Val Kilmer will soon begin performing his singing role as Moses in The Ten Commandments, a “spectacular pop stage musical” that “tells the 3,3000 year-old story of Moses’ exodus from Egypt and his journey towards happiness, life and rebirth,” according to Broadway World.com. (It’s apparently based on the DreamWorks animated musical feature.) Moses was happy? The only time Charlton Heston’s Moses smiled was when he embraced Anne Baxter. This sounds like horseshit for the tourists. And Kilmer is doing this for…the money?

I’m feeling more and more enraged at John Kerry for emulating Michael Dukakis, blowing his lead and forcing his campaign into a last-ditch catch-up mode. There’s now a very real possibility that Bush-Cheney will be in for another four, and this is no one’s fault but Kerry’s. I’m so pissed at him I’m having to calm myself down with cups of Buddha Broth. Kerry is something like 6 to 10 percentage points behind Bush, largely, it seems, because he took the advice of campaign strategist Bob Shrum to not go overly negative against the Swift Boat and Vietnam atrocity sound-bite charges, in defiance of the general feeling that Shrum himself was a huge problem. My Presidential campaign feelings used to be focused on a basic anti-Bush posture. Now they’re half anti-Bush and half Kerry-is-an-indecisive-jerkwad.

You shoulda seen the 20-somethings congregated around Book Soup on the Sunset strip last night (Monday, 9.13) to catch a glimpse of Paris Hilton, who paid a visit to the book store around 7 pm to sign copies of “Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose” (Fireside). Men and women were looking to catch a peek through the window on the sidewalk, and a bunch of grungy guys were hanging around with digital cameras in the rear parking lot. Paris Hilton is just a rich ditz; people oohing and aahing her is a disease that really needs to be cured.

“September is way too early to declare an Academy Award winner,” admits N.Y. Daily News critic-columnist Jack Matthews, “but the Oscar engraver would do well to remember the spelling of Taylor Hackford’s star in the biographical drama Ray — it’s Jamie Foxx, with two Xs.” Foxx, he says, was “the talk of the town over the first half of the [Toronto Film Festival]. He gives such a complete performance as the late Ray Charles that you almost immediately forget you’re watching a performance by anyone other than Charles himself.” And yet Mathews also said that one of his big festival faves has been DreamWorks’ Shark Tale, and I haven’t been hearing that at all from other Toronto troopers. I’ve been hearing flip, facile, so-what and Will Smith can go diddle himself with his own fish tail (or words to that effect).

Hollywood Elsewhere has a new chat room called “Poet’s Corner” — currently up and running. It’s on the navigation bar — please sign up (or don’t sign up… it’s your call) and let fly. I’ve also gone live with the first Dispatches column, which has been written by Shall We Dance? director Peter Chelsom. And come Friday Kim Morgan, former film critic for Willamette Week and The Oregonian and a radio talk-show host for four years, will be be joining the fray with a new column.

So the Bond producers have lowered their sights sufficiently to allow for the hiring of Dougray Scott to play 007? (Whatever the accuracy of this story, it recently acquired the legitimacy of a printed account in London’s Sunday Mirror.) Bond casting has always been about the “it” factor. It’s obvious to me that Scott (check him out in Enigma or Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game) almost has it, but not quite. Clive Owen had it in those online BMW “drive” commercials, but “it” seemed to have deserted him when he turned up in King Arthur. And forget Eric Bana. The Scott hiring is said to be about Bond producer Barbara Broccoli wanting to return to a “brooding” Bond in the vein of Sean Connery. Sheer delirium. The Bond franchise needs to die, not reproduce itself. And it needs to die with dignity, which is a total impossibility with Broccoli and producing partner Michael G. Wilson at the wheel.

Kevin Spacey “absolutely can sing,” says Roger Ebert, but Beyond the Sea, Spacey’s Toronto-screened biopic of Bobby Darin, “follows a fairly familiar formula.” It also “has some problems,” he says, “including a strange structure involving Darin as a child commenting on his own adult life, but it also has real qualities, including musical numbers that really deliver. The movie has many songs in it, and Spacey sings them…damned well. It takes nerve to put yourself on the line like that, but he knew what he was doing.”

Zap2it editor Michael Syzmanski wrote on his Toronto blog last Saturday (9.11) that Taylor Hackford’s Ray, the Ray Charles biopic with Jamie Foxx in the title role, “is the best thing I’ve seen this weekend. All the rumors about Foxx getting a Best Actor nod at the Academy Awards this year [are] definitely true…the film is probably a contender for Best Picture too.” Universal is releasing it on 10.29.

A friend in Toronto who’s been a reliable source on good movies to watch for is telling me to put Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda into the Oscar Balloon as a potential Best Picture nominee. The film is “a sensation,” he says. “It’s the new generation’s The Killing Fields.” The script by George (director of A Bright Shining Lie, writer of Jim Sheridan’s In The Name of the Father) and Keir Pearson is a true story of Paul Rusesabagina, a hotel manager who sheltered over a thousand Tutsi refugees during the slaughter seige mounted by the Hutu militia in Rwanda. The friend says Don Cheadle, who plays Rususebagina, is “a lock for a Best Actor nomination.” Nick Nolte and Sophie Okonedo costar.

I’m getting good vibes and a sense of the right pieces coming together from that story about Jim Sheridan’s next film, a DreamWorks-funded remake of Akira Kurosawa’s classic, deeply touching Ikiru (1952). Variety said pic might possibly star Tom Hanks, in the role first played by Takashi Shimura. (Don’t think about this one at all, dude…do it!). Richard Price’s untitled script, which Sheridan is now revising, is about a low-level New York bureaucrat, 30 years on the same job, who learns he’s got stomach cancer. His first instinct is to party away his last few weeks, and then strike up a thing with an attractive new lady. But then he decides to do something good and helpful. (In the Kurosawa film, I think it was build a park for kids to play in.)

An early I Heart Huckabee’s review from Toronto sounds encouraging. “Five years after Three Kings, writer-director David O Russell returns with an absurdist existential comedy that is more idiosyncratic and daring than anything he has made before,” writes Screen Daily‘s Alan Hunter. “Huckabees combines the lickety-split verbal gymnastics of a Preston Sturges with the philosophical musings of a Stephen Hawking and then adds a side order of Three Stooges-style anarchy just to make things more interesting. The result is chaotic, charming, often amusing and frequently exasperating. The closest affinity in recent years would be with the Charlie Kaufman scripts for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation and the all-star cast could help ensure a similar level of commercial interest, although this is simply too odd for mainstream tastes and will require careful nurturing.”

More on Huckabee’s: “It is a considerable tribute to Russell’s vision that everything eventually fits into place and makes sense,” Hunter declares. “Beneath the apparent anarchy there is actually a strong sense of discipline that prevents the film becoming a folly along the lines of Peter Bogdanovich’s They All Laughed or John Boorman’s Where The Heart Is. The top-notch cast [seems] up for the challenge and whilst old pro’s like Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin and Isabelle Huppert effortlessly rise to the occasion, Mark Wahlberg is the real revelation, bringing expert comic timing and an emotional connection to his role of a man angered by the state of the world. It is Wahlberg’s best performance in some time.”