A pass-along from L.A. Times/”Dishrag” columnist Elizabeth Snead that Paul Newman is on the ropes with lung cancer, and thoughts about the sadness to come from Oregonian critic Shawn Levy, who’s been working hard on a Newman biography for a long while.

“I have known for a while that Newman was very ill, probably with cancer, and today the internet is flooded with the news that it’s lung cancer and that it’s not good. There aren’t very good sources on any of these stories, and nobody has any shocking exclusives, but given what I know I find every word of them credible. He’s 83, and his next birthday is in January, and we can only hope he’ll make it. I suspect I’ll be writing an obituary before I hold a copy of my book in my hand.”

An increasingly desperate Warner Bros. is offering a seven-minute Get Smart preview on the iTunes store as a free download.

Indiewire is reporting that Zeitgeist has picked up Trouble the Water, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal‘s doc about the Katrina disaster. It’s a sad and honest film, but the viewing experience is all when it comes to shaky-cam docs. I called it “the King Kong of hand-held nausea jiggle movies” after seeing it at last January’s Sundance Film Festival. The Zeitgeist people are dreaming if they think people are going to rush out to see this.

(l. to r.) Trouble the Water executive producer Joslyn Barnes, co-directors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin, exec producer Danny Glover.

As I wrote last January, “Half of it was shot by Lessin and Deal in the usual fashion and is no big challenge, but the other half is shakycam footage of Katrina’s devastation shot by one of the film’s main subjects, Kimberly Rivers. (The other is her husband Scott.) The footage is so scattered and whip-panny that I was starting to think about bolting less than ten minutes in.”
I’ll feel better about this whole matter if Rivers agrees to take an ad in Variety pledging that she’ll never shoot any more video footage of anything ever again, will never go to film school to try and learn how to shoot, will stay away from the visual art world for the rest of her days, etc. If she does this, it’ll start to undo some of the damage.
All I know is that as I watched Trouble the Water at the Park City Library, I was saying to myself, “Whatever it is that good amateur video photographers have, this woman has absolutely none of….the gene that tells you how to hold the camera and how to shoot in a way that’s pleasing or at least non-jarring to the eye has bypassed her entirely. Lemme outta here!”

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan was a huge surprise for me in that I almost loved it. I was certainly cool with most of it — smirking, smiling, content, zero pain. Either I was exactly on its wavelength from the start or it was on mine, but Zohan was the first dumbass Sandler comedy I’ve felt fairly okay about. I was actually charmed at times.

The trick is that it crosses the total silliness threshold early on and stays there. Plus it has actual political content, satirical machismo, fantasy narcissism, a kind of vaudevillian energy, crudely boorish but dead-on Hebe humor (and I know whereof I speak, being a former New Yorker and occasional Brooklynite) plus one relentlessly stupid performance after another — Adam Sandler, John Turturro, Rob Schneider, Shelley Berman, Lainie Kazan, etc. Schneider and Turturro are off-the-planet funny now and then.
Zohan (Sandler) an Israeli superstud Mossad agent or whatever, fakes his own death to escape the repetition (i.e., constantly fighting Palestinians and other anti-Zionists) and realize his personal dream of becoming a hairdresser in the States. He knows about cutting hair, but hours after hitting Manhattan his Israeli-ness leads to a quick banishing to Queens and yaddah-yaddah blah-dee-blah. It’s all about the balance, the shtick, the dopey effects and…well, the you-know-where-it’s-going-so-just-enjoy-the-how-of-it aspects, of which there are many.
I was disappointed to learn that the Zohan team, nominally led by director-stooge Dennis Dugan, didn’t shoot the opening scenes in Israel but in Cabo San Lucas and La Paz. They’re going to make tens of millions on this thing and they couldn’t muster the courage to shoot in the actual Holy Land? When you’re doing a fantasy comedy, you need to be as real as possible. My respect for Sandler and Dugan would be that much higher if they’d filled up their man shorts and risked death in order to get it right.

The only thing I really didn’t like last night was a reaction from a guy sitting next to me when the camera showed Turturro lying in bed with 10 or 12 hotties. The guy, a twentysomething, was so impressed that he said “wow!” out loud. He was momentarily dumbstruck by a standard throwaway shot in an Adam Sandler movie! What a bumpkin!
I decided to leave right a couple of minutes after that. There was another 10 or 15 minutes to but I was happy with the film and had definitely gotten the gist. I just knew I couldn’t sit next to that guy any longer. His Clem Kadiddlehopper reaction had eye-dropped a spot of dye into the well, so I figured I’d better get out before the entire experience was ruined.

Dark Horizons‘ Garth Franklin is mezzo-mezzo on The Hulk, and others, he’s saying, are more or less on the same page. “There’s a definite feeling that there’s a much longer and more substantial movie in here which has been truncated, and talk of Edward Norton‘s unhappiness with the final product is understandable if” — he’s saying if — “many of the deeper character scenes have been left on the editing room floor.

