“The old guard has passed and the new guard is here. And the new guard likes to ding dong ditch people just for fun.” — Ashton Kutcher after beating CNN (yes, CNN) to the million-follower mark yesterday afternoon. But what does it mean to be ding dong ditched?

Nikki Finke‘s report this morning that 20th Century Fox is internally projecting a $70 to $75 million domestic opening-weekend gross for Wolverine (with rival studios predicting closer to $80 million) makes you wonder to what extent the illegal piracy and downloading of the film — which was first noticed on or about April 1st — may have hurt the earning potential. Would it be looking at a $90-to-$100 million opening without the piracy?

Brett Ratner‘s 2006 X-Men movie cost $210 million, opened to $102.7 millon. Bryan Singer‘s X-Men United cost $110 million, opened to $85.5 million. The key consideration, of course, is whether the illegal downloading has influenced the general word-of-mouth. How could it not?

It was announced yesterday afternoon that Bruno has gotten its R rating. The real story (i.e., the humor element) would convey what cuts were made to get this rating. The trades never seem to even try to report this.

A DVD of Fritz Lang‘s Manhunt (1941), a classic World War II-era chase thriller, will emerge in remastered form on May 12th from Fox Home Video.

Manhunt was one of my favorite late-night TV movies when I was in my early to mid teens. But it hasn’t been aired in a long time and has never before been released on DVD or VHS.

Based on Geoffrey Household‘s “Rogue Male,” it’s about a gentleman hunter named Thorndike (Walter Pidgeon) who manages to penetrate Adolf Hitler‘s Berchtesgaden headquarters as a kind of hunting exercise, not to kill Hitler but to prove to himself that he was able to get him in his sights. I remember the close-up of Pidgeon’s trigger finger — pausing, hesitating.

Then the story kicks in. Pidgeon/Thorndike is discovered by German security, thrown off a cliff, survives, is tracked down by soldiers and hounds but manages to escape, makes his way to London with German agents still on his trail, meets an emotionally vulnerable streetwalker (Joan Bennett) who wears a little metal arrow in her beret. She falls for Thorndike, takes him in, pays the price.

It’s been decades since I’ve seen it but the principal baddie is played by George Sanders; John Carradine plays another ne’er do well. I especially recall the ending with Pidgeon hiding in a cave and Sanders talking to him from outside, trying to coax him out, and the manner in which the little arrow from Bennett’s beret resolves things.

It doesn’t work for me to call it Man Hunt — it has to be a one-word title.

As with all older action films the pace is slowish and deliberate. But old-fashionedness is what the enjoyment of a film like Manhunt is all about.

This data chart says that Manhunt was shot in March 1941 and was out in theatres three months later. This was more or less standard procedure back then.

One of the features on the disc is a restoration comparison. That’s always a closer for me. Shawn Belston‘s Fox Home Video team is highly respected. I’ve only seen Man Hunt on a primitive black-and-white TV with commercials every 10 minutes.

Sanders was repeatedly cast as villains because of that snide and effete manner that he did so well. But what about those of us who enjoy Sanders’ haughty airs? I loved his disreputable cad in Rebecca and the way he oozed out his insinuations. In any event mix his effeteness with good-guyness and you’ve got one of Sanders’ most winning roles ever — the adventurous journalist friend of Joel McCrea in Foreign Correspondent. And he was charming also (as well as perfect) as Addison DeWitt in All About Eve.

The screenwriters of State of Play, says L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein, “have taken a story that’s really a cop movie and grafted it into the world of journalism.” He makes some good points, but he should have clarified if the same plot points are in the original six-hour British miniseries. I need to watch it again myself so I can answer this question.

“Russell Crowe actually interrogates one suspect — I mean source — in a motel room, with a backup crew of cops — I mean reporters — stashed in an adjoining motel room, secretly videotaping the encounter, which he then shows to another source/suspect in the story. This is, ahem, wrong on a thousand different ethical levels, not to mention, in an era of vastly diminished newspaper resources, who could afford to pay for all the video gear, much less two motel rooms?” Hilarious!

“Crowe has a basic conflict of interest that would disqualify any reporter from covering this story; he’s an old friend (and former college roommate) of the powerful congressman who’s at the heart of a murder mystery. Even worse, from a believability angle, Crowe’s top editor (nicely played as a tough-talking Fleet Street expatriate by Helen Mirren) knows all about their friendship, which in real journalistic life, would have disqualified Crowe from covering the story from the jump-off, especially since he has an even more complicated entanglement with the congressman’s wife.

