I guess there must be a lot of Southland Tales to tell because, as the official Cannes Film Festival website proclaims, Richard Kelly ‘s apocalyptic drama-supplemented-with-music-by-Mobey runs two hours and 40 minutes. That in itself implies sweep, longing, ambition. Ron Howard‘s The DaVinci Code, which is showing out of competition at the beachside festival, runs eight minutes shorter, or 152 minutes.

Merissa Marr‘s Wall Street Journal piece about how Tom Cruise has lost his footing with women fans (and what his people are doing to tryin and get some of it back) echoes what the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell told me a while back, which is that women went cold on Cruise last summer, which was perhaps due more to his attack on Brooke Shields over post-partum depression issues. “At that moment, he moved from the realm of acceptable eccentricity to something scary and cruel,” comments Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center, in Marr’s piece. “It’s easier to forgive his joking about placenta than what is perceived to be an attack on a vulnerable woman’s real problem.” Marr comes to more or less the same conclusion I came to in an earlier piece about Cruise’s image problems, which is that they aren’t bad enough to hurt Mission: Impossible III in a serious way, but they may be bad enough to shave at the profit margins. Enough so that Paramount number-crunchers may slide their glasses down to the bridge of their nose and go, “Hmmmmm…yeah.”

Stephen Colbert‘s Bush-lacerating address before the recent White House Correspondents’ Association dinner — an extremely dry riff on the power and persistence of denial — is worth a looksee.

Thanks for the supportive, encouraging comments about the newly designed main page, which is simultaneously a default home page as well as a kind of parallel-universe home page, since “Elsewhere Classic” — or the good old Hollywood Elsewhere — is alive and kicking and just a click away. The next move is to create a click-thru “comments” template that would link to each item. In fact, I’m trying to figure how to set this up right now.

The biggest flop of the summer? I liked Poseidon and all, but financial prospects for this Warner Bros. release (5.12) are not good. It cost $160 million to make. To be regarded as a seriously performing hit, a movie of this sort needs to bring in $35 or $40 million on opening weekend. Right now, 10 days from opening day, tracking indicates perhaps a $15 million opening weekend at best. Having decided against a nationwide sneak last weekend, Warner Bros. is now trying to jack up interest with big ad buys. A 90-second trailer ran last night on NBC’s Deal or No Deal, which is “very unusual”, a marketing guy tells me. (Most TV spots for upcoming films run 15 to 30 seconds). Poseidon is a bracingly good disaster film as far as it goes, but interest levels are low. If it triples its opening weekend earnings Poseidon may end up with something like $45 million domestically. Obviously foreign, home video and cable will add to this, but that’s still a fairly sucky number for a big movie like this. It should ideally earn at least $150 million domestically, and it may not even do a third of that.

The latest NRG numbers on The DaVinci Code are huge — 94% general awareness, 58% definite interest and 25% first choice. Ron Howard’s film (and I have to say that David Poland’s nickname for this film — Opie’s Dae — is inspired) may be the biggest film of the summer because it seems to have the broadest advance interest among the four quadrants. It doesn’t appear to be as big with under-25s as, say, Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest or Brett Ratner‘s X-Men: The Last Stand but still…

This morning marks the launch of what I’m calling “Elsewhere Now“, which is the new default version of Hollywood Elsewhere. From here on, the front page of the column will be a series of items all running the same length, most of them WIRED-type quickies (which can be read in their entirety on the main page or, if they’re longer than 105 words, will require a jump) with a thrice-weekly feature story thrown in with a little clapboard icon signifying this. For those of you who hate change in any form, this isn’t as big a shake-up as it might seem. If you don’t like the new design just click on “switch to Elsewhere Classic” and you’ll be taken to the standard page with the “old” design (i.e., the one I started with in September 2004). There may be one or two more tweaks or touch-ups over the next day or so, but nothing much. Two designers co-created this new look — one of them is Team Elsewhere’s Jon Rahoi — and if you ask me a beyond-splendid job has been rendered. (Rahoi, a San Francisco-based programmer and web design professional, lists Amazon, Hewlett-Packard and Lucent among his clients.) In any case, sweating out this new design plus being in Houston and travelling on Continental Airlines is why I haven’t posted as much as I usually do the last three days, but it’ll be the usual-usual from here on. I mean, it won’t be the usual-usual because now there are two (clap!), two (clap!)…two Hollywood Elsewhere’s in one.

