To judge by his lean appearance, Robert De Niro was several years younger when he filmed this promo spot on behalf of the Tribeca Film Festival. It’s for some kind of profile of the festival that was destined to appear “Tuesday on Fox,” as De Niro says. The funny…no, hilarious part comes when the off-camera director asks him to sell it “with a little more energy” and De Niro goes, “I’m sorry but that was energetic….you don’t know what you’re talking about…sorry…I’m not selling cars, okay?” (Posted recently or six months ago — don’t know the story — on GorillaMask.net.)

An excerpt from a Dick Cavett interview with Ingmar Bergman on a show that originally aired August 2, 1971. Key quote: “It is absolutely impossible for me to work with a producer who would try to tell me what to do. If he tries, I would ask him to go to hell.” Here’s a second excerpt with Persona costar Bibi Andersson taking part.

Judd Apatow and Greg Mottola‘s Superbad, easily the sharpest and funniest teen-sex comedy in ages, has an issue of concern. New tracking is in and it’s not doing all that well — 26, 25 and 1. For a film that’s opening in two and a half weeks — Friday, 8.17 — that’s not awful (things can change) but the marketers have to start scrambling. The film clearly sells itself, so Sony should sneak it this weekend. The trailer plays nicely, but it doesn’t really convey how above-par exceptional this film is.
The Bourne Ultimatum, opening this weekend, is running at 91, 56 and 28 — figure a three-day tally in the $70 to $80 million range. Bratz is 46, 13 and somewhere between 0 and 1. El Cantante is at 46, 16 and 3. Hot Rod — 62, 25 and 2. Among the new releases, Underdog — 80,16 and 3 — will probably be the #2 film after Bourne. Rush Hour, opening the weekend after next, looks very good but not explosive — 80, 45 and 9.

The rule-of-three once again applies: French actor Michel Serrault, best known for his role as Zaza in La Cage aux Folles, has died of cancer at age 79.

A South Park episode I happened to catch last night called “Make Love, Not Warcraft” was laugh-out-loud funny and flat-out brilliant. The site says it’s been nominated for a primetime Emmy, which is no surprise. This is one of the most perceptive and subversive takes on the psychology and emotional babycake lives of hard-core gamers I’ve ever seen. I don’t laugh out loud all that much, but I did last night.

This 1964 Bruce Lee interview (which I happened upon this morning on nerve.com) is worth watching for Lee’s expression when he mentions that he majored in philosophy in college. He hesitates for a brief instant before admitting this, and his eyes flick to the side just after.

Tom Snyder cracks have been de rigeur since the ’70s when Dan Aykroyd began spoofing him on SNL, but Snyder — who died yesterday from lukemia at age 71 — always had my absolute respect for a single interview he did with Sterling Hayden in, I think, 1977 or thereabouts.
That interview, which ought to be on You Tube or at least on DVD, felt to me like one of the greatest TV chats I’d ever seen because it was so nakedly confessional. I knew Hayden slightly in the late ’70s to early ’80s — he was my first movie-star interview (i.e., on the set of Frank Pierson‘s King of the Gypsies) and he lived in my hometown of Wilton, Connecticut — and so I recognized to some extent how candid he was being with Snyder. I especially remember Hayden saying on that late-night show how “booze really sneaks up on you” and “you’re always a little bit drunker than you think you are.”
Snyder, in any event, was good enough to not get in Hayden’s way — he mostly just guided him along and let him rip.
I last spoke with Snyder when he dropped by the offices of Entertainment Weekly around ’93 or ’94 and hosted a big lunch with a group of staffers (bureau chief Cable Neuhaus) and freelancers. Snyder wanted to pick our brains and put his ear a little bit closer to the rails. I respected him for that also.

That hooded, black-robed figure with the stern expression and almost Kabuki-white face paid a visit to Ingmar Bergman‘s home on the island of Faro last weekend (or certainly within the last few days). I like to think he would have been polite about it and knocked on the front door, but one way or the other he sat by the bed and took the one of the four or five greatest film directors of the 20th Century by the hand, and that was more or less that — a final transition and fade to black.

