Before zotzing Picturehouse and Warner Independent, Warner Bros. management "did look at various permutations of keeping the companies in discussion," the Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein and Borys Kit wrote last night, including having Picturehouse chief Bob Berney and WI honcho Polly Cohen co-manage a merged specialty division, "something the execs agreed to do shortly after the New Line absorption was announced, Cohen said."

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Did the cautious-to-a-fault John Edwards say "I just voted for him on Tuesday" or "I just voted for 'em on Tuesday"? The man is a hedger, a tap-dancer, a slick operator, an angler-dangler with no balls.

Here, sequentially, are some of the Cannes Film Festival day-by-day highlights:

Wednesday, 5.14: Fernando Meirelles' Blindness (comp.).

Thursday, 5.15: Pablo Trapero's Leonera and Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir (comp.) along with Mark Osborne and John Stevenson's Kung Fu Panda (non-comp), Steve McQueen's Hunger and de Bong Joon Ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry's Tokyo! (Un Certain Regard).

Friday, 5.16: Arnaud Desplechin's Un Conte de Noel and Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Uc Mayman (comp.) along with Allison Thompson's The Third Wave...Read More

The Cannes Film Festival official screening schedule went up yesterday with the press screening schedule expected to post sometime tomorrow.

The rundown identifies Steven Soderbergh's The Argentine and Guerilla as a single film called Che that runs 4 hours and 28 minutes. Meaning, obviously, that as far as Cannes is concerned, the two-movie concept is out the window in favor of presenting a single epic-sized film with an intermission.

Che...Read More

Thanks to Variety's Anne Thompson for the initial YouTube post/link, and kudos to dialogue (i.e., subtitle) writer and stand-up comedian James Adomian. This isn't as funny as the collapse of HD-DVD video, but it's close.

Hitler/Clinton: "The superdelegates were supposed to trump the fucking voters! And now you tell me those fat fucks are waddling over to worship that dandy Obama, lke he's the second coming of Jimi Hendrix...Read More

That "All Things Considered" interview I did with NPR media reporter David Folkenflik two days ago will be linkable online by roughly 7 pm this evening. It's not just me talking -- it's three or four movie critics including, I think, former N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Mathews. The piece is called "Movie Critics Disappearing from Newsrooms."

In early April I wondered if anyone cares enough about Carol Reed's Outcast of the Islands (1951) to put it out on DVD. Those dedicated wackdoodles at the Criterion Collection, say. Well, hail hail rock 'n' roll because Outcast will air on Turner Classic Movies come Friday, August 22. August is traditionally TCM's one-star-per-day month and that day will be devoted to Outcast star Trevor Howard. The complete August schedule (with some other interesting rarities) is viewable here.

After reportedly trying to forge some kind of amicable, foward-looking merger between Picturehouse and Warner Independent, Warner Bros. management has suddenly thrown up its hands and is getting out of the "dependent" business altogether, it was announced about an hour ago.

WB president & COO Alan Horn released a statement that seems to translate, when you boil the snow out of it, into the following: "Sorry, but we've come to realize that running a Fox Searchlight- or Paramount Vantage-type operation just isn't our bag...Read More

Glenn Kenny, one of the country's finest film critics and a brilliant writer to boot, has been cut loose by Premiere.com. "What this means for this blog is still up in the air," he wrote this morning. "I've got meetings this afternoon in which such things are to be negotiated. In any case, I now join the ever-growing ranks...Read More

Speed Racer (opening Friday) is running at 90, 29 and 16, which looks to me like $25 to $30 million, at best. (Normally a 16 first choice means $15 to $20 million, depending on the demographic, but the family-trade current will kick this one up.) What Happens in Vegas is running at 87, 32 and 18. David Mamet's Redbelt is going wide this week with 20 general, 24 definite interest and 2 first choice. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (opening 5.16) is at 96, 42 and 14. Sex and the City...Read More

"In a heated phone call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi late last month, Hillary Clinton supporter Harvey Weinstein threatened to cut off campaign money to congressional Democrats unless Pelosi embraced a new plan by the movie mogul to finance a revote of the Democratic presidential primaries in Florida and Michigan, according to three officials who were briefed on the contents of the conversation." -- filed this morning by CNN White House correspondent Ed Henry.

