…in the Dark Knight tiller as of right now. Compared to Titanic‘s all-time tally of $600,788,188, the Shrek 2 milestone of $441,226,247, and the Phantom Menace earnings of $431,088,301.

Enough with the all-Gustav, all-the-time coverage from the cable news channels. It’s not Katrina, New Orleans has been spared a second disaster and there’s no real story except for video of water splashing over the levee walls on the Grand Canal. It’s just a big ferocious storm that’s causing some minor flooding and blowing over a lot of trees. If Katrina had never happened the news channels would be breaking into regular programming with occasional updates and bulletins when necessary…at most.
“Storm weakens to a Category 1 hurricane as it moves over Louisiana,” says the current MSNBC headline. “Water sloshes over some levees, but officials expect them to hold.” It’s over, drop it, back to Sarah Palin.

There’s a story up today about Russell Crowe, 44, thinking about accepting a second-banana role as Dr. Watson in Guy Ritchie‘s Sherlock Holmes, subordinate to star Robert Downey, Jr. If true, it simply means that Crowe has moved into that 40-plus phase in which a top-dog actor figures (a) “if I like the part, I like the part” and (b) “I don’t have to be the big star every time out.”
Jack Nicholson went through the same thing in the early ’80s (when he was also in his mid 40s) when he took supporting roles in Reds and Terms of Endearment.
A few minutes ago I mistyped the title of the Ritchie film as Sherlock Homie — and the instant I did that it hit me that this would be a much better vehicle for Richie and Warner Bros. than a Baker Street period piece with the hat and the pipe. We all know Ritchie isn’t going to respect the trappings of the original Arthur Conan Doyle character, so why even go there? But a brilliant modern-day London detective with perhaps an old-fashioned sense of reserve and decorum going up against the malignant criminal animals who’ve appeared in previous Ritchie films? That I would pay to see! Especially with Downey.
I’m not talking about a comedy or satire but a simple conceptual updating. Today’s under-25 mongrel moviegoing culture doesn’t want to know from 19th Century London. They don’t want to know about anything except eating popcorn, copping feels and scratching their balls during the trailers.
Making Sherlock Homie would also get Warner Bros. out of the duelling Sherlock Holmes movie situation it now finds itself in with Columbia, producer Judd Apatow, Sasha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell.
I wrote Daily Mail columnst Baz Bamigboye whether he’s heard about the Russell Crowe casting, and he replied as follows: “I have no clue. If I have any energy left I might pop into Guy Ritchie’s film party later tonight and ask him.”

“Driven by fantastic energy and a torrent of vivid images of India old and new, Slumdog Millionaire is a blast,” says Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, finally posting from Telluride this morning at 9:49 am after catching pic on Saturday. “Danny Boyle‘s film uses the dilemma of a poor teenager suspected of cheating on the local version of ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ to tell a story of social mobility that is positively Dickensian in its attention to detail and the extremes of poverty and wealth within a culture.
“Originally a Warner Independent title, the picture has just been acquired by Fox Searchlight for release in the U.S., where it will open at Thanksgiving, although Warner Bros. retains an interest. Tasty item looks to catch on in a big way with young, adventurous and merely curious viewers in wide specialized release.”
Yeah, but as “btwnproductions” sardonically wrote last night, Slumdog Millionaire seems “kind of foreign.” Don’t kid yourself that red-state audiences won’t be muttering this sentiment to each other once the Slumdog roll-out begins.
Still nothing from L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas.

I’ve seen it, posted an update and put it to bed already….Jesus.
12:30 pm Pacific Update: “I’ve heard some of the news. I’ve said before I think families are off limits, children limits. It has no relevance. I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. My mom had me when she was 18. And how families deal with issues of children shouldn’t be part of our politics.” — Barack Obama speaking to reporters a little while ago, filed by MSNBC’s Savannah Guthrie at 2:40 pm Eastern.

A motor-sport website reported on 8.26 that the ailing Paul Newman, 83, took a final spin around the Lime Rock track earlier this month in his GT1 Corvette. However accurate this sad tale may be, it summoned an immediate recall of Fred Astaire‘s “Julian” character in Stanley Kramer‘s On The Beach, and particularly Astaire’s expression after he wins the third-act Grand Prix race. (Which comes right at the end of this YouTube clip.)

