I overlooked this two-day-old graph in a story by L.A. Times staffer Steve Lopez about L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa‘s admitting to a no-big-deal affair with Telemundo anchorperson Mirthala Salinas: “We need to know if the former Tony Villar, who blended his last name with that of wife Corina Raigosa, will now be Mayor Antonio Villarsalinas.” Cheap and cruel, yes, but “the cruelest jokes are often the funniest,” as Mort Sahl (subject of a great James Wolcott profile in the new Vanity Fair) once said.

Shia Leboeuf is smart and talented, all right, but he’s a little too exotic to be the next Tom Hanks, despite notions to the contrary on the latest Vanity Fair cover. Unless Leboeuf gets really lucky with a perfect role in the right film (and I’m not predicting this won’t happen), five years from now he’ll be the new Bill Pullman.

The 21 year-old actor is mainly getting the Big Attention because he’s Harrison Ford‘s son in the fourth Indy film, but three weeks after this film opens next year people will be saying “that’s it?” and asking what’s next. At the very least I think it’s fair to ask for a small punishment to be meted out to Leboeuf for playing the pseudo lead role in Transformers. I honestly believe that right now his stock is a tad lower than it was in the wake of Disturbia‘s surprise success earlier this year.
And to this very minute I’m still undecided about how to pronounce his name. I think the “i” in Shia is pronounced like “eye”, and the last name is Leboaf as in “loaf of bread.” Quick — bring up a blank e-mail screen and try to spell the last name. Oh-ee-you, oh-ee-you, oh-ee-you.

ERS News is reporting sans permalink that TV reporter-anchor Mirthala Salinas may get the heave-ho from Telemundo management, partly because she reportedly didn’t level with them previously about her involvement with L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and because reports of a previous power-fucker alliance (reportedly with California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez from ’03 to early ’04) compromises her credibility as a supposedly impartial news reporter.
“High-level officials of NBC’s Telemundo are having meetings this 4th of July (not a barbecue) to consider what to do about Mirthala Salinas,” the story reads. “General manager Manuel Abud and News Director Al Corral are meeting with their legal department and other station officials. They believe there is now a serious question of journalistic integrity and credibility.”

Gone in Sixty Seconds director Dominic Sena is unjustly dissed in this Amazon.com listing of the 12 Worst Movie Directors Today. Apart from loving Gone in Sixty Seconds as a personal guilty pleasure, it obviously has its shit wrapped tight. It’s a cleanly and confidently directed utility film with a smirky, cool-cat attitude, photographed with first-rate composition and lighting and cut like a champ. I could watch this film once a year for the rest of my life without pain or regret.

And not including Sweetest Thing director Roger Kumble on the top-ten list is just derelict. I’m not even sure it’s fair to include Joel Schumacher with films like D.C. Cab, Falling Down, The Client and Tigerland on his resume. I completely agree with Barry Sonnenfeld and George Lucas topping the list. (Thanks to Anne Thompson for alerting me to this.)

Fairly or unfairly, it’s my expectation that sitting through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Warner Bros., 7.11) will be less than fully transporting. (I got off the train after Alfonso Cuaron‘s Prisoner of Azkaban segment back in ’04.)
Given this prejudice, I’d rather see it at next Monday’s IMAX screening on the assumption that the general hugeness and clarity of this process will probably make Pheonix feel more involving on some level. There’s just one problem: Warner Bros. publicists are insisting that journos won’t be allowed to see it in IMAX unless they’ve first seen Phoenix in regular 35mm.
If Nehemiah Persoff‘s gangster character in Some Like It Hot could be inserted into this situation, he would bend over, adjust his hearing aid and then say to the WB staffers, “You mean I have to see this movie….twice?”

