Clearly, many millions have some kind of primal need to put royalty on a pedestal and then show obeisance before that power and that mythology. Women are the most susceptible, it seems. (Particularly those who watch “Dancing With The Stars” and read www.popeater.com.) “Kneeling before power” is built into our genes. It’s mostly satisfied by the worship of certain celebrities, but now England’s royal family is competing for attention with “the new Diana” — i.e., Kate Middleton — engaged to marry Prince William, the heir to the heir of the British throne. Poor guy — 28 years old and he’s all but egg bald.

Obviously a huge hit waiting to happen, but half of the trailer is awfully dark…no? Ford is obviously playing more than a walk-on part. Good for him. He needs the juice. I would honestly like to buy and own and wear one of those blue-light alien wristband things that Daniel Craig is wearing.

I don’t sympathize with yawners either. Especially the ones that make no attempt to muffle it. It’s rude. But honestly? I’ve had yawning attacks myself. Sometimes expressions of boredom or impatience come out without a person meaning to clearly express them. They just happen. I’ve been accused of loudly exhaling during meetings, and I didn’t even know I was doing that.

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment design guy: “So what about the Ishtar Bluray jacket art? I’ve roughed out some ideas.”

SPHE marketing director: “No ideas. Boilerplate. Use the art from the VHS. Tweak it or re-do the titles, but we’re not spending nickel one on re-design.”

Design guy: “The VHS art…? But we’ve got all this material.”

Marketing director: “We don’t care. It’s a loss leader. Just re-do the lettering. Fuck it.”

Design guy: “What about a critic quote?”

Marketing director: “Use the Mike Clark one from 23 years ago.”

Design guy: “Have you read the Richard Brody one?”

Marketing director: “The what?”

Design guy: “The quote from Richard Brody. From last summer. New Yorker guy. A very smart, well-respected dweeb critic with a big brown Leo Tolstoy beard.”

Marketing director: “Average people don’t want to hear from guys like that. Just keep it simple. ‘Undeniable hilarity.’ The dumbest person in the world gets that.”

Design guy: “But…whatever you want, I’ll do it, no worries. But they’re putting this movie out after not putting it out for all these years because it’s become a cult film, and Brody…”

Marketing director: “I don’t want to hear this.”

Design guy: “But they’re not putting this movie out because it’s just another comedy. It has a special kind of dry humor. It’s called no-laugh funny . And Brody is articulating the new view. He gets the new Ishtar coolness.”

Marketing director: “‘No-laugh funny’?”

Design guy: “It’s the new comic aesthetic.”

Marketing director: “What’s the quote?”

Design guy: “He called it ‘one of the most original, audacious, and inventive movies — and funniest comedies — of modern times…it isn’t just a movie worth rescuing for a few choice bits…it’s a thoroughgoing, beginning-to-end masterwork.'”

Marketing guy: “Too long.”

Design guy: “We can cut it down. ‘One of the funniest, most original, audacious, and inventive movies of modern times.'”

Marketing guy: “Sounds intimidating. More like an art film than a comedy you can just laugh at. If I was just looking to just flop on the couch and chill out, I’d watch something else. Something stupid.”

Design guy: “But the people who want to watch Adam Sandler films will never watch Ishtar. That’s the point. It’s a cult film. That’s why they’re putting it out.”

Marketing director: “A cult film that maybe 800 or 900 people in the country will respond to by buying the Bluray. Big deal. The rest of the country just wants to have a good time. Use the VHS art and the Clark quote. Next?”

The Social Network as directed by Wes Anderson, Michael Bay, Quentin Tarantino and Frank Capra. The Anderson-esque rendering of Erica Albright’s break-up moment is perfect. The Bay riff is…well, okay. The Tarantino thing should have been worked on a bit more. The Capra is pretty good. We all get the basic idea, I think.

