“Quite frankly, his bad studio pictures really hurt him. He squandered all the good will from Porky’s and A Christmas Story. But he just loved the process. It was in his blood. He loved storytelling …he wasn’t subtle. It’s going to be a sadder place without him.” — The late Bob Clark‘s former producing partner Len Carmody speaking to the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell.

Can you believe this friggin’ Carmody guy? 36 hours after the death of a former partner — a guy he knew and liked! — and he’s calling him “unsubtle” and a maker of “bad studio pictures.” HE hot-heads, start your engines! Slap him around, tear him a new one, etc.

“It’s natural to want to hide behind someone else’s decision to make [a hit movie] and the fact it made money a year ago. With a sequel they can’t be blamed. They cannot take the bullet if it fails.” — a Hollywood know-it-all talking to the Toronto Star‘s Geoff Pevere about the forthcoming sequel-heavy summer.

This is a very old and creaky thing to say, but one thing you’ll never hear an actor or actress say is, “I did this film because I was offered a lot of money and I never had a shot at any hefty straight-paycheck roles until I won the Oscar, and my agent said to me, as I’m sure all agents say to all Oscar- winning actor clients, ‘Now’s the time to cash in.

“‘Popularity is promised to no actor,’ he said. ‘Memories are short and windows of opportunity are small, so get it while you can.’ So I got it. Took it, I mean.

“We all know what kind of film this is. It’s a slick piece of pandering pseudo- religious crap. But there’s a way to talk positively and enthusiastically about it — have you heard the b.s. I’ve been slinging with interviewers? And don’t get all judgmental. Not everything you do in life can be Boys Don’t Cry or Milliion Dollar Baby. Sometimes you take the paycheck because the script’s not too bad and the dialogue is decently written and the price is right.

“So you just hold your nose and jump in and do your best while developing your own stuff as best you can, and you hope that it won’t be too long before you get lucky again. But if you want to live well you had to be well paid, and we all know what that occasionally entails.”

Does that sound weird or grasping? Not to me, it doesn’t. Sometimes you take a job because it seems like a good way to go at the time, given what you;re looking to achieve.

The problem with Easter weekend is that people in the red-state hinterlands tend to stay away from movies on Easter Sunday (i.e., being into chocolate Easter bunnies, Christian tradition and trying to fortify Ozzie and Harriet family-community values), and that’s why Are We Done Yet?, Black Book and Firehouse Dog opened on Wednesday and The Reaping opened on Thursday.

Some people feel Harvey Weinstein made a mistake not putting Grindhouse into theatres on Wednesday also. (He’s cheap on advertising; a phrase I heard about Harvey is that “money goes through his hands like concrete.”) Grindhouse is tracking decently — the expectation is that it’ll take in roughly $20 million in 2,624 theaters).

“I have never believed there’s such a thing as a movie that is ‘so bad, it’s good,'” writes Oregon Live‘s Shawn Levy. “It’s a core tenet for me that photography, editing, screenwriting and acting are forms of art, and I get no more pleasure out of seeing them done badly than a restaurant reviewer does from a meal that leads to food poisoning. It’s why I don’t watch daytime TV. Or Joel Schumacher films.

“I remain in the camp of Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington or whoever it was who first said, ‘There’s only two kinds of music — good and bad. I like good.’ And for the time being, I’m satisfied to let other folks dig through the detritus to find the good. Happy hunting, and write if you find worth.”

Grindhouse opens today so I’m rehashing four basic points I covered in my 3.24 review: (a) a sleazy double-feature in the style of late-’60s exploitation flicks, it samples and comments upon a long-dead genre without really “being” anything itself except for a slick showcase of hip-guy-filmmaker attitudes; (b) still, for a film that runs just over three hours (i.e., 184 minutes) it’s a live-wire, better-than-okay ride and well worth the $10 bucks plus parking.

The problem (c) is that it starts with a semi-dud (Robert Rodriguez‘s Planet Terror, a tired, gloppy and mostly groan-worthy zombie movie except for Rose McGowan‘s pistol-hot action scenes with her prosthetic machine-gun leg) that you have to sit through in order to get to the really good one, which is Quentin Tarantino‘s Death Proof; and (d) amped with a great Kurt Russell performance (half Hickey in The Iceman Cometh, half hot-rod death demon), Death Proof is a sexy, sassy hot-chick flick boasting one of the most exciting, non-CG car-chase sequences in cinema history.

At least one other guy agrees with a passage in my 3.24 Grindhouse review that the Death Proof road finale is “one of the most exciting car-chase sequences in cinema history.” I’m speaking of Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern, whose review (out today) says that Grindhouse contains “the most thrilling car chase ever committed to film.” And the thing that makes it really wail is that none of the road thrills are CG’ed.

This “Seven-Minute Sopranos” YouTube thing is very nice. It’s been up for four or five days and everyone’s on it. Written (and narrated?) by Paul Gulyas and edited by Joe Sabia. Man, James Gandolfini sure used to be slimmer and have more hair. Little A.J. was really tubby in the old days, and Meadow was no slender reed herself.

