A nicely written interview-profile of Grindhouse star Rose McGowan, by L.A. Times staffer Paul Cullum. It’s also a little bit chickenshit, truth be told, that Cullum failed to mention, however faintly or anecdotally, the on-set turmoil that resulted from Planet Terror director Robert Rodriguez’s indiscretion with McGowan during shooting early last year, blah, blah. EW‘s Chris Nashawaty dodged this one also. Not that it’s an important or worthwhile subject, but avoiding even a cushion-shot mention seems cowardly.

Werner, Werner, Werner Herzog all the way at the Film Forum, starting on May 18th.

Last Monday afternoon I did a brief phoner with the great Jeff Daniels while standing outside a neighborhood luncheonette on Madison and 81st. The idea was to pay tribute to his fine supporting performance in The Lookout, Scott Frank‘s midwestern bank-job drama. Daniels plays a guy named Lewis — a lazy, bearded, low-rent, shoulder- shrugging, guitar-playing, middle-aged smartass — with a dry, succinct wit that settles in and hits the spot. He’s far and away the best thing in the film.

After last Tuesday’s performance of Blackbird at the Manhattan Theatre Club — Tuesday, 3.27.07, 9:20 pm

I’m not a huge fan of The Lookout (it has a few good things), but I really liked Daniels and I was trying to do Frank a small favor. But I waited until today to run this piece, and that makes me two days late and a dollar short. The Lookout opened and died this weekend with only $1,929,000 in the till and $2000 a print. Face it — DVDs of The Lookout will be sitting in the Walmart bargain bin four or five months from now. It’s a cold, cruel, fuck-you world out there.

Plus the interview, frankly, didn’t go all that well. Daniels was in a cranky, almost bitter mood and preoccupied by the emotional load of playing a very difficult lead role in David Harrower‘s Blackbird, a play that was in previews at the Manhattan Theatre Club. His character, Ray, is a guy in his mid ’50s who’s done time for having had a brief affair with a 12 year-old girl named Una when he was 40. The play is about the girl, now 27 (and played by Allison Pill), visiting Ray and wanting to regurgitate and hash things over in more ways than one.

Playing the role, Daniels said, is harrowing, draining, bruising. I mentioned an actor friend who used to unwind from a difficult role by getting a shiatsu massage after each performance. Not in that realm, said Daniels. Getting into Ray makes him feel like he needs the services of a therapist.

Daniels in The Lookout

Is there some way we could meet before or after the play, I asked, so I could take a quick photo? I can’t see doing that, Daniels said. Talk to the Lookout publicist. What if I stood outside with the autograph hounds after a Blackbird performance and snapped a shot when you come out…how would that be? Still don’t see it, he replied. I might not come out right away, it depends what door I leave by, there might be notes, I don’t like to do that stuff anyway.

Scott had spoken favorably to Daniels about me, which was why we were talking there and then. “I mean, I can’t even believe I’m talking to you,” he said at one point, meaning that he was whipped and disturbed and phoners like this were above and beyond the call. I wasn’t offended, but I can’t say I was charmed.

I tried some standard flattery (like mentioning how much I liked him as Chris Reeve‘s boyfriend in the 1981 B’way production of The Fifth of July), but that didn’t help much. Daniels just said “thank you” a couple of times, and the conversation seemed to stop each time he said that, and I started to feel like a kiss-ass. It was basically a dud conversation all around.

So I called the publicist for Blackbird and asked for a couple of press comps. She obliged, and I saw Daniels do the hard thing last Tuesday night. Blackbird is a 95 minute one-acter, and pretty much a straight sprint. It holds you with a hard grip. And Daniels is damn impressive. Not touching, exactly, since he’s playing a kind of monster, but it’s a steady “wow, wow, wow” thing to watch him go to town. He should end up with some great reviews when the play opens on April 10.

Four people walked out, but that’s to be expected, I guess, with a play about a pedophile and his victim. Except it’s not that cut and dried.

