One of the three big tracking companies has Salt running just a teeny tiny bit behind Inception in terms of the usual categories — awareness, unaided awareness, definite interest, first choice and top-three-choices. Inception is opening a week earlier than Salt, of course, and has been marketing fairly steadily while Salt is just turning the heat on.

Right now Inception is at 56 awareness vs. Salt‘s 54, except Salt‘s unaided awareness is at 3 vs. Inception‘s 2. Salt has a 46 definite interest vs. a 47 for Inception. Salt has a 5 first choice vs. Inception‘s 6. And they’re both sitting at 15 among the top three choices.

One significant factor, it appears, is that Salt‘s definite interest is in the strong 40s among older and younger men and women. (The Angie factor, of course.) I’m waiting for Inception breakdowns as we speak (any minute!), but one presumes that it’s probably tracking a bit stronger among men than women. That Nolan-ish thing. But then presumptions and $1.75 will get you a bus ticket.

I don’t know what to do with this Angelina Jolie interview in the new Vanity Fair. She’s as beautiful as ever with a great pedicure, and I’m looking forward to Salt as much as the next guy, etc. But everything she says here is so gracious and settled-down and serene. What are you supposed to do with a q & a like this? She’s hot, cool and fetching, and I’m not…you know, complaining. But what are you supposed to do with this?

She loves Brad Pitt in any guise, even his Old-Man-River beard. She and he might do a sequel to Mr. and Mrs. Smith. (God.) She’s aware that having too many kids might result in none of them getting enough attention. It’s great to be able to chill and stroll around in Venice and not have to worry about anything.

Why didn’t they have her talk to George Wayne ? At least he would have had the nerve to mention the tabloid stories.

The way Elliott Gould sizes up poker players in this scene makes me chuckle every time. The loose smoky vibe is what sells it. Gould mutters like a jazz musician on hemp, George Segal is nodding sagely and the pretty bartender is chuckling away. Neither she nor Segal are bothered, of course, that Gould is making simplistic assumptions based on cultural stereotypes. That’s actually what funny about it.

The Lyndon Johnson guy with the cowboy hat, the kid who’s seen The Cincinatti Kid too many times, the family doctor who doesn’t take chances, the red-coat guy who used to be a cha-cha dancer, the Ku Klux Klan guy, the Hispanic guy who talks louder than he needs to because he came from a large noisy family, the Oriental prince whose father made a fortune selling egg rolls, etc.

It’s amusing stuff in a shuffling Robert Altman context, or at least most people find it so, but if you were to write something a little bit similar to Gould’s patter in an online column, you’d soon be dealing with some very ornery talkbackers. That’s one difference between 1974 and 2010, it’s fair to say. Not that I would be so idiotic as to mention egg rolls in discussing an Asian-American.

In a piece called “Hush vs. Gush,” Variety‘s Marc Graser and Dave McNary describe the thin line that marketers for semi-secretive, big-budget, hot-buzz movies — like Chris Nolan‘s Inception — have to tread.

The trick is to dispense aroma and atmosphere and a few select details that will make everyone drool, but don’t kill the goose by revealing too much. However, “it’s getting harder than ever to keep a secret in Hollywood,” the Variety guys observe.

“The fast fingers of bloggers (professional and amateur), feverishly documenting every aspect of a film’s development and production on websites and Twitter feeds, have made it nearly impossible for studios to surprise moviegoers these days.”

The Hangover director Todd Phillips states the obvious in saying that “the word gets out very quickly now” and “that quick feedback can make or break a movie.”

A marketing exec comments that Warner Bros, marketing honcho Sue Kroll “was actually forced to veer away from the typical marketing campaign because Inception isn’t the kind of film that can be easily reduced to a single catchphrase, although ‘Your mind is the scene of the crime’ and ‘The dream is real’ certainly try.

“‘It’s really a counterprogramming campaign in the extreme,’ the exec says. ‘The studio knows it can’t position this like another tentpole, even though it is a tentpole.'”

I need to say one thing about Inception, and it has absolutely nothing to do with marketing. We all know it contains a big third-act revelation, but I don’t want to see one in which we’re told that most of much of what we’ve seen happen in Act One or Two has been imagined, as if in a dream. I don’t want any of that Dallas crap — please.

My initial thought was to avoid Eclipse altogether, considering the awful time I had with New Moon last November. But with four sources — Variety‘s Peter Debruge, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt, EW‘s Nicole Sperling and Lynette Rice and Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson — claiming it’s the best Twilight pic yet, I’ve decided to catch tonight’s all-media.

The reason for the uptick, they’re all saying, is director David Slade. I was down with Slade’s Hard Candy but not so much 30 Days of Night .

