Robert Rodriguez will he doing the old film-buffy genre-wallow later this month when he begins shooting Machete, a feature inspired by a mock Grindhouse trailer. The film will star Danny Trejo (Heat) and will reportedly use Austin locations. It’s being reported that Robert DeNiro, Jonah Hill and Michelle Rodriguez might be cast, but that sounds a little dicey. Steven Seagal and Lindsay Lohan could also be involved. What was it about the failure of Grindhouse that Rodriguez didn’t understand? Genre spoofs are only for film snobs.

The witty David Rasche (Sledgehammer!) talking to a couple of grinning ABC news guys about the real-life political parallels in Armando Iannucci‘s In The Loop. (I hate sites that don’t offer easy-to-grab embed codes.) “Trust me — I know what I’m doing.”

During her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Judge Sonia Sotomayor “took refuge in the impenetrable language of the law, and in what seemed (and this is becoming a regular strategy in politics) to be the deliberate jumbling of syntax, so people at home won’t be able to follow what is being said,” Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote today.

“To be clear and succinct is to look for trouble. Better to produce a mist and miasma of jumbly words, and sentences that do not hold. You’re talking, so you’ll seem alive — in fact people using the syntax dodge are often quite animated — but as to meaning, you can leave that to the TV producers, who’ll wrestle around trying to get something that makes sense and then settle for the Perry Mason soundbite. (Well, in truth the Perry Mason soundbite is pretty much what they want.)”

I don’t mean to make light of Mischa Barton‘s sad situation, but what do you have to do or say to persuade the authorities that you’re a “5150” and need to be placed under involuntary psychiatric hold? Someone’s misery is not a joke and I’m not looking for laughs, but I know that all my life I’ve held onto a single concept of what it means to totally lose it and be seen as someone who needs a straightjacket. And it comes from a specific movie. And it involves heavy traffic on a busy city street.

The most vivid way of freaking out, I believe, is running out into traffic like a crazy man and shouting excitedly, like Kevin McCarthy did at the end of the original cut of Don Siegel‘s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (’56). The effect is intensified if you run out and slap the hoods and trunks of cars in your underwear, like Phillip Seymour Hoffman did at the finale of Love Liza. Or if you run into traffic wearing clothes but while waving a gun around, as Martin Lawrence reportedly did in ’96.

The fact that McCarthy’s Body Snatchers theatricality has been twice imitated tells you there’s something about running into traffic that registers on a primal level with Average Joes. Can’t take it anymore? Doff those duds and head for the nearest major intersection! Except what do you say once you’re running from car to car and knocking on car windows and all that? It would be tough dialogue to write.

Summit’s gradual Hurt Locker rollout is more or less patterned after the successful territory-by-territory, word-of-mouth-building expansions that resulted in big returns for Slumdog Millionaire and Gran Torino, reports Forbes‘ Laura Myers. She states that Kathy Bigelow‘s film “may become the year’s independent breakout by combining early box-office success with critical acclaim.”

But the proof will be in the chocolate pudding as the film expands to 93 siutations this weekend and then to 200 situations on 7.24. The key, of course, given the general laziness and scattered ADD mentalities out there, will be TV advertising. Word of mouth is well and good and vital for success, but you also have to grab people by the lapels and go “hey!”

In a N.Y. Times profile published today, David Carr writes that with the sale of Deadline Hollywood Daily to Mail.com, Nikki Finke “stands to make more than $5 million in the next eight years, and her deal could go as high as $10 million, according to one of the people involved in the deal who declined to be quoted citing the private nature of the negotiations.” So much for the $14 million sale figure reported by The Wrap on 6.23.

I love the following passage at the end of Carr’s piece, by the way: “If the deal works out, Ms. Finke’s probing phone calls will continue to panic the suits in Hollywood for some time to come. Without saying who it was, she gave a recent example of someone who ended up as a pelt on her wall. ‘I implored him to talk to me, and he did a little, but not enough,’ she explained. ‘He should have protected himself.'”

“If” the deal works out?

