The first comprehensive stab at HE’s 2007 Oscar Balloon (which is now mint green with brighter colored balloons) is up and running. Please give it a once-over and suggest any appropriate takedowns or additions. As the year progresses I will start to boldface those contenders who have exceptional heat. I’m not trying to say that the ’07 Oscar race has begun…please. That won’t happen (i.e., it won’t begin to take on any kind of shape) until July-August, with the real kickoff, as always, being September’s Toronto Film Festival. Enjoy the balmy Oscar-free climate while it lasts.

Lonely Hearts (Samuel Goldwyn, 4.13) wasn’t nearly as hard to sit through as I’d been told to expect. In a groggy, heavy- lidded way I could even describe this period police drama as reasonably decent. And if you’re into red-lipped hotties it’s worth checking out for Salma Hayek‘s performance as infamous serial killer Martha Beck, a bad-ass mama who’s emotionally obsessive (to put it mildly) and almost sadly malicious.

What’s great about Hayek is that her twisted behavior feels earnest and believable. She’s way too pretty and curvy to play Beck as she actually was (i.e., homely and obese, somewhere between 250 and 300 pounds), but I didn’t care. I didn’t feel Hayek was acting as much as being. She’s quite depraved and quite good.

Except for her very last bit, that is, when she’s about to be fried in the electric chair. She calmly looks at a cop watching her and says with an almost impudent look on her face, “So long.” The real Beck silently mouthed the words, which would have been a better choice. I know I didn’t buy Hayek’s coolness and resolve. I’m guessing that everyone feels terrified when they’re about to be put do death. A guy watching Saddam Hussein on the gallows in Iraq said he looked scared. That felt right when I read that.

So the movie is not an embarassment, and yet I can’t call Lonely Hearts anything to write home about. The story isn’t especially moving or startling or thematically rich, and it hasn’t been shot in what anyone would describe as stylistically stand-out. The pacing is just this side of slow, the color is drab and bleachy, and nothing pops through as exceptional. It’s a been-there, done-thatter.

A period drama about a couple of overweight Nassau County detectives (John Travolta, James Gandolfini) on the trail of a couple of real-life nutbag psychos, Lonely Hearts is the third or fourth movie version of the true “Honeymoon Killers” saga. (The best was Leonard Kastle‘s The Honeymoon Killers.)

We’re seeing it again now because Todd Robinson, the director-writer, is the grandson of Travolta’s character, Det. Elmer C. Robinson. And he wants us to know that his grandfather had all kinds of rage boiling inside, that he was haunted by his wife’s suicide, that he took his job a little too personally. And he managed to persuade everyone who helped him make Lonely Hearts that this would add something significant. It doesn’t.

Robinson obsesses about catching Beck and Ray Fernandez (Jared Leto), a pair of cold-blooded killers. But they’re primarily scam artists, and sloppy ones at that. Their haphazard game is about Ray, a hyper, balding guy with a jerkwad moustache, seducing older women, gaining their confidence, and getting them to part with their cash. The wackjob element comes from the lovesick Beck being unable to watch (or listen to) Fernandez making love with these women, which leads her to kill some of them out of concern that Fernandez is actually falling for them.

The story is about Travolta and Gandolfini, who look like they’d outweigh a Holstein cow if you put them both on the same scale, trying like hell to hunt down Hayek and Leto and not succeeding for 90% or 95% of the film. I obviously knew that satisfaction was an hour or two around the corner, but I wasn’t into following the hints and maybes and the accumulation of leads like I was with David Fincher‘s Se7en, say.

What I cared about is how sick and depraved Hayek was playing it. Not that I enjoy watching diseased behavior, but this was where the juice was. The cops were too flat, too bored with themselves, too accustomed to the grind. Scott Caan, another Nassau County detective, played a variation of the same cocky smart-ass he always plays. Strictly tinsel on the tree.

You know something’s wrong when you’re watching a movie about real-life killers and all you can think about is going home so you can look them up online and read the real stories and look at the old photos.

One last Hayek thought, (i.e., one that her Beck performance caused me to ponder). Why is it that the craziest and most psychotic women are always the best in bed, and the steadiest, most loyal and most sensible women (i.e., the best partner types) are always a little bit rote in that department? God has a perverse sense of humor — that’s all I can say.

Anyone who saw and loved Sandra Nettlebeck‘s Mostly Martha when it opened five years ago needs to click on the trailer for No Reservations (Warner Bros., 7.27), the Scott Hicks-directed remake with Catherine Zeta Jones and Aaron Eckhart playing the Martina Gedeck and Serge Castellito roles. It looks like a spirited romantic souffle, but it seems exactly (and I mean exactly) like the German movie, only slicker and cuter with a power-pop girly song on the soundtrack.