I’m most impressed by Honeycutt’s praise considering the fact — I need to put this delicately — that he can be a bit of a grump at times. (Like someone else I could name.) I’m figuring if a half-grumpy guy says a popcorn franchise flick like this is okay, you can half-trust him. But you can’t trust positive-minded people who smile and laugh and hug their friends and always say the glass is half-full. I’ll trust happy-face people when it comes to smaller films, the theory being that if a person with a relentlessly sunny attitude likes something that’s edgy or thoughtful or darkly trippy then it might have that open-window element that draws people in.

“While Catherine Hardwicke did a strong job establishing the franchise, Slade is by far the best director,” Thompson says. “And the story of Eclipse, adapted per usual by Melissa Rosenberg, is far more satisfying and well-structured than New Moon, [and] the central love triangle, as both men press their suits with Bella, is front and center. All three actors are comfortable with their characters, and Slade finds the right balance of action and romance; the story feels organic.”

The one “uh-oh” is Honeycutt’s line that “the CG wolves, huge creatures whose ferocity fails to mask their tenderness, are very cool.” That’s an ixnay, I’m afraid, if they’re the same size as the New Moon wolves. Those were the silliest-looking beasts I’ve ever seen in a supernatural fantasy film, bar none. And what does Honeycutt mean about “tenderness”? Wolves can’t be tender except to their own young.

Like a Gatling gun, the names of the Seven Dwarfs: Sleepy, Grumpy, Doc, Wheezy, Snoopy, Sleazy, Happy, Dopey, Bashful…wait, that’s nine.

“Gathering several hundred participants [yesterday] under the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, Tilda Swinton led them in a soft-shoe shuffle originally performed by Laurel and Hardy,” reports The Scotsman‘s Emma Cowing. “It was part of an effort to create a ‘flash mob dance’, where a group suddenly and spontaneously starts dancing in a public place.

“The instructions, disseminated online, were simple: watch the Laurel and Hardy clip, turn up at 11am and give it a whirl. The reason, declared Swinton, was “in pure unabashed celebration of doing something as a group and looking like dafties”.

Word Theatre, my favorite non-Broadway theatrical experience, is having another show tomorrow night at Soho House — Monday, 6.28, at 6:30 pm. Jason Butler Harner (Changeling, The Taking of Pelham 123) and Sarah Paulson (Broadway’s Collected Stories, Serenity) will read from Rick Moody‘s “Modern Lovers”, and Vincent Piazza (Boardwalk Empire, Rescue Me) will read from Michael Cunningham‘s “White Angel.” Founder/director Cedering Fox will introduce and handle the q & a.

On June 8th I observed that with the super-sized Inception and Salt opening 7 days apart (on 7.16 and 7.23, respectively), it appeared that Inception has “managed a better job of pre-selling itself to ubers and early adopters…my sense of things right now is that Inception is regarded as something people have to see, and that Salt is something that might be pretty good.”

Over the last few days that view has shifted to one in which Chris Nolan‘s boldly imaginative mind-fucker is being talked about as possibly too smart for the room while the word-of-mouth on Phillip Noyce’s spy thriller is getting hotter and hotter. I’m hearing things here and there and sensing this with my insect-antennae. A few days ago a SAG member who’d attended a recent research screening told a journalist pal it’s an audience-friendly wowser. “It’s really good…Angelina meets Bourne,” the guy said.

The shift began after a 6.23 review excerpt from Peter Travers‘ Rolling Stone review implying that Inception may not reach Joe and Jane Popcorn on their levels. “Trusting the intelligence of the audience can cost Nolan at the box office,” he wrote. “How to cope with a grand-scale epic…that turns your head around six ways from Sunday? Dive in and drive yourself crazy, that’s how.”

Two days later a piece on filmsactu, the French entertainment website, ran a piece by Arnaud Mangin that seemed to echo the Travers meme. The headline read “Inception: un film trop intelligent pour le public?” A translated passage reads that “one finds [in the film] more the Christopher Nolan of Memento than of Batman Begins. Memento is an excellent film, therefore so much the better, but it’s not famous for the simplicity of its intrigue and whose commercial stakes were definitely less important.”

Sorry, but that sounds pretty good to me. Being a huge fan of Memento, I’d be delighted if Inception delivers along similar lines.

What’s changed in three weeks? Inception is still the movie that everyone has to see — figure a $70 million opening weekend — but the word on Salt is building into “very good,” “really works,” “yeah!” and so on.

At the tail end of her 6.25 story about the convulsing fortunes of MGM, Lionsgate, the Weinstein Co. and Apparition, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson dropped a grenade blast: “Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life may not make it to the Venice Film Festival after all, I hear.”

Another delay?

