You will bow to Paramount’s Jackass 3D — i.e., the $21.8 million it earned yesterday and the $53 million it’ll probably take in by Sunday night. And you will suffer along with Summit’s second-place Red, which took in an estimated $7.3 million Friday and is looking at $20 million by tomorrow night. And some of you will pay to see the third-place The Social Network, which dropped only 32% yesterday. And others will flock to Disney’s Secretariat, which dropped only 29 % for a fourth-place finish.

This video of Transformers 3 star Shia LaBeouf splashing hot coffee on a corpulent paparazzo was on all the sites until yesterday afternoon, when it was taken down. But now, for the time being, it’s viewable again. Paraparazzi are scum. This is the coolest thing LaBoeuf has ever done, onscreen or off. Yes, it would have been a tiny bit cooler if he hadn’t run after dousing the guy.

Diseased cynicism secretes out of Red like the flu, like poison. Anyone who says this bullshit comic-book actioner thing is “funny” is suffering from total corrosion of the soul. Nothing paycheck movies of this type sap and impurify our precious spiritual fluids. They’re a scourge and a pestilence. I really and truly mean that.

It’s fine with me that Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren, Morgan Freeman and the others got paid for appearing in this thing, but there’s no reason why anyone with even a modicum of taste would want to pay to see it. Words can’t convey how deeply depressing it is to watch Mirren blast automatic rifle fire with a blank expression and without any stress or vibration passed along to her body or face.

I hated this film so much that I got out of my seat and laid down on the screening-room floor (i.e., at the Dolby room on Sixth Ave. and 55th Street) and took a nap at the halfway point. It was that or leave, and I had nowhere to go. I really couldn’t stand sitting there any longer and letting this film infiltrate my system.

“I’ve watched the five-and-a-half-hour Carlos twice now, and am completely convinced that it’s a great film, in serial caps, as it were; and looking at Assayas’ other work, I’m growing in my conviction that Assayas isn’t just one of the most vital filmmakers working today, but that he’s one for the books, as the saying goes — a major figure in his country’s cinema, and world cinema.” — Some Came Running‘s Glenn Kenny in a 10.13 posting.

“It isn’t that Mr. Assayas doesn’t have strong opinions, only that because he wants to move beyond familiar axioms — Carlos the monster, Carlos the cool — he shows history as it’s happening, active and dynamic, rather than how it will be subsequently narrated. Those opinions come through forcefully and at times, with such bluntness, it can throw you.” — N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis in a 10.15 posting.

Sincere gratitude to the Movieline crew for having posted high-quality scans of old Movieline articles from the ’90s, including my own “Ten Interviews That Shook Hollywood” article, which ran in March 1992 or thereabouts.

Believe it or not, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be running a six-day tribute to Cannon Films from 11.19 to 11.24. What’s next — a black-tie tribute at Alice Tully Hall to Elie Samaha? From the online program guide: “Israel’s answer to Simpson and Bruckheimer, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus and their production and distribution company, Cannon Films, bestrode the 1980s with gleeful exploitation-movie schlock and quality auteur cinema from Godard, Cassavetes, Mailer and Ruiz.”

The idea, I’m guessing, is to stay away from the films of Michael Dudikoff, Chuck Norris, Albert Pyun and Charles Bronson and crap like Masters of the Universe, Superman IV and Over The Top and focus on the small handful of semi-decent flicks that Cannon cranked out — i.e., Barbet Schroeder‘s Barfly, Andrei Konchalovsky‘s Runaway Train, Richard Franklin ‘s Link, Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance and — if you want to be extra-accomodating — Tobe Hooper‘s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

Forget Jean-Luc Godard‘s King Lear, which I dismissed as a masturbatory time-waster and, as a senior Cannon employee put it at the time, “a total fuck-you letter to Menahem.”

Here’s that piece I ran last August about my experience as a Cannon staff writer from ’86 to ’88, called “That Cannon Stamp.”

The chronology: (a) President Obama met with the Waiting for Superman team (including the kids) on Monday, (b) I posted a photo the next morning, (c) the White House website posted this video late Tuesday afternoon, and (d) Paramount publicity sent the link around late yesterday afternoon. That’s how it went down.

The video shows that Paramount honcho Brad Grey and Waiting for Superman director Davis Guggenheim were also (naturally) part of the group.