I for one (and I know I’m not the only one) thoroughly respect Universal honcho Ron Meyer‘s decision in late December 2004 to drive out to a prison in Taft, California, in order to visit wiretapper Anthony Pellicano, who was incarcerated there. Nobody loves you when you’re down and out, and you can double or triple that if you’re behind bars. So in my view guys who visit you in the slammer (especially during the Chistmas holidays) are good hombres . Obviously Meyer’s visits implies this or that, but let’s take a second and acknowledge what loyalty is all about .

From This End…

It’s Sunday evening (4.30) and Worldfest-Houston 2006 has come to a close. Earnest apologies for not providing more reports about the films I saw here and the filmmakers I conversed with over the last two days, but something got into me on Saturday — either the same lazy virus that attacks me at odd intervals like the flu, or some hair-brained whimsy or delusion about having some kind of weekend downtime for a change.
Worldfest had its big awards ceremony Saturday night at the Renaissance hotel, which I half-wanted to go to but decided to blow off at the last minute. I don’t mean to sound cavalier, but keeping tabs on the fest’s winners, near-winners and also-rans didn’t seem, in the final analysis, as important as going to The Stables, an old Houston restaurant near Rice University, and ordering a sizzling peppercorn steak.

Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine’s homes in Terms of Endearment, sitting on Locke Lane in Houston’s River Oaks section. MacLaine’s home (r.) has had a brick facade added that wasn’t in the film, and Nicholson’s has been remodelled also.

Anyway, nearly 24 hours have passed since the the ceremony finished and there’s no news account or official press release listing the winners that I can find. The winners will eventually be posted on this Worldfest page.
I briefly observed the last third of the ceremony at the Renaissance hotel, and I can report that lots and lots of filmmakers were given Remi awards. I spoke to two or three satisfied winners (one of them being Chris Buchholz, director of a documen- tary about his late father called Horst Buchholz, My Papa) in a lobby near the ball- room, and I felt something like a contact high coming from them. Recognition of merit from any film festival of note lends a measure of credibility and marketability to their film, and hand-to-mouth indie filmmakers need all the pats on the back they can get.
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I had a sit-down on Saturday with movie-book author, film scholar and Houston- based Variety critic Joe Leydon. Naturally we went over the ins and outs of Worldfest, and out of this came an analogy that I thought sounded fair.
Ask any music critic about garage bands and he/she will tell you they’re an important part of the process of creating music that’s raw, vital and unfiltered. Many of the films shown at Worldfest, Leydon said, are garage-band movies. This implies they aren’t all first-rate achievements in each and every way, but that they deserve a measure of respect. I agreed with him.
Leydon mentioned that I’ve been the only out-of-town film journalist to fly into Hous- ton and report about Worldfest in quite a few years. I’m not sure if that’s true, but so what if I am? I sniffed around and dug in and gave it a whirl. I don’t know what that means, but I saw six or seven half-decent, fairly intriguing films — Letia Miller’s In the Dark, Matthew Marconi’s Truce, Shira-Lee Shalit’s The A-List, Paul Richards’ Pamplona: Running with the Bulls, Chris Page’s Into the Wind, and Robert Peters’ Half Empty. I’ll be seeing the Buchholz doc on Monday.
A week before leaving for Houston I spoke to Page, whose Into The Wind doc is about a few spirited Texans (i.e., Page and his friends) pursuing their love of powered paragliding. The charm is in the unassuming home movie-ish feel of it. Here’s an MP3 file of our conversation

Beach view to the southwest of Galveston, Texas — Sunday, 4.30.06, 2:10 pm.

The Houston Chronicle has been running a lot of Worldfest film reviews, mostly written by Louis Parks. Maybe 15 or so films have been reviewed, and yet my choice for the best film of them all — Eric Anderson’s Way of the Puck — wasn’t reviewed. There’s irony in that.
I’d like to modify my diss about Houston being an “arid corporate hee-haw town.” It still is that, I feel, but there are rich people here who financially support opera and ballet and the fine arts, so the city isn’t all indoor shopping malls, fast cars, oil refineries, Tex-Mex food and strip joints.
I’ll take another swing at this piece on Monday morning before I fly back to Los Angeles — maybe something else will come to mind. Part of the weekend was about working on the brand new design of Hollywood Elsewhere — there’ll be a whole new bloggy look to it, with a series of WIRED-type items plus beginnings of features linked to pages with the entire article. I’ll also be hanging on to the current design by offering a link to it — it’ll be called “Elsewhere Classic” — on the new page.
I’m back for three days in Los Angeles and then I’m off again on 5.3 — Boston for three or four days, Manhattan and Connecticut for eight days, and then off to the Cannes Film Festival.

