Susan Wloszczyna‘s USA Today story about movie phenome- nons winks at (but doesn’t fully acknowledge) the all-but-certain fact that Snakes on a Plane is not the next phenomenon, but is, in fact, a pheno- menon already. In the meantime, we get a bunch of half-assed definitions, recollections, and a big chart going all the way back to Porky’s. (I just tried to remember how to spell Wloszczyna’s name without looking it up, and I blew it again. It’s the most impossible-to-remember last name in the history of impossible-to-remember last names. I don’t even know how to pronounce it. Is it supposed to sound like “Vlossinya“?)

“I can’t really account for it, and I still feel it when I go [to the Cannes Film Festival,” Toronto-based director Atom Egoyan tells Toronto Star critic Geoff Pevere . “I know the [festival] like the back of my hand, and yet there’s a degree of consecration which is peculiar and distinct and quite impossible to really describe.”

This Saturday Morning Shootout video clip with Peter Bart and Peter Guber, obviously recorded last summer, has Bryan Singer confessing that Superman Returns cost more than $250 million bucks. But you’ll have to sit through nine minutes and 15 seconds of this and that first.

The S.S. Poseidon is just leaving the harbor and already it’s starting to take on water. It might make $20 million this weekend, but it’ll be off a good 50% next weekend and with DaVinci Code and X-Men 3 ruling the roost over the next two weeks, Poseidon can do nothing except sink beneath the waves. If you calculate the distribution costs as roughly $50 million (which is what my estimate is) it doesn’t even seem probable that the domestic haul will match this amount. It’s an Alan Horn disaster movie.

The Rotten Tomatoes’ positives for Poseidon are in the same range as President Bush‘s approval rating — 31%. The creme de la creme rating is 27%. Everyone just hates it, hates it, hates it…and it’s really not that bad. I mean, providing you don’t go looking for some multi-tiered, character- driven Ship of Fools. It’s fast, it’s fairly thrilling at times (that seriously claustrophobic crawling-through-the-air-duct scene is a near-classic), the effects are above-average (okay, the rogue wave looks more than a little fake), and thank God it doesn’t try to acquaint you with, much less try to make you care about, the characters. And Josh Lucas, who used to play nothing but scumbags, plays a hard-charging hero and likable good guy here. And praise God again that there’s no fat Shelly Winters character in this thing.

I disagree with the absolute derision in the pan of Poseidon written by Wall Street Journal‘s Joe Morgenstern, which I can’t link to because the WSJ is cheap with its freebies. But I find it perversely enjoyable nonetheless: “A $150 Million Wreck…Shallow Story, Flat Acting Sink Remake of Poseidon…[it’s] a deeply dreadul movie — no, a shallowly dreadful movie — that’s too unpleasant and repetitive to be entertaining.” I swear to God he’s being overly harsh. This is not a hateful flick. It’s nothing, but it’s not that bad. It’s an intentionally empty big-budget disaster movie, and I don’t think it’s fair or porportionate for a seasoned critic to walk up to a huge pile of horse manure and say, “Eeewww, this is awful…it smells like horse manure!”

My brother Tony, with whom I stayed last night at his modest home in Norwalk, Connecticut, lives in Dial-Up Nation, and you don’t want to know what dial-up is like these days. Actually, it’s not bad for a while until, all of a damn sudden, God decides you’re suddenly not going to find any more URL’s or send any more e-mails…sorry.

I don’t know why, and I can’t imagine that anyone reading this would care very much one way or the other so let’s just drop it , okay? I’m late to the table because I had to pick up my rental car late this morning and then drive over to a Wi-Fi Starbucks in Westport, Ct., which is where I’m sitting right now. Southwestern Connecticut is damp and drizzly all over . I feel as I’m harboring a dark and dreary November in my soul. I walk down the street and I feel like knocking people’s hats off.

Two readers — Roy “Griff” Griffis and a guy named Daniel — have both made an excellent points about the ricochet between 9/11 and Poseidon. “Do you think that 9/11 has, for a while at least, put a stake in the heart of old-school disaster movies?,” Griffis wrote. “Since we’ve seen real disaster, lived with its fallout and watched people falling to their deaths…maybe a film like Poseidon just seems too far removed from a reality that was made all too real.” Daniel added, “Part of my problem with Poseidon was that, having just seen United 93 a few days earlier, Poseidon seemed to have even less gravity and the piles of dead bodies seemed even less real and even more hollow. There just didn’t seem to be a point in any of it.”

Just to bend over and be fair, Cahiers du Cinema has put Sofia Coppola‘s Marie-Antoinette on the cover of its latest issue, and critic Jean- Michel Frondon is calling it “a delicious miracle.” There’s also a fairly lengthy interview with Coppola.

I trust that Southland Tales director Richard Kelly ‘s passport problem is resolved at this stage, three or four days before the start of the Cannes Film Festival. I ran a fast item about this a week ago, and then I took it down when it was suggested that it might cause some difficulty. But Hollywood Wiretap had already picked up on it, and then the IMDB’s Johnny-on-the-spot WENN news service ran it a few days later…and now Harry Knowles is on the soapbox.

I’m searching around for news about who will write the script for The Winter of Frankie Machine, an aging-mafia-hitman flick to be directed by Martin Scorsese and star Robert De Niro, to be produced by De Niro and Jane Rosenthal. Whether this film actually happens or not, the source material is a book by Don Winslow. (Haven’t read it, but of course the name “Frankie Machine” was Frank Sinatra ‘s in Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm.) If anyone knows anything…

For the third time in recent months, a respected old-media film critic has been downgraded or shown the door at a major daily: the word broke two or three hours ago that Jamie Bernard ‘s contract will not be renewed at the N.Y. Daily News , and I’m very sorry. A tough break, but print regulars are probably going to be dealing with turbulent upheaval for months and years to come. It’s shake-up time, sorry to say. I took a train to Connecticut around 3:30 this afternoon and ran around a bit, and when I finally got online I read the news about Bernard.