It’s interesting, I think, that Fox 411 columnist Roger Friedman is on the V for Vendetta train, since his Fox News employers have reason to greatly despise this lefty political pic.

This is three-week-old news, but DV Republic is claiming that the great Harry Belafonte (whom I met during the junket of White Man’s Burden, and whose come-what-may candor I found enormously appealing) was disinvited from funeral services for Coretta Scott King because of the attendance of President George Bush, according to “reliable sources.” Belafonte’s been a tough critic of Bush policies in recent weeks, and apparently was kept from the funeral “in deference to Bush’s comfort.” Belafonte was one of
the first big-time celebs to join forces with Martin Luther King in the early ’60s, and “not only contributed his celebrity to the cause, he marched shoulder to shoulder with Dr. King, and provided critical financial support during the movement and after King’s assassination,” according to DV Republic’s story. If the disinvite story is true, it easily qualifies as the most disgusting revelation I’ve heard in a long while, and shame on whomever’s responsible.

It’s really spooky about how the rule of three — celebrities always seeming to leave the earth in trios within the same two- or three-day period — keeps happening. I was on the verge of saying it hadn’t occured last weekend with the deaths of Darren McGavin and Don Knotts, but now comes the news of Dennis Weaver‘s passing in Connecticut last Friday. The three actors were all in their early ’80s and had their greatest triumphs on television in the ’50-s, ’60s and ’70s. Weaver called his Sam McCloud character, based on an Arizona lawman played by Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel‘s Coogan’s Bluff, and whom he played in his own soft-pedalled way on McCloud series from ’70 to ’77, “the most satisfying role of my career.” If you ask me Weaver’s finest hour, hands down, was his performance as the terrorized motorist in Steven Spielberg’s Duel (’71).

I was looking at this Ramey pix micro-shot (top left) this morning of Dyan Cannon, giving what looks like the finger to the guy shooting this photo of her and Jim Carrey at a Laker’s game. (I may be wrong…it’s a small image.) It led me, in any event, to this Christian website story about Cannon having become “an evangelist to the Hollywood community” with her Saturday night “God’s Party with Dyan Cannon & You,” at the CBS Studio Center in Studio City. Visitors “range from Hollywood insiders to people from all across the incredible diversity of the L.A. community,” with Cannon imprinting her personality “on this unique blend of southern revival meeting and Kathryn Kuhlman-like healing service.” Healing? Amazing what some people manage to put together when their career sputters. This is a town of liberal existential artist-heathens with guilty consciences, and the idea of holy-rolling in Studio City seems…well, different. What was that funny line she said in Heaven Can Wait? “I should be Cannon-ized!”

In June, Warner Home Video will finally cough up a DVD of one of the most intriguing late-’60s era films ever made: Richard Lester‘s brilliant, wonderfully textured, time-jumpy Petulia (1968). (WHV has it on the DVD market in England right now.) It’s about an impulsive, airy-fairy wife (Julie Christie) half- cheating on her stiff-necked husband (Richard Chamberlain) with a vulnerably grumpy divorced surgeon (George C. Scott) whom she’s deeply in love with…as far as it goes. Shot in San Francisco during the flower-power summer of ’67, Petulia mixes antsy energy with a bittersweet tone of regret about slipped-away love.

A Senses of Cinema essay by Peter Tonguette says that Petulia represented “the last gasp of Lester’s explicit engagement with present-day life. After it would come the masterful apocalyptic satire of The Bed Sitting Room (1969), which today looks symptomatic of a trend Pauline Kael identified in the mid-’70s: ‘At a certain point in their careers — generally right after an enormous popular success — most great movie directors go mad on the potentialities of movies,’ Kael observed. ‘They leap over their previous work into a dimension beyond the well-crafted dramatic narrative; they make a huge, visionary epic in which they attempt to alter the perceptions of people around the world.’ Kael wrote this in a review of Bernardo Bertolucci‘s 1900 (1976) — characteristic of this tendency if any film ever was — and goes on to site works such as D.W. Griffith‘s Intolerance (1916) and Abel Gance‘s Napoleon (1927). The Bed-Sitting Room was “a massive failure on every level and, not unlike the directors of other magnificent follies, he was punished for it; a full four years would go by before Lester directed a feature film [i.e., The Three Musketeers] again.”