Grabs

Large southern-style home sitting on sprawling grounds in Houston’s River Oaks section.

Way of the Puck director Eric Anderson (l.) playing air hockey with champion player Danny Hynes.

Houston-based book author, film professor and Variety critic Joe Leydon at Renaissance hotel — Saturday, 4.29.06, 1:25 pm.

Short-order joint in Surfside, Texas — Sunday, 4.30.06, 2:45 pm.

Sign outside a jazz joint on Houston’s Richmond Avenue.

Worldfest publicist Cherry Kutac, one of those perky attitude-and-sparkling personality types with a totally committed attitude…worth her weight in gold

The In The Dark team — costars Lionel Carson, Brian Luna, Steven A. Brennan and director-costar Letia Miller.

Way of the Puck director Eric Anderson, air hockey champ Danny Hynes.

The A-List director Shira-Lee Shalit.

Texas Time

I’m staying in a soul-less, corporate-style hotel in Houston between now and Mon- day morning in order to dive into Worldfest, which I’ve never been to before. I was invited to visit a few weeks ago by its founder, Hunter Todd, and it seemed like an agreeable idea, and it felt even better as I flew the hell out of Los Angeles Wednes- day morning.
Worldfest is a friendly, funky-ass film festival that’s mainly about smallish, hand- crafted (as opposed to machine- or committee-crafted) indie films — some of them made by or starring Texans, and others from here and there.

The entrance to the big lounge at Houston’s Renaissance Houston hotel, just off the scenic Southwest Freeway.

Todd, who started this homegrown festival way back in the ’60s (only the New York and San Francisco festivals have been around longer), is the principal bequeather of the “friendly” stuff, although everyone I’ve met here so far — staffers, bus drivers, fast-food servers — has been warm, professional, considerate.
The funky-ass elements are…well, the movies. Pretty-good funky, I mean. Funky different. The better ones (and there are plenty I have yet to see) have a certain face-up quality. Not radically sophisticated and maybe a little average Joe-ish at times, like a hand-painted sign on Main Street or like tight jeans with cool-ass patches. One that’s a tad off-center, another that’s “there” but not 100% realized, but all with a certain non-Sundance-y apartness.
I’m saying it can be a refreshing thing to sample movies that haven’t been made by absolute cream-of-the-crop, front-of-the-pack types. Refreshing as in, “Oh, yeah… movies can tell stories this way too. And that way. Find your way through it…okay, I get it now.”
I’m not sure that the term “Worldfest” is entirely appropriate. It seems as if “Peoplefest” would be more on the mark. Movies by, about and for regular folks who love movies enough to see films with a few speed-bump elements (but not too many), and who enjoy the hell out of their Texas popcorn. (I had several handfuls last night, and it’s a lot more buttery than the popcorn in Los Angeles.)
I can think of three Worldfest films that are about Texans, or made by Texans, or featuring or costarring Texans. Lorraine Senna’s Paradise, Texas, the festival opener, about a middle-aged actor (Timothy Bottoms) on his way down who gets a chance to show what he’s made of. Matthew Marconi’s Truce, a not-bad drama about a weary old cowboy (Buck Taylor) trying to settle some life issues. And a documentary called Into the Wind about four or five Texans who are into power- paragliding.

Worldfest Houston generalissimo Hunter Todd (lower left), daughter Katy Lea Todd (front, middle), wife and partner Kathleen Haney-Todd (lower right); staffers June Pennington, Alicia Granvaud, Valerie Blair, Cherry Kutac, Jason May, Ariane Hannaford, Christopher Schecter, Sara Albert, Kerrie Pegues.

And then there’s In the Dark, a drama set in L.A. about a young Hispanic guy trying to become an agent, which can be called half-Texan by way of Brian Luna, an appealing actor from from San Antonio, playing the Hispanic guy. (I’m stretching it, I realize.) And then there’s Eric Anderson’s Way of the Puck, an air-hockey doc that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, that’s kind of a Houston movie because a strong concentration of air-hockey enthusiasts live here.
Oh, and a doc about Gulf Coast surfers called Miles to Surf, which focuses in part on “tanker surfing,” which is about riding the wash generated by oil tankers head- ing up the Houston ship channel from the gulf.
There’s something mildly exciting about rummaging through a bunch of films that no one’s told you need to see or avoid, movies that may be excrutiating or a blin- ding revelation or somewhere in between…but it’s all a dice-roll.
The only beef is that the theatre where the Worldfest features are showing is way the hell down the road — four, five miles — from festival headquarters at the Renais- sance Houston. There are three shuttles that travel to and fro, but I’m the captain of my own ship. I’d rather walk, drive a car, peddle a bike, take a bus.

