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My God, this is it…it’s here…Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim Word, which will hit theatres in January…oh my God, I can’t stand it…all that lovely brown skin, all those thick accents, those awful Ali Baba shoes, that lovely Iranian/Pakistani/what- ever olive-skinned woman whom Brooks hires, etc.

I know you’re not supposed to ask this and I’m sorry for the sudden loss of producer and Blake Edwards colleague Tony Adams, whom I interviewed in ’81 or thereabouts about one of the Edwards’ films…10 or S.O.B., I forget which…but who dies of a stroke at 52? What happened to the poor guy? How come obits never fill in the blanks?

Speaking of the recently and sadly deceased, filmmaker Jacob Rosenberg has forwarded a link to a short film he made called Bleach that co-starred Charles Rocket, who killed himself in Connecticut earlier this month. A very good guy who ran into a bad patch.

In the mid ’50s, before CinemaScope lenses were perfected, everything and everyone looked horizontally distorted. The joke was that actors had the “CinemaScope mumps.” But on widescreen TVs today — in bars, people’s living rooms, electronic media showrooms — the distortion is easily double what the CinemaScope mumps syndrome delivered, and nobody blinks an eye. Across- the-board high-def widescreen TV is being promised by Direct TV and Comcast, etc., but the vast majority of broadcast images are still standard-sized (aspect ratio of 4 x 3, meant to fit your mom and pop’s TV)…and yet!…the idiots who own widescreen TVs are showing everything at the 16 x 9 ratio because they want to get their money’s worth — i.e., I bought a widescreen TV, I want to see widescreen TV! Filling up your 16 x 9 TV screen (like what…a gas tank?) is the single most cretinous visual vogue afoot in today’s digital-entertainment universe, and there are hundreds of millions of widescreen TVs that are beaming this idiocy right now…horizontally bloated newscasters on ESPN, vaguely egg-shaped basketballs…the proportion of every last object pulled sideways like Turkish taffy. I’m saying this not because it’s new, but because widescreen TV bloat has become the dominant visual mode by which tens of millions absorb TV images, and I resent this moronic aesthetic being so ubiquitous in our culture.

Claire Simpson’s editing of The Constant Gardener is a kind of rhapsodic visual dance, and obviously fully deserving of an Oscar nom. It’s hard to define the difference between oppressively heebie-jeebie, ants-in-your-pants film editing..the kind that makes you grit your teeth and makes you feel like you’re swatting invisible flies (like the cutting of the action sequences in Paul Greengraass’s The Bourne Supremacy), and what Simpson and director Fernando Meirelles achieve in Gardener. But one sings and the other doesn’t, and, according to this piece by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Sheigh Crabtree, admiration for Simpson’s editing has been voiced repeatedly by her peers.

Responses to The Producers (Universal, 12.15) from a couple of readers who’ve gotten in touch have been underwhelming, but reaction among regular folks at research screenings, I’m told, has been fairly ecstatic. The guys who didn’t like it told me the same thing…people were clapping at the end of each song and having a blast. It’s okay to have a good time with broad, brassy obvious entertainments. I guess the only ones who are likely to have problems with this film are…let’s fill in the blank later.

The IFP is getting an early start on things by announcing its nominations for the 15th Annual Gotham Awards, which will be handed out on 11.30 in New York City. It’s a nice inclusionary gesture to nominate Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane and Miranda July’s You and Me and Everyone We Know as competitors with Brokeback Mountain, Capote and A History of Violence for Best Feature. Ditto Michael Almereyda’s William Eggleston in the Real World against Ballet Russes, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man and Henry-Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro’s Murderball.

Just to be clear, I don’t hate March of the Penguins. It’s a fairly soulful and well-made film. What I don’t like…what I couldn’t stand as I saw the French-language version..was the tediousness of all that trekking across the frozen wastelands, and all the sitting around. If I were a penguin I would end it all. I would jump into the water in hopes of being eaten by a killer whale. George Clooney knows what I’m talking about.

Variety‘s Justin Chang is calling Gore Verbinksi’s The Weather Man (Paramount, 10.28) “one of the biggest downers to emerge from a major studio in recent memory…an overbearingly glum look at a Chicago celebrity combing through the emotional wreckage of his life.” This view has been understood by Paramount for some time, and is one reason why they put off opening it earlier this year. (The theory apparently being that gloomy films play better in the fall.) “Aiming for an Alexander Payne-style synthesis of wry comedy and unflinching character study,” Chang continues, “pic has been made with the utmost sincerity, but the frankly lugubrious material and barely compensating spasms of humor are all but impossible to warm to, spelling an uncertain B.O. forecast for Paramount.” I saw The Weather Man several months ago and I’m afraid I agree. It’s one of the most grossly depressing films I’ve ever endured. It’s right up there (or down there) with Peter Brook’s black-and-white King Lear (’71) with Paul Scofield. And Nic Cage’s sad-sack weather man is one of the most intensely dislikable characters I’ve ever reluctantly spent time with in a screening room. His hair style alone is enough to ruin your evening.

Funny The Legend of Zorro review by Variety‘s Brian Lowry…but how is it that I knew this period actioner would be “bigger, louder and considerably less charming than its predecessor” before reading Lowry or anyone else? I must be gifted with a sixth sense. The Martin Campbell-directed sequel (Columbia, 10.28) “gets by mostly on dazzling stunt work and the pleasure of seeing its dashing and glamorous leads back in cape and gown,” says Lowry. “But the firm hand [Campbell] exhibited on the first go-round is shakier here, as the opening hour flits all over and hits some curiously flat patches. Only in the second half does the movie settle in a bit. A quartet of writers contributed to the script, and it certainly has the feel of work by committee. And while there are again welcome moments of humor, some are pitched so broadly it’s easy to wonder if this is supposed to be a sequel to Zorro or Blazing Saddles.”

What a bummer year for George Clooney…seriously. I was thinking about this from time to time last weekend. Head pain, thoughts of suicide, short-term memory loss, and then his dog was killed by a rattlesnake…Jesus. It started with Clooney filming a scene in Syriana (Warner Bros., 11.23) in which he “was taped to a chair and getting beaten up and we did quite a few takes. The chair was kicked over and I hit my head. I tore my dura, which is the wrap around my spine which holds in spinal fluid. But it’s not my back, it’s my brain. I basically bruised my brain. It’s bouncing around my head because it’s not supported by the spinal fluid.” The scene in which Clooney’s chair is kicked over will presumably be in Stephen Gaghan’s film. (Jeffrey Hunter’s eye was damaged from flying sand during the filming of an Omaha Beach combat scene in The Longest Day, and the moment of injury stayed in the film.) Hey, shouldn’t WB be showing Syriana now? It’s less than four weeks away.

Performances that stay with you. Cinematography (by Roger Deakins) to die for. Waiting for Godot in the sand. All geared up and cranked up and no one to shoot. The hip journos — the ones I’ve spoken to who are sharp and fair-minded enough to get the unique character of it, not to mention the sublime quality of presentation — are liking and admiring Sam Mendes’ Jarhead (Universal, 11.4).