I’ve been gift-ticketed into a performance of Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner‘s The History Boys this evening, so I guess I won’t be seeing the PBS documentary John Ford/John Wayne: The Filmmaker and the Legend that airs tonight at 9 pm. It’ll screen during Cannes, however, and will be included, as previously announced, in the big fat Ford-Wayne DVD box set that Warner Home Video is releasing on 6.6. Here’s Brian Lowry‘s review in Variety.

The fearless Ross Johnson on the parallels (or lack of them) between Hollywood’s own accused wiretapper and alleged hit contractor Anthony Pellicano and (a) Pablo Escobar, (b) Charles Bronson (and particularly Bronson’s character in Breakout), (c) Sonny Barger, (d) Suge Knight, (e) Alphonse Capone and (f) Shelley Winters.

Congratulations to Kevin Smith and the Clerks II gang for their film having been chosen to show at the Cannes Film Festival as an Official Out-of-Competitioner. It’ll show at midnight towards the end of the festival. (Smith’s p.r. guy Tony Angellotti has told me that Clerks II will have an earlier-in-the-day press screening for poopheads like myself who hate staying up until 2:30 or 3 a.m.)

The news came down around May 5th (I don’t know why the Cannes programmers took so long to come to their decision) and the plan was to hold until an official announcement on Monday, 5.15, but the news broke today so here it is. I’m hearing, by the way, that Smith’s film might open in July rather than August. Considering it was going to open on 8.18 opposite Snakes on a Plane, I’d say that’s a smart move. Smith will be in Cannes for the Southland Tales competition screening, an AMFAR benefit that Harvey Weinstein has something to do with, and his own Clerks II debut on 5.26.

Robert De Niro‘s The Good Shepherd (Universal, 12.22), a drama about the evolution-devolution of a CIA superspook (Eric Roth‘s script is based on the life of James Jesus Angleton), has gotten a mixed response from a couple of AICN correspondents. The responses to perfs by Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie are fine, but the film has otehrwise been described (and obviously it’s early in the game for December ’06 release) as long (around three hours), “boringly filmed” and that it “needs a lot of work.” It costars Alec Baldwin, Joe Pesci, Keir Dulleau and De Niro.

The Tom Cruise pile-on is getting merciless. I know he brought all this upon himself, but still…whew. Here are some pals who expect to do business with Cruise down the road — Paramount honcho Brad Grey, Universal chief Ron Meyer, C/W partner Paula Wagner — looking to take some of the sting out of that USA Today/Gallup poll that showed Cruise’s favorability rating has dropped 23 points since last summer.

We’ve been culturally “disaster”-ing for the past couple of weeks — new Poseidon out Friday, old Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno just out on DVD, two 9/11 disaster movies in theatres (one now, the second in August). And nobody ever seems to mention or remember in articles about ’70s disaster flicks that only one, Richard Lester’s Juggernaut (1974), was truly satisfying. This modestly proportioned British-produced film was ten times the film that The Poseidon Adventure tried to be. The irony is that the producers thought they were paying for just another piece of schlock (or so I read somewhere), but Lester managed to make something fairly good and clever and adult and underplayed.

The premise of Used Guys is fairly clever, with honest-to-God social observation and metaphor behind it. Set in a matriarchal society in which male clones are bought and sold like used cars…wait a minute, this sounds like The Island. The story revolves around two guys (Ben Stiller, Jim Carrey) who somehow cut themselves loose from the assemby line and try to sort out what being a man has come down to. Emily Mortimer will costar as Stiller’s love interest. (Carrey is going stag?) The only cautionary — okay, disappointing — note in this 20th Century Fox pic, which stars shooting in June, is that Jay Roach (Meet the Fockers/Parents, the Austin Powers films) is directing. That means Used Guys is guaranteed to be right down the middle. It’ll be hip and smart, and it may be funny or very funny or even marginally touching, but it’ll be right down the middle…you know what I mean.

“Wolfgang Petersen‘s Poseidon is a ruthlessly stripped-down update [of the 1972 original]…a slice of delicious cheese, it’s also a brutally efficient machine . Keeping only the original film’s immortal setup — a luxury liner topples over one New Year’s Eve — Petersen sends a ragtag band of outsiders scurrying onward and upward toward the hull. Only this time there’s the added incentive that the ship happens to be sinking at an alarming speed, so every second counts. In recent years we’ve grown accustomed to endless, bloated back-stories and pointless subplots in big-budget movies of this size, so it’s downright jarring when a rogue wave knocks over the S.S. Poseidon less than 18 minutes into the picture. Not counting closing credits, the film runs barely an hour and a half. In other words, if you started watching this movie and Titanic at the exact same time, Poseidon would already be over long before anyone in Mr. Cameron’s opus even spotted the iceberg.” — Sean Burns, Philadelphia Weekly

Objective: relying on a tried-and-true tone of smirky pseudo- sophistication, inject a note of contemporary cultural resonance into the selling of a forthcoming cable broadcast of 34 year-old disaster film. Solution: Link to a movie (and more particularly the public persona of a certain movie star) that is not only here-and-now but, in a manner of speaking, somewhere between gasping for breath and sinking beneath the waves. Watch this AMC promo spot for a Thursday night (5.11) airing and you’ll see what I mean.

Funny, but the most visually arresting aspects of Poseidon in IMAX are the early dialogue-exposition scenes. They’re the most fully lighted and therefore the most detailed and pleasing to the eye. I have never seen blue eyes that look more liquid Technicolor than Josh Lucas ‘s — they’re so vivid in the IMAX print they almost look like some kind of CG visual effect.

Once the upside-down, swimming-around stuff begins the light levels go down and there’s less to feast on because it’s all water and shadows and source lighting and flashlight beams. It’s startling how brisk and to-the-point this $160 million film is, in a way — 98 minutes. It’s a well-jiggered ride that forbids even the slightest dilly-dallying. Not much is provided in the way of poetry or soul or echoes, but the way it unfolds is certainly a tribute to the German-engineer efficiency of director Wolfgang Petersen. I detected a fairly satisfied vibe after last night’s Leows Lincoln Square IMAX screening ended. There was a guy who was half-laughing and half-moaning to his girlfriend about the most startling scene, which I will get into in my coming spoiler piece this weekend about the rules of disaster-movie deaths. (This is the second warning.) The “money” line in this scene is stunning in its heartlesness. It’s the one that everyone will mention when they talk about Poseidon over the next week or two — “Shake him off!”

“Interesting to read about Scientologists buying tickets in bulk for Mission: Impossible III. I spoke to a theater manager in Three Rivers, Michigan — the kind of town where something like M:I:3 should be doing solid business — and he said he and his staff couldn’t believe how poorly the film did last weekend. ‘I don’t know where they made that 48 million,’ he said, ‘because we never had more than 30 or so people at any one show.’ He said the movie made ‘maybe’ $3000 for the weekend. Although everyone he talked to who saw it enjoyed it, he had also heard from many people who said they were ‘sick of seeing [Cruise]’ and under no circumstances would they be going. The poor guy — the theatre manager — is now crossing his fingers and hoping for a box-office lift this weekend from Posedion and Just My Luck.” — James Sanford