The coldest, most lacerating and most misanthropic epilogue ever presented to mainstream audiences in the history of motion pictures. Was there a better one in this regard? Tell me what it was.

270 minutes of drop-dead beautiful photography and impeccable CG, basically amounting to a lot of preening eye candy…can’t wait.

“An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign finance, found that Democrats took in more than $4 from donors in the movie, music or TV business for each dollar contributed to GOP candidates,” AP writer Michael Blood has reported. No surprise there, not in this town.

Mindy Stearns, the only reported McCain supporter among actors; McCain

“Hilary Clinton led the list with $837,000, followed by Barack Obama with $687,000, John Edwards with $322,000; John McCain with $244,000, Rudolph Giuliani with $108,000 and Mitt Romney with $73,000.

Giuliani has collected checks from Adam Sandler, Kelsey Grammer, screen- writer Lionel Chetwynd and Paramount studio chief Brad Grey, the article says.

Obama “has gotten checks from Tom Hanks, Tobey Maguire, Eddie Murphy, Edward Norton Jr., Morgan Freeman and Ben Stiller, among others. In February he held a closed-door fundraiser arranged by DreamWorks studio founders Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

McCain “lists a single actress, Mindy Stearns, but [has] also received donations from producers including Jerry Bruckheimer and Lorne Michaels. ”

Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford finally has a release date — 9.21.07 — and L.A. Times guy John Horn is reporting that there’s been a big backstage struggle about the film’s “tone and length — at one point its running time was more than three hours — according to several people close to the production.”

Remember that Kevin Williamson/Calgary Sun interview with executive producer Tony Scott I linked to several moths ago? Scott said that “we have to be careful how we market [Jesse James] because it’s like a Terrence Malick film.”

Stake in the heart! When I read that remark I knew the game was over. The suits regard Malick-type films as strictly for the critics and the elites — too pastoral and picturesque, too much meditative muttering — which means they’re probably going to bitch about it and try to mongrelize it and then they’ll underfund the marketing so they can get rid of it and send it off to DVD.

The key challenge, reports Horn, “was to come up with a cut of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford that satisfied audiences and Warner Bros., the studio making and distributing the film. At one point there were competing versions — one from writer-director Andrew Dominik and another from producer and star Brad Pitt, according to a person familiar with the making of the movie. It’s unclear which version of the film will be released.”

Note to Warner Bros. marketers: remember your Departed game plan and keep this film out of the dreaded Toronto Film Festival. If the critics love it the public will get the idea that it’s really an arthouse film and then it’ll make even less money.

I’m being told that $120 million is a conservative figure regarding Spider-Man 3‘s projected weekend earnings. I’m now hearing $125 to $130 million. I tried buying an IMAX ticket at Leow’s Lincoln Plaza this weekend…forget it, every seat sold. It’s already rockin’ the sock in Europe and Asia, as this Nikki Finke column reports.

Excuse me for not popping open the bubbly and doing cartwheels on Melrose. This is going to sound like Charlton Heston lecturing the sinful Hebrews in The Ten Commandments, but the more money Spider-Man 3 makes this weekend, the darker the implications for the human condition and the spiritual realms of the American public. Make fun all you want, but it’s true.

I’ll be paying to see the damn thing this weekend so who am I to talk, but at least I’m going into it knowing I’m going to be surrendering to the corporate engulfment syndrome. All right, I’m looking forward to see it slightly…but only that.

I’ve been kept out of Spider-Man 3 press screenings (I plan on catching it commercially on Saturday in Manhattan), but last night I finally saw Lucky You, the Eric Bana-Drew Barrymore-Robert Duvall poker movie that’s being thrown up against the Sam Rami behemoth as a kind of sacrificial lamb. Warner Bros. is calling it counter-programming, but they’re basically dumping it. But I can say without question that it’s a pretty good film, and by no stretch is it any kind of burn.

If I’d seen Spider-Man 3 by now I could write that Lucky You is a wiser, richer, smarter movie, and that it’s much more layered and interesting and recognizably human. But I haven’t so I can’t. But if David Poland and Todd McCarthy‘s Spider-Man 3 reviews are anything to go by, Lucky You is the film to catch this weekend if you’re looking for something that’s reasonably satisfying and in many ways engrossing. It is even moderately touching and lightly amusing at times.

I know, I know…who needs adjectives like “reasonably”: and “moderately,” right? 97% of the moviegoers out there don’t want a cool seasoned-atmosphere ride in casinos of Las Vegas this weekend — they want to be smothered in CG by way of a $270 million African elephant engineered by Sony that they know deep down is going to trample them and leave them unfulfilled. Go figure.

I’m no exceptiion. If I’d had a chance to see the IMAX screening of Spider-Man 3 last night, I would have gone — I admit it. But I’m glad I didn’t because I know without really knowing that I saw a better film.

Lucky You is an absorbing, smartly written, welterweight romantic drama about a crafty gambler named Huck Cheever (Bana) who hates his father, L.C. Cheever (Duvall), and is there fore strolling around the casinos in a state of emotional retardation, and therefore in a weakened state in terms of knowing himself and playing the game in a state of full-alert readiness.

As Duvall tells him at one point, “You live your life the way you play cards, and your play cards the way you should live your life.” Or something close to that.

Huck meets and falls in love with a nice girl named Billie (Barrymore), but spends part of the movie betraying her or letting her down, and the rest of the time screw- ing up and getting knocked back and always glaring at Duvall when they face each other at the poker table, but he eventually comes to a kind of emotional epiphany — a place where he feels settled or least less conflicted.

That, more or less, is the story, and if there’s a problem with the third-act resolution it’s that it seems to come a little too easily as far as the Bana-Duvall conflict is concerned. But the deep Vegas-ness of this movie is what counts, and that’s a result of the craft and the finely-tuned polish that comes with any Hanson film. It’s layered with tangy atmosphere, thought-out older-guy dialogue, engaging performances (Bana’s best since Black Hawk Down) and an aura of believability that gets you early on.

Lucky You has at least two great scenes — a bargaining-marketing duel in a pawn shop between Bana and Phyllis Somerville (Little Children), and a kind of emotional showdown between Bana and Duvall in a Vegas luncheonette.

Plus it has an assortment of amusing wiseguy characters (including a geeky gambler who’s been implanted with a pair of fake boobs as part of a bet) and a keen sense of mathematical engagement. Like any realistic poker flick it holds your attention by making you into a player — before you know it you’re doing your best to count cards and read faces and factor the odds and decide whether to raise or check or fold.

As gambling movies go, Lucky You is almost (and sometimes is) on the level of Robert Altman‘s California Split. It felt as satisfying as John Dahl‘s Rounders, and it’s a hell of lot better (for my money) than The Cincinatti Kid. I’m giving it a solid 8…okay, an 8.5.

Bana is no longer an accursed actor whose presence invites or guarantees financial failure. Not that anyone expects Lucky You to make any real money, but Bana’s Huck Cheever performance is…I’m not going to quite say masterful or revelatory, but I quite enjoyed his company and especially his poker intelligence from the get-go.

Principal photography on this hard-luck movie wrapped almost two years ago, and the final tab is something like $50 million bucks. It doesn’t feel like $50 million — more like $25 or $30 million, tops. It obviously tested in the toilet or Warner Bros. wouldn’t have paid for extra shooting (which I think happened late last year or the previous summer — nobody will tell me when.) Lucky You was supposed to come out 9.8.06, then 10.27.06 and then 3.16.07. And now it’s being thrown to the wolves this weekend. A baahing little lamb tethered to an iron post.

John Horn reported in the L.A. Times this morning that “some half-dozen different cuts [of the film] have failed to wow preview audiences, and the studio is now cutting back on its marketing push.”

A few months ago I called Lucky You the most unloved and unwanted Curtis Han- son gambling movie in U.S. history. It is still is that, but it’s a better-than- decent film, and if you can’t get into a particular Spider-Man 3 show this weekend you could do a lot worse than pay to see it,

That black-and-white short from TCM’s Brando doc — the one showing Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Kevin McCarthy goofing around sometime in the mid ’40s — is here. Silly in an exaggerated, overly “gay” Charlie’s Aunt vein and kind of awful in the way that all over-acting is excrutiating to watch…but interesting nonetheless.

Warner Independent Pictures will put Leonardo DiCaprio‘s The 11th Hour into theatres in October, or a little more than five months from now. The global warming doc, described in some quarters as “Son of Inconvenient Truth,” will have its debut in Cannes two or three weeks from now. The title refers to “the last moment when change is possible,” with the film “exploring how humanity has arrived at this moment — how we live, how we impact the earth’s ecosystems — and what we can do to change our course.”

11th Hour talking heads will include former Soviet honcho Mikhail Gorbachev, scientist Stephen Hawking, former CIA chief R. James Woolsey, sustainable design experts William McDonough and Bruce Mau and roughly 50 others — “leading scientists, thinkers and leaders who discuss the most important issues that face our planet and people.” (Over 50 talking heads? That’s a lot.) Pic was directed by Leila Conners Peterson and Nadia Conners. DiCaprio produced as well as co-wrote Hour with these two.

The feeling seems to be that torture porn has peaked and is on the wane. Has it? Is it? Or are we looking at a healthy (i.e., spiritually rancid but financially formidable) genre that nowhere to go but up?

Is there any straight guy out there who’s sincerely into Auschwitz chic? Does anyone want a girl just like a girl who looks like she might die from malnutrition?

DreamWorks Animation chief Jeffrey Katzenberg has said that “everyone” will see the Spider-Man, Shrek and Pirates three-quels, “but the key will be which one gets the most multiple viewings,” writes Slate‘s Kim Masters. “His argument, not surprisingly, is that Shrek will prevail because it’s only 81 minutes long. The math, at least, is on his side: Pirates is a butt-numbing 170 minutes [and] Spider-Man is 140 minutes.

“A distribution executive at a studio that has nothing to do with any of the films just mentioned predicts that Spider-Man 3 will open huge, at about $120 million,” Masters continues. “The film is an event with a following, and there is nothing in theaters right now that anyone wants to see, according to this executive. But the question is the strength of the movie’s eight legs.

“Shrek and Pirates have broad, broad appeal,” this executive says. “With Spider-Man, the word is out that it’s dark.” Taking into account the movie’s cost, our veteran believes that could mean trouble.”

So we’ve got the numbers game set up now. Anything less than $100 million in earnings this weekend means Spider-Man 3 is a short-faller and $120 million will be regarded as somewhere between pretty good and par for the course. Is that fair, or should box-office handicappers be jumping up and down if this happens? If the columnists and critics keep pissing on it and the “dark” word-of-mouth continues unabated, we could be looking at a very signficant (45% to 50%) second-weekend drop.

David Poland (or someone with a herky-jerky, raggedy-ass camera sense) videotaped Roger Ebert‘s appearance last week at the Overlooked Film Festival, and you have to love the guy — Ebert, I mean — for his buoyant and unstoppable spirit