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.

You’ve seen Yes and therefore know its refrains;

You’re thus prepared to read Anthony Lane’s

Review of this film by Sally Potter

About sex and verse and feeling hotter.

Read David Poland’s “Hot Blog” comments about Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes…just read ’em…very blunt, very hard-nosed, very this-is-what-it-is…a tiny bit wimpy at the very end when he gets “moral” and says no more TomKat reporting, but don’t mind that. The only thing I choked on was his description of how publicist Cindy Guagenti’s handling of the Pitt-Jolie entanglement as “just good, solid publicity management.” Is that what they call lying through your teeth these days?

A very smart and thorough take by the Hollywood Reporter‘s Anne Thompson about the over-35 adult audience, and how they still show up for solid adult-angled movies when the calibrations are right (like they were with Lion’s Gate’s Crash). The piece also observes how the mainstream studios have failed to nurture this audience and in fact have done what they can to systematically alienate them. Good work, guys!

I love it that Lion’s Gate’s Crash, that piercing L.A. drama about racism and criss-crossing fates from director Paul Haggis, has hung in there ($44 million since it opened 5.6 on 1,500 screens) and keeps on chugging. I realize the same thing might not happen with Palm Pictures’ Cronicas (opening 7.8) and also that Sony Classics’ The Beautiful Country (also 7.8) is also facing an uphill ordeal, but I’d sure like to see them both do better than expected.

Besides being a wonderfully inventive remake of James Toback’s Fingers, meaning that it fully honors the Toback while creating its own French-ified fissures and peculiarities, Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Wellspring) has a track that plays over the closing credits that I can’t get out of my head. It’s by The Kills and is called “Monkey 23” and is off their Keep on Your Mean Side album. It’s purchasable for 10 cents at www.allofmp3.com, or you can click on this Randall Pullen link and download it.

Well, at least there’s one thing that works in Bewitched (Columbia, 6.24), and that’s Steve Carrell‘s third-act cameo as Paul Lynde’s “Uncle Arthur.” If only director-cowriter Nora Ephron had decided to weave Carrell into the film as a major character, things might have turned out differently. Lynde played the Uncle Arthur character (as a bitterly witty gay warlock, natch) on the original Bewitched series off and on from ’65 through ’71, and Carrell does Lynde quite well. Known mainly as an off-and-on Daily Show correspondent as well as one of Will Ferrell’s better friends (he previously costarred with Ferrell in Anchorman and Melinda and Melinda), Carrell has an obvious knack for playing acutely hyper alien-visitation characters. He’s the star of Judd Apatow’s The 40 Year-old Virgin (Universal, 8.19) and is currently shooting Little Miss Sunshine. Apparently those reports about him starring as Maxwell Smart in a feature version of Get Smart have some basis in fact.