It’s not lead actress Zhang Ziyi but supporting actress Gong Li who’s the sensation in Memoirs of a Geisha, or so I’ve been told…

Hmmm….a moderately interesting piece by the N.Y. Times‘ Sharon Waxman about a recent visit to the set of Paul Weitz’s American Dreamz, a $19 million political satire that will stick it to Team Bush. My first thought was that the film could date very quickly, depending on what happens in the news…but maybe not. Dennis Quaid is playing a “clueless, if good-hearted head of state named Staton…Marcia Gay Harden plays his Laura-like wife who calls him ‘Poopie’…Willem Dafoe, a senior presidential adviser of the Karl Rove kind, gives the president ‘happy pills’ and fits him with an earpiece…Hugh Grant stars as the gratuitously nasty host of a popular television singing contest called ‘American Dreamz.’ And a novice actor, Sam Golzari, plays Omer, a suicide bomber with a penchant for American show tunes.” Weitz tells Waxman, “If people don’t have anything to say about [this film], it will be really disappointing.” Get it out soon, fellas!

The L.A. Times‘ Claudia Eller and John Horn are now saying that studio execs are admitting that last summer’s slump was mostly about cruddy movies, and probably wasn’t a harbinger of a permanent downturn in theatrical revenues. The reason for this sudden candor is that Hollywood has just experienced four punchy weeks at the box-office (grosses 17% higher than what they were last year from Labor Day to last weekend) due to the popularity of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Transporter 2, Flightplan and Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. To which I say again — it’s the admissions, stupid. The number of people going out to movies has been steadily declining for the last few years. It’s great to have had a robust four weeks, but it now costs $10.75 to buy a ticket at the Grove…hello?

In all the coverage of Sony Pictures refusing to distribute Albert Brooks’ Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, no one has noted the obvious, which is that the title makes it sound like a documentary. We all know Brooks to be a hip and shrewd comic, but doesn’t the movie also sound a tiny bit…what’s the word I’m searching for? Cornball? A little dopey? How sharp and live-wire does anyone expect Muslim humor to be? Isn’t Muslim culture patriarchal and redneck-y and disparaging of women, etc.? I should just shut up and wait to see it, right? Warner Independent has stepped in as the distributor.

I love this line from a review of Capote by Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman, in which he examines the final beat in the relationship between Truman Capote and condemned murderer Perry Smith: “[Philip Seymour] Hoffman
makes Capote’s dissolution a theatrical miracle of devastation. In his final scene with Perry, he’s so conflicted that he does something I’ve never seen on screen: He cries, honestly, and lies at the same time.”

I don’t want to get too excited or lose my mind or anything, but this parody trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is clever as shit, but it also has a dark undercurrent because it perfectly nails the idiot-virus affecting movie advertising attitudes right now. It shows that you can take footage from any drama and lie through your teeth and make it look like a total fluffball movie…and this is what marketing people do all the time, because all they want to do is get people to show up on opening weekend, period. The creators are affiliated with a Manhattan media-advertising outfit called P.S.260.

For a while there, John Stockwell was the director who put soul and character into movies about young people involved in personal struggles and spiritual crises. He did this with crazy/beautiful, about a smart and responsible-minded East L.A. Hispanic teenager who falls for Kirsten Dunst’s alcoholic, self-destructive rich girl from Pacific Palisades, and then with the under-rated Blue Crush, a beautifully-shot, nicely finessed North Shore surfing movie with Kate Bosworth. But now, suddenly, he’s become the go-to guy for exotic outdoor thrillers starring hot-looking 20-somethings. He’s directed Into the Blue (Sony, 9.30), a throwaway diving-for-treasure-and-finding-thrills movie with Jessica Alba, Paul Walker and Scott Caan. And he’s now down in Brazil shooting Turistas, about “a group of young backpackers whose vacation turns sour when a bus accident leaves them marooned in a remote Brazilian jungle that holds an ominous secret.” And what would that be…pygmy cannibals? The hotbod costars are Melissa George, Josh Duhamel, Olivia Wilde and Desmond Askew…terrific. What happened? Stockwell is not Brett Ratner — he’s Curtis Hanson. But perhaps all is not lost. Stockwell has written a screenplay about a high-stakes gambler for-hire called Chasing the Whale and a thing about a 12 year-old criminal mastermind called Artemis Fowl…cool. All I know is, he’s capable of much more than stuff like Into the Friggin’ Blue.

Oh, and by the way? I had an appointment to meet Scott Caan early last July at a hip hotel on Thompson Street in Soho, the intention being to discuss that above-average film he wrote and directed called Dallas 362…and he disappeared. He wasn’t at the hotel, there was no “sorry” message left with the concierge, and no message was left on my cell phone. That makes him a Man of Honor.

Last week’s tracking figures for In Her Shoes, before last Saturday’s sneak, weren’t that hot — 2% first choice, awareness 55%, and definite interest 23%. (The under-25 female awareness was 66%; over-25 female awareness was 68%.) But the sneak has definitely bumped things up, and today’s tracking says first-choice for Shoes is now at 9%, general awareness 66% and definite interest 32%. The second sneak this weekend will bump things up a bit more and so on until the opening on 10.7. For perspective, Flightplan had a definite interest tally of 44% and 14% first-choice the day before it opened.

You want surreal? Read Laura Holson’s New York Times story about the Universal-buying-DreamWorks negotiations that have fallen apart. Because two recent DreamWorks films — The Island and Just Like Heaven — respectively flopped and underperformed, NBC Universal executives involved in negotations to purchase the live-action filmmaking side of DreamWorks (along with the company’s 60-film library) “lowered their projection of the rate of return for DreamWorks” and therfore lowered their offer from $1.5 billion to $1.4 billion. This still would have handed about $900 million to DreamWorks’ partners and investors (David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, Paul Allen and…?). But because of the $100 million downgrade, Geffen, who was repping DreamWorks in the negotiations, said “forget it” and the deal has gone south. This what living in a fantasy membrane of sloth and corruption comes to…here is a portrait of men and women who are so far off the ground and so swaddled in mink and diamonds they’ve forgotten what it means to stand on the ground, smell the air and look reality in the eye. The DreamWorks library has a solid ascertainable value. The future-tense ability of the DreamWorks production team (including director Steven Spielberg) to bring in tens of millions more in revenue from the movies they might make is a very hazy proposition. The Spielberg brand is worth plenty with average-Joe audiences, but if you ask me the rest of the team isn’t worth a whole lot. 90% of the perceived value of a company’s future output is always about smoke and mirrors and hot air. My advice is for someone to purchase the library and let the DreamWorks apparatus scatter in the winds…break the company into a thousand pieces and let the life process recoagulate somewhere else. Are the DreamWorkers supposed to be some kind of golden-goose crew? Says who? Based on what? Take the needle out of your arm.

We all want to be recognized for our own accomplishments, but it still seems…well, funny that the mini-bio for director-writer Rodrigo Garcia in the Nine Lives press kit doesn’t mention that his dad is novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez(“One Hundred Years of Solitude”).

My advice is to brush aside David Poland’s dissing/dismissing of Tony Scott’s 9.25 N.Y. Times piece about Republican party pro-life talking points in Just Like Heaven, The Exorcism of Emily Rose , and even Michael Bay’s The Island. Libertas, the rightie website affiliated with the Liberty Film Festival, discussed the right-to-life issue in The Island with some enthusiasm last summer, and it seems to me that Scott’s observations about Heaven and Emily Rose are fairly astute, and a long way from wild ravings. To some extent, Hollywood is obviously winking at Bubba Nation with these films.