“The ring!” Same formula, same spandex, same CG, same “whoo-hoo!,” same old crap. When 21st Century film historians write about the superhero genre of the aughts, they will not be kind to the ComicCon culture. The apologists for these films will pay and pay. They will make Neville Chamberlain look like Alexander the Great. Movies like this are a plague upon our house. They sap and impurify our precious spiritual fluids.

What a tragedy that David Gordon Green, who looked like the new Terrence Malick back in the days of George Washington, has devolved into a manifestation of late-career Mel Brooks. Green’s last, Pineapple Express, was clever and liberating — a near-perfect surprise. Your Highness is a low-rent mulching of A Knight’s Tale, The Princess Bride, The Year One and A History of the World, Part 1 by way of 2010 throwaway humor, and smeared with the fart-joke sensibility of the bloated Danny McBride.

This morning Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough ridiculed a speculative piece by the Huffington Post‘s Howard Fineman. It said that “well-placed sources” are saying that Scarborough and New York Mayor Michael Boomberg “have begun trying to figure out whether they could be an independent presidential ticket in 2012 [and] have talked about running together, with Bloomberg in the top spot.” I listened to Scarborough deny it all from various angles, and he wasn’t low-key about it — he was borderline angry.

But the instant I read Fineman’s article I could hear a little gear clicking into place. Right now there are no clubhouse Republicans or tea-party wackos with anything close to the kind of charismatic heft necessary to generate serious excitement about a 2012 run at the White House. Nobody. But Bloomberg-Scarborough — a couple of reasonable, right-center, practical-minded corporate ass-kissers who won’t do anything brilliant or revolutionary but are clearly not looney-tunes — do have that charisma. If they were to actually run, Obama-Biden might have something to worry about.

If America can elect an African-American to the White House, it can certainly elect a Jew.

N.Y. Times media reporter David Carr and others have joked that the forthcoming merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek should be called Newsbeast. But don’t laugh — the sound of it works. I’m actually a bit surprised that searches still aren’t finding any professional-looking Newsbeast logos. What else are they gonna call it?

“Tina Brown‘s Daily Beast reportedly loses $10 million a year, and in 2009 Newsweek lost $28 million ,” the N.Y. Observer‘s Nick Summers (a former Newsweek staffer) writes in a just-posted article. “The premise that together the two will somehow make money has struck more than a few people as insane — but the bleeding may be more stoppable than people realize.”

It “may” be “more” stoppable? As opposed to less stoppable or comme ci comme ca stoppable? Somebody explain how “stopping the bleeding” = gradually profitable. Why is it that the financial algebra behind big-media deals like this one always sounds like mystifying gobbledygook?

“The print-ad market [is] coming back,” Summers explains early on. “Newsweek‘s name would add credibility as the Beast grew. And the world of magazine pages, Ms. Brown’s old stomping ground, beckon[s].” Newsweek as currently constituted (minus a recently departed “editor, int’l editor, the editor-at-large, a senior Washington correspondent, a diplomatic correspondent, the executive editor, two editorial directors, two deputy editors, the economics editor, an economics correspondent, two lead investigative reporters, the White House reporter, an international editor plus the website’s editor, general manager, managing editor and three articles editors”) is a shell of its former self. That was then, this is now, and Newsweek is for all intensive purposes a corpse with a “name.”

“Ms. Brown’s name brings in print-ad dollars all by itself,” Summers continues. “Newsweek‘s move from pricey West Village digs to [a] dodgy space at 7 Hanover Square will save $6.3 million in rent and operating costs alone. And there will be layoffs as the two staffs merge. (The incentive is to make those cuts from the Newsweek side of things, as the Washington Post Co. has agreed to cover some of those costs for up to one year.)

“Ms. Brown opposed the merger as late as last Tuesday morning. Three weeks prior, she appeared visibly relieved in the Beast newsroom when negotiations broke down, even reaching a level of Zen when it was clear she would not have to deal with the daunting logistics of a merger.

“Now she does. And she already works around the clock. The Observer asked: Where will she get the extra time?

