Except for the Spy Kids flicks, I know I can always count on Robert Rodriguez to get actresses in his films to take their clothes off…so I was into seeing Sin City for this, and, of course, for the promise of scrumptous black-and-white cinematography. But take no notice of anyone (Rodriguez included) calling this a film noir flick. There is real film noir — crime movies made with a downbeat fatalistic attitude, and grounded in a reasonable facsimile of human truth — and there is simplified noir lite for chumps. By this I mean noir archetypes mixed in with hardboiled machismo, Mickey Spillane-type dialogue, slinky man-eating dames and superhero action bullshit with guys taking four or five bullets in the chest and still breathing, or jumping from 30-story buildings like they’re Batman (which never worked for me either…the Dark Knight can float down to the street from the top of a skyscraper because he’s wearing a large leather cape?). This is noir as re-imagined by Frank Miller and digested by comic-book geeks in their 30s who live in their lonely heads and haven’t gotten laid very much or gotten to know women at all. That said, Sin City has some of the most beautiful black-and-white compositions I’ve ever seen. It looks like it was shot on silver nitrate stock, and feels every inch of the way like a pure monochrome high…two hours of silvery shimmering bliss. That is, except for the tedious stuff, which is relentless.

It was sorta kinda predictable that Jamie Foxx would get an outstanding actor trophy from the NAACP Image Awards for his Ray performance. Okay, he deserved it and all, but the honor is definitely a little “yeah…so?” at this stage. The Oscars are the last stop, the final crescendo…enough already.

I wish I’d taken the time today to write something longer about the coolest and classiest DVD out there right now…one of the most disturbing, penetrating, transcendent art films ever made: Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse, which the Criterion Collection has just brought out on a special double-disc edition. I’m not an Antonioni scholar (I’ve never even seen La Notte), but this 1962 film — the conclusion of his Italian alienation-and-desire trilogy — is flat-out masterful. The genius element? There’s no story whatsoever. It’s purely a meditation about indifference, drifting, emptiness, ennui. I have never felt such a profound sense of nothingness — such an immaculate, beautifully composed void — from any other film, ever. L’eclisse is nominally about Vittoria (Monica Vitti)breaking up with her brooding novelist boyfriend (Francisco Rabal) and drifting into a new relationship with an attractive stock trader (Alain Delon). The film’s seven-minute finale — a succession of locations where Vitti and Delon have met and shared whatever during their brief affair — is justifiably famous. On the second disc there’s an excellent 60-minute documentary called “Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eye That Changed Cinema.”

Melinda and Melinda is Woody Allen’s best film, I feel, since Mighty Aphrodite. But it’s not one of his very best, and he’ll probably never get back up there to Manhattan or Crimes and Misdemeanor-land until he hooks with a co-writer, preferably someone a good 25 years younger. Allen is almost 70 and he just isn’t getting the world as sharply as he used to. He needs a younger guy (or woman) to challenge him and give his scripts some zip, and that’s not a tough pill to swallow. He partnered with Marshall Brickman on Annie Hall and with Douglas McGrath on Bullets over Broadway…so it’s not like this is a new concept.

Most of us have an opinion about Robert Blake’s culpability in his ex-wife’s death, but trial prosecutors “couldn’t put the gun in his hand” (in the words of a Blake trial juror) and that’s the name of that tune. For a reason that had nothing to do with the case, a part of me that felt glad when I read of his acquittal yesterday. I used to tool around on a scooter when I first came to L.A. in ’83, and one day it was stolen. I reported the loss to the cops right away, and a few hours later an officer called to say it had been found in Studio City. I was told where to go to pick it up (i.e., a location on the concrete L.A. river bed near Magnolia), and when I got there I saw two uniformed cops approaching from a couple hundreds yards away with a much shorter civilian walking between them. The civilian was Blake — he was the one who had spotted the abandoned scooter and made the call.

Seven and a half years…whoa…after the opening of Titanic in late ’97, writer-director James Cameron has finally gotten down to assembling material for a special-edition DVD. Actually, two Titanic packages will hit the market next October — a two-disc special edition and a four-disc collector√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬ¥s edition. Among the bonuses with be all those deleted scenes fans have been talking about for years. (Roughly an hour’s worth, including the longer build-up to Kate Winslet’s attempted suicide and the Leo “payback” scene when he wallops David Warner.) The “arduous” process of making Titanic was so hard on Cameron’s psyche, he says in the press release, that “until recently, I wasn√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬ¥t really ready to dive back into it all.” In fact, Cameron hasn’t been ready to dive into directing a movie since. He’s supposed to be working on a 3D adaptation of a Japanese graphic novel called “Battle Angel”…but he’s been so slow or reluctant to pull the trigger on various other “maybe” projects, I’ll believe the “Battle Angel” stories when I hear the film has begun principal photography.