“When Premiere magazine announced last month that its April issue would be its last, the epitaph for long-form movie journalism may well have been written,” Anne Thompson declares in her latest Variety column. “After all, in a world where movie fans can read about movies, see pictures, trailers and video, and find their theaters and showtimes online, who needs a movie magazine anymore?

“At a time when the likes of celebrity website TMZ.com, Defamer and People.com rush amateur photos of the Hollywood Hills brush fire and news of Mel Gibson‘s latest indiscretion to the web at the speed of thought, writers and editors who once specialized in crafting polished in-depth insider features about Hollywood stars and filmmakers are learning the mantra of the web: Write fast — and write short.”

Plus it’s nice to be mentioned in this graph: “Now there’s too much clutter in the online movie space to grab a toehold. How to compete with Rotten Tomatoes, the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDb), E! Online, Fandango, CHUD, IGN Film Force, Yahoo Movies, Movie City News, Movies.com and AOL Moviefone, not to mention bloggers such as Perezhilton, Deadline Hollywood Daily, Cinematical, and Hollywood Elsewhere?

I’ve been sent the script of Danny Strong‘s Recount, and it’s as good as I’d heard and hoped it would be. As I wrote a couple of days ago, it’s the basis of an HBO feature that Sydney Pollack will start directing within a few weeks’ time (for airing in early ’08), about the battle over the Florida returns in the wake of the 2000 presidential election and how the George Bush forces managed to finagle things in their favor at the end of the day.

I don’t want to give anything anyway, but I thought I’d let everyone read a five-page excerpt that covers the back and forth between the Gore and Bush campaigns at the moment when everyone realizes the Florida election is too close to call. I chose this portion because much of the dialogue has been used and repeated in news stories and books about this historic political spin battle. But these five pages give you a sense of how cleanly written and down-to-it Strong’s script is. Tell me if you don’t agree.

One presumes that Pollack will refine and augment as he goes along, but even if he shoots exactly what’s on the pages of this draft he’ll have a pretty good film at the end of the day. The draft I have is 137 pages long. Here’s page #20, #21, #22, #23 and #24.

The following quote appears on page 137, and again, I am revealing nothing as it is from a published dissenting opinion by Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens regarding Bush. vs. Gore: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the winner of this year’s presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”

I saw the first two installments of HBO’s final Sopranos season last night, and as usual, they’re fantastic and brilliant and darkly funny and all the other superlatives, but there’s not much in the way of any pulverizing story turns — nothing decisive or darkly threatening at all regarding the fate of Anthony J. Soprano, his immediate family or associates.

Okay, a prominent character — a rival — meets his ultimate fate but not at the hand of an assassin or lawman, and yes, tensions between Tony and two of his closest family allies come seeping to the surface, but we’re all familiar with how producer- creator David Chase like this series to play and feel. Aroma, character, emotional undercurrents and karma simmering over a low flame in a kitchen in a big fat New Jersey McMansion. The series always hits home and sinks in, but rarely in the way of Shakespearean high drama.

There sure as shit isn’t anything at all in the way of a narrative toboggan ride in episodes #78 (“Sopranos Home Movies”) and #79 (“Stage 5”), I can tell you. But I loved every minute. I was in pig heaven. In fact, I watched the second installment twice.

You wouldn’t think that a longish scene about four close family members (Tony, Carmela, Bobby, Janice) playing Monopoly at a vacation house on a big lake could result in dramatic fireworks, but the one in the first episode does. (Actually, the way a person plays Monopoly is character-revealing. I noticed that about my kids when we played when they were eight and nine.)

Does anything “happen” in this episode? Not really, but it’s hard to tell with this series. Maybe some kind of plot seed is being planted….maybe. Wherever they’re going, Chase and his writers are certainly in no hurry.

The second episode is about Christopher Moltisanti’s slasher movie, Cleaver, and about a certain party dealing with illness and possible death. I’m not going to get into it any further except to say that director Sydney Pollack is superb as an orderly in a prison hospital who was put in jail for killing his wife and two others. (Has Pollack ever given a performance that didn’t feel absolutely grounded and believable? He was easily the best thing in Husbands and Wives, Changing Lanes, Eyes Wide Shut, etc.)

I don’t sense a bullet in Tony’s future — I just don’t see it. Chase is not a black- and-white moralist who needs his sinners to pay up. Besides, the pressure must be enormous to keep the boss alive in case someone wants to try and shoot a feature-film version down the road. I don’t know anything and I can’t smell anything either (not with this series), but if anyone’s going to get whacked it’ll be Bobby or Christopher or Phil Leotardo…one of those guys. But I really don’t know anything.

One thing about The Sopranos is the way people turn around and suddenly the furies are upon them. In a way, Bob Clark‘s death was like a Sopranos plot turn. Out for a dinner or some kind of good time with his son, some asshole coming the opposite way is getting a blowjob from his girlfriend, the car veers to the left and wham…over, lights out, eternity. Ya never know what’s comin’.

The trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (Disney, 5.25) does make the film seem like it might be a pretty agreeable serving of horseshit eye-candy. Question is, how long will it be? I wouldn’t have disliked the second one if it had been, say, 20 or 30 minutes shorter. A jape should never be lengthy. It should run 100 or 110 minutes, tops.