“‘Well, my kids are grown up,’ Ms. Brown said softly. ‘And I’ve this theory that as you get older, you work harder.’ The absence of children creates a hole best filled by work, she said — ‘otherwise you’ll just feel mournful.’

“Ms. Brown, who gets tripped up a bit talking about the future of Newsweek.com, speaks calmly and clearly about her plans for the print magazine. She wants to be carefully organized and not rush into hiring. There will be no gaudy ‘first Tina’ issue. Things will improve gradually. ‘One is ready when one is ready,’ she said. ‘I know what it takes; I know what I’m able to do.’

“To speak with her about what to do with a magazine, even one so battered as Newsweek, is to believe in the magic of dead trees and ink.

“Oh my God. This is really going to happen.”

I caught John Cameron Mitchell‘s Rabbit Hole (Lionsgate, 12.17) for the second time this evening. It hasn’t diminished a bit since I last saw it at the Toronto Film Festival; if anything, it’s gained. It’s a sad, honest and fully engaged thing, and never the least bit boring. It has no weak scenes — each is gamey, steady and true, and adds another layer to a whole that becomes more and more intriguing as it goes along. Really — this is not Oscar bloggie blather.

Every actor in the cast nails it with verve and snap, but especially Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest, Aaron Eckhart and (in his motion picture debut) Miles Teller.

I take it back about Rabbit Hole being an A-minus — I’m now calling it a solid A, and I still have no doubt about its ability to penetrate as a Best Picture contender. I’m not just “saying” this. It really is a keeper; it holds itself together and deepens the game and spreads out and sinks in a step-by-step basis.

Kidman, Weist, Eckhart and Teller joined Mitchell and moderator Eugene Hernandez for a chat following tonight’s screening at the Tribeca Cinemas. Also participating were production designer Kalina Ivanov and a gentleman who may have been cinematographer Frank G. DeMarco. (I’ll confirm Wednesday morning — sorry.)

Rabbit Hole is a restrained/contained middle-class grief drama in the vein of Ordinary People and In The Bedroom (i.e., dead son). David Lindsay-Abaire‘s screenplay (based on his play) never lays it on too thick, but doesn’t hold back too much either. It’s a process drama about keeping the trauma buried or at least suppressed, and about how it comes out anyway — a little hostility here and there, odd alliances and connections, a little hash smoking (a la American Beauty), stabs at organized grief therapy, questions of whether to keep or get rid of the son’s toys.

It finally explodes in a bracing argument scene between Kidman and Eckhart, and then it subsides again and comes back and loop-dee-loops and finally settles down into a kind of acceptance between them. Not a peace treaty as much as an understanding that overt hostilities will cease.

A few people applauded at the end of the TIFF press screening that I attended. They also applauded big-time this evening. This is a very well honed, entirely respectable, honestly affecting drama. There’s no doubting and disengaging from any of it.

The Rabbit Hole gang during post-screening discussion at Tribeca Cinemas — Tuesday, 11.16, 9:35 pm — (l. to r.) moderator Eugene Hernandez, director John Cameron Mitchell, Aaron Eckhart, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest, screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire.

Unlike myself, a friend has found the time to finish a 6.23.10 draft of Natalie Portman and Laura Moses‘ BYO, which I was sent yesterday. L.A. Times reporter Stephen Zeitchik recently described it as a “raunchy, female-themed Superbad comedy.” But “it doesn’t have any serious Jonah Hill-like vulgarity,” my colleague says. “Just lots of Michael Cera snarkiness and McLovin dopey-ness.”

The two main characters are Lucy and “Al” (short for Alice) — Lucy is the wild sex fiend and Al is the more or less level-headed one. There’s a scene on page five in which Lucy is caught blowing a 15 year-old by the teen’s mother. (I read about ten pages so even I got that far.) “There is one other sex scene,” my friend says, “but who knows what it’ll be. Let’s just say it doesn’t get any dirtier than the page-five BJ.”

“I can see it being funnier acted out,” he adds. “It just seems lurid because it’s about chicks acting like horny dudes.”