously spent a good amount of coin promoting them, but they couldn’t cut together a short piece about the Lebowski fans? Will Russell and Scott Shuffitt have been putting on Lebowskifests since ’02, and they’re obviously genuine and repeating. Fox Home Video’s Rocky Horror Picture Show special edition DVD (released in 2000) included a special feature about the fans showing up at midnight screenings, etc. When I ran my Lebowski Fest piece last March I reported there were three hand-made docs being assembled. One by a couple named Robin and Rose Roman. Another by a guy named John Nee, who has an outfit called Idiot Works and who also works for Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production company. And a third Lebowski Fest doc called “Over the Line,” which was said by its maker, Eddie Chung, to be in post-production at the time. Universal Home Video couldn’t get in touch with these people and use their footage to throw together a little short? As Walter would say, “Kinda derelict, dude.”

I do believe in ghosts….I do believe in ghosts…I do, I do, I do, I do…I do believe in ghosts and always have, I swear. And be sure to click on the spooky audio slide show that accompanies this very ghostly story…sitting right there on the left margin.

Bob Berney’s Picturehouse Films has shelled out $3.75 million to be the distributor of Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, a feature based on Garrison Keillor’s radio show. Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Tommy Lee Jones, Virginia Madsen, Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly costar. Berney caught the film at a distributor screening in Manhattan last Thursday. (Another screening happened Friday in L.A.) Variety‘s Ian Mohr reports there was a bidding war, hence the nearly four million dollar fee. An impression was passed along by a couple of set-visit articles that Paul Thomas Anderson informally co-directed Prairie Home Companion, as a favor to Altman having to do with insurance issues. Berney told Mohr that the almost-certainly- folksy film would come out between April and June, and that he would sell it in part to “people who don’t go to every movie but will come out if they find something — the underserved older audience.”

Here’s that snarky 50 Cent toon off Zipperfish…finally found the link. Very funny stuff. I’ll leave it to 50 Cent fans to determine how accurate and/or well researched.

Wow, did you read that undeniably dispiriting excerpt from Maureen Dowd’s forthcoming book in Sunday’s New York Times (“What’s a Modern Girl To Do?”). The book is called “Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), and the subject is how today’s younger women have totally shunned feminism and have reverted back to a 1950s sensibility — catching a man, being demure, letting him pay and going shopping, etc. The subtext, of course, is basically Dowd’s coming to terms with the probable fact that she’s too intimidating to attract a suitably high-powered guy and keep him (i.e., persuade him to propose getting married), and that being a strong, whip-smart professional of a certain age, she’s more or less doomed to live a single life and that’s that. And that feminism has led her to this place and she’s not especially happy about this, and may in fact be livid. I love this photo of Dowd, taken recently at Manhattan’s Bar Centrale, that illustrates the piece on the main page. Here’s a montage assembled from photos I took of Dowd plugging her Bush-bashing book at L.A.’s Skirball Center in September 2004. She’s a very sexy and vivacious woman, but she’s not what you’d call a confessional type and she’s extremely mindful of power dynamics and political equilibriums. (Naturally, being who she is and who she writes for.) Notice that discerning, cold-blooded look she has in the lower-left photo of the montage? Imagine getting that look in her bedroom at four in the morning.

Look at the photo of the bearded, bug-eyed guy wearing a flannel shirt on this Yahoo news site page, and answer the following question honestly. We all need to try and look within, to always try to empathize with what the other guy is going through, etc., but that aside and solely on a visual first-impression basis, does the look in this guy’s eyes freak you out? Just a tiny bit? Does he seem in any way, shape or form like the same guy who stuck a gun in his mouth in that phony mobile beach home in Lethal Weapon 18 years ago? (That freaks me out also…18 years ago?) There’s no question that Mel Gibson, who’s about to start directing Apocalypto in the jungles of Mexico near Veracruz, has gone from being on his own philosphical-religious trip to physically being someone else. That white streak in his beard…! He looks a little bit like abolitionist John Brown, or like some hills-of-Tennessee preacher in a 1930s period film directed by Michael Apted. He’s become very brawny looking in a backwoods, cut-your-own-fire- wood, have-sex-with-your-own-sheep “baaaah!” kind of way. I guess what I’m saying it that he looks completely gone and over- the-hill.

Jim Choma’s Florida-based Zipperfish site doesn’t have an onsite search engine, but a week or so ago there was an inspired animated riff about 50 Cent and Get Rich or Die Tryin’…and now I can’t find it and link to it. Very sharp stuff. Tell you what…watch this thing…a Zipperfish video clip of a newswoman having a Freudian slip moment. Choma (a.k.a. “Walrus”) has a Friday night live-radio talk show on his site, which inspired me to get in touch. Choma then turned me on to Jeff Beard, a tech guy who lives in the same Florida town, and now Beard is helping me launch “Elsewhere Live.”

Many thanks to the Toronto Star‘s esteemed movie critic and essayist Peter Howell for giving my upcoming internet radio show, “Elsewhere Live,” a mention in yesterday’s (Friday, 10.28) column. That said, I have no choice but to post a slight correction. “Elsewhere Live” — an easily thing to listen to as long as you have Winamp and follow the instructions — will begin on this site on Sunday, 11.20, and not tomorrow night, or Sunday the 30th, as promised by Peter’s item. (I mentioned the 11.20 date in a Wired item posted a couple of days ago.) I could start broadcasting as soon as tomorrow night, but I want to get the bugs out of the system first. Thanks again to Mr. Howell for the support.

The trailer for Ben Younger’s Prime (Universal, opening today) told you the film would be sitcommy and Nora Ephronish. And the trailer guys lied. (Big surprise!) They sold the set-up — Jewish middle-aged Manhattan therapist (Meryl Streep) realizes that the much younger man that her 37 year-old patient (Uma Thurman) is having an affair with is her 23 year-old son (Bryan Greenberg) — and, of course, ignored what the film is. Prime is, okay, slightly contrived but also an engaging, not boring, socially acute, well-performed New York adult romantic comedy. The issues are not just the difficulties in a hot love affair between a woman nudging 40 and a guy just out of college, but more fundamentally the difficulties in selling a possible long-term relationship with an older blonde shiksa to the younger man’s New York Jewish family. Craft-wise and in terms of the art of hitting the right emotional note in just the right way, Prime isn’t quite on the level of In Her Shoes, but it’s smart, fairly observant and open-hearted…not half bad. Streep is deliciously funny in some scenes, down-to-it earthy and solemn in others — she’s reason alone to see this thing. Thurman delivers a prickly, particular, up-and-down emotional portrait of a recognizably willful New York woman. And Greenberg is pretty good. (My problem is that if I were a woman or gay, he wouldn’t be my type…plus he doesn’t look like the son of Streep and John Rothman, who plays his dad.) I was more than a little surprised by this thing. Pay no mind to what some of those prick critics on Rotten Tomatoes are saying. The only thing I really didn’t care for is the ending — if Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins can make it work, why not others? It’s been five years since Younger’s last film, Boiler Room…where’s he been?

Get ready for “Elsewhere Live,” a twice-weekly live-internet-radio talk show with telephone call-ins and all kinds of blah-dee-blah from yours truly. It’ll start on Sunday, 11.20, and run also on Thursday evening (let’s say at 10 pm EST, 7 pm Pacific). We’re not talking about some Podcast bullshit (although the radio broadcasts will be archived and downloadable). We’re talking about something new here…real throbbing internet radio that you can listen to “live” and call in to, just like any regular-ass radio talk show. And I won’t have screeners!