As with any subway map, you need to focus on the legend and proceed from there. Consider the partial images below and then click on the big version.

Best wishes and favoring winds to Anne Thompson and her plan to base Thompson on Hollywood on Indiewire starting August 1st. Her deal with SnagFilms and IndieWire CEO Rick Allen, according to a Paid Content story (which links to a Sharon Waxman Wrap story), says she’ll handle her own ads. She’ll of course receive promotion and visibility through the Indiewire hookup. My understanding is that Thompson was looking hard at the Indiewire thing a couple of months ago.

The most uncompromised aspect of Nikki Finke‘s 7.16 post about Bonnie Fuller‘s hiring by Mail.com Media Corporation (MMC) to run HollywoodLife.com is — of course, as ever — the reader comments. I was particularly struck by the following comment posted at 10:53 pm last night by “Stacy,” to wit:

“Egads…Bonnie Fuller? Queen of Tabloid Lies? That woman has zero conscience when it comes to lying about celebrities, making up stories based on the pictures, terrorizing her staff and making a mockery of the media’s first amendment rights.

“Fuller is a cat with nine lives. After American Media (i.e., Star, The National Enquirer, Globe) fired her I really hoped she’d fade into the woodwork and no one would hire her to taint their organization and turn young and impressionable “journalists” into lying scumbags like she did at Us Weekly and the American Media mags.

“But when all anyone cares about is the bottom line then Bonnie Fuller is the person you want. HollywoodLife.com can kiss morals, truth, verified and named sources and just plain old good taste on the ass and wave bye-bye.

“I can see it now. On Fuller’s first day HollywoodLife.com’s homepage will read, ‘BRAD BEGS JEN FOR SECOND CHANCE’ or ‘ANGIE DRIVES BRAD AWAY FOR GOOD!’ or ‘BRAD TELLS JEN, ‘I STILL LOVE YOU”. Just when I thought this fuckery was going to end, along comes Bonnie Fuller out of the woodwork. Bleh. That’s the unfortunate thing with cockroaches — they’ll survive a nuclear holocaust and the rest of us will be deader than doornails. Roaches outlived the dinosaurs and Bonnie Fuller will outlive her fellow cockroaches.”

Stacy needed a better kicker than the dinosaurs/cockroaches analogy. And the line about “this fuckery” coming to an end is a little simple-minded given that (a) the likelihood that mindlessly made-up tabloid stories about celebrity relationships would fade away is less than zero given that (b) the young under-educated females who lap this stuff up every week have certain emotional appetites, diseased philosophies and self-esteem issues that exist independent of Bonnie Fuller’s ravings and imaginings. But the point is made.

There are many ugly and deplorable elements in U.S. society. The people who worship the ravings of Glenn Beck, for example. But sometimes, particularly after buying groceries at a supermarket, I find myself muttering that there’s nothing worse — nothing lower, shallower, stupider, and more spiritually rancid or pathetic — than the longings and imaginings and material aspirations of Fuller’s female readership.

Here is David Carr‘s dry-as-a-bone reporting about the MMC/Fuller announcement.

A fairly recent recording of an information/blistering critique line at the Diamond Cinema in Navan, Ireland — roughly 50 kilometers northwest of Dublin. The Diamond guy who recorded this clearly has issues with the champagne bottle scene. That or he’s a frustrated critic who needs his own film blog. Diamond phone #: 353.046.907.4755.

My all-time favorite saloon shoot-out, hands down. Will someone please save this film from public domain hell and figure out a way to remaster it and make it look as sharp and rich as possible? Bartender: “Mister, you really killed him.” Gunslinger: “Awww.”

The big bearded British guy in McCabe and Mrs. Miller — the hired assassin who carried an elephant shotgun around and wore big boots and a huge sheepskin coat and a huge wide-brimmed hat, and who was shot in the forehead with a single-shot derringer by Warren Beatty at the very end — has pushed off in real life. His name was Hugh Millais, and he was 79 years old. He was about 40 when he made McCabe.