I ask again — if there are any committed people out there who genuinely love and care about movies and can actually put words and sentences together so it all fits together in a smooth and compelling fashion…who actually care enough about writing to scrupulously edit themselves so their work can stand up alongside the work of serious pros….if there is anyone out there, man or woman, young or old, who wants to pen a Hollywood Elsewhere column and not quit or take some other gig after three or four weeks, unlike certain parties I could mention…if there’s anyone who really wants to do this, shoot me an e-mail with two or three writing samples attached and we’ll talk. But please don’t get in touch if you’re not hard-core. And if you don’t know what I mean by this, that’s a very clear indication that you’re not the right person.

I’m truly surprised there are some critics out there trashing or pooh-poohing Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins (Warner Bros., 6.15), by far the smartest, best constructed, most adult-minded Batman film ever. And I’m genuinely stunned by Richard Schickel’s suggestion in his Time review that while Nolan’s effort “is not dishonorable…what it needs, and doesn’t have, is a Joker in the deck — some antic human antimatter to give it the giddy lift of perversity that a bunch of impersonal explosions, no matter how well managed, can’t supply.” The lack of a colorfully over-the-top villain is, for me, precisely one of the very soothing and satisfying things about Batman Begins. The decades-long tradition of flamboyantly-mannered actors (a la Jack Nicholson, Chris Walken, Gene Hackman, Jim Carrey, et. al.) playing ultra-flamboyant baddies in comic-book superhero movies has become stupefying. Finally…finally!…we’ve been spared this tedium by a director trying to re-do things with cleverness and flair (Nolan and co-writer David S. Goyer are obviously just as sick of this as I am), and how does Schickel respond? He writes, “Where’s the stupefying cliche role? I miss it!”

I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that Anne Bancroft, who died Monday at age 73, was only 35 when she played the part of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate when it was being made in early ’67. Only six years older than costar Dustin Hoffman, who was playing a kid of about 20 or 21, and barely embarked upon adulthood by today’s standards, and yet Bancroft was very convincingly playing a World War II generation woman of 45 or so. That sexy-husky voice of hers and those streaks of gray helped, along with the cultivated airs and way of speaking that any Bel Air woman would naturally try to project. But when “Mrs. Robinson” gets aggravated (like when she says “What?” to Hoffman when he asks her what kind of car did she and husband-to-be Murray Hamilton make love in during college), her Bronx accent is as plain as day. I love the way Bancroft says, “It was a Fawwhd, Benjamin. A Fawwhd.” That lying-in-bed hotel room scene in which Hoffman insists on having a meaningful conversation with her is a classic. Mrs. Robinson resists the idea initially, at first by facetiously saying “why don’t we talk about art?” She later reveals she was an art student when she got pregnant and got married to Hamilton, and thereafter gave it up. The look on Bancroft’s face is devastating when Hoffman says to her with a tone of genuine sympathy, “I guess you kind of forgot about [art] over the years.” And she says very gently (or do I mean weakly?), “Kind of.”

Nice little acknowledgement of my recent WIRED item about Tom Cruise vs. Paramount Pictures (i.e., the discomfort studio topper Brad Grey and his executive homies are feeling over Cruise’s “massive and unreasonable” 30% back-end on the upcoming Mission: Impossible 3) in Rush and Molloy’s “Daily Dish” column today.

This is astonishing…a very bright critic has fallen for Mr. and Mrs. Smith and is bringing up that ludicrous The War of the Roses analogy in the bargain. Newsweek‘s David Ansen is declaring that “Doug Liman’s heavily armed comedy…. [is] a high-wire act, pitched above a gaping chasm of implausibility, and the remarkable thing is how well Liman and his red-hot stars sustain the joke.” Trust me, there is no joke to get…the utter flatness and lack of recognizable humor in this film is stupefying and incontestable. Ansen acknowledges that the film is “preposterous, but Liman gives it such a seductive, playfully hip texture that you happily embrace the fantasy.” I’m sorry but this simply isn’t possible. You’d have to be zonked on high-grade heroin to be happy while sitting through this film.