London-based photographer Dafydd Jones took this shot of Paul Newman, Natasha Richardson and Lauren Bacall on a Hudson River boat-cruise party to celebrate the launch of Tina Brown‘s Talk magazine on 9.2.99. To me this photo says that every day above ground is cause for celebration.

Last night I became the very last entertainment journalist/columnist in the world to see Exit Through The Gift Shop. My guilt is lifted…finally! And no more harassment from distributor John Sloss about my dereliction. It’s a half-humorous, half-depressing, altogether fascinating film about the lowering of aesthetic standards in the art world. It’s very “alive” and attuned to 21st Century art-celebrity currents, and in my head has shot to the front of the pack in the Best Feature Doc competition.

It’s absolutely essential viewing for anyone who cares about wall art or lives in a major city with an idea that he/she knows something about where aesthetic standards are heading. (Hint: not up.) The oldest Gift Shop tag line is still the best one: “The world’s first street-art disaster movie.”

I saw Exit at the Tribeca Film Festival at a screening hosted by editor Chris King (l.) and producer Jaimie D’Cruz (r.).

I’m being threatened with eviction by the manager of the Cosmic Diner on Eighth Avenue so I may not finish this, but this more or less sincerely-assembled documentary was paid for by Banksy, the British street artist who never shows his face. Banksy more or less directed Exit, although it’s ironic that the film he funded chronicles the dawn of an age in which genuinely talented and high-craft street artists like Banksy and others are being usurped in a sense by pseudo-artistes like Thierry Guetta. I really am getting kicked out of here (“That’s enough, people need tables,” etc.) so that’s all she wrote until I return to the pad later tonight.

Former Time staffer and James Cameron biographer Rebecca Keegan and recently departed Entertainment Weekly writer/blogger Nicole Sperling are now official L.A. Times entertainment reporters and Oscar season pulse-takers. The idea is to fill the spaces left by the semi-departed Tom O’Neil (who recently reclaimed Gold Derby) and Pete Hammond (now with Deadline).

Two professional white guys who recently saw Tyler Perry‘s For Colored Girls hold differing opinions. One says “there’s no way this movie is getting a Best Picture nomination…there are two or three really good performances but Perry just didn’t succeed at translating the play into a good film.” The other claims “it’s the real deal — maybe too conceptually out there for safe, old, mainstream white Academy tastes, but the performances range from good (Janet Jackson, Loretta Devine) to great (Phylicia Rashad, Thandie Newton) to pretty much masterful (Kimberly Elise, Macy Gray).”

I’m not so sure about the opinion of viewer #2 as he calls himself a “Perry fanboy” and says that the Colored Girls helmer “is one of the most important directors working today, and not just because of his underrated films.” Choke, gag, spit….what? Holy dogshit, he actually did say that. Tie me up and tie me down and splatter a chocolate milkshake all over my face, neck and hair as I scream and struggle to free myself.

So I went back to viewer #1 and said, “Are you sure? I mean, do you think others might share the other guy’s reaction?” Listen, don’t worry about it, he replied. For Colored Girls “is not a Best Picture. It has solid performances across the board, but Perry isn’t a good director and the best parts of the movie are the monologues that come straight from the play. He obviously wanted to do something like Precious but the material just isn’t as strong and it feels like a filmed play rather than a movie.”

Over the last three-plus decades I’ve felt soothed and stirred by the performances of French actress Nathalie Baye, and particularly by her angelic pixie smile. I’ve also succumbed many times to the curious way her little-bird vibe has manifested into erotic intrigue. So I was delighted to lunch with her today at a tres elegant restaurant inside the Helmsley Park Lane on Central Park South. I’m a rabbit running late and way behind the clock, so I’ll pass along the particulars tomorrow.

Nathalie Baye at Garden Cafe inside Helmsley Park Lane hotel — Friday, 10.15, 1:25 pm.

Baye is here to kick off a Film Society of Lincoln Center/uniFrance career tribute that begins tonight and runs through 10.21. My favorite performance? I have three actually. Her stranger on a train in Bertrand Blier‘s Notre Histoire, her Cesar-winning performance in Le Petit Lieutenant, and her costarring role in Blier’s Beau Pere. The first two are being shown as part of the series.