I haven’t gotten my usual Thursday numbers yet, but Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is projecting Superbad as the weekend’s #1 film with a significantly higher figure than I’d previously estimated — about $27.5 million. (I was thinking more like $21 or $22 million, maybe a bit more.) Rush Hour 3 will be second with about $22 milion and The Bourne Ultimatum will come in third with $19. 3 million. Mason foresees The Invasion earning $11 million or so. I see it doing more like $10 million.

Superbad is in solid with under-25 males, but it has an across-the board general awareness of only 54%. Think about that for twenty seconds. Think of all the great reviews, word-of-mouth, advance screenings and constant internet attention that Greg Mottola‘s film has acquired over the last two or three weeks. You’d really have to be unconscious in a cave with earplugs to have missed all the hype, and yet 46% of the people contacted by phone trackers are still going “huh?” — they haven’t even heard of it.

Where do they find these people? How can anyone be walking around this blocked? Do they have corks in their ears? Are they mentally challenged?

I saw In The Shadow of the Moon (ThinkFilm, 9.7) again this evening — still a deeply moving “spirit movie” in the most celestial sense of that term — and later on shook hands with the great Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 astronaut who became the second human to walk on the moon (on 7.20.69) and the first guy ever to take a leak on the moon, a fact revealed in the film. Read Buzz’s Wikipedia bio, and zero in on the short paragraph titled “Confrontation with Bart Sibrel” — my kind of astronaut.

Buzz Aldrin outside Clarity screening room in Beverly Hills — 8.15.07, 10:10 pm

Two years after tanking in Toronto, John Turturro‘s Romance and Cigarettes, a New York working-class karoake musical that isn’t all that bad, will open at Manhattan’s Film Forum on September 7th. The distributor is Turturro himself, and the stay at the Houston Street megaplex is being described by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Goldstein as “open-ended.” It’s not a total wipeout. James Gandolfini‘s first singing scene and Chris Walken‘s dancing-with-the-cops number have a certain something-or-other.

Right now and for the foreseeable future, anything Michael Cera is in, going to be in, producing, writing or saying is automatically worth considering or checking out. Superbad, of course. Jason Reitman‘s Juno (Fox Searchlight, 12.14), which will reportedly show at the Toronto Film Festival. A forthcoming Judd Apatow/Harold Ramis comedy called Year One, in which he’ll costar with Jack Black. The starring role fo “Nick Twist” in Youth in Revolt, a Dimension Films’ adaptation of the C.D. Payne novels (about Twisp “striving to balance out his budding sexual urges while remaining an intellectual teenager in a world of moronic adults”) with David Permut producing.

A password-accessible, members-only page inside the Broadcast Film Critics Association website says that the following films will be junketed during the 2007 Toronto Film Festival — Gavin Hood‘s Rendition (New Line), David Cronenberg‘s Eastern Promises (Focus Features),Sean Penn‘s Into the Wild (Paramount Vantage), Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton (Warner Bros.), Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros.), Neil Jordan‘s The Brave One (Warner Bros.), Shekhar Kapur‘s Elizabeth: The Golden Age (Universal), Robin Swicord‘s The Jane Austen Book Club (Sony Classics) and Kenneth Branagh‘s Sleuth (ditto).

A moderately diverting piece about Edward Norton‘s screenwriting adventures, most recently (and in fact presently) on the new Incredible Hulk film, as reported by L.A. Times “Scriptland” columnist Jay A. Fernandez. (Was it ever settled about Norton’s Hulk being gray and not green? If the producers have any balls they’ll go with the former. How can anyone look at a green Hulk and not be reminded of Ang Lee?)

Edward Norton, costar Liv Tyler on Incredible Hulk set near Toronto earlier this month. [Note: Norton appears physically larger alongside Tyler when next to her.]

“I’m really just being me and growing up,” Evan Rachel Wood has told GQ profiler Mark Kirby. “And I’m sorry if I have blond hair and blue eyes and my boyfriend looks like a vampire. What do you want me to do about it?”

But you know what? The “Heart Shaped Glasses” video, which is significantly about Wood and b.f. Marilyn Manson getting it on, is visually repetitive (i.e., not enough coverage), and nowhere near as hot as the blood-spattered lovemaking scene in Alan Parker‘s Angel Heart.
And it’s all about trying to stir interest in Julie Taymor‘s Across the Universe (Sony, 9.21), the troubled musical in which Wood costars.

