After 21 months on the job, the fate of Dominick Prizzi has descended upon L.A. Times publisher David Hiller. A car pulls up, a guy gets out….he doesn’t even hear it. I don’t mean to sound cavalier about all the pain that’s going around in Dead Tree-ville. Pain, in fact, is probably too mild a term for what some people are experiencing and feeling. And I’m very sorry. But so many people are getting zotzed it’s a little bit like a gangster movie, admit it.

“Now a revered commodity thanks to The Office and Extras, Ricky Gervais is making a rare journey to the U.S. to do standup,” writes Variety‘s Phil Gallo. “A precision-oriented writer with well-oiled timing, Gervais instead goes deep into non-politically correct territory, riffing on autistic kids, the Holocaust, AIDS and gay sex, diseases and the pervy behavior of his schoolmates, the belly laughs shifting around the Kodak Theater as nerves are struck. On his opening night in the States, Gervais’ no-nonsense approach hit every bull’s eye.”

I don’t think I’ve ever reported about a breakup story in this column’s four year history (and I’d like to avoid it henceforth), but Vanity Fair is reporting that Jimmy Kimmel and Sarah Silverman are “no longer f***ing.”

For a reason I can’t quite figure, this strikes me as sad news. My feelings are somewhat akin to the VF line that “their union was the binding force that kept Hollywood from exploding in a mass chain reaction of irony and sexual frivolity.” So was there some kind of…you know, subtext to those competitive “I’m F**king…” videos they both made earlier this year? The Vanity Fair story said that reps for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had no comment on the breakup.

The Dark Knight will pull in north of $120 million this coming weekend — it may even hit $130 million. Update: Okay, I was being too conservative. It may hit $150 million, but forget anything over that. The tracking — 97 general, 68 definite and 44 first choice — tells the tale. Mamma Mia! is running at 84, 28 and 14….$25 to $30 million, maybe more. Space Chimps are Dead Chimps — 54, 17 and 2.
Stepbrothers (opening 7.25) is 78, 35 and 6…but consicousness is low on this thing because of the Batman film. Give it time to build and breathe. X-Files: I Want To Believe (7.25) is running at 71, 26 and 4. The Rocker (Fox) is looking pretty bad at 17, 11 and 0. The Mummy (8.1) is at 87, 38 and 5…not bad, getting there. Kevin Costner‘s Swing Vote is running at 43, 16 and 1…nothing yet, work to do.

“If the pattern of the past seven years prevails, WALL-E will be nominated for the Best Animated Feature category,” writes Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern. “And if justice prevails, it will win. But WALL-E isn’t just an animated feature; it’s a great motion picture by any measure.
“In keeping with its singular distinction, Pixar’s latest gift to movie lovers should be a candidate for the most prestigious award, Best Picture, when Oscar time rolls around. And the time to start the drumbeat is now, because the path to that nomination is strewn with prickly practicalities and marked by timeworn doubts.”
And I say no to that. Animated feature making needs to work its side of the fence, and more-or-less-real movies need to work their own. Keep the Berlin Wall up, Mr. Gorbachev! Biological actuality is too precious and beautiful to sully its textures with hard-drive simulations and vice versa. Sometimes segregation is a good thing. Let art flourish in every corner, and let WALL*E be saluted for the superb animated family drama that it is.

For the last few months director Phillip Noyce has been veering back into the high-tension thriller vein of Clear and Present Danger and Patriot Games. He’s now attached to both Edwin A. Salt, a Sony thriller that may star Tom Cruise as a CIA officer suspected of disloyalty and/or treachery, based on a Kurt Wimmer script, and The 28th Amendment, a Warner Bros. project about a youngish U.S. president who discovers that a secret organization controls U.S. government policy, and screw the three branches.

Phillip Noyce, partner Vuyo Dyasi and their three-month-old son son, Luvuyo William Noyce.