After being buzzed for Cannes 2010 and then dropping off that radar screen four or five weeks before the festival began? Despite having begun filming in the spring of ’08 and Malick having been in editing for…what, at least 20 months? Despite assurances last April from a post-production source that Malick had recently “screened it to an audience of about thirty, and it’s literally 97% done…our boss was able to see it, and called it the best film of [Malick’s] since Badlands” and that “it will not make Cannes [because] the visual effects aren’t done…the reason for the delay in post is because of the amount of detail [that] IMAX 70 mm requires.”

The idea was for The Tree of Life to have its preem at the Venice Film Festival and then the Toronto Film Festival, followed by a theatrical debut in November. And now there’s a possibility that Malick may blow off the early September film festival triumvirate of Venice, Telluride and Toronto? Doesn’t a possibly challenging film like this (a dysfunctional domestic drama mixed with a dinosaur sequence) need the acclaim of film festival critics to start the ball rolling? They can’t just open it with trailers and TV ads and hope for the best.

Ten months ago I wrote the following:

“I was talking about the dino aspect with a journalist friend a couple of weeks ago, and we were both shaking our heads and acknowledging what a bizarre mind-fuck Tree of Life sounds like. On paper at least. And it’s not like I’m blowing the dinosaur thing out of proportion because there’s some kind of Tree of Life-related IMAX dinosaur movie due in 2010 that will augment or expand on some theme that’s expressed within the parameters of the Sean Penn-Brad Pitt story. Right? I’m just trying to sound like I have a clue.

“All I know is that it’s one hell of a transition to go from a story of angry, pained, frustrated people in the 1950s as well as the present and then to somehow disengage the spacecraft and travel into another realm entirely (like Keir Dullea did in 2001: A Space Odyssey when he soared through Jupiter space), and somehow float into a world that is pre-historical and pre-human, and have this time-trip somehow add to our understanding and feeling for the sad/angry/bitter people in the Pitt-Penn realm.

“I mean, if someone like me is scratching his head and going ‘what the fuck…?’ over the unusualness of a ’50s domestic drama mixed with footage of prehistoric beasts , imagine what Joe Popcorn is going to think or say. Don’t even talk about the Eloi.”

Two days ago I under-estimated the five-day haul for Knight and Day. I feared that the three-day weekend figure might be less than $15 million, but fortune wasn’t so cruel. It wound up taking in $20.5 million Friday-to-Sunday and earning $27.8 million for the five days.

Still nothing to write home about — a fairly crappy figure, all things considered — but it’s no Jonah Hex.

Toy Story 3 led the weekend with $59 million — a very significant haul for a film in its second weekend of release — and Adam Sandler and Dennis Dugan‘s Grown-Ups pulling down $41 million…Jesus!

We all know about the black sheep syndrome — the brother or uncle or cousin who took a weird turn in life and wound up destitute or dead or in jail. (Like my younger brother Tony, who lived a marginal existence before suddenly dying last year.) And no one thinks this is a reflection upon anyone but the person who took those turns. And yet the sordid saga of Matthew Nolan, the older brother of Inception director Chris Nolan and screenwriter Jonathan Nolan, seems to contain echoes of the films that his siblings have made, or vice versa.

The photo being held by Batman in this doctored photo may or may not be a likeness of Matthew Nolan

Matthew Nolan’s story — financial scams, check-kiting schemes, an attempted jailbreak, an accusation of murder — has been hashed over in a 6.27 London Sunday Times piece by Christopher Goodwin .

At the end of the article Goodwin writes about “how eerily the mystery about Matthew Nolan’s true identity, and his descent into a paranoid world of aliases, crime and murder, mirrors his brothers’ dark and bloody filmmaking obsessions.”

Goodwin also notes that the actions of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s character in Inception seem to contain reflections of Matthew Nolan’s misadventures.

DiCaprio “plays a conman who steals valuable secrets from people’s minds while they sleep,” he reports. “When he is embroiled in a deadly blackmailing scheme, he becomes an international fugitive whose dangerous secret life costs him everything he has ever loved. The film’s disturbing catch-line is: ‘Your mind is the scene of the crime.'”

On top of which is was pretty hard not to think of the jailed-Joker plotline when it was reported last November that Mathew Nolan had attempted to break out of Chicago’s Metropolitan Correctional Center using “31 feet of rope made from bed sheets, a body harness, a clip that would have been used to unlock handcuffs and a razor.”

Goodwin reports that “although the Nolan brothers’ late father, Brendan Nolan, who worked in advertising, was British, the Nolan brothers spent much of their childhood in Chicago because their mother, Christina, is from there.

