I’ve been trying to (a) sell my black beater Nissan 240 SX (which runs reasonably well, isn’t that bad looking, has good brakes and unworn tires and a working radio/CD player) and (b) find someone to adopt/babysit the BMW yellow-jacket motorcycle (i.e., keep it and ride it now and then so the battery won’t die) and coming up blank on both fronts. You have to either drive vehicles or sell them — they can’t just sit in a garage. Over the last few days these two matters have been the biggest time swallowers apart from the InFilm tour, which came to an end yesterday. I fly back to Manhattan today at noon. Dead zone from 12:30 pm to 7 pm Pacific.

I never glance at Interview magazine much less read it, but Jack Nicholson‘s q & a with Mad Men‘s January Jones is…well, curious, of course. I presume the deal happened between Jones and Nicholson first and then the editors got involved, but still…odd. But he’s a relaxed and relaxing questioner and a very good listener. I would pay serious coin to read a series of interviews between Nicholson and two or three dozen actors, directors, screenwriters, producers, etc. He gets right down to it, knows exactly how things work and gets right into the strategies.

That said, the article’s headline copy is disingenuous by claiming the piece is “by Jack Nicholson” when it’s clear that he didn’t write the intro copy.

Yesterday’s opening-day tracking had Funny People with a multi-quadrant first-choice average of 14%…low. This translated, per Steve Mason, into an $8 million opening yesterday and a likely $22 million for the weekend. That’s roughly the same opening-stanza coin earned by The 40 Year-Old Virgin four years ago but half the amount earned by Todd Phillips‘ The Hangover.

That said and for what it’s worth, Funny People is the weekend’s #1 film, whipping the asses of G-Force, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and The Ugly Truth.

I went to this Howard Stern show clip from Thursday’s interview with Funny People guys Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen in order to hear their delivery of those reported Katherine Heigl-ripping comments. But the whole ten-minute excerpt (part 2 of a three-parter) is just fun to listen to.

I’ve just heard from Ben Stiller about the satirical Red Hour/20th Century Fox video that was released yesterday afternoon by Movieline. “It seems the Red Hour Industrial got out there! Just wanted to give you the context if you’re interested. It was made for Fox execs and handed out with Red Foxx T-shirts at our initial meeting. We wanted to do something for them to kick things off. They were all in on it, and especially [Tom] Rothman, who is a good friend. [It was] obviously not meant to go out in the world, but I guess that’s pretty hard to stop these days. Hope you’re well. Love that Hurt Locker. Best, B.”

My immediate, honest-to-God, solar-plexus reaction to today’s news about Rob Marshall being the likely helmer of Jerry Bruckeimer‘s Pirates of the Caribbean 4 — a project that warrants the same degree of respect and esteem as Jaws 4: The Revenge — is that it’s not going to help matters if Marshall earns a degree of Best Director consideration for Nine later this year. My gut tells me the Bruckheimer gig is going to hurt in the same way that Eddie Murphy‘s starring role in Norbit helped put the kibbosh on his Best Supporting Actor campaign in ’06/’07 for Dreamgirls.

Gamer…great. An action film that’s a little bit different (gamers controlling prisoners in mass-scale, ultra-violent online games involving real death) but makes the relationship between Gerard Butler and Logan Lerman (in this clip at least) feel an awful lot like Bruce Willis and Justin Long in Live Free or Die Hard. So viewers will, you know, feel safe and assured.

Megan Fox clearly humiliated Seth Rogen by preventing him, quickly but gently, from planting a cheek peck or air kiss. That’s cold, man. And in my book that’s it for Fox. She can’t be taken down soon enough.

Funny People “is leisurely, with many extended sequences, but the performers’ natural command of rhythm holds it in tension,” writes New Yorker critic David Denby in a review dated 8.3. The hilarious dialogues among the three roommates are like complicated, interlocked sparring matches.

“The scenes between Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen are more conventionally dramatic, but George’s shifting moods make them unstable and nerve-racking. Apatow is not only generous to performers here; he’s generous to himself, too, creating the kind of visual divertissements he has never attempted before — most memorably, a mock George Simmons family film, Re-Do, with Sandler’s grownup face digitally joined to the body of an infant.

“George talks on the phone, complains, shouts. He literally returns to diapers — the comic’s inner infant never dies. But when [he] tries to act as a grownup in life, things don’t go as well. He has a vision of the happiness he lost — a relationship with a live-wire actress, Laura (Leslie Mann), twelve years earlier. He cheated on her, and they never married, but, his disease in remission, he tries to get something going with her again, even though she’s now living in Northern California with her two daughters (the actual children of Apatow and Leslie Mann) and her fierce Australian husband (Eric Bana).

“Like an errant meteor, George crashes into a functioning family. The last third of em>Funny People is a further development of the question that em>Knocked Up/em> asked: What does it take to be a husband? Apatow, who probably understands the obsessive loneliness of comics as well as anyone, also knows a thing or two about family life. The miracle of Funny People is that it brings these two entirely dissimilar, even antagonistic worlds into a single, resonant whole.

There is, of course, no previously mapped lead-in to a story involving humans in Ridley Scott‘s just-announced Alien prequel. The only back-story alluded to in Scott’s 30-year-old original came when mining-cargo voyagers John Hurt and Veronica Cartwright explored that huge abandoned spacecraft resting on that dark, howling planetoid and came upon that skeletal carcass of a gargantuan creature with an elephant trunk whose rib cage apparently been penetrated from within.

Honestly? I would love to see a subtitled film about a crew of 30-foot-tall life forms with elephant trunks dealing with an alien invasion. No humans, I mean. That would be very cool, very avant-garde. Joe Popcorn wouldn’t like it, of course, but a studio chief who looks to Joe’s wants and needs for movie inspiration needs to go on a sabbatical.

Screenwriter Jon Spaihts will write the prequel screenplay (his pitch to 20th Century Fox and Scott Free having triggered the project). And we’re all presuming that Scott will deliver a class-act feature but c’mon…this is just another lazy greed move-slash-brand reboot. The franchise has been re-thought, re-vamped, re-mined, re-action-figured (I own two black queens from the mid ’90s) and DVD box-setted to death.

By The People: The Election of Barack Obama, that long-reported-about doc partially funded by Ed Norton‘s Class 5 Films and directed by Amy Rice and Alicia Sims, will have a brief Oscar-qualifying run at Manhattan’s Sunshine Cinemas and L.A.’s Sunset 5 (no! not the Sunset 5! aagghh!) starting on 8.7 — i.e., a week from Friday. It will thereafter have its official big-time debut on HBO on 11.3. In other words, no press screenings or preferential press treatment of any kind? Okay, fine — I’ll be there opening day.