“There [are] other farfetched moments, including a scene where Mirren refuses to print an explosive story, saying that the paper’s new owners are insisting that Crowe get at least one key source on the record. A reputable newspaper would indeed demand that at least one source be on the record before printing a big story, but that demand would come from the editors, not from the owners of the paper, who usually find out about a big story at the same time the readers do — after it’s printed.

“But for me, the biggest whopper of all happens after Crowe has pushed his deadline to the limit. He finally sits down and cranks out a complicated expose that could ruin a number of powerful Washington insiders in even less time than it took me to write this blog item. (Fair enough — that’s dramatic compression, since who wants to see the dreary details of all that typing.) But when Crowe is finished, he simply hits the SEND button, gets up and walks out of the newsroom, as if his job were done.

“It’s a heroic walk off into the sunset, but in terms of veracity, it leaves out all the real work that goes into a story after the first draft is finished. In other words, there’s no editing, no rewrites, no fact checking, no trims for space, no perusals by the paper’s lawyers, no nothing. It’s a wonderful movie moment, but like all too many movie moments, whether they involve lawyers, doctors, cops or grouchy newspaper reporters, it leaves out an awful lot of the rich detail that goes into accomplishing a task.”

Teasers mostly provide the mood and visceral flavor; trailers do the same but they also get out the blueprints and explain the story, characters and theme. And by this strategy a just-released, phase-two Hurt Locker trailer (Summit, 6.26) does its job quite well. Except, that is, for the artificial addition of an “oh, boy” when Jeremy Renner pulls out four or five bombs from under the sand. Too folksy sounding. Some kind of barely discernible animal sound would have worked better.

There’s a malfunction, by the way, when you click on the Hurt Locker‘s website. You get nothing, flatline, whiteness.

Welcome to the commercially flush world of ultra-violent video games. I once watched my son Dylan play Grand Theft Auto, asking him at one point what kind of sick fuck would dream up the violent stuff in that game, but this is far worse. It’s satanic. I’m asking HE readers to watch this footage (i.e., which is somehow linked to www.projectmanhunt.com) and try to convey in 25 or 30 words how it makes them feel.

The guy who created this needs to be put in a damp dungeon, his leg chained to the floor, a pile of straw to sleep on. For life.

I hereby demand apologies from everyone who felt yesterday’s reaction to that teabag protest photo (“We’re a Christian Nation,” etc.) was excessive. Image is from a Huffington Post-ing called “The Ten Most Offensive Tea Party Photos.”

Digital Bits columnist Bill Hunt has reported that Peter Jackson is preparing to double-dip his Lord of the Rings trilogy on Blu-ray. Only the theatrical versions will be out on Bluray by the end of the year, obviously leaving room for the release of an “ultimate” Bluray box set of extended versions,which will be released concurrent with Guillermo del Toro‘s upcoming Hobbit films. Repeat the legend until it becomes fact: Jackson is Lucas, Jackson is Lucas, Jackson is Lucas, etc.

Todd McCarthy‘s annual Cannes forecast piece contains some fresh info but for the most part mentions a lot of the same films previously listed by Screen Daily‘s Mike Goodridge in a 2.11.09 speculation piece. The official slate of Cannes ’09 films will be announced on 4.23.

McCarthy and Goodridge have both listed Pedro Almodovar‘s Broken Embraces , Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds, Lars von Trier‘s Antichrist, Cristian Mungiu ‘s Tales From the Golden Age, Ang Lee‘s Taking Woodstock, Michael Haneke‘s The White Ribbon, Jane Campion ‘s Bright Star, Ken Loach‘s Looking For Eric, Terry Gilliam‘s The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus and Andrea Arnold‘s Fish Tank.

McCarthy made no mention of Gaspar Noe‘s Enter the Void, Fatih Akin‘s Soul Kitchen or Todd Solondz‘s Forgiveness — you tell me. Nor did he mention Ron Howard’s Angels and Insects, which may, I’m told, have some kind of special screening there to promote the film with European audiences. (Why would Howard want to re-experience the terrible reception that The DaVinci Code received in Cannes in ’06?)

