Nobody ever seems to destroy anything in low-budget films, but expensive stuff often gets blown up and inferno’ed in big-budget franchise pics. Is there anyone in the world who finds these spectacles exciting in any way, shape or form? Is there a metaphor I’m missing that action fans have understood all along? That beautiful yellow whatever-it-was sports car that was blown off the ground inside the gates of Vatican City in Mission: Impossible III…an absolute flat-liner. Like all explosions. Filmmakers keep using them, I assume, because they’re a kind of visual punctuation. This would be fine if fireballs were the equivalent of a simple period, but they’re not — they’re exclamation points, which only bad writers resort to. All I know after reading this item is that I’m now a lot less interested in seeing Casino Royale.

Billy Wilder was born 100 years ago today in a village now known as Sucha Beskidzka, Poland. He left us four years and three months ago, or roughly seven months after the best book about him — Cameron Crowe‘s “Conversations with Wilder” — hit the book stores.

You could argue that the last “real” Billy Wilder film — The Fortune Cookie — came out 40 years ago, and that the guy’s a relic by 2006 measurings. But all that goes away when you sit down and watch his better films. Not the stodgy ones…not Love in the Afternoon or The Spirit of St. Louis (a personal soft spot) or The Front Page but (I have to remind myself there are hundreds if not thousands who’ve never heard these titles) Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, Stalag 17, Sabrina, One, Two, Three. Here are three dialogue excerpts — from Sunset Boulevard , The Apartment, and One, Two, Three. Which reminds me…where’s that DVD of Ace in the Hole?

Former N.Y. Daily news critic Jami Bernard‘s “Incredible Shrinking Critic” blog (which I really shouldn’t be linking to, given her alliance with a certain hammerhead), and a video piece she’s recently thrown together about how life feels now without a portfolio.

When you flip through the 32-page newsprint program for the L.A. Film Festival, everything suddenly comes into focus. Compared to the chore of finding your way through the ruts and ravines of the online site, the paper program is clearer, simpler and much easier to sort through.

That said, I’ve been half-persuaded to check out Ian McCrudden‘s Islander, about a lobster fisherman (Thomas Hildreth) going through a crisis. (It plays on 6.25 at 7 pm at the Mann Festival — check out the site for the other two showings.) “A really solid piece of work,” a somewhat interested party claims. “Hildreth is a find, as are Amy Jo Johnson and Judy Prescott as two women he becomes involved with in the film. Costar Philip Baker Hall is his usual outstanding self. Definitely worth a look if you can catch it.”

Former Boston Herald freelance film reviewer Paul Sherman has dynamited his career over the crime of selling approximately 117 feature film screeners to online pirate distributors (known as “warez” groups) from 1999 to June 2005. He may not do time because he’s cooperating with the FBI, but he deserves whatever punishment he gets. The ethical-moral breaches are thoughtless enough, but he’s also a small-timer. As Sir Thomas Moore says to Richard Rich in A Man For All Seasons, “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the entire world…but for Wales?”

