Kris Tapley isn’t admitting this in so many words, but his sage industry-centric column, In Contention, has been cut loose at Hitfix, which has been dumbing itself down and cranking up the fanboy content in attempts to increase traffic and profitability. The owners of Hitfix have been unsuccessful in attempts to sell the site and so, a source says, they’ve been “cutting the fat” to make it as attractive as possible to buyers. I’m told that they’d come to regard Tapley’s column as too hip and upscale to appeal to the knuckle-draggers they’re now looking to focus on.

Tapley’s contract had ended and he’d allegedly stalled in re-upping for some reason. I’m told he’d met with Variety‘s Claudia Eller to discuss some kind of adoption or alliance. The Hitfix honchos told Tapley a week or two ago that they’d “decided to go in a different direction, this is what we’re doing, we’re not doing award-centric coverage any more…thanks a lot,” as a source puts it.

Insect antennae signals are telling me that Barry Levinson‘s Rock the Kasbah (Open Road, 10.27) (a) is definitely good and possibly better than that, party due to Mitch Glazer having penned the screenplay, (b) might turn out to be Bill Murray‘s best role since Lost in Translation and maybe even Rushmore and (c) a theatrical comeback for Levinson. Costarring Bruce Willis, Zooey Deschanel, Kate Hudson, Leem Lubany, Scott Caan, Danny McBride, Arian Moayed, Taylor Kinney and Beejan Land.

After nearly a four-day absence Zak returned this morning. Out of the effing blue. “Oh, hi…you losers didn’t miss me, did you? I was catting around, adventuring, living the life of Ernest fucking Hemingway. What’s doing on the boring-ass home front?” I was half overjoyed, half pissed. Part of me wanted to say “you fucking asshole, where were you?” but I suppressed that. We made out for a half-hour straight. My guess is that the local kidnapper saw one of my “lost cat” signs and felt guilty and let him go. That or Zak escaped. Food, whipped cream, grooming, more backrubs, neck massages, ear kisses. He’s sleeping now. All is well.

People who buy low-thread-count T-shirts at Target won’t understand but this Kooples priest-neck T-shirt, which I bought yesterday at a 50% discount at the Robertson Blvd. store, is perfect, exquisite. I tried it on and my eyes were flooded with tears. I’ve been looking for a T-shirt like this all my life, and I might possibly wear T-shirts like this for the remainder of it. Three dark-blue buttons below the neck, covered by a military-styled flap…to die for. All hail The Kooples! Seriously.

Talking Point Memo‘s Tierney Sneed is reporting that Jeb Bush has cynically dummied up when asked about the apparent motives of Charleston shooter Dylann Roof. When asked if he thought the attack was racially motivated, Bush told a Huffington Post reporter, “I don’t know.” The question came after a speech Bush made at a Faith and Freedom Coalition summit in Washington. Then came the death quote: “I don’t know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes, but I do know what was in the heart of the victims.” Translation: “I don’t want to risk alienating the right-wing racist yokel vote in the primaries so let’s sidestep the racial-hate stuff and concentrate on empathizing with the God-worshipping victims.” Let me explain something very clearly: Jeb Bush’s candidacy is dead in a general-election sense. Maybe not with the Republicans and Tea Party-ers but he’s finished nationally. The man is a calculating soul-less fiend. He’s just side-stepped himself into eternal infamy.

“Sicario is basically about heavily militarized, inter-agency U.S. forces hunting down and shooting it out with the Mexican drug-cartel bad guys, and at other times flying here and there in a private jet and driving around in a parade of big black SUVs and so on….zzzzzz. It’s a strong welcome-to-hell piece, I’ll give it that, but Sicario doesn’t come close to the multi-layered, piled-on impact of Steven Soderbergh‘s Traffic, portions of which dealt with more or less the same realm.

“The tale, such as it is, is told from the perspective of Emily Blunt‘s FBI field agent, who, being a 21st Century woman who’s in touch with her emotions, is of course stunned and devastated by the unrelenting carnage blah blah. You know what I’d like to see just once? A female FBI agent who isn’t in touch with her emotions, or at least one who tones it down when it comes to showing them. Too much to ask for, right?

“One of her battle-hardened colleagues, a senior veteran with a semi-casual ‘whatever works, bring it on’ attitude, is played by the ever-reliable Josh Brolin. My favorite character by far was Benicio del Toro’s Alejandro, a shadowy Mexican operative with burning eyes and his own kind of existential attitude about things. Benicio the sly serpent…the shaman with the drooping eyelids…the slurring, purring, south-of-the-border vibe guy.

Does the story of heroic commercial airplane pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger strike anyone as a nutritious film? Clint Eastwood will direct a Warner Bros. feature about Sully with Tom Hanks (who else?) playing “Captain Cool.” On 1.15.09 Sully and his co-pilot took off from LaGuardia in a well-loaded Airbus, hit a flock of geese, lost both engines and then quickly decided to land on the Hudson River. The water was colder than a bastard but everyone survived. I’m sorry but there’s a short film here but no movie. A pilot acted coolly under pressure and saved the lives of his passengers — a single, perfect, beautiful act of professional cool. But the whole episode from takeoff to landing lasted…what, 15 minutes? 20? Where’s the inciting incident? Where’s the story tension? Where’s the second act complication or story pivot? Where’s the fucking story? Sully experienced a little post-traumatic stress disorder (flashes, sleeplessness) after the episode but he got through it. Sully will almost certainly turn out to be a rote exercise in hero worship, and I mean especially with Hanks doing his low-key, man-of-character, professionalism-under-pressure routine for the 37th time.

Mad Max: Fury Road‘s Charlize Theron and Nicholas Hoult have reunited under director Gilles Paquet-Brenner with a screenplay by Gone Girl‘s Gillian Flynn. The “traumatized lead character wakes up from a nightmare” moment suggests that genuine lightning strikes very occasionally and in fact rarely. Costarring Corey Stoll, Chloe Grace Moretz, Christina Hendricks, Tye Sheridan, Dora Madison Burge and Drea de Matteo. (Where’s Drea been since she got whacked on The Sopranos?) Dark Places will debut on Directv’s video-on-demand service this week, followed by a theatrical break on 8.7.

As part of a quid pro quo deal in having accepted a new NBC News gig as “breaking news anchor for live special reports,” Brian Williams has issued the following statement:

“I’m sorry. I said things that weren’t true. I let down my NBC colleagues and our viewers, and I’m determined to earn back their trust. I will greatly miss working with the team on Nightly News, but I know the broadcast will be in excellent hands with Lester Holt as anchor. I will support him 100% as he has always supported me. I am grateful for the chance to return to covering the news. My new role will allow me to focus on important issues and events in our country and around the world, and I look forward to it.”

What Williams Should Have Said: “I’m sorry I got caught lying. I tried to equivocate and sidestep and tap-dance my way out of the problem but…well, it didn’t work. So now I’m really ‘sorry.’ You get what I’m saying, right?

“The offshoot is that I’ve been offered a chance to come back.  Not to NBC News but MSNBC. I won’t exactly be Lester Holt‘s breaking-news bitch but it wouldn’t be far off the mark to call me that. I like the idea of collecting a check and being a working newsman again, but by any standard this is a humiliating, take-it-or-leave-it punishment position in which I’ll have to play the role of a demoted and discredited anchor who has a tendency to lie…I mean ‘exaggerate.’ I’ll have to do a lot of smiling. I’ll have to do a shitload of yoga in the mornings. Maybe Lester will occasionally ask me to run to the deli and pick up a chicken salad sandwich and a hot tea with a bag of chips for lunch. Maybe I could shine shoes on the side.

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. We don’t have all the facts but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun. Now is a time for mourning and for healing, but let’s be clear. At some point we as a country will have to have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it.”

Posted by Indiewire’s Eric Kohn: “The success of Jurassic World obscures the more enterprising possibility for cinema to advance toward new horizons. Rather than settling with a formula that sticks, movies should be celebrated for building on past successes or upending them altogether. Mad Max: Fury Road is an ideal example, but in the 32 days since its release it has yet to gross as much as Jurassic World made on opening weekend. It’s easy to give audiences what they want and harder to convince them to take on a challenge. Jurassic World provides the latest evidence of this frustrating tendency, which studios all too eagerly exploit.” Fury Road is a “challenge”?

Kohn references a description of Jurassic World by critic Sam Adams as “a metaphor for itself…a bad movie about why movies are so bad.”