Directed by Joe Mantello, Blackbird is about two people who are totally destroyed by the fact that they were genuinely in love (or something close to that), and who briefly and clumsily acted on it and have been paying for this criminal sin for 15 years and counting. It’s also about dealing with guilt and trying to move on. It could also be about a serial molester who’s never moved on at all.

This is Lolita territory, of course, which means that it’s not just about an older guy having his way with a lamb in the woods (although it was certainly that in part). Ray’s crime was loathsome, of course, but it’s clear from listening to the 27 year-old Una that she had some pretty strong feelings at the time of the seduction that were nearly the equal of Ray’s, and that putting this kind of relationship in a box and keeping it there isn’t easy or simple.

The American-moviegoer problem with Aishwarya Rai, the super-beautiful, violet-eyed Indian actress, is obviously of a xenophobic and shameful nature, but a problem nonetheless. I’m sorry to sound like a guy wiping windshields at a Baton Rouge car wash, but she has a three-syllable first name that’s hard to hang onto and is somewhat difficult to pronounce.

Even after reading this Martyn Palmer article in the 3.30 London Times and practicing the pronunciation of her first name over and over, I still can’t remember it. Quick — turn your head away from the computer screen and try and say her name. See? Plus it contorts your mouth every which way to say “aysh” (pronounced like J. Carrol Naish?) and then “war” and then “ya.” I’ve got enough aggravation.

Plus she apparently said in an Asian website q & a that her favorite all-time film is Casablanca. As I’ve recently explained, it’s not flattering for a 2007 person of any accomplishment to put Casablanca at the top of his/her list. It strongly suggests that the person has a bland, schmaltzy, not-very-inquisitive movie mentality, which suggests that he/she has a bland and schmaltzy mentality in other respects.

Plus there’s a woman named “Sashay” who responded to Palmer’s article by saying that (a) the piece “conveniently left out the part about how Aishwarya married a tree during her engagement,” etc., (b) that “the few Indian movies I’ve seen her play, she is either being knocked over the head or having her hair pulled by some man, like somehow it’s romantic,” and that (c) “she’s an average pretty girl that has above-average luck.”

This may be an April Fool’s joke, but Dark Horizons‘ Garth Franklin has reported (via Reuters) that Al Pacino is “being sought” to join Robert DeNiro in the Departed sequel, based on a script by the brilliant, bulky and bearded William Monaghan.

The film (I know this part isn’t bullshit) has no choice but to focus on Mark Wahlberg‘s “Dignam” character because — spoiler for people who live in caves! — he’s the biggest name who wasn’t killed in the original.

The story revolves around big-time political corruption as the abrasive, motor-mouthed Wahlberg goes undercover to take down an oily U.S. Senator (DeNiro). The producers (Graham King, etc.) want Pacino to play Wahlberg’s new boss (i.e., succeeding the dead Martin Sheen), “a force veteran who may not be as clean as he appears.”

Alec Baldwin (“You’re one of those healthy types, right? Go fuck yourself”) is also expected to reprise his Departed role. (Why wouldn’t this be true?)

The Warner Bros. project is said to be moving forward with such haste that “it could very well be Scorsese’s next,” Franklin passes along. April Fool!….not?

No matter what happens between De Niro and Pacino in this film (i.e., sharing the same scene, confrontationally speaking), I can’t see it topping their legendary Kate Mantellini mano e mano in Michael Mann‘s Heat.

The weekend’s #1 film and the absolute toast of America is Blades of Glory, which will end up with $33,433,000 by tonight. Meet The Robinsons is second with $25,7000,000…very respectable. And Zack Snyder‘s 300 came in third with $11,235,000.

TMNT is #4 with $9,001,000, down 63% (popular!) from last weekend. Wild Hogs Roasting On A Spit came in fifth at $8,320,000. Antoine Fuqua and Mark Wahlberg ‘s not-especially-great Shooter is sixth with $7,927,000, and the indisputably bad Premonition came in seventh with $5,121,000.

