wired

Just so it’s understood: the zombies in George Romero’s Day of the Dead still slowly shuffle around. They do not do the zombie sprint (i.e., running toward their victims like Olympic athletes) as witnessed in 28 Days Later and the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead. Romero’s zombies are still taking their time because, according to Romero (or rather a Universal publicist who says Romero has said this), zombies are “more spooky” when they’re lumbering rather than running.

You’ve seen Yes and therefore know its refrains;

You’re thus prepared to read Anthony Lane’s

Review of this film by Sally Potter

About sex and verse and feeling hotter.

Read David Poland’s “Hot Blog” comments about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes…just read ’em…very blunt, very hard-nosed, very this-is-what-it-is…a tiny bit wimpy at the very end when he gets “moral” and says no more TomKat reporting, but don’t mind that. The only thing I choked on was his description of how publicist Cindy Guagenti’s handling of the Pitt-Jolie entanglement as “just good, solid publicity management.” Is that what they call lying through your teeth these days?

A very smart and thorough take by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson about the over-35 adult audience, and how they still show up for solid adult-angled movies when the calibrations are right (like they were with Lion’s Gate’s Crash). The piece also observes how the mainstream studios have failed to nurture this audience and in fact have done what they can to systematically alienate them. Good work, guys!

I love it that Lion’s Gate’s Crash, that piercing L.A. drama about racism and criss-crossing fates from director Paul Haggis, has hung in there ($44 million since it opened 5.6 on 1,500 screens) and keeps on chugging. I realize the same thing might not happen with Palm Pictures’ Cronicas (opening 7.8) and also that Sony Classics’ The Beautiful Country (also 7.8) is also facing an uphill ordeal, but I’d sure like to see them both do better than expected.

Besides being a wonderfully inventive remake of James Toback’s Fingers, meaning that it fully honors the Toback while creating its own French-ified fissures and peculiarities, Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Wellspring) has a track that plays over the closing credits that I can’t get out of my head. It’s by The Kills and is called “Monkey 23” and is off their Keep on Your Mean Side album. It’s purchasable for 10 cents at www.allofmp3.com, or you can click on this Randall Pullen link and download it.

Well, at least there’s one thing that works in Bewitched (Columbia, 6.24), and that’s Steve Carrell‘s third-act cameo as Paul Lynde’s “Uncle Arthur.” If only director-cowriter Nora Ephron had decided to weave Carrell into the film as a major character, things might have turned out differently. Lynde played the Uncle Arthur character (as a bitterly witty gay warlock, natch) on the original Bewitched series off and on from ’65 through ’71, and Carrell does Lynde quite well. Known mainly as an off-and-on Daily Show correspondent as well as one of Will Ferrell’s better friends (he previously costarred with Ferrell in Anchorman and Melinda and Melinda), Carrell has an obvious knack for playing acutely hyper alien-visitation characters. He’s the star of Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year-old Virgin (Universal, 8.19) and is currently shooting Little Miss Sunshine. Apparently those reports about him starring as Maxwell Smart in a feature version of Get Smart have some basis in fact.

Two Tom Cruise items have just broken that are going to enrage certain parties. Radar Online is reporting that Cruise made repeated calls and made certain overtures to Scarlett Johansson “weeks” before he began his relationship with Katie Holmes. (Johansson was reported by Upcoming Movies as being firm to costar with Cruise in Mission: Impossible 3 in July ’04.) The item, which quotes Johansson directly and says her publicist didn’t respond to calls or e-mails seeking confirmation, claims Johansson not only declined Cruise’s offer of a Scientology-fortified relationship, but that Cruise then made similar relationship pitches to Kate Bosworth (22) and Lindsay Lohan (18) “before settling on the 26-year-old Holmes.” The other item is from N.Y. Daily News gossip columnist Ben Widdicombe(i.e., “Gatecrasher”), and it says the following: “So here’s what I’m hearing about that relationship. A source VERY close to the deal is saying there’s a contract. It’s worth $5 million. It’s for five years. There will be no sex. The deal was sealed June 7. That’s what I’m hearing.” Hold on…only $5 million for five years? If I were repping Katie I would insist on at least $2.5 million per year (more?) with all kinds of extras and stock options and you-name-it.

