Robert Towne (Chinatown, The Last Detail, The Firm) being hired to write a Sony miniseries based on Robert Harris‘s “Pompeii” — the same property that Roman Polanski tried to adapt into a feature only to abandon in ’07 — is an okay thing and a mildly interesting move. Because one might speculate that the Chinatown-resembling elements in Harris’s story had a bit to do with Towne’s involvement.

The main protagonist is Marcus Attilius Primus, a Roman engineer in the mold of Charlton Heston‘s character in Earthquake — a willful and sympathetic character with professional responsibilities. He rushes down from Rome to the Bay of Napoli to repair a damaged aqueduct, the Aqua Augusta, only to meet and fall for Corelia, described in an Amazon summary as “the defiant daughter of a vile real-estate speculator” a la Evelyn Cross Mulray and Noah Cross.

Down the road Corelia supplies Marcus “with documents implicating her father and Attilius’s predecessor in a water embezzlement scheme.” I’m not making this up!

All disaster movies are obliged to follow the same plot scheme. Acquaint the audience with a community of characters — some admirable, some villainous, some marginal — in Act One, while supplying indications and warnings of the disaster yet to come. The disaster occurs sometime during Act Two (or at the beginning of Act Three), and thereby shows what the key characters are made of. The pure logistical spectacle of the disaster occupies a good 15 or 20-minute span. And then the sorrow, the cleanup and the final resolution.

“All of us I think, have fantasies about living in the past and Pompeii uniquely allows you to indulge that fantasy,” Towne was quoted saying by Variety. “The Harris book tells a compelling story with contemporary relevance. If you want an idea of what it was like to live life back then, ‘Pompeii’ is it.”

Not taken by yours truly during my May 2007 visit to Pompeii.

Exec producer Ridley Scott said Towne would “bring his trademark vision to this remarkable project. In portraying an historical world on the brink of destruction, he will no doubt capture and engage audiences globally. His adaptation will truly make for an astonishing television event.”

I only ask that Scott and Sony spend the extra time to make the CG as fine and exacting as possible, and that Towne supply as much detail as he can about the minutiae of Italian life in A.D. 79. I say this as someone who visited Pompeii four years ago.

When he bailed on his Pompeii project Polanski said he had “put a lot of work and energy into [it] so it is not without regret that I have to decline my further involvement.” If I were Towne I’d be all over Polanski’s script and research, and urging Scott and Sony to compensate Polanski and give some kind of screen credit for creative input or whatever.

Polanski reportedly wanted Orlando Bloom, an actor whose career has been all but dead since the debacle of Elizabethtown and the underwhelming response to Kingdom of Heaven, to play Marcus Primus, and Scarlett Johansson was web-rumored to be interested in (or being sought for) the Corelia part.

Earlier today Awards Daily ‘s Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino and I chewed the usual fat. Actually, not usual — interesting, sometimes amusing fat. Source Code, France again, early VOD windows, 48 to 60 fps photography, Sasha’s belief that Woody Allen has been off his game since the mid ’90s, etc. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

So Movieline critic Elvis Mitchell might have read an early draft of Ben Ripley‘s Source Code screenplay and remembered a line about Jeffrey Wright‘s character smoking a pipe, and somehow this recollection found its way into his review of the film…in which Wright doesn’t smoke a pipe. So effin’ what? Every so often processed information and impressions and memory fragments bleed into each other and scramble around. And then you fix it.

Anton Corbijn‘s Control, which I first saw at the 2007 Cannes Filn Festival, is probably the most beautiful black-and-white film of the 21st Century. (Francis Coppola‘s Tetro is a close second.) It’s been crying out for a Bluray, and so far the Weinstein Co. hasn’t announced one. Today I ordered the Alliance Region-A Bluray — sure to look great on the 50″ plasma.

At the end of Source Code is Jake Gyllenhaal‘s Colter Stevens finally over as a half-living entity (i.e., dead), or is he living a happy smiling life with Michelle Monaghan in the Source Code realm, or is he “alive” in the body of Sean Fentress, the guy he’s been inside all along, in the real-world realm? I’m not recalling all the particulars. Consider this bold-faced spoiler warning before watching the video. (Thanks to Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet for starting this off.)