“All three brothers — Matt, now 41, Chris, 39 and Jonathan, 34, known as Jonah — were privately educated and have dual British and American citizenship. [But] Matt, despite his English accent, is the only Nolan brother to have settled in Chicago . He has been living there with his American wife, Erika, and their two young boys in a $650,000, three-storey house in an upper-middle-class neighbourhood, not far from where the Obamas lived before moving to Washington.

(l. ) Chris and Jonathan Nolan; (r.) an alleged photo of Matthew Nolan and (apparently) one of his children.

“Matt is the most charismatic, likeable and engaging of the three brothers, say people who know the family. Chris, the director and the most famous, comes across as very English — stiff, formal, private and weirdly obsessive: he keeps both his passports on him at all times in case of emergency. ‘He’s a cold guy who makes cold films,’ one producer recently said.

“Matt inherited his father’s gift as a storyteller. After their father died last year, Jonah Nolan recalled of him: ‘He would make up stories, most of the time on the spot. He had an amazing ability to spin a yarn, which he did right up to the end.’

“With those easy charms, Matt might have been expected to be the one to become the successful filmmaker. Brendan Nolan gave his children an 8mm camera when they were very young, and he and Chris and their friends made little films together. But Matt and Chris drifted apart over the years and now it’s Chris and Jonah who are friends and collaborators, despite their greater age difference.

“Chris and Jonah first worked together a decade ago on Memento, a paranoid psychological thriller, told in reverse, about a man with amnesia who desperately tries to find out who murdered his wife.

“The Nolan brothers’ nightmarish and bloody vision and their obsessive fascination with the criminal mind, the boundaries of psychological identity and social transgression, have since made them among the most successful filmmakers in the history of cinema.”

A friend of Matthew Nolan’s named Tom Sedlacek is said to have “often wondered whether sibling jealousy over Chris and Jonah Nolan’s extraordinary success in Hollywood may have pushed Matt, the oldest and most charismatic brother, to try to find his own fast-track to wealth.”

It was reported a year ago last March that Matthew Nolan had been arrested in Chicago on suspicion of murder, in connection with a 2005 killing in Costa Rica of Florida businessman Robert Cohen. “According to reports, Nolan and alleged accomplice Douglas Mejia went to Costa Rica to try to reclaim a 5 million pound debt that Cohen owed to another businessman,” one account said.

Nolan “had been under investigation by Chicago Police in a $700,000 bank-fraud (or check-kiting) scheme when FBI agents here nabbed him over the Cohen killing.

“Nolan pretended he was interested in doing business in Costa Rica when the two met in a hotel. But his real mission was to recover $7 million (U.S.) Cohen owed another Florida man, authorities said. An accomplice kidnapped Cohen and the men tried to extort the money from Cohen’s family; but when that failed, they killed Cohen, Costa Rican authorities said.”

A Wall Street Journal headline last fall read “Holy Bat Brother!” with the subhead “Was Director’s Kin Plotting Escape?”

“Matthew Nolan intended to do what no one has ever done — escape from the high-rise downtown Metropolitan Correctional Center,” a Chicago Tribune story reported. “The MCC is no Blackgate Penitentiary — one of the prisons in the Batman comics — but a Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman said its records show no one has ever escaped from the jail where gang leaders, mobsters and higher-lever drug dealers await trial. ”

In her 6.17 N.Y. Times review of Brett Easton Ellis‘s just-published Imperial Bedrooms , Erica Wagner laments the numbing effect of reading books (and, she might have also said, watching movies and cable TV shows) that are saturated with flash and brutality. “The reader has to wonder what Ellis is trying to prove,” Wagner writes. “That people numbed by the poison of a society based solely on money, fame and beauty are capable of practically anything?

“If that’s not news to us it’s thanks, in large part, to Bret Easton Ellis. But what purpose can simple repetition serve?

“We, the modern audience for novels like this, have gotten over being shocked. There’s nothing left. From A Clockwork Orange to Antichrist and with American Psycho along the way, we’ve seen it all. We too have been poisoned, so that when we see pictures from Haiti or from Abu Ghraib, they appall us, perhaps, but not for long. They are part of the landscape: they are what we expect to see, and we must blunt ourselves to their power if we are to survive as feeling human beings.

“That’s not a call for a return to the past — for the veil of doubt cast over Tess Durbeyfield as she lies in a wood at Alec’s mercy. Nor for the stark moralism Dickens suggests with the death of Bill Sikes, even his poor dog’s brains dashed out in despair. But a skilled novelist, one who wants to examine the way we live and why, needs to move the conversation forward. The obligation is even greater if he’s returning to a world he’s depicted before.

“‘History repeats the old conceits, the glib replies, the same defeats,’ runs one of this novel’s epigraphs, a line from Elvis Costello. So it may, but fiction doesn’t have to: that’s the point. Let’s hope Ellis figures that out.”