No slight to Marlon Brando‘s emoting in Sayonara, but Red Buttons — who died today at age 87 — was less actorish and affected in that film than Brando was (i.e., the Alabama accent and all). Button’s performance as Joe Kelly, the pissed-off Air Force grunt who defied military pressure to marry a Japanese woman (Miyoshi Umeki) only to join her in a suicide pact down the road, was the best work he ever did — frank, blunt, b.s-free. He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for it. He also delivered a strong performance in Sydney Pollack ‘s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969). But almost everything else Buttons did besides these two felt either forced or cornball or over-sold.

The final season of The Sopranos (i.e., eight episodes) has been bumped from January to early March ’07 because of a knee operation that James Gandolfini will have sometime soon. The surgery alone would delayed the season only three or four weeks “but that would have put The Sopranos up against the football playoffs and the Super Bowl,” according to HBO honcho Chris Albrecht . The knee procedure is necessary because Gandolfini was recently knocked off his scooter in Manhattan collision with a taxi.
(This happened to me in Paris in the summer of ’03. I was on the back of a scooter that Jett was driving, and as we approached the Place Bastille Jett slammed on the brakes too hard and the bike hit the pavement with me on it. I was bruised pretty badly and gimping around for two or three weeks after that, but I eventually healed. If I’d gone to a local hospital with ample medical insurance on the day of the accident I would have been relentlessly subjected to the benefits of modern medicine at a cost of many thousands of Euros.)
“I know you’re all hoping that [more than one or two Sopranos characters will] die,” Albrecht told the Television Critics Association in Pasadena on Wednesday, but he gave assurances that viewers won’t be disappointed in this regard. “I know the story lines for the final eight, and I am absolutely positively certain that when the curtain comes down on [the final Sopranos], the vast, vast, vast majority of people will say it’s one of the great things of all time.” (Shouldn’t he have said “greatest,” as in “one of the greatest things of all time”?)

A possible reason for today’s You, Me and Dupree tracking uptick is a new TV ad that ran last weekend that uses this line of narration: “Last summer, he crashed weddings” — referring to Owen Wilson, of course, with a brief hit of Wedding Crashers footage — ” and this summer he’s crashing a marriage.” The coincidence is that Scott Foundas‘s Village Voice review, which was posted on 7.11, starts with this sentence: “Owen Wilson has moved up in the world: He’s gone from crashing weddings to crashing entire marriages.”

How many people saw that 30-minute pilot for Ben Stiller‘s Heat Vision and Jack seven years ago on Fox? Penned by Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab, it was about an astronaut named Jack Austin (Jack Black) and his pet motorcycle (voiced by Owen Wilson) hiding out from the dreaded Ron Silver — the actor playing himself as a dual-identity villain — and his evil NASA bosses.

Fox blew it off, but it’s pretty damn clever and funny….a satire of gimmick superpower shows in the vein of “Captain America”or “Knight Rider.” In any event, here it is on YouTube.

Kevin Smith has a certain perspective on the heat that M. Night Shyamalan has been getting lately for spilling every last intimate thought and hang-up and creative concern in Michael Bamberger’s The Man Who Heard Voices. Smith has been doing nearly the same thing, after all, by sharing his ups and downs and innermost whatevers on View Askew since the mid ’90s. So I asked him about the M. Night brouhaha at the Clerks 2 junket , and here’s what he said: “I think maybe there’s something to be said for [directors] staying under the radar. There are different rules for a guy like me given the kind of movies I’m making. My movies haven’t made over two billion dollars, and so when I talk about what’s been going on backstage people it doesn’t sound quite as whiney to people.”

A sudden extraordinary surge of interest in You, Me and Dupree is showing up in today’s tracking. From last Sunday’s polling to Wednesday’s (i.e., yesterday’s) , it went from 71 general awareness and 25 definite interest to 81 general and 37 definite — a big-ass jump. And it all happened last weekend. Surges like this are rare, and are usually due to a change in the TV ad campaign when they happen. This may be an aberration, or maybe it’s just more evidence that people don’t pay attention to upcoming films until they’re a week away from opening. So it’s looking for a half-decent Dupree opening, but more in the range of $15 million rather than $20 million. Maybe.

More old-media film critic cutbacks, this time in the Big D. The Dallas Observer‘s Robert Wilonsky is reporting that “Belo Corp. management has decided to ditch most, if not all, of the Dallas Morning News movie and television critics. Word of this stunning move toward scaling back the paper’s GuideLive arts staff comes weeks after it was announced that the News was offering what it called ‘voluntary severance’ in order to eliminate some 50 to 60 editorial positions at the paper.”

