A couple of weeks after I called director-screenwriter John Milius about that issue of seeing parallels between the Wolverines in his classic Red Dawn (1984) and the anti-American resistance in Iraq, he finally called back. I’ve been speaking to him off and on since the late ’80s or early ’90s. We danced around the question for a bit, but that’s often what talking to Milius is like — circling, veering in and out. He’s one of the greatest guys in the world to talk to about the psychology of war and military history. We eventually sashayed into the subject. “I’m one of the few people who think that the Iraq war is a good thing,” he said. “It’s not the goal of it [that's bad], but the way it’s being conducted…conducted for the beneft of the Halliburton corporation, and the...

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I’m reluctant to get into this because I know how venting about weight makes me sound, but funny-guy Vince Vaughn looks too bulky in the trailer for The Breakup (Universal, 6.2). I was half focused on the premise, dialogue and jokes, and half trying to ignore a voice that wouldn’t stop saying, “Whoa…guy’s gotta hit the treadmill.” But I lost the battle and the “whoa” voice, in fact, kept getting louder and louder. Forget Vaughn’s Swingers physique — he hasn’t had that for ten years. The problem is that he looks heavier in this trailer than he did in The Wedding Crashers, in which he was close to the edge but okay. Vaughn can relax and be zen about who he is, but there’s a line at which a slightly gutty bear-like physicality tips over into the realm of “uh-oh…he’s gone too far.” The last time I...

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Being something of a talent-spotter, I agree with Anne Thompson‘s recommendation about Movie Marketing Madness. It’s a site about the latest scientific techniques to strengthen soil nutrients in water-depleted areas…a site about the business of selling movies, I mean…and it’s pretty damn good. The author is Chris Thilk, a 31 year-old Chicago-based writer and married guy with two kids. (I wrote earlier that Thilk is most likely single and lonely, since happy fulfilled guys don’t bang out blogs….not this time! Thilk has also never toiled in any ad agencies.)

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The smartest thing that Business Week columnist Jon Fine says in his riff about New Line’s Snakes on a Plane (8.18) is “I can’t wait till this comes out…although on a certain level, I guess it already has.” Precisely. Snakes is the internet rumble about it…I’ve had lots of fun and laughed at a lot of hand-made songs and video spots…and I’m starting to think the hoopla has probably already peaked, in fact. (I told this to a Washington Post staffer who interviewed me for a Snakes piece yesterday morning — file it quickly!) Richard Williamson at Adfreak has suggested a headline for the final...

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There’s a boo-boo in Borys Kit‘s Hollywood Reporter story that’s partly about Stone Village Prods. having hired Bo Goldman to pen an adaptation of a forthcoming remake of Jules Dassin’s Rififi, which will star Al Pacino in the Jean Servais role. The piece names the director of the remake as “Walt” Becker. Referred to in the story as Pacino’s collaborator on Sea of Love and City Hall, the guy’s actual name is Harold Becker. