“I don’t think of dying. I think of being here now.”

This is Valerie Harper‘s statement to People‘s Tim Molloy about her having been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, and having been told by doctors she may have as little as three months to live. What kind of foul, fiendish manifestation is leptomeningeal carcinomatosis, “a rare condition in which cancer cells spread into the fluid-filled membrane around the brain”?

Love, hugs and empathy to Valerie, her husband, family, friends, fans. Hugs all around. Hugs forever.

Most of us, I’m sure, agree with and try to live by the famous title of Baba Ram Dass’s 1971 book. But the difference between being able to tell yourself you’ve got 10 or 30 or 50 or even 5 years left and looking at lights out within twelve weeks has to be a significant one. “Be here now” indeed, although I vastly prefer living with the general condition known as denial. Who, me? I’m fine, man. I eat right, feel great, never get sick.

I also feel a bit more kinship with Woody Allen‘s famous line: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work — I want to achieve it by not dying.”

Spartacus’s (i.e., Kirk Douglas‘s) answer to the above question: “No more than I was to be born.”

The WordPress version of Hollywood Elsewhere is up and running.  Disqus is also installed.  And yet, I’m told, commenting on previous posts (i.e., those composed before this very instant in the presently constituted space-time continuum, or the currently morphing version of same) are a no-go.  They can only be posted via “the old commenting system,” I’m told, except that’s not accessible any more so what the eff?

The new commenting universe begins this morning.  Hollywood Elsewhere’s ten-thousand-mile journey begins right now.  As William S. Burroughs once said in a Felt Forum event that I attended in the early ’80s, “We are here to go.”

I shared my final thoughts last night about Venezulean president Hugo Chavez. He died a few hours ago. This N.Y. Times video commentary by former Venezuelan correspondent Simon Romero sounds fair and balanced, but my heart agrees with what Chavez’s former friend and friendly portraitist Oliver Stone told TheWrap‘s Tim Kenneally.

”I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people and those who struggle throughout the world for a place,” Stone said. “Hated by the entrenched classes, Hugo Chavez will live forever in history.” Notice that Stone didn’t call Chavez a “great hero” by his own standards — he called him “a great hero to the majority of his people.”

“His life was in a manner of speaking gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, ‘This was a man.” — William Shakespeare‘s Julius Caesar

Hollywood Elsewhere will become a WordPress site sometime after midnight. Preparing for this has distracted my energies to some extent over the last few days, and especially yesterday as I felt I needed a little tutoring. WordPress is obviously not that big a deal, but I frankly prefer posting with HTML code rather than the purely visual option. (For now anyway.) I’m told that readers won’t have to re-register for the newly installed Disqus commenting software. I know that one way or another I’ll retain the power to delete certain comments and/or ban commenters outright. HE wouldn’t be HE without that.

A couple of hours ago Coming Soon critic-reporter Ed Douglas graciously agreed to do a brief Oscar Poker chat about Oz The Great and Powerful, which opens on Friday. Ed is more of a fan than I am, and has actually called Sam Raimi‘s film “as entertaining” as Victor Fleming‘s The Wizard of Oz (1939). My review will post sometime tomorrow. We mostly compared the two films. I decided that the ’39 version is more personally motivated and character-flavored while the Raimi is more conventonally genre-ish and CG-driven and even socio-political.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that Paramount has bought Allison Schroeder‘s screenplay of Agatha, about the 1926 disappearance of the famed mystery writer Agatha Christie. With Will Gluck (Friends with Benefits, Sony’s forthcoming Annie) attached to direct and Fleming calling the script a “female Sherlock Holmes meets Romancing The Stone,” there’s a clear possibility it’ll turn out to be coy, shallow crap.

Christie’s’ still-unexplained disappearance was the basis for Michael Apted‘s 1979 Agatha, which costarred Vanessa Redgrave as Christie and Dustin Hoffman as American journalist Wally Stanton. For whatever reason Fleming, who rarely misses a trick, doesn’t mention the Apted version. I haven’t seen it in ages, but I recall a decent, so-so drama that at least made a serious attempt to convey authentic 1920s period, dialogue, costumes and interior design. It was certainly a feast for the eyes with the darkish but oh-so-carefully lighted cinematography by Vittorio Storaro and production design by the great Shirley Russell.

I’ve no excuse for missing Robert Redford‘s The Company You Keep at last September’s Toronto Film Festival. Except that I said to myself when reviewing the schedule, “Okay, I’d like to see the Redford but not right this second because I need to see this, that and the other film first. But I’ll get to it.” And here it is March and I still haven’t seen it, although there are L.A. and N.Y. screenings happening as we speak. The NYC junket is just around the corner. Sony Classics is opening it limited on 4.5

The Rotten Tomatoes score stands at 63%. I’m told it’s not all that riveting in thriller terms but is otherwise intelligent and smart written and impassioned as far as it goes. And you know Susan Sarandon will be rock-solid as Bernadine Dohrn, so to speak.

For me the Iron Man franchise went belly-up 2 and 3/4 years ago during that ridiculous Monte Carlo duke-out between Robert Downey‘s Tony Stark (who wore too much eye make-up) and Mickey Rourke‘s Ivan Vanko in Jon Favreau‘s Iron Man 2…God, what an endurance test! And to think what a pleasure the original Iron Man was. Even I, a hater of almost all things geek, was more or less happy with that 2008 film. But I’m off the boat now. Who’s actually enthused about seeing the third installment? Please.