The 28th Amendment screenplay is by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (Transformers).
Cruise was going to play the president in 28th Amendment, but now he’s apparently more committed to Edwin A. Salt — although he’s not attached to either. Warner Bros. has offered the 28th Amendment lead to Christian Bale. Apparently Denzel Washington has had some kind of interest in playing a special forces operative in this film. I’ve read a recent draft of The 28th Amendment and agree (as have many others) that it’s a solid and gripping piece of work.
After the ’06 release of Catch a Fire Noyce was thinking about doing American Pastoral, a father-daughter relationship drama based on a Phillip Roth work. Then came Dirt Music, an infidelity drama set in Western Australia. Late last year and early this year he was planning to direct Mary Queen of Scots with Scarlett Johansson, but that went south after its producer, Capitol Films, ran aground with its finances. (Noyce informs that Dirt Music is still scheduled for September next year.)

It’s not necessarily a contradiction to say that I love the passion that fuels geek movie culture — the fact that it’s a ardent demo unto itself, and that geeks are heavily invested in the mythology of this or that franchise — although I’m starting to feel more and more repelled by the CG wham-bam throttle factor that seems to infect every last fantasy, monster and comic-book-derived movie out there.

All to say that I don’t want to be swallowed up by a crowd that worships this stuff regardless. I don’t want to be part of that vibe at all, even peripherally. I’d rather hang with contrarians than with obedient servants, worshippers and Upper Nile pyramid builders. Which is all to say I’m going through my usual “do I really want go through the hassle of Comic-Con?” dialogue. It all starts on Wednesday evening, and right now I’m thinking I might…naaahh, not likely.
I feel like a number when I’m sitting in that massive hall, sitting there as those promo reels play and the panelists sit and smile and sell their shpiel. What’s the big can’t miss-this event this year? What reel from what essential movie is being shown with what talent in attendance? I’m looking over the schedule and I’m saying to myself, “I don’t know, man…I really don’t know.” Nikki Finke recently posted each day’s activities — here’s July 23rd and 24th, July 25th, July 26th and July 27th.
And I don’t look forward to bumping shoulders with the low-life cretins who hang around the Gaslamp district and sometimes spray attitude and start fights. Does anyone remember L.A. Times guy Geoff Boucher writing last year about getting sucker-punched by some tattooed, shaved-head, cutoff-wearing ape, and then getting knocked to the ground and going home the next day with staples in his head?

Don’t forget also that Transformers and Shoot ‘Em Up producer Don Murphy and his wife also “suffered a similar attack [in the Gaslamp district] that left us in the emergency room for hours….we were with a group of twelve, six people attacked, two arrested.”
Boucher wrote that “the cops at the scene said this sort of incident isn’t that rare” — i.e., is somewhat common. Commenters on the Boucher essay page, some of them San Diego residents, didn’t strenuously disagree. A poster named “Rob D” called the Gaslamp district “a magnet for stupidity…on any given night during the summer you’ll see people stumbling into the street, hanging on street lights and yelling incoherent drunken shit..[the area is] literally a haven for the retarded.”

I wouldn’t want to take away from HE’s regular reader response traffic, but tech guy Brian Walker has installed a new Hollywood Elsewhere chat room. I’m not sure how much attention I’ll personally be paying to it, but it seems like a mildly cool thing to have going. The link is now sitting on the horizontal navigation bar.

Last Friday’s Script Girl report that QT’s Inglorious Bastards script has officially been bought by Miramax is wrong, a Miramax spokesperson tells me. He’s heard the Weinsten Co. is producing/distributing. Update: News of a Weinstein Co./Showtime deal.

In the 7.21 New Yorker, there are two familiar but distinctively shaped impressions of The Dark Knight from critic David Denby — awed praise for the performance of Heath Ledger, and another lament (the fourth so far from a cultivated dead-tree critic) about feeling throttled and numbed-down into a state that of confusion and lethargy. I thnk it’s fair to say at this juncture that Dark Knight contrarians are now officially a mini-movement — Denby, Edelstein, Ansen and Thompson.

