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The Power of Nightmares director Adam Curtis told me last night (Saturday, 5.14) that Sony Pictures Classics has submitted a bid for U.S. theatrical distribution of his controversial documentary. Sony Classics’ Tom Bernard confirmed his company’s interest this afternoon (“We want it!”) at the American Pavillion. Nightmares points out philosphical parallels between Al Qeada and the American neocons and contends that U.S. government fears about a coordinated, single-minded Al Qeada organization are pretty much a myth. The two-hour, 35-minute doc would probably never be shown on U.S. television, and I’ve long presumed, given the ultra-British tone and slant of Curtis’ work, that U.S. theatrical distribution is out of the question. Congrats to Sony Classics for having the cojones to step up and exhibit a truly superb, tough-minded political film.

Those who’ve seen a five-minute DVD reel of David Lynch’s next film, called Inland Empire and starring Laura Dern, Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux and Harry Dean Stanton, are describing it as a surreal oddball thing involving people in rabbit costumes (or wearing rabbit heads). “It’s great in a typical dark-weird Lynchian way,” said one distributor at Saturday’s Picturehouse party. “It feels like a cross between Lost Highway and Mulholland Falls,” said another. Side note: Mulholland Drive costar Laura Harring told me during an interview a year or so ago that she had acted in a short for Lynch (in ’03 or perhaps a bit earlier) that involved dressing up in a rabbit costume.

Picturehouse, that new HBO/New Line Cinema joint venture being headed by former Newmarket marketing-acquisitions hotshot Bob Berney, has, I feel, acted wisely in acquiring Paul Reiser’s The Thing About My Folks. I wrote about this amiable, family-values dramedy after seeing it at the Santa Barbara Film Festival in early February. The company has also acquired distrib rights to Steven Shainberg’s Fur, a Diane Arbus biopic starring Nicoel Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr.

That story that Reuters’ Mike Collett-White ran two days ago about the Star Wars legacy (“Was Star Wars Good or Bad for Cinema?”) has stayed with me. Particularly Paul Schrader’s quote that the series “ate the heart and soul of Hollywood,” and Peter Biskind’s that the rudimnetary good-against-evil storyline of all the Star Wars films “has become a simplistic prototype for today’s blockbuster. Unfortunately, we will be living in the shadow of Star Wars for a long time.”

Box-office commentator Paul Dergarabedian sums it all up in a much darker way than he (probably) realized in Sharon Waxman’s New York Times story that ran yesterday (5.9). It’s about Hollywood suits biting their nails and furrowing their brows over ’05’s sluggish business so far, and more particularly the underwhelming response to last weekend’s openers, Kingdom of Heaven and House of Wax. “The marketplace is obviously in a malaise, and it’s going to take movies like Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith to get us out of it,” Dergarabedian said. He means it’ll be a huge hit, of course, but good God…if there’s one thing Sith doesn’t accomplish, it’s make anyone feel like they’ve been lifted out of a malaise. This is the aridity of Hollywood in a nutshell — a film that everyone will go to but not that many will truly enjoy being described as some kind of restoration trip that will set things right.

In his review of Monster-in-Law in last Friday’s Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt called it “a deeply dispiriting movie, not just because it is grindingly bad but because Jane Fonda actually chose this for her comeback after a 15-year absence from the screen.” Correction: Fonda didn’t exactly select Monster-in-Law as the very best comeback vehicle she could find. She decided to do it as a fallback thing after (a) she auditioned for but didn’t get the Cloris Leachman alcoholic-mother role in Spanglish (director James L. Brooks felt she wasn’t quite right), and (b) after she blew off a chance to play Orlando Bloom’s mother in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown because she didn’t think the role was big or fully-written enough. I reported this in some detail in my 12.28.04 column. (It’s the third story from the top.)

