What’s the rumble about Must Love Dogs, the John Cusack-Diane Lane romance that snuck last night? Variety‘s Justin Chang praised Cusack’s performance but called the film “middling.” His lead graph begins, “To properly appreciate Must Love Dogs, one must first love John Cusack…thesp’s maverick turn steals the show.” James Watson, non-pro from Tallahassee, wrote in this afternoon and said pic “wasn’t half bad. The theatre sold out with mostly 30 to 40 year-old women in the audience, and it played extremely well with them. I found it mildly diverting, although it did have a few laugh-out-loud moments. Lane and Cusack have reasonably good chemistry together. Within the constraints of the summer romance meet-cute genre, it’s definitely well above average.”

Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott…together again? That’s what I hear, but that’s all I’ve heard.

You’ve got to keep on your toes if you’re doing an online anything, and especially a gossip column. Take Radar‘s “Paris Review”, which is written by Julie Bloom and Derek De Koff. In Friday’s 7.22 posting they ran a multiple-choice quiz that led with a question about Paris Latsis’ obsession with fiance Paris Hilton, and which included a photo of the couple calling them “the future Mr. and Mrs. Latsis.” Very soon afterwards the Star‘s website ran a story saying the wedding’s off and Paris has flown home from Greece, etc. I don’t know if the Star has it right and I personally don’t give a shit about any of this, but if you were Bloom and De Koff wouldn’t you want to check this out and possibly shuffle your copy around if required, just so it looks like…you know, you’re on top of it? There are no “weekends off” in journalism…not any more.

So the Hollywood Elsewhere team is trying to install a travelling news-ticker thing at the very top of the column, but we’re having trouble with a software that looked very cool at first but has since developed some problems. Are there any software designers out there with a solid reliable news-ticker software that can handle RSS feeds from different sites, maintain the same look and speed on different browsers, and generally be steady and consistent all the way around the block? If you can fill the bill, I’ll not only buy it from you — I’ll tell everyone else how good it is on the site.

Variety‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that the “official” title of Steven Spielberg’s currently-rolling feature about Israel’s revenge on the Palestinians behind the 1972 Munich killing of Israeli athletes is Munich…or at least that the cover page of Tony Kushner’s script “starts” with this word. Fleming repeats the general concern about the film leaning too heavily on a book about the Israeli operation called “Vengeance,” because the book’s veracity “has been widely questioned.” Look…I figured this whole thing out in a piece than ran on March 9th. Read it over and tell me if it doesn’t make sense. The bottom line is that Munich will be Spielberg’s second major-league feature having to do with lethal aggression against Jews, the first being Schindler’s List, and he knows this latest effort will be compared to his 1993 Oscar winner, so he’s got to make it complex, high-minded, morally probing. You can figure that Munich will be some kind of super-charged, early William Freidkin-type thriller about the ultimate futility of seeking revenge, with a theme (as suggested by a published quote from Munich costar Daniel Craig) that says “if we all keep taking an eye for an eye, pretty soon the world will be blind.” This is an actual line from a 1986 TV movie called Sword of Gideon that dealt with the same subject.

In Sunday’s N.Y. Daily News, Elizabeth Weitzman asks if Ben McKenzie, whom she calls The O.C.‘s “resident hunk,” is about to make his mark in the forthcoming Junebug (Sony Classics, 8.5). I’ve seen Junebug and yes, McKenzie’s performance shows “he can do more than brood beautifully,” as Weitzman puts it — it shows he’s extremely convincing at playing a pathetic jerk. Junebug is a nicely handled family relationship drama, but McKenzie’s “Johnny” character is an uneducated, emotionally immature blue-collar dork who treats his wife with callous disregard. (The wife, a very pregnant woman named Ashley, who’s a bit too angelic and myopic to be believed, even by small-town terms, is superbly portrayed by Amy Adams.) Bottom line…and I’m acknowledging this may be a small-minded way of looking at things….but the general rule of thumb is that it doesn’t matter if you’re just inhabiting a character, like any good actor. You can’t get a career bump off a performance in a good film if you’re playing a total asshole, so McKenzie will have to wait.

