This is an “old” (i.e., three days old) piece, but it’s worth quoting from regardless. It’s Entertainment Weekly critc Owen Gleiberman lamenting that United 93 didn’t take in any more than $30 million domestically (which isn’t that awful , considering how much people everywhere were talking about not seeing it. “I…found the experience of United 93 to be scary, inspiring, and cathartic,” Gleiberman wrote. “I felt closer, in a way that gave me a shudder, to what happened that day; I felt a little more connection to the brave people on that plane, much as I have when I’ve read, in the newspaper, those agonizing transcripts of their final moments. We don’t expect serious journalists to soft-pedal the news. So why do we say that a movie that dares to present itself as an incendiary act of dramatized journalism has touched the forbidden third rail? Why do we insist that it’s too real, too raw, too painful [and] too soon? I say: It’s not what’s up on screen that we should turn away from. It’s our fear of seeing it .”

Richard Kelly’s intensely political, surreal and audacious Southland Tales screened at the Grand Palais this morning, and it’s time now to head over to the press conference, which begins in five minutes…

A journalist has an issue with the Breakup and Omen tracking figures that I passed along yesterday (or perhaps with the way I interpreted them) and he wants to know who passed them along to me. He mentioned a name, and has said if I don’t reply that he’ll feel free to interpret that for what it may imply. In short, he’s looking to out a source. I won’t reveal my source and feel it’s odious beyond measure for a fellow journalist to threaten what he’s threatened. I replied that NRG Tracking is NRG tracking is NRG tracking — it’s on paper, printed with black type, and if it’s accurate what’s the difference if Donald Duck or Minnie Mouse passed it along? If I misunderstood the numbers or misinterpreted their meaning (a reader got in touch last night and said the numbers I reported don’t square with his) I will of course report that and issue a correction and an apology. The source who passed along the figures is well positioned and has given me accurate figures for a long time. I have no axe to grind against The Breakup or The Omen, and if clarification is needed on this matter I will quickly provide it.

An L.A. industry friend reports there was “applause following the World Trade Center trailer in Westwood’s Festival theatre just before the Friday night at 8 pm showing of The DaVinci Code. The theatre was sold out…and everyone I met afterwards, your basic LA moviegoer, liked the film. DaVinci is clearly a crowd-pleaser and more of a guilty pleasure than critics are willing to admit. Akiva Goldsman‘s script and particularly his dialogue are beyond tedious and painful, but Tom Hanks manages to survive and pull it out of the gutter. A lesser actor would have followed it down the hole.”
One woman told me they had driven to three theatres in the area that were not only sold out- but
all Friday night shows after on all of the multi screens- sold out as well.

The Breakup (Universal, 6.2), Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston‘s romantic discord comedy, isn’t tracking. With only twelve days to go before opening, that means the game is pretty much over. Definite interest is at 30, 1st choice is 5…it’s finished. I’m told that while audiences enjoy Vaughn in an off-the-wall mode, they don’t want to see him in semi-romantic parts. This is bad news for Aniston also because now she’s 0 for 4 — Derailed, Rumor Has It , Friends with Money and now this thing. She’s all but kaput as a big-screen, big-bucks player. She’s not particularly sexy, not perky, not a gifted comedienne…and she always seems to play parts in an introspective, low-energy way. I’m not deriving any joy from saying this, but Aniston is probably one or two steps away from competing with Helen Hunt for HBO roles.

Tracking on John Moore‘s The Omen (20th Century Fox, 6.6) is in the toilet. Definite interest is 19, definitely not interested is 18, and first choice is 2. It didn’t cost very much to make so it won’t be a bringer of financial doom if it doesn’t fly, but that 18% definitely not interested figure basically means forget it. Why? My guesses are that (a) audiences have seen the Richard Donner ’70s version on TV and don’t want to see it again, (b) they’ve seen the DVD of same, (c) Liev Schrieber doesn’t sell tickets and isn’t Gregory Peck (besides the fact that it’s hard to believe in Schreiber as a U.S. ambassador to Great Britain under any circumstances), (d) Julia Styles isn’t Lee Remick and (e) devil movies were all the rage in the ’70s, but are over now (as producers of last year’s Exorcist prequel will probably testify).

