The new trailer for Fernando Meirellles’ The Constant Gardener (Focus Features, 8.26) is up and rolling. Download it and make of it what you will, but also consider the view of a reader who recently saw the entire film: “Gardener is a tad more conventional and mainstream than Meirelles’ City of God, which I was a huge fan of, but it combines thriller elements, a love story and searing reportage of everyday catastrophes besetting Africa…it’s by far the strongest Le Carre adaptation in feature form ever. There are just so many good things about it that it’s hard to know where to start. And while this film is nobody’s notion of an easy sell (the big problem is the unfortunate title), The Constant Gardener‘s uncompromising and indisputable emotional power should give it a shot at a lot of recognition and buzz. You want to see this one ASAP.”

Those attending the War of the Worlds all-media showing this Monday (6.27) will be obliged to miss the televised debut of the two -and-a-half-minute trailer for Peter Jackson’s King Kong. But there’s an alternate option: an announcement on the official King Kong site says that “Volkswagen, the exclusive automotive promotional partner of King Kong, has been granted the exclusive online debut window for the teaser trailer. Beginning at 8:44 PM ET (15 minutes prior to the NBC Universal primetime roadblock), the teaser trailer may be viewed exclusively on the Volkswagen website (www.volkswagen.com). This Volkswagen online exclusive will continue for 48 hours.”

“You gotta find a good woman. Not too smart, not too dumb. Not too old, not too young. One that can cook and clean.” — Saddam Hussein’s advice to an unmarried 20-something American guard in Baghdad, according to a news report.

It won’t be enough for that new David Spade Comedy Central satire show (“The Showbiz Show”) to goof on moronic Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight-style coverage of Hollywood and celebrity news. These shows parody themselves. Spade is going to have to really get down and be mean…if you catch my drift. If the show were on right now, for instance, he would have to really talk about what’s going on with everyone talking about but not really talking about the Tom Cruise meltdown. If Spade just does his usual “nyah-nyah..I’m a funny smart-ass” thing without taking it to the next level, the show won’t make it.

I’ve thought and thought about it over the last 24 hours, and I still don’t get Sharon Waxman’s Tom Laughlin-wanting-to-do-a-Billy Jack remake story. It seemed to mainly be about Waxman (or maybe Times editors Michael Ceipley or Jodi Kantor) being a fan, etc. I couldn’t figure any other reason why it ran. Does Laughlin seriously expect people to relate to a 73 year-old barefoot Billy Jack setting things straight about…what?..the religous right, nuclear power, the Iraqi War and the proposing of a third-party candidate? Tom Laughlin and Billy Jack nostalgia are waaaay past the identification or recollection abilities of the general ticket-buying demographic. It would be one thing if Laughlin was planning on hiring a younger guy to play the Native American character, but there was no indication of that in the story….so I don’t get it. What did I miss?

My people-rebelling-against-flaunted-celebrity-behavior theory (by way of Nathaniel West’s Day of the Locust) seems to be gaining validity. The London Independent‘s Andre Gumbel has, in a just-posted article, half-rationalized and come close to applauding last weekend’s squirt-gun attack (click on video here) upon Tom Cruise by a guy from a Channel Four news team. “Though [Cruise] kept his cool, the stunt will have been heartily applauded by those who are beginning to tire of Cruise’s endless self-promotion,” Gumbel wrote. “The production of Tom Cruise: The Movie is in full swing and the response, at least so far, appears to be a resounding thumbs-down.”

A sincerely rendered approval-slash-redemption piece appeared in last Sunday’s New York Times, with Charles Isherwood lauding the talents of Elizabeth Berkley and her work in Scott Elliott’s revival of David Rabe’s Hurlyburly. “I hereby spread the word that [Berkley] is pretty darn good,” he wrote. “You may have already heard that virtually everyone is terrific in this much-acclaimed production. That Ms. Berkley holds her own among this skilled company of scene- stealers (i.e., Ethan Hawke, Josh Hamilton, Wallace Shawn) is a testament to how much her talent has grown since her appearance in [a certain] monumentally bad movie. As Bobbie, a ‘balloon dancer’ who gets more than she bargained for on a joyride with a frustrated actor, the statuesque Ms. Berkley is like a big, battered Barbie doll, a bruised good-time girl who, contrary to expectations, turns out to have a more reliable moral compass than almost anyone else onstage. Ms. Berkley handles the more baroque stretches of Mr. Rabe’s dialogue with aplomb, and strikes a deeply poignant note in the play’s second act, when Bobbie interrupts a drug-induced, nihilistic reverie from Mr. Hawke’s character with a morsel of humanistic truth: Life may be a big, empty lie, but that’s no excuse for being mean to your friends.”