The man was a genius, a God…a deliverer of pure, chilly clarity in a muddled and equivocating world. His work was astounding, penetrating, devastating. Ingmar Bergman made me feel better about being an occasional misanthrope and down- head and a sometime depressive than any other artist I’ve ever encountered. And when they were in the mood, Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nykvist had no equals at conveying subtle but heated eroticism.
The slightly discomforting thought is that Bergman’s greatest films (the ones he made from the mid ’50s to mid ’70s) and in fact the very idea of Bergman himself — a filmmaker whose material often came from the deepest gloom-pits of his soul, who didn’t fill a room with light as much as focus on an intimate, small-room situ- ation with a kind of blue-flame intensity, and who adhered to a visual language that was often somber and austere — has been regarded as a yesteryear thing for a long time now.
I wonder how many under-35s have even seen a Bergman film. The Bergman art- house aesthetic of the ’50s and ’60s is about as far from the Tarantino film-geek attitude as you can get. Film Snob Dictionary authors Martin Kamp and Law- rence Levi wrote a couple of years ago that “watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and-Chardonnay.”
Jett, 19, knows who Bergman is (he first heard his name and rep in that passage from Manhattan when Diane Keaton‘s character calls him over-rated) but he’s never seen a single one of his films. I’m going to try and persuade him to sit down and watch a Criterion DVD of The Silence or Through a Glass Darkly or Shame sometime later this week.

In this 9.29 L.A. Times essay, critic Kenneth Turan seems to be writing about Once from a slightly different angle — i.e., how come it took so long for this exquisite little film to get picked up? — than the one I went with yesterday, which was basically “how come more Average Joes haven’t paid to see it?” But he gets around to saying the exact same thing at the conclusion.

“The Once experience worried me,” Turan writes, “because it underlined how much the risk-averse studio mindset of being indifferent to quality, of caring more about what can be sold than what will be cherished, is infecting an arena that has always prided itself on being impervious to those ways of thinking.
“Yet to be fair, it would be wrong to completely blame the specialty distributors for their lack of brio where acquiring Once was concerned. If they are timid, if they lack trust in the willingness of an audience to find and support something that lacks marketable elements, it’s because experience has shown them that they have reason to be afraid.
“Even now, in the face of the success and visibility of Once, I am constantly running into supporters of independent cinema who have not gone to see the film partly because, despite a terrific Fox Searchlight campaign, it lacks the kind of easy-to-remember hook having Keri Russell in a cute uniform has given Waitress.”

Turan’s kicker graph is well phrased, but it’s a stern lecture from a man who’s losing his patience with those who say theyr’e into offbeat cuisine but in fact are dilletantes looking for comfort food: “If you want distributors to acquire films as sophisticated and unusual as Once, ” Turan admonishes, “you must make the extra effort to seek them out and patronize them. If you don’t, don’t count on them to be around when you need them the most.”
The irony is that Once is about as comfort food-y as anyone could ask for. It just happens to be very Irish and low-budgety and lacking in big stars.

“After watching Evan Almighty, I noticed that the exiting audience — pale, wan and harrowed — were collectively singing the post-movie equivalent of the lamentations of Jeremiah, emitting cries not unlike those of the sorely tested Job or the benighted citizens of plague-fatigued Egypt, and generally cursing His Holy Name with every obscenity in the biblical lexicon.
“All the Big Questions popped rapidly into my mind: ‘Why does God inflict Bad Movies on Good People?’ and more pertinently, ‘How can we know for certain that God is good if he permitted this piece of dung to reach our screens?’
“Certainly Evan Almighty (‘a laugh-drought of biblical proportions,’ one critic called it) performed a breathtaking miracle by making Steve Carell unfunny, but the film should have believers and nonbelievers alike down on their knees praying for funnier comedies.” — thus sayeth (or said-ith) The Guardian‘s John Patterson.

Edward Norton participated in a Hulk dog-and-pony show in front of 6500 Comic-Conners yesterday along with costar Liv Tyler, Hulk director Louis Leterrier, and producers Avi Arad and Gale Anne Hurd. It had to have felt a little forced. Norton simply isn’t part of the tribe — doesn’t talk geek, look geek….the genes and the attendant belief systems simply weren’t passed along by his parents — and no amount of good-sport promo whoring can change that fact. (Original reporting by MTV.com’s Larry Carroll.)

Photo originally posted by mtv.com

“And heah, out of the oven…the chicken and the peahs….very nice…sort of a French thing….a little pepper on the top….400 degrees…one hour….these peahs are very nice, very tasty…they’ve gotten kinda candied …pehrfect with the chicken…they go very well togetheah.” — Christopher Walken cooking what looks like a delicious upright chicken along with six or eight sweetened pears. Walken’s a serious foodie, but it’s hard to watch this video without wondering when the punchline’s coming, even though you realize there probably won’t be one. And you’d be right.