Patrick Goldstein and others feel that the arrival of United 93 is not only healthy but overdue. And if it’s a less-than-soothing experience for some…well, get used to it. “With the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 approaching, it is not too soon for movies to offer some unflinching perspective,” Goldstein writes in his “Big Picture” column. “The cold truth is that great art — or at least, as in the case of United 93, sober, thoughtful art — is unruly and impatient. Studios and politicians take polls to see if they are too far out in front of the public. Artists lead with their chin, scrambling headlong out onto ledges or exploring into dark corners. They don’t wait for the audience to form a cozy quorum.”

“It may be the film’s most compassionate gesture — its single most humanizing touch — to indicate that the heroes of Flight 93 were motivated not by patriotism, as it may be comforting for some to think, but by unthinkable fear and a primal survival instinct.” — critic Dennis Lim‘s review of United 93 in the Village Voice.

The final Bushian war-cry epilogue that appeared on the tail end of unfinished versions of Paul Greengrass‘s United 93 (Universal, 4.28) — “America’s war on terror had begun” — has been removed from the film. The finished version, screened in Beverly Hills Tuesday night, ends with the words “Dedicated to those Americans who lost their lives on September 11, 2001″…or words very close to that. So the final graph in Dennis Lim‘s Village Voice review is now invalid. It partly reads,”Perhaps mindful of his target audience, Greengrass makes sure to dangle some red-state red meat…United 93 slips into propaganda with a concluding title card that declares, ‘America’s war on terror had begun.’ Whatever Greengrass’s intentions, his film’s closing moments essentially memorialize 9-11 Bush style, as an occasion for revenge. Painful as this movie is, it’s even more excruciating to imagine how it might play in some of the country’s multiplexes.” No worries…the concern is moot.

The Hollywood Foreign Press saw Mission: Impossible III Tuesday night and some Entertainment Tonight people saw it earlier in the day, but the Wednesday M:I:3 junket was suddenly cancelled by Tom Cruise due to Katie Holmes having given birth to their daughter Suri sometime prior to 4 pm on Tuesday, which is when her arrival was announced. (Ancestry.com says that “Suri” is a Hindu and Sikh term…”Sanskrit suri for sun, priest, sage.” It is also “an epithet of Krishna.”) And by the way: Brooke Shields, Cruise’s philosophical opponent last year over the subject of post-partum-depression, gave birth to a baby girl yesterday also.

So who is “Film Fatale“, the new MCN blogger? Like other mysteriously-reclusive-women-friends-of-David–Poland I’ve barely spoken to in years past, the lady (I’m assuming she’s not a gay guy doing a Libby Gelman-Waxner) is being reclusive and, for the time being, hiding her identity. I’m not saying she’s busted or anything, but if you click on a 2.13.06 post called “Welcome to Hollywood” it says “posted by Justine.” It would be very easy to guess it’s Justine Elias. Perhaps too easy. I wonder…

You can’t see An Inconvenient Truth (Paramount, 5.26) “and not think of George W. Bush, the man who beat Gore in 2000,” observes Richard Cohen in the N.Y. Daily News. “Bush has been studiously anti-science, a man of applied ignorance who has undernourished his mind with the empty calories of comfy dogma. For instance, his insistence on abstinence as the preferred method of birth control would be laughable were it not so reckless. It is similar to Bush’s initial approach to global warming. It may be that Gore will do more good for his country and the world with this movie than Bush ever did by winning in 2000.”

David Poland thinks that because he links to a news story before others do then on some level that story kinda half-belongs to him and that others who link to the same story are feeding off his site, or his initiative. The ridiculousness of that view aside, here’s a Poland Hot Blog thing I’m bouncing off….Poland had it first, all right? But it’s also the best riff I’ve ever read by a mainstream newspaper guy — the Guardian ‘s Alan Rusbridger — about how and why old (i.e. print) media is on the way down and new (i.e., online) is on the way up. The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) staged a lecture on March 16th (not “the other night,” as Poland had it) in London. It’s on Adobe Acrobat and I friggin’ hate Adobe Acrobat, but it’s fascinating reading. It nails the attitude of big newspapers like the New York Times and how so many established publications are losing readers to various upstart online publications, etc.

I saw Bruce Willis at a party last night for Andy Garcia’s The Lost City (Magnolia, 4.28), and although I’ve spoken to him at junkets my first thought was that he’s taller than he looks in films.
Apparently he’s friendly with Garcia, perhaps in some small way due to Willis having turned down the part of the Steve Wynn-type Vegas mogul in Ocean’s 11, which led to Garcia getting it. And Willis and Garcia are both political conservatives in a heavily liberal town, so there’s also the strategic alliance thing to consider. In any case, I was sent this online video file of Willis in a Japanese TV commercial for Eneos, the Japanese oil corporation. I’ve watched it twice and can’t figure what the pitch is. There’s no wit to it.

Paramount is showing Mission: Impossible III this evening to the Hollywood Foreign Press in preparation for interviews happening tomorrow (Wednesday, 4.19) with Tom Cruise and (perhaps) others from the film. You’d think with all the negative press on Cruise happening right now (the high NRG negatives I reported on last weekend, the women-don’t-like-him angle from Peter Howell, the placenta-eating put-on story that broke this morning, the rigged Parade poll story, the American College of Radiologists critique, etc.) that Paramount might want to step out of the box a bit and have columnists like me see the film this evening also…you know, with the understanding that if it works as well as some of us are hearing that we could do a little word-of-mouth spreading about the film, for a change. That way the buzz wouldn’t be all wacky-wacky like it is now.

“The title was what got my attention,” Samuel L. Jackson tells USA Today‘s Susan Wloszczyna in the last and final Snakes on a Plane story of the spring. “I got on the set one day and heard they changed [the title], and I said, ‘What are you doing here? It’s not Gone with the Wind. It’s not On the Waterfront. It’s Snakes on a Plane!’ They were afraid it gave too much away, and I said, ‘That’s exactly what you should do. When audiences hear it, they say, ‘We are there!'”

It appears that those Tom Cruise Parade poll results were rigged. Question is, by whom? Parade.com recently asked readers to opine about whether Cruise was responsible for his wackzaoid public image last year or if it was mainly the media painting him that way. As I reported a few days ago, 84 percent blamed the press. But Parade publicist Alexis Collado has told “Page Six” that “we…found this a little bit fishy, so we did some investigating. We found out more than 14,000 (of the 18,000-plus votes) that came in were cast from only 10 computers! One computer was responsible for nearly 8,400 votes alone, all blaming the media for Tom’s troubles. We also discovered that at least two other machines were the sources of inordinate numbers of votes. It seems these folks (whoever they may be) resorted to extraordinary measures to try to portray Tom in a positive light for the Parade.com survey. There is even a chance they wrote a special ‘bot’ program for the sole purpose of skewing the results, rather than casting the votes by hand on a computer.”

A nice page of graphic steals from the opening credit sequence of Jason Reitman ‘s Thank You for Smoking. And here’s the credit sequence itself. Composed by an outfit called Shadowplay Studio, the titles draw from the look of classic cigarette packaging.