Last Wednesday I did a phoner with Paramount’s Ron Smith, the restoration guy who quarterbacked the work on the Ten Commandments Bluray. (And on the theatrical version.) A ten-minute portion of our chat is on the video. The film is best appreciated as “a Cecil B. DeMille proscenium arch experience,” as I put it. It’s immaculate old-world fakery, shot almost entirely on a sound stage. The 44 days spent shooting location footage in Egypt mean nothing to me. The Exodus scene could have been shot in the Mojave desert.

Here are the DVD Beaver and Bluray.com reviews.

“Digital processes have made it cheaper and easier to assemble such multitudes in films like Gladiator and 300, but pixels are pixels, no matter how artfully deployed. Only DeMille and his army of assistants could have captured the spectacle of The Ten Commandments, a human spectacle, with weight, warmth and life.” — from Dave Kehr‘s 4.1 N.Y. Times appreciation.

Sunday night update: TMZ is reporting that during tonight’s Torpedo of Truth show in Chicago, Sheen said “he’d go back to Two and Half Men, but that the people who run it are bloodsuckers. He [also] called Jon Cryer a ‘rock star.'”

Earlier today: “The word is from one of Charlie Sheen‘s friends is that he’s in talks to return to Two & A Half Men, but along with traditional rehab he will have to write formal letters of apology to CBS, Warner Brothers and producer Chuck Lorre as well as make public statements to the same. There will be provisions in place that will ensure this doesn’t happen again during production.”

Serious rehab and apologies and accepting provisions would obviously be the best solution for Sheen, but they’ll never happen…no way. Not from the guy who played Detroit last night. Sheen is way too cranked on his own juice to eat humble pie.

25 minutes at Gallery 825 on La Cienega and then a drop-by at Bergamot Station where a swarm of bicycle night-riders poured into the main parking lot (like a scene from Fellini’s Roma or Blow-Up) as a thrash-rock band started playing [see video below]. Quite a moment. And then finally down to Culver City for some food. We passed on Harrison Ford‘s…I’m sorry, his son Ben‘s Montana food joint (i.e., Ford’s Filling Station).

The night before I spent some time at a mini-street festival on Abbot Kinney Blvd. In the late ’80s and ’90s this arts-and-crafty, non-corporate Venice neighborhood was one of the toniest in Los Angeles. Three to five years ago it was still cool in a festive but mostly low-key way. Now it’s swamped with “whoo-hoo!” under-30 eager beaver beardos in T-shirts, sandals and pork-pie hats — i.e., the night-life equivalent of crabgrass. The only thing missing is a karaoke bar.

This is really “beat up on poor Charlie Sheen” day, isn’t it? First Mark Ebner‘s 1998 Details piece about the old poontang days, and now an account of Sheen’s disastrous debut show (“boos…walkouts..unmitigated disaster”) in Detroit by Entertainment Weekly‘s James Hibberd.

Update: Here‘s the first YouTube clip I could find. Posted six or seven hours ago. Tiger blood. Cranked. A man on a mission to…what? Prove to the world that he still matters commercially despite the loss of his TV series? To spread the gospel of an egoistic theology called “winning”? I’m guessing it starts near the beginning of Charlie’s set. 8 likes, 18 dislikes. But the girl who recorded this from somewhere in the balcony (or her friend) was obviously charmed.

As I’ve heard it (but take this with a grain), the problem with The Hangover 2 is that it primarily feels like The Hangover transposed to Thailand. No deepening intrigue. “Here we go again!” in spades. What do I actually know? Nothing.

“Your suspicions about Your Highness (Universal, 4.8) were correct — it’s pretty lousy,” says a trusted reader. “It’s one of the laziest films I’ve ever seen. I suspect the geeks will attempt to explain this as a kind of purposeful charm but I’d just call it shitty. It has some great lines but they gave most of them away in the first red-band trailer. It’s essentially 30 iterations of Danny McBride saying stuff with an olde English accent with an f-bomb tossed in.”