Yesterday's Grand Wizard award went to Hillary Clinton for blatantly using the term "white Americans" in a USA Today interview written by Kathy Kiely and Jill Lawrence. "I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said, citing an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

''Bush may turn out to be the worst president in history,'' W. director Oliver Stone has told Entertainment Weekly . ''I think history is going to be very tough on him. But that doesn't mean he isn't a great story.

Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks as George and Laura in Oliver Stone's W.

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I wasn't going to say anything and just wait until the 5.18 screening of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in Cannes, but since Ain't It Cool has run a neg review from "ShogunMaster" (and since Hollywood Wiretap has linked to it), the cat is out of the bag and I may as well share something of my own.

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"The big question if Clinton stays in the race is this: Just how will she campaign? Yesterday, there were no negative TV ads or attack mailers. But Clinton did stress that she can win the general, implying that Obama might not be able to.

"'I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on,' she told USA Today, citing her support with white working-class voters. It's comments like that one that might drive more supers toward Obama pretty quickly. Why? Because they know the math...Read More

I admire and respect the moves and the intent of Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.9), which I saw last night at the Leow's IMAX near Lincoln Center. Right away I was saying to myself, "All right, this is out there....infuriating but brilliantly out there." But it offers almost nothing in the way of genuine personal charm (except for the monkey, Chim-Chim) and I began looking at my watch starting around the 45-minute mark. Honestly? More like a half-hour in.

This is a deranged, steroid-cranked family-action movie...the work of madmen...Read More

Ain't It Cool's Drew McWeeny was on the record with his Speed Racer rave yesterday, before David Poland. I should have acknowledged this when I posted my 5.7 piece at 1:19 pm. "I think critics are forgetting that part of our job is to not only say what we like, but to review a film based on the intent of that film," he says. "Comparing Speed Racer to Andrei Tarkovsky or serious adult cinema is a sucker's bet. Of course they don't compare. But it's one of the most outrageous visions in kid's cinema since Read More

"In his victory speech after the smashing North Carolina results came in, Barack Obama went directly after both John McCain and the media. '[McCain's] plan to win in November appears to come from the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election,' Obama said. 'Yes, we know what's coming. I'm not naive. We've already seen it, the same names and labels...Read More

Come July 9th, this is the guy I want standing on my desk. I'm going to lay out the money right now. Heath Ledger wasn't a friend (hardly) but he always smiled and gave me a "hey" wave when we made eye contact at parties or press gatherings, and he always gave me two or three minutes when he wasn't being swamped. For what it's worth and in a weird sort of way, having this guy on my desk will be, for me, a way of burning a candle for him.

Modest and likable and decent though he may be (okay, is), this is not the real John McCain. Or it is and it's not enough. A charming, low-key guy selling misguided, outmoded, old-school medicine. Nice to talk to, but inwardly snarly and obstinate and, in a decent-American-on-a-Sunday-morning sort of way, blind.

There is nothing wrong or suspect about liking a film that almost everyone else hates. On the contrary, it is the mark of a critic who's probably worth reading ...as long as he/she doesn't go all Armond White on disliked or discredited films too often. That said, it's a bit of an eye-opener (or is it a dark omen?) that MCN's David Poland has given a fairly hearty thumbs-up to Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.9)

With tracking looking dicey at best and a Rotten Tomatoes positive rating of 37%...Read More

Forever partial to the films of Abel Ferrara, the Cannes Film Festival is offering a special screening of his latest, a doc about a certain storied Manhattan hotel called Chelsea on the Rocks. Screening on Friday,. 5.23, it'll include "interviews with residents past and present" such as Milos Forman, Ethan Hawke, Dennis Hopper and R. Crumb, plus vintage music, archival footage and re-enactments of famous Chelsea episodes -- Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious, Janis Joplin -- performed by Bijou Phillips, Jamie Burke, Adam Goldberg, Giancarlo Esposito and Grace Jones.

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"GOP heavyweight James Baker III and Democratic strategist Ron Klain couldn't have been more at odds than they were during the disputed Bush v. Gore 2000 election battle in Florida," writes Politico's Jeffrey Ressner. "So it's no small irony that as HBO's telefilm Recount (debuting 5.25) was being readied, the two men both signed off on a completely fictional scene in which their characters meet briefly on an airport tarmac."