The hostility levels are rising between celebs and photographers and the public. It may be coincidence, but I’m picking up vibes from that mob riot scene at the end of Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust. First, the confrontation levels between celebs and crazily aggressive paparazzi started to lunge way out of control, prompting Us editor Janice Min to pledge that the magazine wouldn’t run photos captured via ruthless methods. At the Bewitched premiere last week Nicole Kidman went up to a New York photographer and called him “very rude” after he booed her. Then Leonardo DiCaprio got cut with a broken beer bottle at a party last Friday…not by a media person but an unbalanced woman who apparently didn’t know him. (The facts aren’t in yet, but it looks like she wanted to hurt him because he was Leonardo DiCaprio.) Then Tom Cruise got squirt-gunned (doused from a fake water-loaded microphone) in London on Sunday by a guy working for a new comedy show for Channel 4 in which celebrities are the targets of practical jokes. Nathaniel West was saying there’s a very thin line between fans worshipping movie stars and hating them and even wanting to hurt them, and that these frenzied emotional states are located on flip sides of the same coin. I think on some kind of weird subliminal level this psychotic atmosphere is heating up and starting to spill over. Something is going on…I can feel it.

The aliens are looking to slaughter everyone in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (Paramount, 6.29) and, of course, the film doesn’t bother to explain their motive. In a current Newsweek piece, Spielberg says “having no idea why they’re killing hundreds of thousands of people is scarier than having them arrive, make an announcement and then go to work.” At least screenwriter David Koepp makes a stab at an explanation. “I think the whole war is about water,” he says. “I figure their planet ran out. Wars tend to be fought over very elemental things: water, land, oil.”

Right off the top and sight unseen, I’m intrigued by David Koepp’s decision to write Tom Cruise’s War of the Worlds character as “kind of a jerk.” Ray Ferrier is described in the Newsweek article as “a divorced, blue-collar guy more interested in fast cars than in his young daughter (Dakota Fanning) and teenage son (Justin Chatwin). But then huge alien tripods begin destroying everything in their path, and Ray finds himself on the run with his kids.” Cruise, says Koepp, has “played so many characters that are capable and cocky, and I thought it would be fun to write against that [and make him into] someone whose life didn’t pan out the way he thought it would.”

This Friday’s opening of George Romero’s Land of the Dead (Universal, 6.24) has stirred an observation about pedestrians in the touristy areas of Manhattan. This is nothing new, but out-of-towners always seem to walk the streets without the slightest hint of spunk or urgency in their step, like they’re making their way from the bedroom to the refrigerator at 2 ayem in their pajamas and nightgowns. And they’re always wearing those dead-to-the-world expressions. (Writer Fran Leibowitz has described the shuffling gait of tourists as the “mall meander.”) Every day I’m walking along at my usual spirited pace and these Jabbas and sea lions are always walking ahead of me in self-protecting groups or, worse, three abreast. The idea that they might be blocking people, much less defying the basic transportation law of going with the flow, doesn’t seen to occur to them. Then again, the flow in Jabba tourist areas (Times Square, Rockefeller Center) is very zombie-paced so it probably feels right from their perspective. I don’t mean to sound overly misanthropic — it’s just the Romero/zombie thing that brought this to mind.

Just so it’s understood: the zombies in George Romero’s Day of the Dead still slowly shuffle around. They do not do the zombie sprint (i.e., running toward their victims like Olympic athletes) as witnessed in 28 Days Later and the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead. Romero’s zombies are still taking their time because, according to Romero (or rather a Universal publicist who says Romero has said this), zombies are “more spooky” when they’re lumbering rather than running.