Well, whoop-dee-doo…Universal production chief Stacey Snider made a firm call on Sunday to become chief executive and co-chairperson of DreamWorks…as if everyone was on pins and needles wondering if she’d stay with Universal. (Hah!) Snider will share the same creative and corporate authority that DreamWorks founders David Geffen and Steven Spielberg hold, and will report directly to management genius Brad Grey, the chairman and CEO of Paramount, which bought DreamWorks in December for $1.6 billion. The Snider thing was a Geffen move, of course. Hiring Snider was Geffen basically giving NBC/Universal’s owner General Electric (and its chairman and CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt) a hale and hearty f.u. for failing to deal in a more assertive and forthright way when a purchase of DreamWorks was being mulled by Universal last year. Like all corporate owners of entertainment companies, G.E. is basically a bean-counting operation without a lot of enthusiasm for entertaining or movie-making, and Geffen has taken advantage of that element of vague corporate suffocation by offering Snider a somewhat more creative, hands-on job with a bit more time off for her kids. With Geffen and Spielberg’s assent, Snider will be able to greenlight projects with budgets up to $85 million.

If someone wants to give me free-of-charge a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player, a big stack of high-def DVDs and a really good high-def widescreen TV, I’m an instant fan. But having seen demon- strations of both Sony’s Blu-Ray high-def player and its Toshiba-manufactured HD-DVD competition, I can honestly say that the difference between them and how DVD’s look right now on my big Sony flat-screen is noticable, yes, but not stunningly so. High-def is very cool, but it doesn’t quite make you wet yourself. The only ones who will shell out for these goodies are rich industry elitists (producers and directors like Mike DeLuca, Rod Lurie, Bennett Miller) and money-to-burn tech-heads of a certain age looking to impress girls and friends. In short, a micro-sized sliver of the buying public.

Profile of an eternal lightweight…a guy with not even a trickle running through him, much less a river.

No question that the Criterion Collection’s high-def transfer of Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar 1966) is one of the most beautiful ever seen. But I don’t get the website claim that says the image is “presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1.” Looks more like 1.75 to 1 to me, and damn close to 1.85 to 1. Consider the shot below (top) of the opening image from Warner Home Video’s DVD of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, as it appears on my own TV. This, according to the info provided by WHV, is a 1.66 to 1 image, and my trained eyes have understood the same for years. The bottom shot is from Criterion’s Balthazar disc, and if you look back and forth between the two, you’ll notice the Lyndon is a little bit taller. How can these two differ if Criterion and Warner Home Video say they’re both 1.66 to 1?

Running Scared‘s Paul Walker, who acted in Clint Eastwood‘s Flags of Our Fathers last year, says, “I grew up on Eastwood [but] I was afraid that I was going to be completely let down. I’d heard nothing but good things about him, but I guess I’m a bit cynical. Like, who’s going to talk trash about Clint Eastwood? I mean, c’mon, the guy’s on top of his game right now, you have no choice but to say you like him. But you know, he is a good guy. He’s not real wordy. He’s not the kind of guy that likes to waste his breath. But when he opens his mouth, everyone’s hanging on his every word.” — from a profile by the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Stephen Rea.

I spoke to Lamont Johnson a few minutes ago, and he says the cut of The Last American Hero that Pauline Kael saw and reviewed back in early ’73 ran “10 or 12 minutes” longer than the 95-minute version of the current Fox Home Video DVD. He doesn’t know if the longer version exists anywhere, but his agent might.

Prosecutors are squeezing “Hollywood superlawyer” Bert Fields with “evidence” against Fields and/or his partners regarding arrangements Fields may have made with Anthony Pellicano that may have involved illegal wiretapping, according to a N.Y. Times story by David Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner. They want him to spill, of course. The net is closing. Perspiration beads are forming.