(l.) James Baker; (r.) Ron Klain

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We've all felt that peculiar irritation that kicks in when news of yet another "special collector's edition" DVD of a classic film (single or double-disc...same difference) is announced. I say to myself "no, I won't fall for it...screw those greedy DVD distributors trying to milk me for the second or third or fourth time." Then I read that the new release will provide a "restored" and presumably improved transfer, and I'm hooked. Even if the transfer on a DVD of the film that I own looks perfectly fine. Because I'm a sucker for any upgrade.

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Cinemorgue, which features listings and descriptions of thousands of death scenes that are alphabetized by the names of actors and actresses, is grim and exhaustive and...valuable, I guess, but also kind of strange. I'd forgotten how many times Elke Sommer has been gruesomely killed on-screen. Two skiiing accidents, shot three times (machine gunned in 1969's The Wrecking Crew, the Dean Martin-Matt Helm movie), blown up, and bludgeoned to death.

Almost all movie deaths, it seems, are brutal, bloody, sudden, ghastly, traumatic and otherwise unpeaceful. Nod-off deaths -- like Sir Cedric Hardwicke 's passing in The Ten Commandments...Read More

"The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti- Reverend Wright...campaign, they are simply going to fail." -- a declaration made yesterday by (believe it or not) Newt Gingrich on Human Events, a conservative website.

The DVD of the original 219-minute cut of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate has been available for more than eight years, but even those who mostly despise the film (myself among them) will concede that seeing an allegedly "restored" print on a big screen in a first-rate house like Santa Monica's Aero is definitely the preferred way to go. Kevin Thomas will introduce the 5.22 Aero screening, which will start at 7:30 pm.

History long ago noted that renowned critic F.X. Feeney is primarily responsible for recasting Heaven's Gate...Read More

Lionsgate has decided to open Frank Miller's The Spirit, an adaptation of Will Eisner's heavy-noir comic strip, on Christmas Day 2008 instead of 1.16.09. Pamela McClintock's 5.6 Variety story, quoting Lionsgate theatrical films chief Tom Ortenberg, says the decision to shift the film to 12.25 "came after the project was presented to fans at New York Comic-Con."

Scarlett Johansson as "Silken Floss" in Frank Miller's The Spirit

Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha (Hanway Films), which is playing at Manhattan's Film Forum from now through 5.20, is arguably the best Iraq War foot-soldier drama to have been released thus far. Mostly because it uses the POV of all the sad victims in this wretched episode and presents the particulars in a way that straddles the line between judgment and lament.

Shot in purposefully ragged docu-drama style with non-actors and deserving, I feel, a solid 8 on a scale of 10, Haditha will certainly be avoided en masse...Read More

Huge exhale and good riddance. Barack Obama wailed in North Carolina and lost Indiana by a nose hair, and that, ladies and gentlemen and undecideds, is finally the end of Hillary Cinton. Tim Russert said this morning that every political player now accepts that Obama will be the party's nominee in Denver. Politico's Mike Allen wrote this morning that Obama "won't push her out -- he'll let her get her coat, and walk to the door. But he's talking to the whole country now -- not just to Democrats, and not to individual states."

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Forced to simulate indications of seasoned intelligence and sensitivity during a recent visit to Keith Olberman's "Countdown," Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo star Kal Penn was, by any fair standard, fairly convincing.

Possibly as a result of catching yesterday's Oprah tribute, Sumner Redstone has amended his position on Tom Cruise (or told his wife to stop kvetching) and has been laying down a welcome mat in hopes that a Mission: Impossible 4 might happen down the road. (S.R. and Cruise dined together in March, it says here.) "I consider Tom Cruise a great actor and a good friend," Redstone said during a business conference in South Korea. "And if Paramount decides -- and they will make the decision -- to move ahead with him, I will not object."

The Swedish Hancock trailer is supposed to be ruder than the American one? The beginnings and middle of both are pretty much the same. I'm not sure about the final thirds.

First, those stories about Heath Ledger/Joker dolls fetching $50 a pop on e-Bay don't appear to be valid, as this e-Bay page makes clear. Second, 6" Joker dolls are for eight year-olds. Serious collectors prefer the more detailed 12" or 15" tall models with their much better facial likenesses.

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No article has filled me with more trepidation and suspicion about Hancock than last Sunday's N.Y. Times piece by Michael Cieply. It's supposed to be about a superhero flick that pushes limits in terms of the main character's behavior, but all I got out of it were a bunch of pretending-to-be-concerned-or-thoughtful comments from a lot of smug over-paid people who ride around in pricey cars.