The Last Mimzy, down 60%, came in eighth with $3,967,000, just a notch ahead of The Hills Have Eyes 2, also down 60%, with $3,895,000. Mike Binder‘s Reign Over Me, down 51%, came in tenth with $3,668,000. (Americans!) And Scott Frank‘s The Lookout bombed — $1,929,000, about $2000 a print.

There’s reason to half-believe that Once (Fox Searchlight, 5.18), a curiously intoxicating date movie, might catch on. A suggested copy line — “If you can’t get laid after seeing Once with someone you’re after, you can’t get laid” — is one reason. Whatever the odds of this happening (a decent box-office haul, that is), it seems that director John Carney is planning on some kind of spirited reception.

Glen Hansard, Marketa Irglova in Once

A friend who spoke with him in L.A. after a recent press screening says he intends to shoot a sequel about the continuing romantic travails of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova‘s characters. Call it a kind of nod to Richard Linklater‘s decision to shoot Before Sunset as a completion of Before Sunrise.

Notable Hollywood smoothie adorned in regal 17th Century duds and put to canvas by successful Moscow painter Nikas Safranov, profiled by L.A. Times staffer Jeffrey Fleishman. Safranov, a bit of a smoothie himself. is peddling the 2007 version of children-with- great-big-eyes paintings….no?

“Another problem with killing Tony Soprano [at the end of the about-to-start final season] is how likable he is, despite his pathologically long list of misdeeds and murder. We like him, that’s why we watch the show, and doing him in more than the writers and the audience can bear. Indeed, they want to believe he can change.

“‘Arthur Miller used to say, you don’t go to the theater unless you see your- self onstage,’ says Glen O. Gabbard, a psychiatrist at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who wrote The Psychology of the Sopranos: Love, Death, Desire and Betrayal in America’s Favorite Gangster Family. ‘The audience thinks that maybe, just maybe, this bad man can be transformed into a good man. That’s what [Dr. Jennifer] Melfi thinks, that’s what the audience thinks.’

“And yet, something more powerful than the demands of storytelling may dictate Tony’s final fate — Hollywood. Although Chase is ending the series because he’s mined the show for all he can on television, rumors persist about a possible Sopranos feature film. A Sopranos movie without Tony? As the Bada Bing! boys might say, not gonna happen.” — from Martin Miller‘s 4.1.07 L.A. Times piece.

Will Ferrell as an astronaut, a bullfighter, a ballerina and a referee. Four new-movie ideas proposed by Arizona Daily Star smartass Phil Villarreal that would broaden Ferrell’s following and build upon his tremendous talent.

“After Hollow Man, I felt that I should change gears, because I felt that it wasn’t a personal movie anymore. I felt like I could not express myself in a personal way and said that I have to back off from the fantasy and the science fiction or the studios or whatever. I have to do something that’s for me; I want to do something which I believe in again.” — Black Book director Paul Verhoeven speaking to Coming Soon‘s Edward Douglas.

Paul Verhoeven during HE interview at Beverly Wilshire hotel two weeks ago, snapped by yours truly

A letter about comedians going serious (Sandler, Murphy, Rock, Ferrell) by L.A. Times reader named Nicholas Silver was published in today’s edition. I don’t agree with everything he says (particularly a remark about Adam Sandler seeming shallow in Reign Over Me), but he says it fairly well:

“You want to know what we really learn when comics like Adam Sandler and Chris Rock make so-called serious movies? We learn how very shallow they are and, by extension, how very debased we are as Americans for paying so much attention to them.

“Listen, anybody in a moment of quietude can seem to be thinking. Take Eddie Murphy: apparently he was great in Dreamgirls, but talent and charm have never been an issue with him. The question is, where’s his head at? I’ll tell you where: Norbit.

“Will Ferrell is funny and sweet, but he’s stuck in television. Every idea he gets is based on perceptions gleaned from watching TV. Nearly all American comedians post-Saturday Night Live have been siophomoric, developmentally stunted and crude. The bar has definitely been lowered.

“At least when watching a picure by Woody Allen, America’s greatest living comedian, you know you’re watching a man who’s constantly running interference between bona fide seriousness and an irrepressible gift for cracking wise.”