The geeks have known for a long while that Robert Downey‘s Tony Stark has a cameo in The Incredible Hulk (Universal, 6.13) . Here’s a TV clip that tips/alludes. And…what, they’re setting up an Avengers movie that would have these guys in it plus a few more? Something along these lines? (Embedded code for the spot withheld on YouTube.)

Three days ago Variety‘s Dave McNary quoted a Milken Institute report claiming that the WGA strike “[has] cost the California economy a projected 37,700 jobs and $2.1 billion in lost output through the end of 2008.”
Which means, in effect, that the studio suits and producers who needlessly prolonged the WGA strike are the responsible parties. Am I wrong? Is there any other interpretation?
The Milken report “also asserts that the 100-day work stoppage helped tip the state into recession earlier this year,” McNary wrote. “The researchers said the strike’s impact will be less noticeable next year unless the Screen Actors Guild strikes — in which case the impact will intensify and the recovery will be delayed by another year.
“SAG’s current contract expires June 30. Guild is in the 24th day of talks with the majors but has not yet set a strike authorization vote.”

The car is hereby retired except during thunderstorms. The motorcycle is better for getting around anyway. Thanks to the thief who stole my bicycle 18 months ago. It’s great living in a section of a sprawled-out city without subways.

Sergei Bodrov‘s visually dazzling Mongol (Picturehouse), easily the finest biopic of the legendary Asian warrior (and certainly heads and shoulders above Dick Powell‘s The Conqueror or Andre De Toth‘s Mongols), has averaged a very decent $26,627 on five screens for a 3-day tally of $133,136. Somebody did something right.

Has anyone seen PS3 kiosks in any American airports anywhere? Because I haven’t. I saw these at Charles De Gaulle airport a week ago yesterday.

The preferred description of fickle opinionists who compile lists of exceptional achievers and achievements, which Virginia Heffernan fails to note in this 6.8 N.Y. Times piece, is not “list makers” or “listmaniacs” but list queens. Right?

“You Don’t Mess With the Zohan — in which Adam Sandler plays an Israeli counterterrorist commando whose big dream is to become a hairdresser — is the movie Munich should have been. At the very least, it’s got to be the first picture to use smelly-feet jokes as a means of parsing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But more than that, it’s a mainstream movie that dares to make jokes about the kinds of complex political realities that most of us don’t dare bring up at dinner parties.
“And while it doesn’t attempt to offer any viable diplomatic solution (you won’t see Sandler accepting the Nobel Peace Prize anytime soon, or ever), it makes a valiant effort to bridge a gap that most of us, dispiritingly, have come to believe is unbridgeable. When Zohan’s mother, played by the saucy, sunny Dina Doronne, urges him to stay in the army, she professes to see some light at the end of this very long, dark tunnel: ‘They’ve been fighting for 2,000 years, it can’t be much longer.’ The stark reality is that it probably will be.” — from Stephanie Zacaherk’s 6.6. review on Salon.

Criterion will issue a loaded DVD of Pier Paolo Pasolini‘s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom two and a half months from now. To those who’ve never seen it, I can only say two things: (1) As a perverse but lacerating piece of social criticism by a first-rate filmmaker, it’s totally deserving of respect but (2) you’ll never see a more appalling depiction of deliberate cruelty in your life.

I’ve sat through it twice, and I’m not sure I want to go there again. My second viewing was at the New York Film Festival in ’76 or ’77. I remember that during the scene when the four fascists are dressed in drag, a guy in the audience yelled out, “Diana Vreeland!”

The most concise what-went-wrong-with-Hillary’s-campaign? explanation I’ve read so far, written by Michael Kinsley for the 6.8 N.Y. Times. But it’s not the only one.

It’s doesn’t feel like 17 years since I’ve seen Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s Delicatessen, but that’s how long it’s been. I’d forgotten how finely ordered it is; how musical.

Two days ago — two days ago! — New York‘s Vulture guys ran a page from Brett Ratner‘s 6.3.08 rewrite of the script for Beverly Hills Cop 4. It’s obviously safe to say that the simian aspect has been fully invested in.

The website for Bill Maher and Larry Charles‘ Religulous (Lionsgate, 10.3). Burkini babes?