Here are the latest, up-to-the-minute Frat Pack standings as of 7.13.06: the King Shit title-holder is either Steve Carell, who has the best role of his career in Little Miss Sunshine (Fox Searchlight, 7.26), Vince Vaughn (as long as he doesn’t get too fat, and hats off if he takes that John O’Neill role in Against All Enemies), or Jack Black. Ben Stiller has been in a state of dormancy for so long I can’t remember when there was any serious heat on the guy (Dodgeball?) although he may be back on the horse with A Night in the Museum come December. Owen Wilson‘s marquee cred is about to take a big hit after people get a look at You, Me and Dupree this weekend…but he’ll bounce back. Luke Wilson‘s acting as a relaxed lowball smoothie in The Family Stone was a career breakthrough, but mellow-toned amiableness does not a frat packer make. Will Ferrell looked like toast last summer after the failure of Bewitched and especially after audiences were heard groaning when he first emerged from the shadows to begin his cameo in The Wedding Crashers, but now he’s (apparently) back with Talladega Nights (Columbia, 8.4) and Marc Forster’s reportedly impressive Stranger Than Fiction. Oh, and here’s a far less judgmental Frat Pack piece by USA Today‘s Susie Woz, a.k.a., Susan Wloszczyna.

This is old news to the graphic-novel community, but Rosario Dawson recited the basic promo drill the other day about “Occult Crimes Taskforce,” a just-published comic-book series in the vein of X Files and Men in Black (about “different creatures, different people and different things having to live with each other”) that’s about a new action-chick character (obviously the spittin’ image of Dawson) named Sophia Cruz.

“OCT” arrived in comic-book stores (like West Hollywood’s Golden Apple) this month, and Dawson will be hitting Comic Con late next week or so to promote it. She said at the Clerks 2 junket on Tuesday that Cruz is a vulnerable lady-with- a-gun-and-badge in the tradition of Jodie Foster‘s Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. Naturally, a video game and a feature film version are in the works.

Reported in late May by N.Y. Times stalwart Laura Holson, rotely repeated by yours truly after speaking to a Disney employee at a party a week and a half ago, and now reiterated by Variety and also CNN Reuters: whackings, whackings…big whackings at Disney are soon to happen. “Plans to slash annual movie production by more than half — film production will drop from 18 films annually to eight — and eliminate jobs to ttrim costs and improve shareholder returns.” L.A. Times reporter Claudia Eller has written that “people familiar with the studio’s plans [estimate] that the workforce will be reduced by 20% to 25%.”

One of my absolute favorite things in this town (or any town, for that matter) is being invited to a party that’s supposed to start at 10 pm, as I was to Tuesday night’s Clerks 2 soiree at the Avalon on Vine Street, only to be kept waiting for five or ten minutes outside the damn place because the people in charge don’t feel like letting the guests in just yet, even though they’ve had a couple of hours to prepare for their arrival — 7.11.06, 10:08 pm.

(a) A ’70s or ’80s style sub-run theatre on Hollywood Blvd. near Vine — Tuesday, 7.11.06, 9:50 pm; (b) 1950s Mickey Spillane-styled sleazy sex shop and strip joint; (c) Surprise reaction to snapping of a photo during breakfast at Urth Caffe on Melrose — Monday, 7.10.06, 9:15 am; (d) Old Capitol records building on Vine Street opposite the Avalon — Monday, 7.11.06, 9:50 pm; (3) I beat a hasty retreat to the old 1949 Bob’s Big Boy on Riverside just after the Lady in the Water screening last night — Wednesday, 7.12.06, 10:20 pm; (4) ditto — Wednesday, 7.12.06, 10:23 pm

I’m very, very sorry to report this because I admire M. Night Shyamalan‘s crazy courage — the guts to follow through on a way-out-there vision of a film that he believes in 110%, despite the risk of complete failure. There are very few filmmakers like him. But after the word gets out about Lady in the Water, a lot of filmmakers are going to be very, very relieved that they don’t resemble Night at all.
I saw Lady in the Water Wednesday evening. I don’t know when the right time will be to post a review, but I know one thing: Disney chief Nina Jacobson is looking like one very smart, very prophetic executive. There’s an already-famous Jacobson quote in Michael Bamberger‘s book (“The Man Who Heard Voices”), and after coming home from tonight’s screening I read them over again, and I’m really sorry to write this because it makes me feel like Bob Balaban’s “Farber” character to do so, but much of what she said about Shyamalan’s Lady script way back when still holds.
“You said it was funny — I didn’t laugh.,” Jacobson told Night. “Your’e going to let a [film] critic get attacked? They’ll kill you for that. Your part’s too big — you’ll get killed again. You’ve got a writer who wants to change the world but doesn’t, but somebody reads the writer and does? Don’t get it. Lin Lao Choi is going to explain all these rules and all these words? Not buying it. Not getting it. Not working.” I don’t want to get started, but there are many, many more issues of concern besides these.