I’m at the Amsterdam airport, my plane for Nice leaves about three hours from now, and writing a WIRED item about this no-big-deal fact is, no argument, lame. And yet…I’m sitting in the “communication centre” on the second floor, and for 10 Euros you can get a wireless hookup for 24 hours, and it’s awfully damn nice to plug in right away on foreign soil and use your laptop as a U.S.-based phone. I’m referring to Vonage’s Soft Phone software, which lets you call the States for a flat fee of $10 for 500 minutes. It works fine as long as you have a decent set of headphones with a microphone.

Fridays reviews of Kingdom of Heaven (out 5.6) made it clear almost no one agrees with me about Orlando Bloom’s Bailin or Ibelin filling the boots of a charismatic hero type. I know Bloom holds his own in this Ridley Scott film and then some, and I don’t need a large crowd agreeing with me on this, but I don’t seem to have any allies on this at all. Of all the stuff I’ve read since Friday, the meanest and funniest Orlando write-off has come from the Seattle Weekly‘s Tim Apppelo. “I know you like Kingdom of Heaven,,” he wrote the other day, “but thought you might be interested by my thesis that the main problem is a fine elf in a role that calls for a hero. As a war hero, Orlando Bloom reminds me of the nickname Truman Capote’s father gave him — Little Miss Mouse Fart.”

What might have escaped you while watching Kung Fu Hustle is that about 35% of the lines are in one language, and the rest are in another. This is a uniquely Chinese problem. The actors talking to each other in a scene aren’t necessarily speaking the same language. Yet, much like Han Solo and Chewbacca, they communicate just fine. Is this found anywhere else in nature? And by the way, the movie is MUCH funnier if you know Cantonese. They have different archetypes. One last thought: I hope Stephen Chow doesn’t come to America and start sucking like John Woo.

In a New York Times piece piece giving various sci-fi writers a forum to trash the Star Wars series, Henry Fountain writes, “As if hyperdrive rendered historical continuity irrelevant, the first Star Wars film was actually Episode IV, and the last is Episode III. In the eyes of nonfans, of course, it doesn’t really matter where one lands in the saga. After the second film (The Empire Strikes Back) the whole thing went downhill.” Well, yes …but Empire was the pinnacle of the series in the eyes of true fans…meaning those who got off the boat 22 years ago with the arrival of Return of the Jedi.

Of course, if you listen to Kevin Smith (yeah, my former boss), Revenge of the Sith is “fucking awesome…the Star Wars prequel the haters have been bitching for since The Phantom Menace came out. And if they don’t cop to that when they finally see it, they’re lying. As dark as Empire was, this movie goes a thousand times darker…[it’s] so satisfyingly tragic, you’ll think you’re watching Othello or Hamlet.” I’d really like to believe that, but how can I? How can anyone believe that George Lucas has had some kind of radical personality transplant…that the filmmaking instincts that made Jedi, Menace and Attack of the Clones such resounding groaners have suddenly been retired or banished? Nobody’s that covert and middle-aged guys don’t change their spots. But an army of journos will be seeing it this coming Thursday (5.5), so there will be plenty of opinions to sift through before long.

It’s easy to be skeptical about that Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes fluid exchange that’s supposedly happening, according to Cruise’s publicist (and sister) Lee Anne DeVette. My first instinct was to paraphrase Woody Allen and call it “a sham of a mockery of a mockery of a sham.” And I lurrrve Kyle Smith’s analysis of why it all seems like staged bullshit. Of course, people always hook up because they believe the other person will do something for their life or career, and Cruise and Holmes are naturally thinking along these lines. But I don’t believe it’s complete theatre. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but a person in a position to know once told me that the Tom-and-Nicole thing was fairly genuine…emotionally, anyway. You have to guard against being too cynical in this town, but I have to say I laughed out loud at that recent comment about that Cruise-Holmes appearance in Rome on Defamer, to wit: “Excuse us while we figure out a way to press our naked eyeballs onto the burners on the electric stove.”