Great news! After weeks and weeks of waiting and loads of political horseshit, it’s finally being announced that Clive Owen is committed to playing the lead role in Michael Davis’s Shoot ‘Em Up, a very hip-funny absurdist urban actioner fron New Line that will start shooting in January ’06. This is an excellent move on Owen’s part, and a major score for Davis. Anyone who doesn’t remember the 3.2.05 piece I wrote about Davis and Shoot “Em up, here it is.

The white-faced freak has walked…hooray for the white-faced freak. Celebrity wins! Paving the way for more friendships with boys, more “hand-holding,” more Jesus juice, etc.

Wanna know why Mr.and Mrs. Smith did as well as it did last weekend? Read this story by Maureen Story in today’s New York Times (“Forget About Milk and Bread. Give Me Gossip!”) I will say no more. Just read it. Remember how everyone was saying after 9/11 that the country and the culture will never be quite so frivolous again as it was before that tragedy?

Don’t you just love the American public? More specifically, the moviegoers (let’s just say it — those really deep women out there who read the tabs and are total fools for the Brangelina mythology) who just had to see the thoroughly rancid Mr. and Mrs. Smith to the tune of $51.1 million last weekend, and thereby rewarded director Doug Liman and stars Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie for making the biggest piece of shit of their careers?? (Variety said that “boosting Smith were older femme adults, who don’t usually turn out for actioners but do read the celeb weeklies and watch tabloid TV chronicling the are-they-or-aren’t-they star pairing.”) Let’s just be happy that the Smith success makes it that much easier for the next grossly expensive big-studio piece of shit to get greenlit. And also that all of those wise and perceptive American moviegoers (most of them under 35, I’m guessing) also decided to blow off Cinderella Man last weekend (it was down 48% from the previous weekend). The story of Jim Braddock is basically a corpse now, just waiting to get picked up and carried out of theatres because so many millions of American moviegoers didn’t show up over…what? Russell Crowe’s phone-throwing episode? Because Ron Howard’s boxing film is too quality-skewed to compete in the mindless summer season? Because Univeral didn’t push the family angle heavily enough in the ads? A good movie is a good movie, darnitall, and every indication is that those who’ve seen Cinderellla Man really like and speak well of it. It just doesn’t add up that a movie as worthy and emotionally effective as this one would just stumble and run out of gas like this.

Russell Crowe’s career as an A-list star — i.e., a guy who gets the $15 million-or-higher fees and a first-look at the best scripts — is on the ropes. Despite his latest film Cinderella Man having gotten a 99% favorable CinemaScore grade last weekend, which means it has fantastic word-of-mouth behind it, Crowe’s recent telephone-throwing incident has so turned people off, it appears, that they’re pulling away from the 1930s boxing flick. How else to explain the fact that last night’s Cinderella Man earnings (for Friday, 6.10) of $2,848,000 were down over 50% from last Friday (6.3), when the Ron Howard film took in $5,905,225 on opening day? (Last weekend’s total was a less-than-expected $18.3 million.) What other possible reason could there be for a first-rate, very well-liked film dropping this heavily on its sophomore session? On the day of the Mercer Hotel phone-throwing incident a journalist wrote and said, “There goes [Crowe’s] Oscar nomination.” Now that Crowe has single-handedly turned Cinderella Man into a financial disappointment, it’s hard to avoid a suspicion that his ability to demand the big bucks may be in great peril. Hollywood hardballers are going to look at what happened this weekend and draw some very blunt conclusions. Then again, he is Russell Crowe, a great actor and a guy who can bring real gravitas and authority to a part. But if audiences are going to look at his films when they open and say, “Screw it, I don’t want to pay to see that thug” — like they apparently did this weekend — then he’s going to be making a lot less and he won’t be as much in the running for the best parts, and that means Crowe will probably be attending the IFP Spirit Awards next February and trying out his new indie cred.

Yesterday’s tracking figures on War of the Worlds (Paramount, 6.29) are through the roof — awareness is over 90% and definite interest is over 50%. For a movie that’s two and a half weeks from opening, this indicates something really big about to happen. This is almost Star Wars-level. Who knows? The Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise collaboration could do $90 to $100 million in five days time.

