There’s one good thing about MGM’s current lack of liquidity, which has resulted in the suspension of development on Bond 23 — i.e., the 007 film that would have have been directed by Sam Mendes — and has banished Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson‘s The Hobbitt into the realm of financial uncertainty.

The good thing is that it’s now at least faintly possible that The Hobbitt could be scrubbed. This would obviously force Del Toro, who’s been prearing to direct the two-part epic, to make something more personal and particular — i.e., something in the realm of Pan’s Labyrinth. The shit-canning of The Hobbitt isn’t likely, I realize. Jackson will probably find alternate financing. But I can dream.

“Part of the reason they’re announcing the suspension of Bond 23 is that it clears the way for necessary payments to talent and others to be dropped for the time being,” a friend remarks.

If you’re filing like me (six or eight or ten posts daily) it’s all you can do to keep up with the regular Cannes Film Festival screenings plus whatever odd market screening you’re able to slip into. (Not to mention the occasional parties and press luncheons.) So let’s say plainly what most people would rather not say, which is that most waterfront-covering journalists might be able to attend one or two Director’s Fortnight screenings at best, and that’s if they’re seriously military.

Ellen Barkin in Cam Archer’s Shit Year

Of the just-announced 2010 Director’s Fortnight showings, I’ll be making an effort to see Cam Archer‘s Shit Year. Beyond that I’m not sure. I’d like to happen upon something stunning or breathtaking but how do you pinpoint such films in advance? Every day Cannes is a dawn-to-midnight struggle against the clock — you can’t mosey around.

If I plenty of nostalgic kick-back time I’d want to see 80 year-old Frederik Wiseman‘s Boxing Gym and maybe Stephen Kijak‘s Stones In Exile (i.e., a promotional tie-in to the 5.18.10 release of the remastered Exile on Main Street, about the recording of that classic Rolling Stones album in the South of France in ’71). Does anyone know anything solid about any of the DF selections?

There’s a Christina Hendricks clone on the cover of the current Esquire, and also in a photo spread inside (or at least on esquire.com). I don’t know the cause — radical diet, plastic surgery, Photoshop — but she’s definitely not the actress I’ve seen in Mad Men. Her particularity has been chiselled and scrubbed down and made to seem less particular, more generic. She could be any hot-bod Maxim babe.

In a 1964 Twilight Zone episode called “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” creator Rod Serling recited the following intro: “For want of a better estimate let’s call it the year 2000. At any rate imagine a time in the future in which science has developed the means of giving everyone the face and body he dreams of. It may not happen tomorrow, but it happens now — in the Twilight Zone.”

“But is that good?,” Collin Wilcox‘s Marilyn Cuberle asks Richard Long‘s Dr. Rex. “Being like everybody? I mean, isn’t that the same as being nobody?

To which Dr. Rex grins and says, “I think it’s time you tell me where you’re getting these radical ideas.”

I don’t remember loading this onto my iTunes collection, but it played during my drive to Connecticut last weekend, and I was suddenly reminded how transporting rhythm guitar and drum back-up can be without vocals. I would kill to find a collection of good ’70s and ’80s rock tracks with the singing entirely gone — just straight-ass band chops.

No excuse for posting this three days late. I meant to throw it up Sunday morning but something (I forget what) distracted and then it was gone. Watched this again today and it’s definitely mildly funny.

Could one fairly describe Alynda Wheat, the new People film critic who’s replaced Leah Rozen, as a scholastically correct film monk in the tradition of Karina Longworth, say, or Stephanie Zacharek? Or perhaps some kind of spirited resuscitation of the spirit of Pauline Kael, or maybe some kind of film-dweeby Rachel Maddow type?

I don’t personally know Wheat, but she doesn’t appear (emphasis on that word) to be any of these things, or even a “member of the cloth” as it were. She’s just a good snappy writer from Entertainment Weekly, apparently, who used to write about TV.

How well does Wheat know the films of Ernst Lubitsch, Anthony Mann, Nicholas Ray, Agnes Varda, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, etc.? More to the point, are there any People readers who give two shits who these directors were? Or care about any perspective other than one that expresses their own secular theology? Is it unfair to dismiss People readers as intellectually challenged girly-girl types? I honestly don’t think so. Was Wheat hired because the editors wanted someone who wasn’t snobby, who hailed from the under-35 demo and could “speak Eloi” or…you know, communicate with whatever vague sensibility is thought to represent the readership?

The answers to these and other questions will, I’m sure, be revealed soon enough.

No great shakes — I was in Weehawken, New Jersey around 7:45 pm and I’d never taken the ferry to Manhattan before, so I did. It was warm enough to stand on the windy deck with just a T-shirt and spring jacket. The video needs something else, I realize. A huge howling serpent would do. Rising out of the Hudson, splashing around, tipping the ferry over, etc.

I’m sorry for anyone who’s been told they have only a few months or a couple of years to live, or who’s back on crack or has attempted suicide, or both. I feel sorry for anyone who claims to enjoy watching dogs try to chew each other to death. I feel nothing but loathing for the guy who took snaps of poor Dennis Hooper as he fell to the ground. (And yes, I’ve read the accompanying article.) The tabs are pure ugliness, pure hallucinatory nowhere-ville. They’re worse now than they’ve ever been.

A Knopf publicist called me back this morning about Michael Feeney Callan‘s Robert Redford biography, which I wrote about yesterday. It’s a Knopf title and not Simon & Schuster, as Amazon.com claims. The earliest the Redford biography will be out, she said, will be spring 2011 but more likely summer 2011. Changes, edits, revisions, etc. With either release the book will have been in the works for a minimum of 13 years, since Callan was definitely on the case in early ’98, as I explained yesterday.

I pulled off the Jersey Turnpike this morning to do a little work at one of those junk-food rest stops. Average Joes obviously don’t choose the grub at these roadside joints, but in a way they do by buying and wolfing down the Roy Rogers fried chicken and Nedicks hot dogs in mass quantities. You can buy a salad or a chicken wrap or a smoothie — they have those alternatives — but everyone’s scarfing down the chemicals and the batter and the burgers.

All you have to do is sit in one of these places for a half-hour or so and study the customers — the way they look and dress and shuffle around. These folks are bored, lazy, unhealthy. Not paragons of vim and vigor. I know, I know — I should tend to my own issues and leave well enough alone. But I can’t help myself. I look at these guys and go “sheeesh.”

The photo below is of a man named John Robinson, who worked as a sideshow freak fat man in travelling circuses in the 1880s or 1890s. There are two or three guys sitting around in my roadside rest stop right now who are roughly the same size.

There are next to no electrical outlets near the seating areas, and I’m suspecting that the guys who designed these nightmare malls have deliberately hidden the electrical outlets to keep guys like me from plugging in. Update: Five minutes ago a guy who works here (uniform , baseball hat) noticed my distress, came over and showed me an outlet hidden behind a table of Starbucks condiments. Thanks, man — much appreciated.

The late John Robinson

What was deemed very likely earlier this month is now assured — Olivier Assayas‘ five-hour-long Carlos will screen out-of-competition at next month’s Cannes Film Festival. As noted before, a five-hour sit plus a press conference plus writing a review is going to nearly eat up an entire day. I’d personally love a chance to see Carlos before Cannes for the sake of time efficiency alone.