There’s one toxic line in the trailer, I regret to say. Jones, playing a sophisticated chef coping with heavy stress, says to costar Bob Balaban, “I wish there was a cookbook for life,” and he answers, “It’s the recipes that you create yourself that are the best.” (I flinched when I heard that; I may have also moaned slightly.) I know that I haven’t trusted Hicks in a long time. His last good film was Shine, and that was 11 years ago. Since then he’s made Snow Falling on Cedars (’99) and Hearts in Atlantis (’01), and they both blew.

No Reservations has been a long time coming with a lot of potholes and false starts. I’ve run this history before, but here it is anyway….

A little more than four years ago Variety’s Michael Fleming reported that director Lawrence Kasdan (Grand Canyon, The Big Chill, et. al.) was starting work (along with screenwriter Terri Minsky) on a U.S. remake of Mostly Martha for Castle Rock. There was moderate excitement about this since pretty much everyone with any taste was fairly taken with the ’01 German-made original.

I ran a rave in June 2002 about Martha, calling it “a culinary Kramer vs. Kramer” about a female Hamburg chef (Gedeck) with selfish tendencies having to take care of her recently deceased sister’s young daughter. I also called it “the most succulent, sensually appetizing, food-trip movie since Big Night or even Babette’s Feast.”

But Kasdan and Minsky, who wanted to set their film is some foodie city like New Orleans or San Francisco, ran into difficulty (I don’t know what kind) and their movie never happened.

In May ’04, a moderately painful, obviously Martha-inspired confection called Raising Helen, directed by Garry Marshall and starring Kate Hudson and John Corbett, was released by Disney and wound up earning just under $40 million domestically. It had the same set-up (sister dies in car crash, selfish single professional woman suddenly has to take care of her kids, etc.) although Hudson’s Helen wasn’t a chef — she worked at a modelling agency.

And then along came No Reservations, which is a resuscitation of the Castle Rock-Kasdan project. And again it’s about a selfishly-inclined lead character (now back to being a chef) taking care of her diseased sister’s young daughter (Abigail Breslin). The script is by Carol Fuchs, and the chef boyfriend is being played by Eckhart.

“For what it’s worth, today in my magazine writing class at Hunter College we discussed the Don Imus brouhaha, and not one kid, not even the black kids, thought he should be fired. Censured, fined, suspended…sure. But not fired. Looks like they understand the First Amendment better than the craven corporate types.” — hotshot Manhattan entertainment journalist Lewis Beale.

Disturbia and Perfect Stranger are going to be neck and neck this weekend. The latter is tracking at 71, 33 and 14, and Disturbia has been clocked at 61, 35 and 15. Neither one is going to blow the roof off.

A guy I know suspects that Disturbia might perform a little bit better, possibly because moviegoers are picking up oppressive formula fumes coming off the latter, a Bruce Willis-Halle Berry thriller. (A friend says Stranger, which had its all-media screening last night, has an irritating twist element at the finale that’s been used solely because movies like this are supposed to have twist endings.)

Does anyone know or care about Shia LaBeouf, the Disturbia lead guy? I know that a GenY Rear Window movie seems a little more enticing than Berry playing Nancy Drew and agitating Willis until things come to a boil.

Tracking on Spider-Man 3 (Columbia, 5.4) is phenomenal — 95, 44 and 32. By the time it opens the first choice figure will be over 50. Two semi-noteworthy films are opening against it — Curtis Hanson‘s Lucky You (35, 20 and 1) and September Dawn (13, 16 and 0).

4.20: Fracture (41, 29 and 4), Vacancy (54, 25 and 3) and In The Land of Women (31, 24 and 2).

4.27: Condemned (31, 29 and 0), The Invisible (38, 18 and 0), Kickin’ It Old School (26, 16 and 0), Next (45, 24 and 1).

It’s over for Don Imus….temporarily, I presume. CBS honcho Leslie Moonves pulled the plug on “Imus in the Morning” earlier today, and this combined with MSNBC’s decision yesterday to drop its simulcast of the radio show means the guy is totally over and lights out. For now. Obviously an economic decision due to sponsor queasiness about sticking with Imus with the racial context heating up and the Sharpton-generated calls for his dismissal. Never pick on the unpowerful. Imus will make some more amends, and then go off to his ranch and chill for a few months, and then his show will return on some other network. Within a year, I’m guessing.