Thanks to the good, gracious and supportive readers who’ve tossed me some loose change over the past three or four days, in response to my request for help (see upper left ad box) in getting through a proverbial bad patch. For those of you who can’t pitch in, don’t sweat it…your steady readership is what really counts. For those thinking of doing so …well, whenever and whatever. But thanks again to everyone.

The fanboy community freaked last week when 20th Century Fox announced their decision to hire Breet Ratner to direct X-Men 3. Ratner will of course degrade the franchise. Not in any thuddingly obvious way but in a hundred little ways. One of these is his decision to add more laughs. “Not jokes for the sake of jokes,” Ratner said in a recent interview, but “jokes that come from character humor, that come from characters and that come from the situations.” This sounds to me like a guy saying he doesn’t entirely get (much less get off on) the X-Men mythology or metaphor, and that he’s a tiny bit bored by it so why not throw in some more gags? As Red Dragon was to Silence of the Lambs, X-Men 3…we know how this sentence ends, dont we? X-Men 3 will begin shooting in Vancouver in mid-August.

Did I miss the news about Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Esrada finding a U.S. distributor, or are Jones and his producer Michael Fitzgerald still hunting around for the right match? The latter, apparently…but shouldn’t this obviously worthy drama (several reviewers in Cannes called it a great Sam Peckinpah film) have found a distributor by now? It’s a fairly safe bet it’ll be an award nominee (Jones took the Best Actor prize in Cannes, on top of Guillermo Arriaga winning for Best Screenplay) if it comes out in October or November. It’s probably the usual-usual (producers asking for more money than distribs feel it’s worth, etc.) but if anyone knows anything solid, please get in touch.

There are two things that scare me just a little bit about the upcoming movie version of Rent (Columbia, 11.11), the phenomenal mid ’90s Broadway musical that was based on Puccini’s “La Boheme.” The first is that Joe Roth’s Revolution Pictures produced. Roth has shown such lousy instincts and has built such a terrible track record that the word “Revolution” is, in a Hollywoood context, pretty much synonymous with stinker. The second concern is that Rent was directed by Chris Columbus, a nice-enough guy who likes to sentimentalize and sugar-coat everything he shoots. If there’s a way to overly-sanitize and prettify and otherwise screw up a musical as good and vibrant as Rent, Roth and Columbus are just the guys to manage it. That said, the Rent trailer is awfully good. It’s mainly the cast (Rosario Dawson, Adam Pascal, Taye Diggs, Idina Menzel, Jesse L. Martin, Wilson Jermaine Heredia) singing the beautiful “Seasons of Love” as we’re given a standard montage of sad-joyful scene clips and a slight taste of the sad-joyful storyline. Even with Columbus behind the camera, it made me wonder — it planted the idea in my head — that this might be as good as Milos Forman’s Hair. If nothing else it reminded me what a good song “Seasons” is.

I’ve dipped into this twice now, but that item I ran last Thursday (6.2) about Paramount’s not wanting to green-light Mission: Impossible 3 unless Tom Cruise agreed to scale back his 30% gross revenue deal has been verified by a report in today’s (6.8) Los Angeles Times saying that the film is now set to go and what put it back on track was Cruise’s willingness to take “a major pay cut, giving up what could amount to tens of millions of dollars.” Cruise agreed to take 22.5% of the gross instead…big concession! Reports
have said that Paramount chief Brad Grey has haggling with Cruise for the last week over this matter. I ran an assertion last Thursday from a connected insider saying the M:I3budget was nearing $180 million, and now the Times story has said that Paramount insiders are placing the figure at $185 million. The film will start shooting in mid July and hit theatres next summer.

When I wrote about Russell Crowe’s phone-throwing altercation a couple of days ago I suggested that the hotel employee who got hit by the phone might have been giving Mr. Fistbiscuit an attitude of some kind. I was being sincere, and I read a statement from Crowe’s rep that the hotel guy was being a bit of a dick. Then I said that “the hotel employee obviously didn’t understand the golden rule when dealing with celebrities, which is ‘don’t fuck with the Gods!’ I say get those hotel employee wankers…get ’em!” Some people wrote in and said, “Are you siding with Crowe on this? I like to see how you feel when you get hit by a flying phone,” etc. I realize my sense of humor can be a bit dry at times. I was trying to make fun of what I suspect might be a self-image or attitude that Crowe embraces.