I don’t know or care, really, if Josh Hartnett and Scarlet Johansson are still entwined and it doesn’t matter either way, but the general belief is that they met during the making of Brian De Palma‘s The Black Dahlia. If they’re still happening at this moment, by the law of Hollywood relationships the failure of Dahlia — critically, commercially — means that if they’re still together, they won’t be for much longer. Doomed. A movie is like a child — a creative by-product of an alliance that began with an on-set affair — and if it goes out into the world and is dissed by critics and the ticket-buying public, it’s like a thumbs-down on the relationship itself. Which makes the lovers feel like they’ve contracted a virus of some kind. And before you know it they’re “done.”

More Flags of Our Fathers deck shuffling: a friend tells me Clint Eastwood‘s Iwo Jima film (Dreamamount, 10.20) was scheduled to screen in the evening in Manhattan over the last 36 to 48 hours, but then it was cancelled. (That’s on top of a few people alegedly being invited and then disinvited to see it at yesterday’s L.A. screening.) Flags screened this morning in New York at 9 ayem, and then the print flew out.

On one hand those Movie City News interview clips from last weekend’s The Departed junket are cool because they’re video — robust aural-visual immediacy! On other hand the quickie-question format reduces everything to banaility. Individuals lose, the promotion machine wins…and I always feel a little less alive and more like a spoon-fed monkey in a cage when I watch one of these pieces. The thing to run (and which I would be proud to create some day on HE) would be an ongoing Jamie Stuart-type video journal. Stuart is an avatar of a streetcorner reality vs, showbiz sensibility that’s fermenting out there right now.

It’s been a hunker-down week for Clint Eastwood‘s two Iwo Jima films. Flags of Our Fathers (Dreamamount, 10.20) was screened for a tight little group yesterday, but if any press people were invited I wasn’t told about it. (Not that I made a big deal about finding out.) The first Left Coast journo showing apparently won’t be happening until next week. And Warner Bros., apparently, continued to explore and negotiate and re-examine all over again what date will be best for the release of Letters From Iwo Jima, Eastwood’s Japanese-soldier war film intended to complement Flags. Dither, dither, dither.

What an amazing, exciting, profitable thing all around: Peter Jackson is partnering with Microsoft to create at least two Xbox 360 video games, one of which will be based on Jackson’s upcoming Halo, under the aegis of a new outfit called Wingnut Interactive. I’m getting the chills just thinking about it. Jackson and close partners Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens will dream up the particulars together. Think of the joy, the jazz…the cultural adrenalin that will be felt from these games. Not to mention the truckloads of money to be earned.
I’m saying, in other words, that Jackson is perhaps better attuned or suited to the video-game creator mentality than that of a genuinely intriguing filmmaker, which is to say someone with an ability and/or willingness to hold back at times, to occasionally understate, to not always push the visual pizazz at level 10. Jackson always creates at an extremely showoffy, unsophisticated level, and I think this approach is more in synch with what gamers are looking for than what people who appreciate the sometimes more delicate chemistry that goes into making a truly fine film.
Water always finds its own level, and I think Jackson has just found — accepted — his.

“There has never been anything quite like Asger Leth‘s Ghosts of Cite Soleil,” Variety‘s Todd McCarthy has written. “It’s amazing it even exists and that the director is still alive. Rough as can be in both content and style, Ghosts will be welcome everywhere tough, provocative docus are shown.”

This Matt Damon-Jimmy Kimmel confrontation happened a week or so ago. What’s wrong with it, of course, is that it’s an act. It would have been brilliant — historic — if Damon had really gotten angry and stormed off. It would have been something real and rude instead of another damn mock- ironic put-on. Everything is on this level these days — on talk shows, SNL, sitcoms. Nothing laid on the line, every statement in “quotes.”

I need to be honest and admit something, which is that I’m not particularly enthused about watching a forthcoming F/X TV series called 4 oz., as in one quarter of a pound, which is the weight of a surgically severed penis. I don’t think this one holds great interest for me. 21 Grams — the weight of a human soul — worked as a title but not this…sorry. Ryan Murphy‘s forthcoming series is about a married sportswriter who decides to become a woman…terrific. I haven’t been permitted to see Murphy’s Running With Scissors (Columbia, 10.27), but as far as I know it’s only about verbal (as opposed to surgical) slicings.

I don’t know how many people are making personal /quirky New York Film Film Festival video diaries, but Jamie Stuart is probably better at this sort of thing than anyone else. He really has a handle on something here — the precisely timed cutting style, the grungy lonely-guy narration…he’s really the best. He just needs to do more sit-ups and eat more fruit and fewer cheeseburgers. And everything loads way too slowly on the site — it’s like watching paint dry. Stuarts’s first NYFF encounter is with the Little Chidren team — Todd Field, Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Noah Emmerich, etc.

“It’s not a ghost town yet, but unless they rent some of those offices and start to use the sound studios, it’s not hard to envision tumbleweeds and coyotes moving in.” — a Paramount “source” speaking to Radar Online‘s Jeff Bercovici about the low activity and population levels on the Paramount Pictures lot.

If you could pick any actor or filmmaker to meet in a boxing ring, who would it be? Ten rounds, no holding or hitting below the belt…but you can slug away all you want. Or maybe you’d rather face down a film critic or a columnist? I’ve fantasized from time to time about beating up tech-support outsource guys from India, but I really don’t like slugging people. I haven’t been in a fistfight since the seventh grade.

I’m no longer the only guy advocating the Best Actress candidacy of Factory Girl‘s Sienna Miller, and breathing easier. Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, another “Envelope” forecaster, has put Miller on his own list. I’m not sure, though, if he’s actually seen her in Factory Girl or if he’s just riding the tailwind.