“What remains, though certainly not the dud many were expecting, is not good enough to justify the need for such a restart. Unless you\’re a fan, the new Hulk isn’t one to rush out for, but it is worth catching eventually.” What…on a plane, he means? An iTunes download in September or October?
Franklin says he talked to three reviewers afterwards, and that “no one outright hated but no one really liked it…two gave an ‘it was all right’ reaction.” Proper reviews have started going online as well — very mixed it seems. Here’s Eyefilm, Cinema Blend, Urban Cinefile and Emanuel Levy.
See? See? I told you Kris Tapley wasn’t to be trusted on this one.

The films directed by Mervyn LeRoy (Quo Vadis, Million Dollar Mermaid, Rose Marie, Mister Roberts, The FBI Story, The Devil at 4 O’Clock, A Majority of One, Gypsy, Mary, Mary) were very popular in their time with mainstream ticket buyers. Some of the go-along critics liked them as well, but for some reason no one today even speaks of these films, much less admiringly. And I’ll bet there’s some connection between this and the fact that the tough critics of the ’50s and early ’60s didn’t think very much of them.

James Stewart in Mervyn LeRoy’s The FBI Story (1958)

A culture needs tough critics to articulate standards. Even if those standards are seen as effete and elitist. Even if some critics are lonely, neurotic overweight drunks. Because the obsessions of the ones who know how to write are sometimes worth their weight in gold, which obviously means they’re certain to be read by future generations.
This is a point that the Brooklyn Rail’s Vincent Rossmeier seems to under-appreciate in his undated piece.
I asked this before but here goes again: who are the Mervyn LeRoys of today, Steven Spielberg Ron Howard and Michael Bay aside?

Marina Zenovich‘s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired will air on HBO tonight with a different ending than in the version of the doc shown at Sundance and Cannes, reports Slate‘s Kim Masters.
Zenovich, she reports, “concludes her film [by recounting] that in 1997, two attorneys appeared before a sitting Los Angeles Superior Court judge — not named in the film — and reached an agreement that if Polanski returned to the United States, he would not be taken into custody.
“At the very end, the film states in white letters dramatically typed on a black background, the judge imposed one condition: The proceedings would have to be televised. The obvious implication: Here we go again, another Los Angeles judge poised to turn Polanski into media chum. Polanski, the film reports, turned the deal down.
“But it doesn’t seem to have happened that way.
“There was a 1998 meeting with the judge, who was Larry Paul Fidler. He presided over the recent Phil Spector murder trial, and in that case, he allowed the cameras to roll. Spector’s case was the first criminal trial televised in its entirety in a Los Angeles Superior Court since the O.J. Simpson case in 1995. That may be why Fidler was sensitive to the film’s implication that he was another media-obsessed jurist.”
There’s almost certainly another side to this to be gotten from Zenovich. It’s a small point, in any case. The film is sharp, clear-minded, persuasive, masterful.

Because In Contention‘s Kris Tapley is totally in the tank for big-budget movies based on graphic novels (being, in his own words, “a comic book fan”), you can’t really trust his rave review of The Incredible Hulk. The only Hulk rave I will take to the bank will be one from a genre hater** like myself. (Are there any? Most critics are too cowardly to admit to biases.) Then and only then will I be persuaded.

“Louis Letterier‘s The Incredible Hulk is not only likely to be the biggest, most exhausting (in all the good ways) filmgoing experience you’ll have this year,” Tapley says, “but it also…promises to be one of the greatest cinematic roll-outs the genre has [ever seen or] will see.” Nope, not buying it. Especially considering the use of the word “exhausting.” I don’t want to know from that word unless I’m jogging or pulling an all-nighter.
This passage, however, sounds like real honesty: “And while it might miss with some and perhaps only find itself passable to others, it has struck the landing for this skeptical viewer in a big, big way.” That’s me Tapley is (probably) talking about. One the “somes,” standing tall with the “others.”
Now watch me love or half-love the Hulk, which I’ll be seeing tomorrow night.
** Yes, comic-book movies.

Tracking on The Incredible Hulk (opening Friday, 6.13) is running at 96, 37 and 14, but first choice is in the mid 20s among younger males. A similar fervor isn’t there for M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Happening, which is tracking at 72, 35 and 16. (Yes, the first choice number is two points higher than the one for the Hulk, but it has no hot-to-trot quadrant looking to see it at all costs — the support is soft.)
The two big-studio comedies opening on 6.20 — Get Smart and The Love Guru — are both in trouble as we speak. Smart is now at 81, 35 and 7, and Guru is at 81, 35 and 5. I suspect that audiences are smelling desperation on Warner Bros.’ part with all the changing Smart trailers. I’ve seen the Guru trailers in theatres with ticket buyers and nobody’s laughing.
Disney/Pixar’s WALL*E (6./27), a comedic love story between robots, is looking good. 76, 36 and 7 are very good numbers for an animated film two and half weeks out.
Universal’s Wanted (also 6.27) is running at 67, 35 and 7.