The L.A. Film Festival kicks off tomorrow night, and is it me (a definite possibility) or am I detecting an extra measure of vitality…some kind of exceptional on-it factor? The special events, parties, discussions and film selections feel almost Seattle-ish….perhaps even better than that. Here are 19 initial picks, and I’m sure there are five or ten other films and events I shouldn’t be overlooking: (1) Julie Anderson‘s Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater (6.24, 2 pm, Majestic Crest — 6.30, 7 pm, UCLA James Bridges — 7.2, 5:30, Laemmle’s Sunset); (2) Jauretsi Saizarbitoria and Emilia Menocal‘s East of Havana (6.25, 9:45 pm, Mann Festival — 6.29, 10 pm, Majestic Crest — 7.1, 4:45 pm, Laemmle Sunset); (3) Bill Couturie‘s Boffo! Tinseltown’s Bombs and Blockbusters (6.28, 7:15 pm, Mann Festival); (4) Kelly Reichardt ‘s Old Joy (6.23, 5 pm, Italian Cultural Institute); (5) “The Nature of Film Criticism: Neil LaBute and Kenneth Turan” (6.23, Armand Hammer, free); (6) Neil Marshall‘s The Descent (6.23, 8:30 pm, John Anson Ford Amphitheatre); (7) Discussion panel titled “Unshown Cinema: Inside the World of The Films That Got Away” (6.25, Armand Hammer, free); (8) Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (6.25, 9:30 pm, UCLA James Bridges Theater); (9) “Conversation with Richard Linklater” (6.25, 7 pm, Italian Cultural Institute); (10) Nikolaus Geyrhalter ‘s Our Daily Bread (6.27, 9:30 pm, UCLA James Bridges Theater — 7.1, 4:45 pm, Landmark’s Regent); (11) Bradley Beesley, Julianna Brannum and James Payne‘s The Creek Runs Red (6.27, 7:15 pm, Landmark’s Regent — 6.30, 5:15 pm, Italian Cultural Institute — 7.2, 3:15 pm, Laemmle Laemmle Sunset 5); (12) Chris Gorak‘s Right At Your Door (6.28, 9:45 pm, Mann Festival Theatre — 6.30, 4:30 pm, Mann Festival); (13) Fabian Bielinsky‘s The Aura (6.28, 9:30 pm, Landmark’s Regent); (14) Richard linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (6.29, 8:30 pm, John Anson Ford Amphitheatre); (15) So Yong Kim‘s In Between Days (6.29, 9:30 pm, Landmark’s Regent — 7.1, 7 pm, Landmark’s Regent); (16) Jean Luc Godard‘s vMasculine Feminine (6.29, 9:45 pm, UCLA James Bridges); (17) Gil Kenan‘s Monster House (6.30, 8:30 pm, John Anson Ford Amphitheatre); (18) Lisandro Alonso ‘s Los Muertos (6.30, 9:30 pm, UCLA James Bridges Theater); (19) “Conversation with James Ellroy” (6.26, 9:45 pm, Italian Cultural Institute).

Harry Knowles chit-chatting with Brandon Routh…keep it light, keep it fanboyish, keep it friendly.

“If you’re going to run anonymous criticism of someone’s story” — i.e, the one written last Monday by L.A. Times columnist Patrick Goldstein — “[by] saying ‘these articles never interview black execs, even in confidence — they always go after high-level talent to comment…’ you could at least call me or email me and ask if that was actually true in my case,” Goldstein has written Deadline Hollywood columnist Nikki Finke in an e-mail. “If you had called, I would have told you this: Of course, I interviewed plenty of black executives. What this person doesn’t seem to realize is that no black exec currently employed at a studio feels safe enough in their job to openly criticize their bosses about they dismal hiring record. They are only willing to say it off the record. And unlike the rest of the world, I√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢m very old-fashioned — I don√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t run anonymous quotes from anybody. I feel people have a right to know who’s doing the talking. I think it’s also unfair to imply that Spike and Singleton don√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t hire enough black staff, since I go on tons of movie sets and they are the two guys who always have a predominantly African-American crew, something you almost never see in white, white Hollywood. But mostly, if you√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢re going to allow someone to comment on my column, and whether I did the right kind of interviews, you owe me a fair chance to respond.” Finke then responds to Goldstein’s response, et. al.

This isn’t going to make that much of a difference. The die is cast, the digital fix is in, and Old Media is on a slippery-ass slope. The decision by L.A. Times management to hire away longtime Hollywood Reporter veteran Lynne Segall to try and turn things around paints a pretty clear picture of what’s been going down and how scared they all are.

HE’s who-gives-a-shit? scanner is officially switched on this afternoon regarding Ed Zwick‘s Blood Diamond (Warner Bros., probably Nov./Dec.). It feels to me like an on-the-nose moral outrage piece…a sticky-wicket neg-head thing.

Do you want to see a dramatically grandiose Ed Zwick melodrama about a mercenary (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a fisherman (Djimon Hounsou) mucking about during the Sierra Leone civil wars of the ’90s? An era when rebels seized mines to sell “blood diamonds” to buy arms as they murdered and mutilated thousands of innocent men, women and children? (You do?) I’m not following the thread but somehow the resistance levels are even higher with this report from L.A. Times reporter Elizabeth Snead that Sitrick and Company, L.A.s highest-profile damage-control publicists, have been hired by De Beers, a bigtime South African supplier of rough diamonds, to counterspin the negative image of their industry delivered by Zwick’s film, and that Sittrick, in turn, will be using former South Africa president and anti-apartheid crusader Nelson Mandela as a spokesperson. √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚ÄúMandela is going to say that all that stuff seen in the film is in the past, that there are no more conflict diamonds in circulation and that the diamond industry is economically good for South Africa,√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù a source has told Snead. √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚ÄúAnd who in their right mind is going to argue with Nelson Mandela?”