For perversity’s sake or simply to alleviate boredom, I’m going to briefly riff on Judd Apatow‘s Knocked Up (Universal, 6.1) by sampling and counter-punching Joe Leydon‘s South by Southwest Variety review, which was (I want to describe it carefully) Niagara Falls orgasmic.

Katherine Heigll, Seth Rogen in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up

I agree with many of Leydon’s reactions. Knocked Up is Apatow’s best film so far, it’s graced with Seth Rogen‘s star-is-born performance, and the fact that it’s a caring, human-scale look at growing up and coping with responsibility means it’ll probably connect with women as well as men. But the bearded Houston critic over-gushed here and there.

Knocked Up is not generically “uproarious.” It’s a gentle and amiable relationship comedy that is, yes, often funny and uproarious when it’s in the mood to be that, but to use “uproarious” as a bottom-line adjective is misleading. The film is often very funny when it wants to be (i.e., maybe two-thirds of the time), but Apatow’s goal is not to bust your seams and make you lose consciousness from rolling in the aisles and gasping for breath. I counted less than ten really big laughs. Then again I don’t get high any more, I don’t have back hair or a sandpaper fuzz beard, I don’t relate to guys who wear Fruit of the Loom T-shirts (especially ones that say “Amsterdam” on the front), and I try to keep my weight down

Leydon would have you think that Knocked Up is one of those comedies that builds and builds and get wilder and wiggier in some expertly constructed Billy Wilder-like fashion. It’s not. It’s a likably mellow and mostly believable “maintainer comedy” that goes from scene to scene and chapter to chapter with more or less the same energy and the same pacing.

All first-rate comedies are built upon deep-down emotional issues, and all second-rate comedies are just about trying to get laughs any way they can, no matter how cheap the tactic. Knocked Up has a lot of great stoner-gorilla “hoo-hoo” bits (there’s a moderately amusing riff on Steven Spielberg‘s Munich), but the best parts of it aim higher. It has a loutish streak and is definitely sloppy in certain respects, but don’t take Leydon’s claim that “line for line, minute to minute, [it’s] more explosively funny than nearly any other major studio release in recent memory” to the bank because the check will bounce.

That said, Leydon’s prediction that Knocked Up is “bound to generate repeat business among ticket-buyers who’ll want to savor certain scenes and situations again and again if only to memorize punchlines worth sharing with buddies” may turn out to be true. The jokes that work are very, very funny. It’s an obvious crowd-pleaser.

But it’s not one of those “stop whatever you’re doing and go see this thing right now” movies. It doesn’t blow your mind or reinvent the wheel. I was happy watching it, but can’t say I ever said “wow, this is amazing.” Because it plays to both sexes, Knocked Up will probably be very commercial, but I wonder about Leydon’s claim that it will “remain in megaplexes throughout the summer and, possibly, into the fall.”

That’s all I’m going to say for now. I’ll get into Knocked Up a bit more next month — just before the Cannes Film Festival begins, or maybe even during — but there’s obviously plenty of time before it opens on 6.1.

The good Cannes Film Festival announcement news is that many of the predictions came true and a lot of high-profile titles and big-name directors will be in attendance at the 60th anniversary gathering next month. I’ve got an initial count of at least 23 must-sees, including (thank the movie gods) Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country For Old Men, Michael Moore‘s Sicko, Gus Van Sant‘s Paranoid Park, Wong Kar Wai‘s My Blueberry Nights, Michael Winterbottom‘s A Mighty Heart and Abel Ferrara‘s Go-Go Tales.

a still from Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park — the name of the young actor is undetermined, but it could be Gabe Nevins…maybe.

The disappointing news is that Todd Haynes‘ I’m Not There, his long-awaited Bob Dylan movie slated for release in late September, either wasn’t ready or didn’t make the cut (presumably the former), and Paul Thomas Anderson‘s There Will Be Blood, a Paramount release opening in November, was, despite Anderson’s favored-director status among festival honchos, also MIA.

But the Cannes competition slate alone is very strong with at least 10 newbie stand-outs: No Country For Old Men, My Blueberry Nights, Bela Tarr‘s The Man From London, Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Paranoid Park, Emir Kusturica‘s Promise Me This, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud‘s Persepolis (locked down by Sony Classics last year), Carlos Reygada‘s Silent Light, Catherine Breillat‘s Une Vieille Maitresse and James Gray‘s We Own The Night.

Two high-profile U.S. hangover entries — Quentin Tarantino‘s expanded (i.e., lap-dance supplemented) version of Death Proof, and David FIncher‘s Zodiac — will also show in competition.

Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart

Plus there will be three very prominent out-of-competition screenings (among them two Brad Pitt ventures): Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart, (the Daniel Pearl movie with Angelina Jolie and Dan Futterman), Sicko (the long-in-gestation healthcare documentary) and Steven Soderbergh‘s previously announced Ocean’s Thirteen.

Plus a pair of essential midnight titles — Ferrara’s Go-Go Tales and Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington‘s U2 3D.

At least two Un Certain Regard standouts — Barbet Schroeder‘s L’Avocat de la terreur and Harmony Korine‘s Mister Lonely — will screen. Also listed are two Special Screenings with a significant vibe — 11th Hour, the Leonardo DiCaprio gobal-warming doc that Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners co-directed, and Ken Burns‘ The War, a seven-episode PBS miniseries about how various people from four quintessentially American towns experienced World War II, both on the battle and the home front.

The festival will also host three accomplished documentaries about filmmakers — Mimi Freedman and Leslie Greif‘s Brando, Mike Kaplan‘s Lindsay Anderson, Never Apologize, and Anne-Marie Faux and Jean-Pierre Devillers’ Maurice pialat l’amour existe — along with Todd McCarthy‘s Pierre Rissient, about an extraordinary cineaste who’s been everywhere, met everyone and done everything within rarified film circles over the past 50 years.

Joaquin Pheonix as he allegedly appears in James Gray’s We Own The Night

Add the 10 competition must-sees (12 if you count the Tarantino and the FIncher) plus the out-of-competition trio and the two midnight titles and that’s 15 films (17 avec Tarantino-Fincher). Plus the two Un Certain Regard entries, the two Special Screenings and the four filmmaker docs and that’s 23 films just for starters. This obviously omits many others, and ignores whatever possible left-field surprises may be in store.

Anyone who knows something I don’t (I know, I know…a long list) is hereby urged to get in touch and tell me what I should be seeing and talking about in addition to the above. Please…I only have eight hands and two heads.

That item I ran last Monday about Mann’s National theatre closing its doors this weekend is true, says a Variety story that went up this evening. The Mann exhibition execs who should have announced or at least confirmed the closing of this historic Westwood landmark chose not to because…I don’t know, you tell me. Because they’re assholes? Because they couldn’t deal with their feelings of grief?

A fairly brilliant, dryly funny piece by the New York Observer‘s Hilary Frey about what happened to three particular actresses — Parker Posey, Claire Danes, Chloe Sevigny — who were “It” girls in the mid ’90s before the zeitgiest turned to others and the sun went down and they got older, etc. Congratulate Them!,” the blue boldfaced copy says. “They’ve Had It With Clubs ‘n’ Columns. Once-Flickering Starlets Aren’t Has-Beens — They’re Grown-Ups!”

I’m sorry but the Worth 1000 movie poster pictured below is funny and deeply sick — it reminds me of an old joke that went around a few weeks after New York deejay Murray the K. died in 1982 — it began with “What do they call Murray the K. in heaven?” and the reply was, “The second Beatle”; this is funny also; ditto.

Spider-Man 3 (Columbia, 5.4) blows, according to Times Online critic Leo Lewis, delivering a three-stars-out-of-five review. Having caught the film at the Tokyo premiere, Lewis calls it “a daft, highly polished couple of hours of fantasy fun,” but that’s just a lot of blah-blah on his part. Read the damn review — Lewis has a sense of humor but he basically says it sucks stinking hairy dog balls.

“The central theme of the film is that even superheroes can have a dark side,” he writes. Whoa….mind-blower.

“There is not enough of the super-villains and they are not nearly twisted enough,” Lewis says. “But then there never is and they never are. There are digital effects galore to remind us that Sony is a high-tech company, particularly when a new super-villain, Thomas Haden Church‘s Sandman, is transformed into a living sandstorm and pulverizes bits of Manhattan.

“At one point Tobey Maguire, who plays Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Church, James Franco and Topher Grace square off in a four-way clash clearly designed to satisfy all tastes in hairstyle, physical build and jaw-line. The imperilled Kirsten Dunst, meanwhile, barely registers.

“And for reminders that Japan, the home of manga comics, is an increasingly powerful influence on Hollywood directors there is an unmistakable homage to the anime classic Akira.

“Perhaps, more subtly, there are ample goodies aimed head-on at the female Japanese filmgoer, the most important demographic in what has become the world√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s second biggest box office. The hunk count is disproportionately high, the babe count oddly low.

“The challenge that Spider-Man faces from the Sandman — he learns of a connection with the murder of his Uncle Ben — a mysterious black substance has turned his Spider-Man suit black. It brings forth a darker side of Parker and Spidey that nobody has seen before when he is conveniently infested with an alien parasite.

“The problem is that even Spider-Man’s ‘evil’ side is still hopelessly mild- mannered. We are shown a montage of his sub-Mr. Hyde depravities. His hair droops over one eye; he swaggers along the street; he flirts with passers-by; his girl ditches him; and he makes an ass of himself in a nightclub. In short, he behaves like a textbook drunk on any given Saturday night.

“A horrifying glimpse into the unspeakable pit of the human soul this is not.

“Also disappointing is the inability of the director, Sam Raimi, to end the romp without a fleeting shot of the American flag. The Stars and Stripes just happens to be fluttering behind Spidey as he makes his triumphal return to honor, probity and good honest fist-fighting.”

The flag thing in itself is deplorable. I’m sorry to be the among the first to say this, but Spider-Man 3 may herald the temporary end of Sam Raimi. It may take him years to recover from this. If the reviews continue in this vein, Raimi is probably going to have to walk into the Southern California desert wearing sandals and carrying a Charlton Heston Ten Commandments staff and try to find his soul again.

Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke is saying “there’s no truth to the internet rumor that Imagine’s Ron Howard has a deal, or is close to a deal” with Warren Beatty to play Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon, Howard’s forthcoming film about interviewer David Frost and the U.S. president who used to sweat profusely on his upper lip.

Finke is referring to my report that went up yesterday, which was based on speaking to a certain party in the loop. The way I phrased it was that the Beatty deal isn’t “signed, sealed and delivered” but that it’s “nearly complete.” (I also quoted a guy with ties to Beatty who said, “Naaah, that’s not gonna happen.”)

Finke says she “understands” that Howard, the film’s director, “has talked to a few possibilities which include Beatty but there won’t be a decision for a few weeks. Which probably means, given Warren’s usual hemming and hawing, he’ll be passed over.” Maybe, and maybe somebody in the Imagine camp is trying to backpedal. But Beatty was offered the role two months ago, I’ve been told, and the interest has been real all along, and Beatty being the most likely final choice isn’t regarded as a hot-air “rumor” by the people I spoke to.

Also: how come Finke didn’t name any of the other “possibilities” who are allegedly being considered to fill the Nixon role? Not naming alternates tells me Finke’s source was mainly blowing smoke.

I could live with not seeing Uwe Bolle‘s Postal, but I like the insensitive, no-excuses rudeness of the trailer (as posted on Anne Thompson‘s Variety blog). There’s no U.S. distributor, but when and if somebody picks it up they shouldn’t wimp out and change the title because of the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

It grieves me to live in a country in which people are most likely going to continue to occasionally flip out and spray their workplaces and classrooms with automatic rifle fire whenever the pressure gets too great. I can’t believe i just wrote that, but ours is not a healthy society and repressed rage is more common than the common cold. I wish I could snap my fingers and the U.S. could suddenly turn into Canada. Psychologically and emotionally, I mean.

What happened to Rachel McAdams? She was standing at the top of the Hollywood plateau in ’05 after her breakout performances in The Wedding Crashers, Red Eye and The Family Stone. Everyone wanted to work with her. She had “it” and everyone knew it. Then she seemed to hit the brakes and say “uhhn, wait a minute.” And she’s been in an idling mode ever since.

What happened is that she hooked up with former Notebook costar Ryan Gosling (whom she’s been with for about two years) and decided to be…what’s the term? …extremely discerning in terms of choosing roles. She seemed to go all gun-shy and pattern herself after the Kevin Kline of the ’80s and early ’90s (when he was known as “Kevin Decline“), and by hook or by crook this led to a long hiatus.

In effect, McAdams deliberately turned off her career heat, in part (it appears) because of the influence of Gosling and his general “be an aloof artiste and avoid the Hollywood meat-grinder” attitude. Which is absolutely the right attitude, of course, unless you overdo it and it takes over and becomes a form of career novacaine.

Anyway, McAdams seems to be finally back in the game. This Variety story, which was written by “Michael Fleming, Michael Fleming and Dave McNary,” says she’s starting work on The Time Traveler’s Wife this August, for release in ’08. The New Line film will be directed by Robert Schwentke and costar Eric Bana as the time traveller. The IMDB also says she’s in a Sidney Kimmel film called Married Life.

A recent Elle article says McAdams “turned down parts in Mission: Impossible III and Casino Royale, as well as roles that went to Anne Hathaway in both The Devil Wears Prada and the upcoming Get Smart.” The implication is that she was only offered parts in glossy bullshit movies, which I don’t believe for a second. Everyone knows McAdams one of the best younger actress around. No way she wasn’t sent lots of pretty good-or-better scripts.

“I’m not going to make movies just to make movies,” she recently told People. “I have to be passionate about [the film], and at the same time I can get very distracted when I’m working, and I like to get back to my life a lot.” That kinda sounds like actress code talk for “I’m not that much of a hardcore careerist, frankly, and sometimes a relationship has to come first, and over the last couple of years I wanted to fortify things with my actor boyfriend, who needs a lot of loyalty and attention and support.”

I knew McAdams was given to a certain fickleness when she bolted out of that Tom Ford nudie shoot in late ’05 for the cover of the Oscar issue of Vanity Fair that appeared in early ’06. I’m not saying that doing the VF cover would have been the wisest career move in history, but it would been a moderately good thing. It would have made a symbolic imprint by affirming that McAdams had arrived in a big way.

I also always felt that walking around on the street and on magazine covers as a blonde (i.e., her natural color) was the wrong thing to do, image-wise. There was a reason she was a brunette in her big three ’05 movies (think about it), so it’s not just me being weird. She looks soulful and wholesome as a brunette but slightly gothy as a blonde — gothy and sorta vampy. It takes her warmth away.

The only problem with The Time Traveler’s Wife is that McAdams has chosen to not just make a film with Eric Bana, but in a sense grapple with the Eric Bana curse.

It’s not fair or rational to suggest that things like curses exist, but baseball players have hitting slumps and they get all superstitious about it (remember that element in Bull Durham?), and I know that when an actor has that can’t-win aura it affects everything he touches, and there’s no fighting it or defusing it until it goes away of its own accord. The fact is that the triple-whammy of Hulk, Munich and Lucky You really hurt Bana, and it’s going to take a lot of reverse karma to make things turn out right for the poor guy. This sounds cruel but if I were McAdams I would stay away from him, just to be on the safe side.

If Joel Schumacher is directing, you know it’ll be “a Joel Schumacher film,” especially with the word “saints” in the title. Somebody needs to sit down and do a definitive study, but I always go “uh-oh” when I see that word in a title of a movie or a book or anything.

I notice that the El Capitan’s special Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End advance-ticket-purchase and general here-it-comes! promotion doesn’t mention any squishy-pillow rentals or shiatsu ass massages in the lobby for people who may have trouble coping with the nearly three-hour length. If I had kids who were six or seven I would be horrified at the idea of taking them to this thing. It would be agony.