There’s a passage in the Hollywood screenwriting rulebook that says if a major star is required to die in a film (i.e., obviously an unusual thing in itself), the death should not be vividly or bluntly depicted — no knife in the chest, no bullet holes, no spurting blood, and especially no showing the star wincing or looking fearful.
To do otherwise, the rulebook says, would be disrespectful of the star — it would make him seem mortal and vulnerable and rob him of his aura. Stars can’t be killed like grubby extras — they have to surrender their ghost in some noble majesterial way. One way to convey this is to have the camera look away or pan up to the sky at the instant of departure. (Granted — Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s deaths in The Departed are blunt and graphic, but theyr’e also quick — and Damon gets to go “okay” before getting plugged by Mark Wahlberg.)
Spoiler ahead for all the ostriches out there who don’t want to know what happened to the military guys (and others) who plotted to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944:
I’m mentioning this because I’ve just read a January 2007 draft of Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander‘s Valkyrie, the Tom Cruise-Brian Singer movie about the German anti-Hitler plotters, and on page 114 — the final page and final scene of the film — it follows the rulebook exactly.
Cruise plays a senior plotter, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, and just as his moment of truth comes he “shouts defiantly” Stauffenberg’s final words — “Long live sacred Germany!” (“Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland!”) — and the camera CRANES UP and away as the music swells, looking at to the overcast darkness of the night sky.”
Singer can of course shoot this scene any way he chooses, but before the big day comes he should rent The Counterfeit Traitor and watch the scene in which Lili Palmer is machine-gunned to death by German soldiers in a prison courtyard. Or he could look at video footage of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena after they were shot in the same way, in 1989. What he’ll see isn’t pretty but it’s real-er than hell.
As Singer well knows, today’s aesthetic demands that the old rules have to give way to raw visual truth as it comes to us on TV and computer screens 24 hours a day. McQuarrie and Alexander may not understand that the old romantic crap doesn’t fly any more, but Singer ought to.

Movie theatre attendance “is running behind last summer’s and has even fallen below that of summer 2005, a year of box-office duds that had some analysts predicting audiences were abandoning movie houses in favor of home theaters and other entertainment options,” the AP’s David Germain reported in a 7.3 piece.
“With studios offering a stronger late-season lineup than normal this year, attendance likely will pick up and lift Hollywood to a respectable summer. Still, early forecasts that Hollywood would have its first $4 billion summer now look like wishful thinking.”
The reason seems obvious to me. Attendance is down because none of the big May-June-July blockbusters — Sony’s Spider-Man 3, DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek the Third, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Uni’s Evan Almighty and Dreamamount’s Transformers — have really connected. They’ve all stunk of corporate-think and therefore haven’t really turned audiences on. (There’s a difference between rote and genuine enthusiasm.) The only groundswell word-of-mouthers have been Knocked Up and Once and…what else?

The Lives of Others director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has written a piece in yesterday’s edition of Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung saying it’s a good thing for Germany that Tom Cruise is playing would-be Hitler assassin Col. Claus von Stauffenberg in Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie.
Donnersmarck’s article obviously implies that German authorities who’ve refused to give permits to Singer’s movie to shoot at a legendary building in Berlin should re-think their position.
Cruise, wrote Donnersmarck, is “the most successful of all the [Hollywood] superstars, [and] his superstar light will illuminate this rare shining moment in the darkest chapter of our history. In doing so, he will do more to improve Germany’s international image than 10 soccer World Cups could.”

I’ve been waiting for the right thought or angle with which to jump into the Scooter Libby thing. A pretty good one hit me yesterday — i.e., that Bush’s commutation of Libby’s prison sentence provides a perfect third-act climax to Warner Bros.’s Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson project, which Akiva Goldsman and Jerry and Janet Zucker are producing — but then Sasha Stone beat me to it. (I haven’t found any links, however, to support her notion that Sydney Pollack is involved.)

Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame

In any event, here’s another one: Jez and John Butterworth, the guys writing the Plame-Wilson screenplay, need to finish their work quickly so the movie can shoot as soon as possible. The increasing velocity and high-volume turnover rate means that the voltage on this story will be dropping off sooner rather than later. The producers are dreaming if think they can take their time with this thing. If it’s not out by, say, the end of ’08, forget it.
Plame was outed by Robert Novak as a CIA agent in July 2003 — how many years does Hollywood need to throw a film together on an evolving news-topic movie? The Watergate break-in happened in June 1972, and Robert Redford got All The President’s Men onto screens by the summer of ’76 — four years from start to finish. If the Plame-Wilson movie hits screens by late ’08, it will have taken five and a half years after the inciting incident. Somebody or something is dragging ass.
Oh, and I still say Tom Hanks as Wilson and Robin Wright Penn as Plame.

Fantasymoguls.com columnist Steve Mason is reporting that Transformers “scored an estimated $28 million to $31 million on its opening day, surpassing the previous Tuesday record of $15.7 million set by Pirates 2 last summer. [and] likely the 4th-best opening day of 2007 behind only Spider-Man 3, Pirates 3 and Shrek the Third.
“Ratatouille is holding especially well, adding another $7.85 million Tuesday and pushing past the $60 million mark. Live Free or Die Hard is also proving resilient with $4.44 million Tuesday and a new cume of $57 million. License to Wed, a critically-reviled comedy from Warner Bros, is a full-scale disaster earning only an estimated $2 million.”

In a 7.4.07 piece, N.Y. Times reporter David Halbfinger has looked into “the explosion of the old gentlemen’s agreement by which the Hollywood studios screened movies early for critics, and the critics held their reviews until opening day,” which has brought about the only card that studio publicists have to play these days — i.e., “hide the ball.”
The destruction of the old g.a. “has been several years coming,” Halbfinger says. “The rise of film blogs like MovieCityNews.com and Hollywood-Elsewhere.com — for whom there is currency in being first to have seen an important new movie — has prompted the trade dailies to view them as competition.
“The trades’ quest for a wider consumer audience, in turn, has brought first Variety‘s and then The Hollywood Reporter‘s critics out over the news wires. The Associated Press has often responded by speeding up the publication of its own reviews, publicists for the studios say.
“For film critics from major newspapers, standing by while the available positions on a given movie are staked out by multiple competitors, whether online or in print, can be too much to ask.” Halbfinger quotes N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Matthews as saying, “I think editors are right in asking, `Why is it okay for bloggers to review movies early and not us?’
“Studios used to exercise much control over when reviews and other articles would publish,” Halbfinger writes. “But the contours of today’s online reviewing landscape dictate hard decisions about when to screen movies in advance, and whom to invite. ‘It’s about all we have control over any more,’ Adam Fogelson, president of marketing at Universal Pictures said.
“So, for films that are bad or merely expected to be assailed by critics, the play to run is hide-the-ball, especially when the movie doesn’t need critical support to be a success. In a watershed move last year, for example, Sony did not screen The Da Vinci Code for critics until the night before its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was widely panned, but the movie still was a worldwide blockbuster — in part because interest in the movie had fueled countless articles in the entertainment press exploring the subject from every conceivable angle that didn’t require seeing the movie in advance.
“‘Every single movie is its own little war,’ says David Poland of Movie City News. ‘The whole thing is about avoiding the negative. Unless you’re a smaller picture, reviews are no longer the issue. The marketing is so huge that what they need to avoid are the critics hating something. It’s a defensive game: only a community saying one thing in a single voice can hurt a picture.”
Avoiding the negative, eh? Why is it that articles of this sort never state the obvious bottom-line truth, which is that oppressively expensive dumb-ass tent-polers are the essence of negativity themselves? A movie that numbs, bores, bludgeons, tromps on the gas and recycles is a movie that is saying “no, no, no, no….we will not try anything truly new, we will not work out the kinks, we will not divert or depart…we will do only what the Lorenzo di Bonaventura types want us to do. Bayo, Bayo, Bayo!”
What’s a mild-mannered columnist supposed to do in the face of all this? Channel Susan Granger?

Best commercial ever….