Magnolia marketing deserves a salute for creating this undeniably cool and catchy one-sheet for Terrence Malick‘s To The Wonder. Yes, Brad Brevet — it owes a certain debt to the poster (or was it the Bluray jacket?) for Malick’s The Thin Red Line. Wonder opens on 4.12.

Poor cancer-stricken Hugo Chavez is reportedly just about down for the count, and I’m sorry. His “breathing has deteriorated” due to “a new and severe respiratory infection,” leaving the Venezuelan president in “a very delicate state.”

Bolivan president Evo Morales, South of the Border director Oliver Stone, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez following 9.23.09 screening at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade theatre.

He knows what’s happening. He’s right there and feeling it all slip away and dealing with a lot of pain and probably a little bit of fear. Or maybe he’s past that. What’s to be scared of anyway? I’m not scared of dying, but I’m terrified of not being able to breathe.

I’ve always bought into Oliver Stone‘s view of Chavez, or the generally favorable view conveyed in Stone’s South of the Border (’10). It basically profiled the nativist South American leaders who came to power over the last dozen or so years, Chevez being one plus Bolivan president Evo Morales, Brazil’s Lula da Silva, Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner (along with her husband and ex-President Nestor Kirchner), Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo (who left office last year), and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa.

“It’s a pleasure and a relief to see a fair-minded, turn-the-other-cheek film about Chavez and the others,” I wrote in September ’09 about South of the Border. “Chavez has been at war with Venezuelan right-wing interests (including the TV stations) for most of the last seven years, and if he sleeps with both eyes closed for more than two hours he’ll be unseated. He isn’t perfect — who is? — but at least he belongs to Venezuela and Venezuela alone.”

Another film that persuaded me that Chavez was basically more of an honorable than a dishonorable man who was trying to buck the Venezuelan oligarchs and run his country in a Bolivarian fashion was Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain‘s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, which I first saw ten years ago at the Toronto Film Festival. It’s a somewhat slanted but rousing view of Chavez’s first three years in office and particularly the failed April 2002 right-wing coup against the Chavez government.

I wrote the following six or seven years ago: “Is Chavez an egotist and a bit of a bully in some respects? Maybe, but politics is a very rough game in Venezuela. Bartley and O’Briain’s doc basically says that Chavez is supported by the poor and disenfanchised, and is pretty much hated by the moneyed classes. It doesn’t mention anything about his support with the poor drying up because he’s failed to push reforms, so maybe that’s the case now.

“But the doc persuaded me that the righties tried to blame the leftist Chavez supporters for the shootings that happened before the April ’02 coup attempt, even though right-wing thugs were the clear provocateurs in this situation. The doc contended that the privately run TV companies are total mouthpieces for the oligarchs, and that they didn’t report the truth of what was happening during the counter-coup and in fact spread lies.

“Chavez has been at war with Venezuelan right-wing interests (including the TV stations) for most of the last seven years, and if he sleeps with both eyes closed for more than two hours he’ll be unseated. He isn’t perfect — who is? — but at least he belongs to Venezuela and Venezuela alone.”

And soon, apparently, to the ages.

In response to the Australian Classification Board having banned all screenings of Travis Matthews‘ I Want Your Love at the Melbourne and Sydney LGBT festivals, friend and ally James Franco (whose Oz The Great and Powerful opens this Friday) has recorded this polite, mild-mannered video in sport of Matthews, with whom Franco teamed on Interior. Leather Bar.

It’s always good to stand up against the blue-noses (I’m presuming the ACB has a problem with IWYL‘s graphic content) but Franco really, really, really, really needs to give the gay-identification or gay-obsession thing a rest. Like, for the rest of his life and then the next life also. I don’t care what his orientation may or may not be and neither does anyone else. It’s like he’s made six or seven films wearing Micky Mouse ears. Enough already.

Quentin Tarantino‘s character in Reservoir Dogs: “Dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick.” Eddie Bunker: “How many dicks is that?” Harvey Keitel: “A lot.”

George Clooney‘s Monuments Men, which begins filming in Berlin and surrounding environs very soon, is looking for 1500 extras (mostly men, some women and children) to show up on Saturday, March 9th, at Studio Babelsberg in the Berlin suburb of Potsdam.

Monuments Men, based on Robert Edsel’s book and slated to open on 12.18, is about an allied group trying to save art treasures from destruction at the hands of the German military during World War II. It’s basically a cousin of John Frankenheimer‘s The Train (’64). Pic will costar Daniel Craig, Clooney-with-the-beard, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Bill Murray, Jean Dujardin, Matt Damon and Bob Balaban. Sony and 20th Century Fox are co-producing and splitting territories.

Roughly translated this German-language announcement says they’re looking “for about 1,500 men between 18 and 70 years” plus women and children of all ages. “The men must be prepared to get a 1940s-style haircut” and should not stand taller than 190 centimeters (about 6’2″) and not be too fat. And anyone who’s been to a tanning salon recently is out — you have to look gray and pale.

The producers in particular are lookng for people with arm and leg amputations; ditto “younger men with military experience” as well as “very thin women, men and children.”

The announcement states that Clooney will not be at the casting call so no gawkers or lookie-lous and definitely no autographs or iPhone photo ops.

I toured the legendary Studio Babelsberg last May 11th.