I’m a little slow at times and maybe that’s why I’m not quite loving this first-anywhere gallery of Elizabethtown cast photos that just appeared on the film’s official site. If Cameron Crowe’s film is anything like the script (which I’ve read), Elizabethtown (Paramount, 10.14) will be a well-honed, colorfully layered story of romantic restoration on top of a quietly penetrating family ensemble piece. The idea behind these photos — a series of portraits of the principal actors in character (Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, Susan Sarandon, Bruce McGill, Alec Baldwin, et. al.) — is to say, “Hi, guys…we’ve got a really nice ensemble piece here.” What I’m saying is, if you’re giving people some visual first impressions of a film, shouldn’t you be trying to convey the emotional angles, the penetrating points, the underlying mood or tone…and not just a bunch of, you know, class photos?

That allegedly first-hand description in the Star of Angelina Jolie sounding like a “wounded animal, like someone being killed” during a gymnastic whatever during their stay at the Alfajari Villas beach resort in Kenya…man, I love that, and I don’t care if I read it first on Defamer. Item says the security guys became concerned, “grabbed their weapons,” rushed to Pitt and Jolie’s suite and “hammered furiously on the door with their clubs.” The screams suddenly stopped and a guy’s voice said, “Everything is cool guys. You can leave — we’re okay.”

James Cameron has been futzing around with this and that project and not really doing anything feature-wise for so long (what’s it been, seven and a half years since Titanic came out?) that you really can’t pay attention to stories about his latest movie-to-be…I mean, this stuff is just in one ear & out the other. Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson and reporter Sheigh Crabtree have written that Cameron’s next film will not be Battle Angel, a pic based on Yukito Kishiro’s Japanese graphic novels about a “nymphette” who morphs into an action heroine, but another film called Project 880. No one at Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment is saying anything about what Project 880 is…and I’m not sure anyone cares. Cameron has stayed behind-the-scenes for so long he’s become The Man Who Can’t Pull the Trigger — a guy whose whole deal (apart from the TV projects and the underwater IMAX docs) is to prepare, research and develop movies to death, but never quite get around to making or releasing them. Thompson says that when and if Cameron makes either Project 880 or Battle Angel, both films would be shot in 3-D with custom-designed high-definition cameras. Well, whoop-dee-doo.

N.Y. Daily News columnist George Rush ran a lead item today about the Russell Crowe/Cinderella Man meltdown in today’s “Daily Dish” column…fine. (Especially since he quoted yours truly.) But in looking at how off-screen movie star shenanigans may be affecting box-office performance, Caryn James has summed up the whole celebrity-feedbag phenomenon rather nicely in today’s New York Times. She’s saying movies are no longer about the purity of the moviegoing experience — the tabloid-gossip crap is feeding into the watching of movies and vice versa. “For the average viewer in this celebrity-crazed culture, the hype and buzz are simply part of the baggage we carry into the theater along with the popcorn and the smuggled cans of soda,” she writes. “Whether Brad Pitt and Russell Crowe are playing characters in films, playing themselves on talk shows or are caught by paparazzi at unsuspecting moments, their fictional and nonfictional roles blend into one huge performance piece that affects how we watch their films, now more than at any time since the star-making business began.” This also: “Eons ago, when movie studios could fiercely control stars’ images, there was no Smoking Gun Web site to offer instant access to their arrest reports, no computers or camera-phones to spread unglamorous images. Now the media overload creates an ambient noise around movies, a sound so pervasive that even people who don’t pay attention absorb it.” In such a hot-house atmosphere, it is no stretch to acknowledge that Crowe’s real-life phone-tossing “hasn’t benefitted” Cinderella Man. It was more damaging than that, if you ask me.