A news report says that five and a half hours ago, at 4:20 am Monday morning, Russell Crowe was arrested at Manhattan’s Mercer Hotel for allegedly throwing a telephone at a hotel employee. “He was upset because he couldn’t get a call out to Australia,” said Sgt. Michael Wysokowski. “He threw a phone at the employee hitting him in the face and causing a minor laceration.” What I want to know is, what did this asshole — the hotel employee, I mean — do to provoke Crowe? Seriously…Crowe is too intelligent an actor and too large-of-spirit-and-imagination to throw phones at people just to pass the time of day. 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! Crowe was expected to appear in Manhattan Criminal Court later on Monday. Remember Tom Petty and don’t back down, Russell! Hollywood Elsewhere is pulling for you and the rights of X-factor artists the world over who can’t help themselves when bad people say and do the wrong things.

There’s a very good piece by David Fellerath at Slate.com that portrays former heavyweight champion Max Baer in much more sympathetic and thorough terms than Ron Howard’s portrayal of Baer in Cinderella Man. Fellrath points out that Baer was a proud Jew who wore a prominent six-pointed star on his trunks. There’s also a star on the trunks worn by Craig Bierko, the charismatic actor who plays Baer, but it’s “significantly less prominent than the one that the real Baer wore in the 1935 fight,” writes Fellerath. “It’s no surprise that Howard would obscure this detail, as it would complicate his film’s Rocky-meets-Seabiscuit narrative.” Fellerath also notes that while Baer is depicted in the film as a guy more or less at peace with having killed a boxer named Frankie Campbell during a 1930 bout, this tragedy in fact “so rattled Baer that he lost four of his next six fights.” He also quotes Baer’s son as saying “it was after he killed Campbell that he started clowning. He started smoking cigarettes and he had nightmares for years.”

Okay, forget that whole Sharon Waxman-suggested scenario about Paramount chairman Brad Grey hesitating about bankrolling Mission Impossible 3 because of…well, Waxman vaguely implies this is due to concerns or at least questions about Tom Cruise’s recent oddball behavior. A seriously informed source says the reason why an un-named Viacom executive told Waxman that “no definitive decision has been made” about M:I3 is because of…ready to be surprised?…Cruise’s deal. Specifically, his “massive and unreasonable” back-end deal, which is around 30% of the first dollar. (He doesn’t take upfront cash.) With the budget of M:I3 pushing toward $180 million (yup, that’s what I’m hearing) and with a first-time director (J.J. Abrams), Grey and Co. aren’t anxious to pay off a monster-sized deal that was made by Par’s previous regime. “And they really will pull the plug if need be, or so goes the talk,” my guy says. If you really want to get tricky about it, I guess the Cruise-acting-slightly-wacko theory plays into Par’s court because the more this viewpoint gets around, the weaker or less together Cruise appears to gossip hounds as well as certain Scientology-dissers in the press, which eventually seeps down to the Average Joe’s and translates into a general lowering of Cruise’s stock due to everyone going “what’s up with this fucking guy?” and this, finally, bounces back into Cruise’s corner and his agents have to lower his price because their client has backed them into a corner without a strong hand to play.

What I’m not quite understanding from the various has-Tom-Cruise-gone-crazy? pieces, and particularly from Sharon Waxman’s report in today’s (6.2) New York Times, is why, exactly, Paramount Pictures is apparently re-thinking its support of Cruise’s Mission Impossible 3. As Waxman points out, many millions have already been spent on the action thriller, the total estimated M:I3 budget is around $150 million, and the projected start date is July 18. And yet Paramount chairman Brad Grey is seemingly reluctant to give a final green-light. This conclusion hinges on a quote from an executive with Viacom, Paramount’s parent company, telling Waxman that “no definitive decision has been made…it’s a discussion.” Okay, but why? Cruise’s recently eccentric, unusually passionate behavior (stronger-than-normal Scientology advocacy, a relationship with Katie Homes that no one believes is real, jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch) is playing so oddly that Paramount is sensing some kind of flame-out? They’re fearful that maybe the public is cooling on Cruise a tiny bit? They’re starting to see him as a bit less of a slick actor-producer-breadwinner and bit more of a spectacle unto himself and therefore less of a solid commercial contender? I’m not saying Cruise is edging into Michael Jackson territory — I’m just trying to divine what’s being implied by these stories. (Richard Corliss’ take in Time is another one.) Some might say this turn was inevitable when Cruise decided to hand p.r. duties over to his sister, LeAnne Devette, who is heavily supportive of Scientology herself and therefore less circumspect and less neutrally professional about handling Cruise, Inc. than Cruise’s former handler, PMK/HBH’s Pat Kingsley, might have been if Cruise hadn’t let her go. Something tells me if Kingsley were running the show right now, there wouldn’t be this media atmosphere swirling around…even if doesn’t make a lot of sense. Par’s War of the Worlds is going to do massive business, the last two Mission Impossible films were cash cows, and Cruise has always been a methodical, hard-nosed pro who gets movies made smartly, on-time and on-budget so…I don’t get it. Theories and speculation are welcome.