The DaVinci Code earned a hefty $28.6 million on Friday , and a rival studio (i.e., not Columbia, the domestic distributor) is projecting a $78,790,000 weekend. The question is what it will do on weekend #2 and #3, especially with X-Men 3: The Last Stand expected to go through the roof when it opens next Friday. Brett Ratner’s sequel is going to make over $100 million over the 4-day Memorial Day weekend . (A recent tracking report had general awareness at 89, definite interest at 56 and first choice at 23. By the time next weekend rolls around the first choice figure for X-Men 3 will likely be up to 40.) Mission: Impossible III did $3.3 million on Friday and will only do about $10.9 million for the weekend, which means it’ll be a push to $120 million. M:I:3 may do okay with foreign revenue and everything else factored in, but that’s not much of a domestic haul for a film of this size. Over the Hedge is expected to do about $38,200,000 for the weekend. Poseidon is off 57% this weekend, with a projected $9,500,000. It cost $160 million to make, and it may earn a bit less than $50 million before leaving the domestic arena.

The Inconvenient Truth press conference in Cannes’ Grand Palais ended at 5:30 pm, or about an hour ago. The question-receivers, naturally, were Al Gore, director Davis Guggenheim, producer Laurie David, producer Lawrence Bender and two others whose names I can’t remember.

Some highlights: (a) As things began moderator Henri Behar asked Gore how he should be addressed, and Gore replied, “Your Adequacy“; (b) Gore said he has no plans to run for President in 2008 (“I can’t foresee any circumstances that would lead me to run,” etc.), and that the whole running-for-office phase on his life is essentially over; (c) As far as dealing with global warming in a meaningful way, much less recognizing the scope of the problem, Gore allowed that some senior officials making decisions on behalf of the United States live in “a bubble of unreality” but “the people are always way ahead of the politicians on this issue”; (d) In a reference to Katrina and other domestic ecological disasters that are likely to result from global warming, Gore said that “even Bush and Cheney will eventually be forced to change their views“, adding that “nature is a very persuasive force”; (e) After a journalist made a humorous reference to the Keifer Sutherland series 24, Gore said, “I think it was this season that the President [of the U.S.] on 24 turned out to be a real villain…right?” He then stroked his chin Sherlock Holmes-style and went, “Hmmmm”; (e) I asked whether he thinks Hilary Clinton has been a sufficiently active eco-friendly legislator as a U.S. Senator and whether he could name any eco-friendly potential candidates that he personally approves of in terms of their legislative record on global warming issues, Gore said, “This is going to frustrate you but I think it’s too early to get into the 2008 Presidential race…right now I would rather focus on a local level for the fall elections.”

A good (if short) N.Y. Times piece by Pat H. Broeske about the two upcoming movies — Minnie Driver‘s The Virgin of Juarez and Jennifer Lopez‘s Bordertown — that focus on the mystery of 400 killings of women in the Juarez area.

“You studio assholes have been lording it over us all this time and we licked your backsides, but [now we] are in the most insecure media job market in decades while you drive around your Hummers and pay lip service to environmentalism and complain when your second maid is sick and worry about paying for your next $20,000 vacation, and if kissing your asses isn’t going to help us secure our positions and we see people getting famous (if relatively poor) by selling mean-spirited gossip on the web , guess where we are going?” — David Poland ‘s dead-on read of the attitude of entrenched old media types towards here-and-now Hollywood, in a nicely observed piece about the media’s vicious slamming so far of big-budget summer flicks. (My only beef is Poland’s bizarrely persisting negativity towards An Inconvenient Truth, as indicated by the “while you drive around in your Hummers and pay lip service to environmentalism” line.

Four days into the Cannes Film Festival (the fifth night is tonight — Saturday, 5.20) and here’s the tally sheet: no major explosions, one widely agreed-upon stink bomb (Ron Howard‘s The Da Vinci Code); a couple of missed screening ops (on my part, I mean); a pair of strong and exciting efforts from the masterful Ken Loach (The Wind That Shakes the Barley) and the great Pedro Almodovar (Volver), with my personal preference leaning toward the latter; a thrashingly emotional, jizz-sticky, psycho-therapeutic homoerotic love story from John Cameron Mitchell called Shortbus , a film that is nothing if not emotionally intense, but also summoned memories of Frank Ripploh’s Taxi Zum Klo (distribution in the U.S. is very much an open question) and which prompted me to reconsider the virtues living a Spin & Marty, red state-type life on a horse ranch in New Mexico; a light but quite radiant Paris anthology film (Paris Je’taime ) in which the standout effort is indisputably Alexander Payne ‘s, called “14th arrondisement”; and Summer Palace, a marginally irritating, ersatz-French nouvelle vague Chinese love story from Lou Ye…way, way overpraised.