McCarthy has listed Francis Coppola‘s Tetro< ./em> (while forwarding the new information that it was shot in black and white), and Werner Herzog‘s Bad Lieutenant 2: New Orleans Port of Call Sweat and Seafood Gumbo (or whatever it’s called). An “almost certain midnight attraction,” he says, will be Sam Raimi‘s Drag Me to Hell.

He also mentions Jonnie To’s Vengeance (i.e., wolf-faced Johnny Hallyday as a hitman-turned-chef who heads to Hong Kong to avenge his daughter’s death, blah blah) , Marco Bellocchio‘s Vincere with Giovanna Mezzogiorno and Filippo Timi in a study of Mussolini’s secret lover and the couple’s son Albino, and Police, Adjective< ?em>, directed by 12:08: East of Bucharest helmer Corneliu Porumboiu.

Plus a whole bunch of Asian films that I’ll get around to mentioning later on. No hurries or worries.

An L.A. Times story by John Horn is basically saying that the audience for smart complex dramas and thrillers like State of Play (which is expected to tank this weekend) and Duplicity isn’t big enough these days, and that the likelihood of more movies being made in this vein isn’t high.

The common element in these films is poor Tony Gilroy, who directed and wrote Duplicity and did a State of Play rewrite. So this trend (if it persists) is a big slap at the Gilroy brand, which of course many screenwriters respect and try to emulate.

Great. Bring on the lowest-common-denominator dumbness. Michael Bay movies, chick flicks, Bourne thrillers, Sascha Baron Cohen dramas, coarse comedies, family-friendly animated features, Roland Emmerich movies, Judd Apatow comedies, etc.

The underlying point of Horn’s piece isn’t that movies like State of Play and Duplicity can’t sell tickets, but that they cost too much for what they’re likely to make. State of Play should have been made for $25 or $30 million instead of $60 million. ditto Duplicity. It’s that simple. No more star salaries.

Horn quotes Universal production chief Donna Langley saying “you are going to find every studio saying, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it’…It will be awhile until there are a lot of really smart dramas.”

It’s not that I’ve always loathed metal, although I have. I also think you have to be a bit of a low-life to play it, much less be a fan…right? What would the ghosts of Gustav Mahler or Chet Baker say about metal bands if they were brought back to life? They’d say, “Can we be dead again, please?” Metal, for me, is still the reigning metaphor for the coarsening of civilization. It’s for primitive, thick-fingered types who get high a lot and don’t want to know any better. Sorry.

But there is God and spirit in the playing and savoring of all music, even metal, and the love that the fans feel for it, however pathetic, is as genuine as my love for The Who, Patti Smith, Queen, Joni Mitchell, the acoustic sets of Kurt Cobain, early (’63 to ’66) Rolling Stones tracks and Bernard Herrman‘s score for North by Northwest.

And I have to say, late as I am to the table on this, that Anvil!: The Story of Anvil — which opened last Friday in select cities — is one of the saddest (as in funny-sad) and most recognizably human, emotionally touching rock-music documentaries I’ve ever seen. Seriously.

It’s about a has-been metal group that I’d barely heard of (mainly because they never really made it commercially), and an attempt by the now-50ish members — Steve “Lips” Kudlow, Robb Reiner and Glenn Five — to get their lives going again. They were admired by some but their albums were reportedly poor sounding and they never tapped into any real money. And now they’re grappling with intimations of mortality, bald spots and ticking clocks, but they have to give the career-restart thing a go anyway. How can anyone not love that?

We first encounter them living rural, dead-end lives and trying to gradually make things happen again. Sisyphusian and then some. We see them going through some fairly anxious moments, often, as well as some depressing ones, and also some that warm your heart. And some that are close to hilarious — loser humor that only guys who’ve actually gone through the doldrums coudl come up with. (Talking to the camera about a European tour in which many things went “drastically wrong,” Lipps adds that “at least there was a tour for it to go wrong on.”)

There’s also a moment that’s damn nice in a familial way. And the ending is pure Hollywood.

I mean it about the heart-warming element. Lipps and Robb are nice-enough guys, but they’re basically apes playing ape music for the ape masses (let’s face it), and you can’t help but root for them. Theirs is a passion play for the ages — a universal never-say-die parable about the water that we all long for. The size of the fight in the dog and all that. Listen to this riff about the ticking of time,, initially voiced by Lips and seconded by Reiner. The whole film, in a way, is in this one passage.