I didn’t ask Benicio del Toro at last night’s Three-Amigos-minus-one party about his intention to play “Lawrence Talbot” in Mark Romanek and Andrew Kevin Walker‘s The Wolfman, but we got into a couple details about Steven Soderbergh‘s two Che Guevara films — The Argentine and Guerilla — in which he’ll play the lead.

Shooting on the two Spanish-language films will begin (or so I recall reading) sometime in May or June. But first Soderbergh has to finish post-production on Ocean’s 13 (Warner Bros., 6.8.07). I think Benicio said something about the plan being to shoot Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s story in sequence — Argentine first, Guerilla second — but I can’t swear to it. This would make sense, of course.

I was later told by editor Stephen Mirrione — Oscar-nominated for his work on Babel, currently cutting Ocean’s Thirteen, hired to cut Guerilla — that Soderbergh has already cut together a sequence reel (he called it a “kind of trailer”) made from the footage of Benicio-as-Che visiting New York City in 1964, which was taken last year. Man, would I love to see this. It would also be great, naturally, to get hold of the Argentine and Guerilla scripts.

I asked Mirrione if Ocean’s Thirteen, which Clooney and others have said is a revenge piece, will resemble The Sting. Not that much, he said. The guy that the gang takes its revenge upon, he made clear, isn’t Andy Garcia‘s “Terry Benedict” character but Al Pacino‘s “Willie Banks.”

The L.A. Times finally runs its own official Eddie Murphy takedown piece, separate from the stuff Tom O’Neil ran last week in The Envelope. It happens to be in the form of an article about how much damage Norbit (which a friend saw and hated last night) is doing to Murphy’s chances of winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his pretty-good-but- that’s-all performance in Dreamgirls.

“Every time I pass that billboard, it makes me sick,” a veteran Oscar consult- ant tells Times staff writers Greg Braxton and Robert W. Welkos. “I think his performance in Dreamgirls‘ is so fabulous” and deserves to win the Academy Award. But, he added, Murphy’s latest comedy offering “doesn’t help.”

To paraphrase a line that Charlton Heston says in Ben-Hur, “When and if Murphy loses the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, a cry will rise up throughout the land.”

“If the online file-sharing universe is the Wild West, Sweden is Deadwood — a place where the rule of law leaves barely a footprint,” writes Steve Daly in a just-out Vanity Fair piece about cybergeek movie piracy called “Pirates of the Multiplex,” and particularly the two guys who run Sweden’s Pirate Bay site, Fredric Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm.

Vanity Fair Hollywood issue, page 278

“Thanks to a combination of national copyright laws, laissez-faire social attitudes, and inexpensive and superior bandwidth,” Daly erxplains, “gentle little Sweden — which refers to itself as Europe’s ‘duck pond’ — has become a file-sharing fortress in which more than 10 per cent of its nine million citizens trade digital material, much of it provided by Pirate Bay.”

The seminal pull-quote of the piece reads, “Will Hollywood adapt and survive, or will it continue its battle against a million resourceful computer geeks?”

Being a relentless ahead-of-the-curve type, it took me eleven months to catch up with this non-movie-related YouTube juggling video, which has been viewed 8,957,608 times.

“In my view Berlin is now the third leg of the tripod of markets — there’s AFM in the fall, Berlin in the winter and Cannes in May. That’s the new paradigm.” — H20’s Mark Horowitz speaking to Variety‘s Elizabeth Guider. Toronto and Sundance are chopped liver?

Best scene in the film…

Children of Men opened in England in late September, so naturally the DVD is out now and purchasable at that cool-ass DVD store next to the Nuart.

Vanity Fair‘s Michael Wolff writes about a visit with a billionaire looking to invest in a daily periodical or two, a guy who “knew nothing whatsoever about the newspaper business, or news. Zip. Nada. I am not sure he quite understood that it was a bleak business. I offered that there are many people who believe that the commercial viability of big-city dailies will be kaput within five years. He said, with affable certainty, and as though agreeing with me, Oh, but there will always be lots and lots of people who want to read a newspaper. I pointed out that, actually, only older people read a daily paper — average age: 56.”

Leonardo DiCaprio “actually played the better role in The Departed, if you ask the Bagger, but he’s nominated for lead actor in Blood Diamond. If there is confusion, so what? A vote for Leo is a vote for Leo.” — N.Y. Times Oscar guy David Carr in a 2.7.07 entry.

Except a vote for Leo in Blood Diamond is not just a vote for Leo — it’s also a secondary pat-on-the-back for the chops and visions of Diamond director Ed Zwick, and that’s a problem. Leo didn’t just play a better role in The Departed — his emotional ferocity levels were such in that film that all kinds of wild-ass light seeped into his hunted-animal performance. It was way, way beyond what he managed to do in Zwick’s film.

“It wasn’t totally surprising to learn [yesterday] that Sony isn’t planning to show critics Ghost Rider, which opens a week from Friday,” N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick wrote yesterday in his new blog. “The latest Marvel Comics blockbuster starring Nicolas Cage, which carries a pricetag of $120 million, may well be the most expensive event movie movie to receive this treatment, which tends to embarass the talent involved.

“Sony has been in the vanguard of the snowballing no-screening movement, racking up a record string of No. 1 openings last years including a number of (mostly low-budget)films that avoided advance critical scrutiny. Just this weekend, the poorly-reviewed The Messengers topped the charts after opening cold, as they say in the trade.”

“My hope for the future is for people to start cutting loose from [their] geographic roots, to begin moving towards a state of freedom, of rootlessness. I feel this is what someone like Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has already done. By shooting Babel in Morocco and Japan, you could say that he was leaving his roots and finding his identity.

“I have a huge appreciation of backgrounds. What I have a problem with is borders. The language of cinema is cinema itself: it doesn’t matter whether it is filmed in Spanish or English or French or Japanese. The same goes for the people who make it. Yes, I’m a filmmaker from Mexico. But I also belong to the world.” — Children of Men director Alfonso Cuaron, writing in the Guardian.