So there’s Page Six’s account of the circumstances surrounding the canning of publicist Jasmine Madatian at Paramount Pictures, and there’s David Poland’s…the latter having been posted Saturday night after Poland looked into it (he was the first to report Madatian’s sacking) and was told the Page Six version was wrong. I haven’t called around about this myself, but I’m presuming Poland probably has it right. His version is a lot more specific and I know he’s got good sources on the lot.

It’s funny how this always seems to play out, but there’s always been a regional/geographical tendency when it comes to print and online journos reporting stories about Hollywood. London journos are the toughest (the tabs can be merciless and sometimes insane, but London’s serious critics, essayists and documentary filmmakers have frequently been the most candid and piercing and on-target). New York journos are almost as tough and lacerating as the Londoners but somewhat less so because their editors sometimes “play the game,” meaning there’s a now-and-then, depending-on-the-shot tendency to sand down the edges and perhaps be a tad more circumspect. And L.A. journos are, for the most part, the “friendliest” — i.e., frequently the ones with the best information, but also the ones most likely to report their information and opinions in let’s-not-be-overly-harsh terms because they’re right in the middle of the political thicket and want to keep their industry relationships at par. In other words, the determining factors in terms of getting information and reporting it thoroughly are proximity, politics and personal relationships.

Obliquely racist labelling of Hustle & Flow is an irritant and a real problem. The always thoughtful and frequently fair-minded David Poland says the Paramount Classics film “still hasn’t made a strong move to crossing outside of being an ‘urban’ success” and that “the international market for black dramas is not strong.” The universal humanist chord struck by Hustle & Flow is so obvious and pervasive that calling it an urban black film is like saying Melissa Etheridge is first and foremost a blue-state lesbian singer, Nelson Mandella is first and foremost a black politician and Jesus of Nazareth was first and foremost a poor unemployed Jew. Obviously I am not calling Poland a racist, but he is passing along — indulging in — obliquely racist box-office pigeonholing by calling one of the few movies out there with a truly universal character and theme an “urban” movie or a movie for blacks. When we use shorthand to describe a film, we should not allude to the superficial packaging labels but the soul of it…the spiritual element it’s either trying to express or can’t help expressing in spite of itself. (By this standard Mr. and Mrs. Smith is not a light summer entertainment with explosions and lots of gunplay — it’s a foul vomitous thing that’s actually a lot closer to being a work of demonic possession than anyone is willing to admit.)

No joy in Mudville over Friday’s figures. I was hoping Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would suffer a heavy drop this weekend (for his own good, Tim Burton needs to be bitch-slapped but good), but it took in $9 million on Friday and will probably end up with $25 million or so for the weekend. There’s really no accounting for taste, especially when it comes to the family trade. Wedding Crashers is holding quite nicely, on track to earn a bit more than $20 million for the weekend. Hustle & Flow took in $2.7 million on Friday — you do the math — but it will probably hold its ground in the coming weeks.

Reporting for the New York Times, David Carr is the latest journalist to visit the St. Paul, Minnesota, set of Robert Altman’s Prairie Home Companion. He differs, however, with reports about Paul Thomas Anderson acting as some kind of de facto co-director. [See below] Referring to Anderson as “a thin young man [who] kept popping up on Mr. Altman’s shoulder during shooting recently,” Carr says Anderson “is ostensibly on the set for insurance purposes; Mr. Altman is 80, so a backup director is part of the package.” He also quotes Anderson as saying, “Whatever chef is going to take credit for it, it is going to be a very spicy dish that I will be more than happy to dine on.”

To many, Carr explains later in the same New York Times piece, A Prairie Home Companion” is “a kind of secular religion.” Robert Altman, the film’s director, offers the following assessment: “Garrison [Keillor]’s audience is like the Mel Gibson Jesus audience. This movie is going to play for two weeks in places like Chicken Switch, Arizona, because the program has such strong rural appeal. The cast and myself will have our own audience to draw on. I think given that we have Meryl Streep and Lindsay Lohan, a lot of different people will be curious to see what this movie is about.” Chicken Switch! I love where Altman’s head’s at.