“All good things must come to an end,” begins an Invasion pan by Variety‘s Dennis Harvey. “In this case, the lucky streak that’s made every adaptation of Jack Finney‘s 1955 sci-fi novel The Body Snatchers distinctive and effective, until now.
“Troubled production — of which the Wachowski brothers reportedly reshot at least a third after a cut by original helmer Oliver Hirschbiegel failed to please suits — emerges a slick but forgettable, characterless thriller. Lure of Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig‘s first post-Bond role and large-scale PG-13 action-horror could produce OK opening numbers, but steep falloff is guaranteed. Ancillary may drag pic into the eventual black.
“Perhaps auds will eventually get to see what German helmer Hirschbiegel, making his English-language feature debut, and scenarist David Kajganich intended in director’s-cut DVD form. Purportedly it was offbeat, politically barbed and quasi-documentary in style. Those qualities are MIA in the current version, whose occasional nods to earlier versions (Veronica Cartwright, memorable in the Kaufman version, has a brief role here) only serve as a reminder of how much better they were.”
Harvey’s idea makes basic sense. How could Warner Home Video not win by releasing the Hirschbiegel cut? At the very least it would make for an essential two-disc special edition DVD. No HE comment on the 93-minute Wachowski “suit” version until Friday, but including an alternative director’s cut would obviously heighten interest when the film debuts on DVD at the end of the year (or sometime in early ’08).

“El Evento Cinematografico de la Decada!,” the copy states in the opening frames of the Spanish-language trailer for Shine a Light, the Martin Scorsese/Rolling Stones concert doc that’s been bumped from 9.21.07 to sometime in April ’08.

The official reason for the delay that the Stones’ European tour (wrapping at the end of this month) will keep Mick, Keith and Charlie from doing a full-court press promotion to plug the late September opening. And yet the tour dates and the 9.21 opening were obviously set many months ago. If the Stones wanted to rest after the tour Par could have just pushed the release back to October or November or December?
Variety‘s assessment is that “rather than enter the overcrowded award-season months of October, November or December, the principals involved in the Scorsese project opted for an April date.”
Except the bump-back leaves Paramount proper with just Beowulf (out 11.16) as the only Par-produced movie on ther fall slate. Everything else is DreamWorks-produced (The Heartbreak Kid, Things We Lost in the Fire, Bee Movie, The Kite Runner), reiterating all the more that the proper company name is Dreamamount.
I know that Shine a LIght was being assembled earlier this year and that a rough cut was shown to Paramount suits last May, and yet a source told Variety that “it was a tight schedule…everybody felt it was getting rushed.” Eight months of editing is a rush job?

Twelve or thirteen years ago I got a very friendly call from a producer on the Sony lot. I knew who he was but had never spoken to him or called his office about anything. “Jeff! Howya doin’?” His tone was car-salesman chummy. Almost like a guy trying to pick up a girl at a bar. I didn’t know what to say except “Uhhm….good! How are you?” It went on like that for another eight or ten seconds until he realized he’d dialed the wrong Jeffrey Wells. “Oh…uhhnn, okay…well, bye!”
Turned out there was an L.A. guy with the same name who drove a limousine, and lived at the time somewhere near Playa del Rey or Manhattan Beach, and was apparently very well liked by industry execs. That’s still the case because an assistant to a director-writer friend called yesterday looking for the same guy. Nice to know he’s still doing well after all this time. He doesn’t Google, even when you type “limousine driver” in front of the name. And he’s not findable through Switchboard. But he’s very popular with certain flush types, and very trusted.

The Reeler’s Stu Van Airsdale has the lineup for the 2007 NY Film festival (9.29 to 10.14), and a good portion seems like a replay of last May’s Cannes Film Festival. There are, however, some notable fresh-pick exceptions — Wes Anderson‘s The Darjeeling Limited for the opening-nighter (old news), Noah Baumbach‘s Margot at the Wedding (good cast, ample star wattage), Brian DePalma‘s Redacted (comeback?) and Todd Hayne‘s I’m Not There (an ambitious, multi-thread Dylan film with a top-drawer cast opening at the Film Forum..what’s that about?).

Other for-the-most-part-unseen choices include Carlos Saura‘s Fados, Sidney Lumet‘s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Ira Sachs‘ Married Life, Claude Chabrol‘s A Girl Cut in Two, Eric Rohmer‘s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, andJohn Landis‘s Mr. Warmth (a Don Rickles portrait)…that’s ten plus two or three newbies I’m ignoring.
I’m also counting twelve Cannes titles: Joel and Ethan Coen‘s No Country For Old Men (centerpiece), Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud‘s Persepolis (closing nighter), Christain Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 weeks, 2 Days (the Palme D’Or winner), Julian Schnabel‘s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Hou Hsiao-hsien‘s The Flight of the Red Balloon, Abel Ferrara‘s Go Go Tales (missed it at Cannes), Catherine Breillat‘s The Last Mistress, Bela Tarr‘s The Man From London (serious pacing problems), Gus Van Sant‘s Paranoid Park (underwhelming), Carlos Reygadas‘ Silent Light and Juan Antonio Bayona‘s The Orphanage (a brilliant sophisticated spooker).
There’s also three interesting-sounding docs — Murray Lerner‘s The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival, 1963-1965. Jia Zhang-ke’s Useless, and a nearly four-hour-long documentary (238 minutes, to be precise) from Peter Bogdanovich called Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin’ Down a Dream.