Hollywood Elsewhere’s self-sponsored follow-up to the Netflix Rolling Roadshow — a non-approved, unofficial fall sequel to the current tour — has just added (1) Elia Kazan‘s Viva Zapata! (’52) , to be screened at an open-air faciity near Olvera Street in downtown Los Angeles (Friday, 10.7), (2) Peter Yates ‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73) at an outdoor theatre adjacent to Boston’s Government Center (Friday, 10.14), and (3) Anthony Mann‘s El Cid (’61) at an undetermined location on 10.21. Admission is free. Bring your own food, drink and blankets. There’s just one problem…

An argument against “in vino, veritas” has been written by security consultant Gavin de Becker in an open letter to Endeavor agent-partner Ari Emanuel, who suggested earlier this week that people in the industry should blacklist Mel Gibson over his anti-Semitic remarks. The letter appeared in Friday’s Hollywood Reporter, but it’s not linkable so here it is on Defamer. And here’s the Defamer intro .

Standard studio-produced sell-job video for World Trade Center, and yet it has a straight, comprehensive and emotionally honest tone. It’s viewable on I-Film. The idea behind this movie is catching on. I can feel this happening. But I still say Paramount should have snuck in this weekend.

Here‘s a N.Y. Times piece that’s a portrait of GenX males getting older and not getting married — marriage levels are down all over — and just shuffling along and scratching their heads. Written by Eduardo Porter and Michelle O’Donnell, the article is called “Facing Middle Age with No Degree, and No Wife.” It basically says that women with jobs and maturity and a firmer sense of responsibility don’t see that much upside in getting married to some 37 year-old dude who’s trying but not pulling down much of a salary. And so the guys whose careers aren’t going great guns are kind of getting pushed aside.
It seems as if a whole new social class is being formed — single middle-aged pudgeballs. (A pudgeball being a guy who was a major bong-head and ESPN-watcher and Frito-muncher in his 20s and early 30s but is now trying to grim up and fly straighter as he approaches the big four-oh.) Imagine hundreds of thousands of these guys amblin’ into their 40s and 50s, nudging the hockey puck along with the toe of their lace-up Converse shoes.
This ties in on some level to that piece I wrote in early July about “a trend in movies about GenX guys in their early to mid 30s who’re having trouble growing up. Guys who can’t seem to get rolling with a career or commit to a serious relationship or even think about becoming productive, semi-responsible adults, and instead are working dead-end jobs, hanging with the guys all the time, watching ESPN 24/7, eating fritos, getting wasted and popping Vicodins.”

Take a moment and think about Arthur Lee, who died Thursday from lukemia at age 61. And if you don’t have a CD of Forever Changes in your collection then I guess that’s your choice. You can always do something about this later on.

Recapping for precision’s sake: The three Darjeeling Limited brothers are going to be Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman and Owen Wilson. In Movieland, as we all know, brothers rarely look like each other and there’s almost never any resemblance — none — between parents and their kids. But The Darjeeling Limited is a Wes Anderson pic, and Andersonville is a much more particular and exacting place, and the usual bullshit doesn’t apply.

(l. to r.) Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody, Owen Wilson

So with this in mind, I have to say I’m having a little trouble with these three being from the same brood. I’m seeing vague gene-pool sharings between Schwarztman and Brody, and Brody and Wilson both have big thin noses…but in real life it would be tough to accept that Wilson and Brody are cousins, much less brothers. Well, maybe. I could buy into it a little easier if Wes’s script gives them different mothers or fathers.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is doing much better than those projected figures in the low to high 30s that showed up on Thursday and Friday. It did $18,254,000 last night (i.e, Friday) and one estimate is projecting $49,287,000 by Sunday night. The reason is that’s doing extremely well in the red-state boonies. If this pattern holds you can bet Columbia will claim a first-weekend figure of just over $50 million. Sunday is always weaker for a redneck white-bread comedy like this, which — face it — won’t be attracting much support from African American filmgoers. Movies that play stronger on Sunday tend to have an “urban tint”, which Talladega definitely lacks.

Steve Oedekerk’s Barnyard, a Nickelodeon/ Paramount animated film that I didn’t care about seeing, did a decent $5,463,000 — a little over $1600 a print. — yesterday, and is projected to bring in $16,936,000 by Sunday night. The weekend projection for Pirates 2 is $10,875,000, off 47%. The expected weekend tally for Miami Vice…hold on to your hats…is $9,577,000, which is a drop of 63% from last weekend. It’s over — it’ll be a push to reach $60 million. Lionsgate’s The Descent will do about $9,438,000, which means they’ll probably report over $10 million. John Tucker Must Die will wind up with $6,697,000. Monster House, $5,907,000. Dupree, $3,716,000. Ant Bully, $3,706,000. The Night Listener with Robin Williams is toast with $3,561,000 projected for the weekend. It’s playing in 1367 theatres and did a bit more than $2000 a print.

Christian Bale is locked down to play the Van Heflin role in James Mangold‘s 3:10 to Yuma. That’s the less charismatic role, as if you had to be told. Russell Crowe has the cool-bad-guy Glenn Ford role, or the one that Tom Cruise was going to play before he bailed over…I don’t why he bailed. (Does anyone?) Columbia Pictures bailed on this oater a while back, but now Relativity Media is going to cover production costs.

I haven’t spoken to anyone at 20th Century Fox, but a guy who knows everyone and everything is saying the plan is for Meryl Streep‘s The Devil Wears Prada peformance to be put up for Best Actress. And in the words and cadence of David Mamet, I say no, no, a-thousand- times-no to that. Meryl isn’t the main character in Prada — Anne Hathaway is — and she won’t have a snowball’s chance in hell if she goes for Best Actress. And forget about her spirited performance in A Prairie Home Companion. That’s strictly backup, strictly “oh, yeah, she was good in that too.”

Magnolia Films chief Eammon Bowles called earlier today to explain his position about not wanting Michael Moore to show Jesus Camp, a doc about evangelicals, at the Traverse Film Festival . The film, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, is a balanced look at evangelicals, he says, and he doesn’t want Average Joes in middle America getting the idea that it’s a lefty, anti-Christian thing because they would almost certainly interpret Moore’s support of the film as evidence that it is, most likely, a lefty, anti-Christian thing.
Eammon has a good practical point, but even if Jesus Camp is as balanced and even-toned as he says it is, we all know who and what evangelicals are. They’re devout intense people who basically believe in a kind of fundamental absolutism, which is what hard-core righties are also about, which is why they’re generally regarded as being in more or less the same camp. But c’mon, honestly…does anyone anywhere know of any evangelicals who are liberal-minded and drive hybrid cars, and who voted for John Kerry in ’04? The most vile thing that has ever happened by way of American culture is the American right’s co-opting of the teachings of the gentle, imbued Yeshua.
As Max von Sydow‘s character says in Woody Allen’s Hannah and her Sisters, “If Jesus were to come back to the earth and see what’s going on [here] in his name, he would never stop throwing up.”

“Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.” — Napoleon Bonaparte. In other words, better to have ridden high and drunk the electric brew, however briefly, than to have never ridden at all.