The Drudge Report has this transcript of what Imus said this morning: “My position on all of this is not whining about the hideously hypocritical coverage from the newspapers — from everybody — or the lack of support, say, from people like Harold Ford, Jr. who I had my life threatened over supporting and all these kind of things. It all began, and it doesn’t make any difference — like [James] Carville said — stop talking about the context, it doesn’t make any difference. If I hadn’t have said it I wouldn’t be here. So let’s stop whining about it. You gotta stop complaining. I said a stupid, idiotic thing that desperately hurt these kids. I’m going to apologize but we gotta move on.”

Being a graduate of Wilton High School, I ran a summation on 3.25.07 of a N.Y. Times story about several teenaged students who were outraged that their WHS principal, Timothy H. Canty, had cancelled an April performance of a play they were preparing on the Iraq War called “Voices in Conflict.” Canty told Times reporter Allison Leigh Cowan that he kibboshed the play over “questions of political balance and context.” Translation: conservative voices in Wilton wanted it suppressed.

Wilton High School principal Timothy J. Canty, seemingly dejected and despondent in the wake of news that “Voices in Conflict” will be staged at New York’s Public Theatre.

Now, two and a half weeks later, the students and their play have prevailed and Canty, with some assistance from the N.Y. Times photo editors, is looking like a putz.

A N.Y. Times story published today says that “Voices in Conflict” will be performed in June at Manhattan’s Public Theater and also at the Culture Project, which is “known for staging politically provocative work.” A third show at a Connecticut theater is also being discussed.

“We are so honored and thrilled…there’s no words to describe how excited we are,” Bonnie Dickinson, the teacher whose advanced theater class at Wilton High School put the play together, told the Times yesterday.

The story says that the students “were presented with a Courage in Theater award last month for their ‘non-performance’ from Music Theater International, a New York agency that licenses many high school productions. And last week, theater greats including Edward Albee, Christopher Durang, John Weidman, Marsha Norman, Doug Wright, John Guare and John Patrick Shanley, under the auspices of the Dramatists Guild of America, joined the National Coalition Against Censorship in calling for the [Wilton] school district to allow the play to go on.”

The reason I said that the N.Y. Times photo editor has contributed to the diminishment of Canty’s reputation is obvious when you consider the above photo. It’s clearly an impressionistic portrayal of Canty as a sour and bitter man of small stature and dejected spirit. Its appearance next to Cowan’s story obviously conveys an editorial view on the newspaper’s part. Any liberal, free-thinking person would agree with this view, of course — Canty was certainly the bad guy in this story. The photo is actually comical — I laughed out loud when I first saw it this morning.

There are some who reject the concept of icky money, and claim that if you earn it semi-honestly that all money is green and nurturing, no matter what tactic you used to obtain it. But if you were with Lionsgate and you believed deep down that there is such a thing as icky money, what would you feel ickier about — making millions from bloody slasher films, or making millions off the Christian faith market?

A guy named Stephen Tramontana, whom I haven’t spoken to but who resides in the L.A. area, has a website called The Real Grindhouse. It’s largely about a film called Grindhouse, a kind of hommage to grindhouse movies made in the same style as the real McCoys from the ’60s and ’70s, that he and a partner, Lenny Shteynberg, made and finished in ’03 for about $4,000.

Tramontana is claiming on the site he and Shteynberg met Quentin Tarantino at a party in ’02, and that they told him about their Grindhouse movie idea during a brief conversation. Flatline response. And that they sent a copy of the finished film via registered mail to Tarantino teh following year, hoping to find some way of landing a DVD deal. Nothing happened. And then two years later Tramontana read about Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez planning to make their own Grindhouse, which he and Shteynberg felt was a ripoff of their idea.

Tramontana is claiming that “all efforts to receive credit for the idea from the production company or Tarantino were constantly squashed.” Tramontana has therefore concluded that Tarantino is “a thieving piece of shit and he knows it…he stole Grindhouse from a bunch of kids who were just asking for his help….and he helped them by stealing their title and concept.”

I have done no digging except to try and call Tramontana. He offers no e-mail or phone contact info through his website. He apparently exists and has a phone, but it’s not obtainable for free through Switchboard. Intelius has information on him but you have to pay $7.95 to get it. He’s selling copies of his Grindhouse flick through Google checkout at 99 cents a pop.

Blackbird, the David Harrower play that I briefly reviewed early this month (after doing a dud phone interview with the play’s star, Jeff Daniels), opened on Tuesday, 4.10, and has gotten rave reviews, including this one from N.Y. Times critic Ben Brantley.