I said it felt really good to fly out of Los Angeles yesterday. But I’ll be honest — I started to have second thoughts minutes after I touched down in Houston.
There are good people all over this town but with the exception of a visit Wednes- day night to River Oaks, where the really rich folks live and where the oak trees are huge and the grass is moist and fragrant, Houston seemed less than abundant with down-home charm. And if you’ve been to New York or Paris or London or Rome, it feels lacking in cultural refinement.
To me, it’s an arid corporate hee-haw town. Not enough sidewalks. Cavernous malls. Lots of middle-aged guys with monster beer bellies. Expensive cars tearing around like they’re in the Monte Carlo Grand Prix. Not enough trees. Women with vaguely predatory vibes and long jaws and all those revolting glass-and-steel towers. And the strip clubs — strip clubs! — as prominent and well located as the better restaurants, music stores and markets…nothing covert about them.
A friend (a blonde whose presence and personality are the best things about being here so far) told me before I came that Houston is like L.A. but without the soul, and I think that just about nails it.
Early tomorrow morning I’m going down to the courthouse where the Enron trial is happening. And then I’ll drive by St. John’s, the private school where Wes Ander- son shot Rushmore, and maybe visit Shirley MacLaine’s Terms of Endearment house.

Grabs

Artificial falls in front of Williams Tower

View from my hotel room, looking out on the beautiful Southwest Freeway.

Pond at twilight, south of Houston’s Williams Tower

In Richard Donner‘s The Omen (1976), a 59 year-old Gregory Peck played Robert Thorn, the U.S. ambassador to England, and Lee Remick, who was 40 or 41 when the film was shot, played his wife Katherine. Remick may have seemed a bit too old to be getting pregnant and raising a young son, but her age wasn’t a stopper. Peck certainly seemed too old to be embarking upon fatherhood for the first time, but this was balanced by the fact that he was completely believable as a high-level diplomat at the summit of his career . In John Moore‘s Omen remake (20th Century Fox, 6.6.06), these characters (i.e., they have the same names) are played by 38 year-old Liev Schreiber and 25 year-old Julia Stiles, which makes them seem too young. Except Schrieber’s Thorn is apparently not the London-based U.S. ambassador but an assistant to the ambassador who suddenly elevated into power when a vacancy opens up, so to speak. This is how I understand it, at least. If anyone knows better, please advise.

This is a video clip shot during the shooting of Mission: Impossible III that shows Tom Cruise lying prone on a street and waiting for a big truck to start hitting the brakes and then jacknife and then roll right over him…and then it actually happens and it’s quite cool. Damn thrilling, in fact. In fact, it’s more exciting than when the sequence happens in the film. The difference is that I totally believe the video — it’s obviously “real world” and un-tricked — and I don’t really believe anything I see in a super-expensive action film of this sort. I don’t trust my eyes, I mean, to the extent that I’m presuming that a good portion of what I’m seeing during any big stunt sequence is digitally composed or has in some way originated on someone’s hard drive.

I first saw this teaser for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford on Friday night at the AMC Dunvale 30 in Houston. It was at this precise moment that a less-than- profound Casey Affleck thought came to mind. Here he goes again, I muttered, playing another creep — the doleful deadhead Robert Ford, infamous for putting a cowardly bullet into the back of Jesse James (Brad Pitt). On top of his last creepy-head — that glum-ass, do-nothing piece of wood in Steve Buscemi‘s Lonesome Jim, and what was perhaps his seminal blank-stare creep role in Gus Van Sant‘s Gerry (’02). I don’t know anything about Affleck’s “Chris” character in The Last Kiss or his “Patrick” character in Gone, Baby Gone, a forthcoming Boston-area crime drama based on Dennis Lehane‘s novel, to be directed by brother Ben Affleck, and his recurring role in the Ocean-ic caper movies isn’t worth mentioning. But I know there’s a growing sense that Casey is gradually becoming a kind of magnet for neghead roles — the go-to 20-something actor (who’s actually 30) if you’re casting a youngish character with a fuck-me, I-can’t-quite-put-it-into- words-but-I-know-I-feel-like-a-baloney-sandwich attitude. I’ve listened to this damn teaser three times and I still can’t understand the first portion of what he’s saying. I think what I’m saying is that I’m starting to associate the name “Casey Affleck” with a kind of flu syndrome.