I really don't like that photo of producer Akiva Goldsman laughing uproariously while standing next to Will Smith...Read More

The Indiana/North Carolina basics: "At stake are a total of 187 pledged delegates -- 115 in North Carolina and 72 in Indiana. Polls open in North Carolina at 6:30 am and close at 7:30 pm. In Indiana, most polls open at 6:00 am and close at 6:00 pm, but because some parts of the state are in the Central Time Zone, the official poll closing time is 7:00 pm eastern.

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Indy 4 director Steven Spielberg recently told N.Y. Times contributor Terrence Rafferty that "he tries to cut as little as possible" in the Indy action sequences because "every time the camera changes dynamic angles, you feel there's something wrong, that there's some cheating going on." Precisely. Too many movies feel like visual cheats from the get-go. So Spielberg's goal is "to do the shots the way Chaplin or Keaton would, everything happening before the eyes of the audience, without a cut."

Sounding a little bit like Werner Herzog...Read More

"That's a fragment of something Andrei Tarkovsky said. He said that art is different than life because art is a representation of life and therefore it doesn't contain death. Life contains death. So making art is life-affirming. So even if the art is tragic, it's still optimistic. There can never be pessimistic artists, there can only be mediocrity." -- from John Del Signore's 5.5 piece for the Gothamist about Lou Reed and Julian Schnabel discussing Berlin, a film about Reed's 2006 revival performance of his 1973 album at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn.

Berlin...Read More

A movie is only as good as its weakest creative link -- as clever or knowing or visually alive as the stodgiest, most old-fashioned, least-hip person in the inner creative circle. So if it turns out that there's something a little bit wrong with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull...Read More

Speaking of the fight scenes in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Harrison Ford has told The Australian's Chrissy Iley that "we didn't shoot it like a Matrix style where if you hit somebody they end up in this big space and you didn't feel the hurt, you don't feel the fear. I feel you very quickly lose emotional connection with the character if it's like that. We are more old school."

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This teaser for Beverly Hills Chihuahua (Disney, 9.26) obviously promises a spirited family entertainment. Chihuahuas are Mexican dogs, of course, and Mexico, of course, was the seat of ancient Aztec and Mayan culture many centuries ago. But what could this have to do with a present-day story about a rich Beverly Hills chihuahua named Chloe (voiced by Drew Barrymore) getting lost during a Mexican vacation and looking for a way home? Obviously she gradually gets past being a spoiled and arrogant bitch by connecting with her ancestral roots, etc.

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I feel horrible about what may happen tomorrow in Indiana and North Carolina. Terrified. It could all finally start to be over (please!) if Barack Obama finishes slightly ahead of the Hildebeest among the Hoosiers and takes her, say, by eight or ten points among the tarheels. But it could go badly too, and the agony could well continue. Just ignore it, I've been telling myself today. Or at least don't fret. At least until tomorrow.

Then I came across this 5.4 Kurt Andersen piece in New York...Read More

One and a half tablets of Tylenol PM resulted in four hours of sleep on a totally crammed 767 that left LAX last night around 11:50 pm. Groggily took the E train out of Jamaica, forgetting that I should have taken the A or the C which would have stopped at Broadway Junction, where you get the L train. A slow hellish ride ensued, the train poking along at an average of 12 mph through endless dark tunnels under Queens.

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Oprah Winfrey aired a Tom Cruise interview last Friday, and today she's running a tribute show about his 25 years of stardom. Cruise's big career kick-off, of course, was Risky Business, which opened in August 1983. It strikes me as odd, as it has to Roger Freidman, that neither Cruise nor Winfrey thought to invite the film's director-writer, Paul Brickman, to take part in the show. By any fair standard this seems like ingratitude and bad manners.

The reason for the blow-off, I'm presuming, is because Brickman didn't become a powerhouse director in the wake of ...Read More

Taking advantage of last weekend's first-anywhere screenings of Sex and the City (New Line/HBO, 5.30) for junket press here in Manhattan, N.Y. Daily News feature writer Colin Bertram blew off the embargo and ran a spoiler-free valentine review in today's edition.

I talked this morning to a journalist who saw it here also, and if you merge his reactions with Bertram's I'm getting the sense that it's not too bad. Lacking the constitution of a stand-alone movie, perhaps, but enjoyable enough on its own terms.

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