When Layer Cake director Matthew Vaughn dropped by my UCLA Sneak Preview class in early April, I asked if he could confirm that he’ll be directing X-Men 3. Vaughan said he’d just come from a meeting an hour or two earlier at 20th Century Fox to discuss just this, and said he didn’t want to do the X-Men sequel if he couldn’t give it a particular flavor and inner life of his own. (The Hollywood Reporter quoted him as saying he wanted to bring “more heart” to the next episode.) Clearly, Vaughan had doubts about Fox’s willingness to let this happen to his satisfaction. I then brought up director Franc Roddam…the ultimate example of a British director who’d made an excellent film (Quadrophenia) and was thereafter imported by Hollywood only to make bigger-budgeted, more formulaic stuff like The Lords of Discipline, which brought about a huge career devaluation. Vaughan said he was aware of this potential and wasn’t about to follow in Roddam’s footsteps…and reiterated he wouldn’t direct X-Men 3 unless the deal looked and felt exactly right to him. And now, almost two months later, the other shoe has dropped: 20th Century Fox said Tuesday that Vaughn is giving up the reins of X-Men 3 over “personal reasons.”

Variety‘s Todd McCarthy is the first big gun to weigh in on Mr. and Mrs. Smith (20th Century Fox, 6.10), and…let’s see, the opening sentence says that “marital therapy acquires life-or-death ramifications [in this] exhaustingly elaborate romantic fantasy actioner.” Uh-oh. “Built on the cutesy premise that a great-looking husband and wife are paid killers without the other knowing about it, the at-least $110 million two-hander pirouettes entirely on the script’s whimsical approach to serious business and the charm generated by leads Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. But it doesn’t take long for the souffle to fall.” Yikes. McCarthy adds that “this is one of those films for which viewers willing to buy into the premise might happily go along for the ride…[but] for those who find it resistible, if not preposterous, Mr. & Mrs. Smith proves a very long haul indeed. The sheer weight and volume of mayhem toward the end is numbing and meaningless, and two hours is a good 25 minutes more than such a frail conceit can sustain.” For what it’s worth, a female journo (and non-critic) who’s seen it says “there’s a ton of heat between Brad and Angie, it gives Brad a chance to be very cute and funny, Angie looks less likely to transmit angst in this role than in any of her other movies, and as long as you don’t attempt to think about the plot at all, it’s lots of fun.”

Six or seven weeks ago I called Hans Petter Moland’s The Beautiful Country (Sony Classics, July 8) “some kind of masterwork…one of the most profound and compassionate and finely nuanced films about the rough-and-tumble, never-say-die life of a roaming, disenfranchised person I’ve ever seen.” Only no one voiced their agreement and I couldn’t figure out why because it’s an extraordinarily fine film and I know what I’m talking about. But now — finally! — N.Y. Daily News critic Graham Fuller has joined forces with a blurb that appeared in 5.29’s Sunday Now section, to wit: “Though it has generated little buzz so far, this wrenching sea-and-road odyssey could attract Oscar attention next year.” The main character Binh (Damien Nguyen), a 20 year-old Vietnamese whose American parentage has made him an outcast among his own people, “toughens and gains in wisdom as he ventures into the heart of a different kind of darkness — and out the other side,” Fuller adds. The Beautiful Country is “a road (and sea) movie in the most profound sense of that term,” I wrote on 4.20.05, “and a story about the resilience of the human spirit (although I have mixed feelings about describing it this way, given how totally full-of-shit that last proclamation sounds)…it’s a movie about restraint, restraint and more restraint…and eventually, huge payoffs. Especially during the last 20 minutes or so, when the great Nick Nolte arrives.”