“The great Ledger…shambles and slides into a room, bending his knees and twisting his neck and suddenly surging into someone’s face like a deep-sea creature coming up for air. Ledger has a fright wig of ragged hair; thick, running gobs of white makeup; scarlet lips; and dark-shadowed eyes. He’s part freaky clown, part Alice Cooper the morning after, and all actor. He’s mesmerizing in every scene. His voice is not sludgy and slow, as it was in Brokeback Mountain. It’s a little higher and faster, but with odd, devastating pauses and saturnine shades of mockery.
“At times, I was reminded of Marlon Brando at his most feline and insinuating. When Ledger wields a knife, he is thoroughly terrifying (do not, despite the PG-13 rating, bring the children), and, as you’re watching him, you can’t help wondering — in a response that admittedly lies outside film criticism — how badly he messed himself up in order to play the role this way. His performance is a heroic, unsettling final act: this young actor looked into the abyss.
And here’s the scolding downer stuff…
“Many things go boom [in The Dark Knight}. Cars explode, jails and hospitals are blown up, bombs are put in people’s mouths and sewn into their stomachs. There’s a chase scene in which cars pile up and climb over other cars, and a truck gets lassoed by Batman (his one neat trick) and tumbles through the air like a diver doing a back flip. Men crash through windows of glass-walled office buildings, and there are many fights that employ the devastating martial-arts system known as the Keysi Fighting Method.
“Christian Bale, who plays Bruce Wayne (and Batman), spent months training under the masters of the ferocious and delicate K.F.M. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you a thing about it, because the combat is photographed close up, in semidarkness, and cut at the speed of a fifteen-second commercial. Instead of enjoying the formalized beauty of a fighting discipline, we see a lot of flailing movement and bodies hitting the floor like grain sacks.

“All this ruckus is accompanied by pounding thuds on the soundtrack, with two veteran Hollywood composers (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard) providing additional bass-heavy stomps in every scene, even when nothing is going on. At times, the movie sounds like two excited mattresses making love in an echo chamber. In brief, Warner Bros. has continued to drain the poetry, fantasy, and comedy out of Tim Burton’s original conception for “Batman” (1989), completing the job of coarsening the material into hyperviolent summer action spectacle.
In other words, Denby “can’t rate The Dark Knight as an outstanding piece of craftsmanship. Batman Begins was grim and methodical, and this movie is grim and jammed together. The narrative isn’t shaped coherently to bring out contrasts and build toward a satisfying climax. The Dark Knight is constant climax; it’s always in a frenzy, and it goes on forever.
“Nothing is prepared for, and people show up and disappear without explanation; characters are eliminated with a casual nod. There are episodes that are expensively meaningless (a Hong Kong vignette, for instance), while crucial scenes are truncated at their most interesting point — such as the moment in which the disfigured Joker confronts a newly disfigured Harvey Dent (a visual sick joke) and turns him into a vicious killer. The thunderous violence and the music jack the audience up. But all that screw-tightening tension isn’t necessarily fun.
“The Dark Knight has been made in a time of terror, but it’s not fighting terror; it’s embracing and unleashing it — while making sure, with proper calculation, to set up the next installment of the corporate franchise.”
This last graph sounds like it came from the same well as that rant I published last Tuesday (“Boom Fart, Whee! and Splat”), to wit: “The world is collapsing, descending into chaos, destroying itself with tribal warfare and asphyxiating itself with fossil fuels. And in a certain spiritual way, corporate Hollywood product is a part of this implosion/self destruction.”

Barack Obama‘s campaign is calling an illustration on the cover of the 7.21 issue of the New Yorker magazine, showing a turban-headed Obama fist-bumping an AK-47-slinging Michelle in the Oval Office, as “tasteless and offensive.” It’s meant as a satire, of course, of the right-wing scum who’ve been pushing the Manchurian candidate myth as well as the rural boobs who’ve been buying into it, but if I were on the Obama team I’d probably take one look at this thing and go “jeeeez!”

Here’s an interview about the cover between New Yorker editor David Remnick and the Huffington Post‘s Rachel Sklar.