Film industry reporters (and their editors) love writing about how this or that middle-aged corporate white guy has come into power, and what they’ll do when they start using it. (Or how they lost their grip on it.) Disney’s Bob Iger, the guy taking Michael Eisner’s place, is the current topic. Last week it was Howard Stringer becoming the first non-Japanese Sony CEO. The Weinstein brothers had the heat in February for concluding contractual talks about relinquishing Miramax to Disney, and announcing their plans to start a new operation. Paramount’s Brad Grey was the guy in January…and believe me, nobody outside of a small New York-Los Angeles clique cares. Because corporate white guys don’t affect the movies — filmmakers and their producers do. Brad Grey and his boss, Tom Freston, are, in some ways, going to make Paramount Pictures more of a go-getter operation than Sherry Lansing’s Paramount was…fine. And there’s a certain fascination in the drama of corporate samurais acquiring and losing power. But they’re all the same white guy to me…different faces, same suits, slightly different haircuts…each serving the same sociopathic corporate goals. CWG’s come and go, and the only people who perk up and say, “Look…a new CWG has replaced the previous CWG!” are these reporters, their editors and publishers, and a small elite readership (i.e., regular readers of Variety, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, etc.) “Maybe [Iger] really has a vision for the future that Michael Eisner hasn’t seen,” David Poland wrote the other day. “Of course, even if he does, he has another problem: no one is anticipating real change under Iger.” Uhh…David? No one anywhere anticipates real change from any CWG, ever. They couldn’t be more interchangable.

“In a couple of days throngs of movie theater owners and managers will descend on Las Vegas for four days of schmoozing, a smattering of screenings, a Mobius strip of meals and receptions, seminars and sundry other activities. It’s called ShoWest”… and most of these exhibition guys will be secretly miserable, because Vegas is the worst money-grubbing place in the world and the vibes are seriously awful. Unless you’re someone like Len Klady, it’s a tolerable environment for roughly four to six hours and then it’s agony…all you want is to leave and never come back.

Of all the summer’s hot-sounding marquee titles, my biggest want-to-see is Richard Linklater’s The Bad News Bears (Paramount, 6.10). Everyone knows it’s Billy Bob Thornton as a surly, vaguely alcoholic manager of a kids’ baseball team, and understands this basically translates into another Bad Santa movie. I guess that’s the comfort factor — that heartwarming, exposing-minors-to-rot, slovenly-misfit-redeemed-by-innocence formula….as long as it’s done in a low-key way. Linklater mined this pretty well in School of Rock with Jack Black as the bum, so Bears will probably be smooth sailing. In any event, here’s the trailer . Gregg Kinnear and Marsha Gay Harden are the costars. I don’t know which of the kid actors has the Tatum O’Neal part, but I’ll bet one of them sorta does.

This is a few hours old, but it appears that Lars von Trier’s decision to have a donkey killed for a scene in his forthcoming Manderlay (which will have its debut screening in Cannes nine weeks from now) was all for naught. For the sake of realism, an ailing donkey was given an actual lethal injection for a scene in which hungry people kill a donkey for food. Reports about this provoked a big uproar from Scandinavian animal rights groups, and costar John C. Reilly quit the film in protest (and was replaced by Zeljko Ivanek), and Von Trier’s producer Peter Aalbaek-Jensen lived up his reputation as a subtle charmer when he told a Swedish reporter “that fucking donkey was going to die anyway.” But now von Trier has caved into the protests and is cutting the scene from the film, saying he doesn’t want the film’s political and social themes be overshadowed by a donkey. “The welfare of animals is important,” he told a reporter, “but the welfare of people is in my opinion even more so — part of this is free speech and political debate.” A Swedish newspaper reported that a mass e-mail campaign by more than 300 animal rights activists forced von Trier to cut it out. Von Trier said that the meat from the donkey was “passed along, so it could be a part of the food chain, which donkey meat is these days.” He admitted, though, that killing the donkey might have been a bit “pointless.” Here’s a link from a Swedish newspaper, and here’s another . Remember how Francis Coppola killed an ox (i.e., had its head cut off) in Apocalypse Now? I don’t remember anyone sqawking about that.

When in danger, always move forward.

Waay slow (again) on the repair, but Jorge Drexler, the composer and singer of the Oscar-winning song “El otro lado del rio”, from The Motorcycle Diaries, is from Uruguay, not Argentina.