“To Kurt Vonnegut, the only possible redemption for the madness and apparent meaninglessness of existence was human kindness. The title character in his 1965 novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, summed up his philosophy: “Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” — from the N.Y. Times obit for Vonnegut, who died on Wednesday in Manhattan.

After my riff on the Get Smart movie went up earlier today, I received three interesting e-mails. One containing a draft of the Get Smart movie script (dated 3.30.06, by Tom Astle and Matt Ember), a second pointing me to a Get Smart TV series fan site that has posted a fairly negative, very detailed review of Astle and Ember’s script, and a third from a guy in the business who asked to be referred to as “Agent Orange.” I know him — he’s for real.

“Agent Orange” doesn’t like the script any more than the fan site guy does, but that’s neither here nor there. The film could pan out and by funny and make money; you never know with these things. The interesting part is that AO is claiming that Warner Bros. is trying to keep the original series’ creators Mel Brooks and Buck Henry “from being paid [the] huge sums they’re entitled to.”

I don’t know the details and I haven’t made any calls yet. For all I know Brooks and/or Henry are getting paid a modest amount but not, in their view, enough. Or they’re getting royally shafted. Or their compensation is being chipped away at. I know nothing. I do know, however, that “Agent Orange” has certain relationships and is in a position to know what’s up.

“Your piece on the new Get Smart film hit the nail perfectly on the head,” he began. “The script, from the morons who wrote Failure To Launch, has been long considered to be eye-rollingly bad and was only given the go ahead because of Steve Carrel’s current ‘heat,’ as well as his limited windows of availability due to his series and other movie commitments.

“The greenlight notion was, let the star and the title speak for itself and ‘let ‘er rip.’ But this material makes Steve Martin‘s Pink Panther seem like genius.

“What’s most egregious is the apparent disregard the producers and studio have for the original creators of the show. Mel Brooks said in an interview that it would be best to leave Get Smart alone, but if it is to be redone, he offered to give input because he liked Steve Carrell and thinks he’s ‘talented.’

“Brooks postulated that a modernized Smart should deal with current events, just liked the original show lampooned the Cold War, and should riff on Iraq, Condi Rice and finding Osama bin Laden. Instead, this Get Smart is a dumbed down redo of the plot of Rowan Atkinson‘s Johnny English. So much so, that it’s already been nicknamed Johnny American.

“There’s also a lame attempt to address the age gap between Carell and Anne Hathaway, saying that she had plastic surgery to hide her identity. Still, the photo you’ve shown looked like The Forty Year Old Agent posing alongside Little Miss Sunshine. In this version, Maxwell Smart will try to legally adopt 99.

“The worst part of all this is that Warner Brothers is trying to deny Brooks and Buck Henry their sizable royalties for this production by claiming that they didn’t actually create the original show. The legal department postulates that since the original idea to spoof James Bond back in the ’60s came from a production company, Brooks and Henry were ‘work for hire’ as opposed to incepting the idea.

“They’ve taken depositions and are combing through paperwork as they endeavor to prove their contention and cheat these two comic legends out of the huge sums they’re entitled to.”

Thursday morning update: After this item went up late yesterday afternoon, I heard from another admirer of the original Get Smart TV series who has ties to Leonard Stern, one of the surviving owners of Talent Associates, the production company that brought together co-creators Mel Brooks and Buck Henry and produced Smart in the mid ’60s.

“I wanted to drop you a note and confirm the story about how Warner Brothers is trying to screw Brooks and Henry out of their credit as creators of the show,” his letter began. “I have spoken to Leonard Stern about this and [he confirms] it is true.

“WB attorneys have taken depositions to attempt to prove that Talent Associates came up with the concept, characters, and details of Get Smart and that Brooks and Henry merely served as writers for hire. They have a memo from Talent Associates that gives the show bible and they are trying to use that as proof. Unfortunately, the memo is dated a year after Get Smart aired. Not letting that fact stop them, WB is claiming that it was a misdated memo.

“Both Stern and Daniel Melnick, the surviving owners of Talent Associates, deny the studio’s claim, but the suit is still moving forward,” he says. “This is all part of the reason why no one is consulting with the original series’ creative team.”

The Get Smart film is being produced by Mad Chance’s Andrew Lazar and Mosaic Media Group’s Charles Roven and Alex Gartner. The Stern ally claims that Mosaic, the talent management firm founded by Eric Gold and Jimmy Miller that reps Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell and the Wayans brothers, is the force or impetus behind the lawsuit, and “not executive producers like Carell.”