Water is currently rolling and spilling over the New Orleans industrial canal’s west side, but Hurricane Gustav, thank fortune, has been downgraded from category 3 to category 2, and it’s starting to look like it won’t quite be a Roland Emmerich disaster film. (Thirty years ago the term would have been “an Irwin Allen disaster film.”) The worst of the storm will happen within the next couple of hours, but some are guardedly sensing that this won’t be Katrina 2. You can almost — almost — detect a slight tone of disappointment in the voices of the cable newscasters covering this thing.

“There was a time when Nicolas Cage, with his hangdog barks of irony, could have shouldered some of the women’s work, mocking his own penchant for excess. Now, however, the more ridiculous his films become, the more seriously he takes them — and the more, presumably, he is paid to do so.

“The Cage of Wild at Heart and Leaving Las Vegas found life to be engrossingly weird, and treated it accordingly, whereas the Cage of Bangkok Dangerous intones a line like ‘There’s a beer in the refrigerator’ as if he were reading from the Book of Micah. He appears sunken throughout, understandably depressed by his long, ropy mane of black hair; from a certain angle he’s a ringer for Chrissie Hynde, of the Pretenders.
“Only once does the Cage of yore flicker into view. It happens when Joe enlists the services of a resourceful thief, who introduces himself as Kong (Shahkrit Yamnarm). ‘Kong?’ Joe repeats, with a smile and a drawl, as though wondering when the guy is going to stop fingering wallets and start climbing the nearest tower.” — from Anthony Lane‘s review of Danny and Oxide Pang‘s Bangkok Dangerous in the 9.8 edition of The New Yorker.

“There’s sadness and tragedy within Slumdog Millionaire — starvation, genocide, child prostitution and overwhelming oppression — but there’s humor, humanity and dignity as well. [Director] Danny Boyle, stepping outside the UK to focus his lens on India, seems to have freed himself here to bring his brilliance as a director to its fullest fruition.
“Slumdog Millionaire is Boyle’s best film to date, which is saying quite a lot; He’s made a joyous, fun, and wonderfully accessible film that should play well in Toronto before moving on to wider release.” — from Kim Voynar‘s Cinematical review, posted this evening at 8:03 pm.
When is Variety‘s Todd McCarthy going to get around to posting his review of the Boyle film (which screened last night, after all) and Paul Schrader’s Adam Resurrected, which screened yesterday afternoon? And where, for that matter, are the reviews of same from L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas? Hubba-hubba, guys.

9.1 Update: The Sarah Palin “Babygate” thing is over. It turns out that Bristol Palin, the 17-year-old daughter of the Republican vice presidential candidate, is five months pregnant. It was certainly legitimate to ask questions given the reportedly curious circumstances of Trig Palin‘s birth last April plus the photos that provided no obvious indication that Sarah Palin was in a late-term pregnancy state prior to delivery. But it’s over now so forget it.

Every time I see a massive, shape-shifting dark gray storm cloud — a really big one, I mean — my mind always recalls those swirling God clouds above Charlton Heston during the red-sea parting in Cecil D. Demille’s The Ten Commandments. What a grotesque hypocrite DeMille was, and yet he had a great eye and the diligence and exactitude to make his films look just so.

This Getty images photo from N.Y. Times was removed before I could copy the photographer’s name.

The counter-current ‘s against Burn After Reading continues in this filing from the Venice Film Festival by Time‘s Richard Corliss: “The viewer’s fun, such as it is, comes from guessing where the movie is headed and why it’s going there. The ultimate question, from this admirer of virtually all the brothers’ work, from the early Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing to their previous Clooney collaborations O, Brother, Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty, is a plaintive ‘what the heck kind of film is this?’
“As close to an answer as you’ll get here is that Burn After Reading is an essay in the cocoon of ignorance most of us live in. It pushes the old form of movie comedy — smart people saying clever things — into collision with today’s dominant model of slackers whose utterly unfounded egotism eventually worms its way into an audience’s indulgence. Which is to say that most of the people here seem like bright lights but are actually dim bulbs. They’re not falling-down stupid; they radiate the subtler variety of idiocy that can be mistaken for charm, decency or even brilliance.
But in the end, says Corliss, “the movie’s glacial affectlessness, its remove from all these subpar schemers, left me cold and perplexed.”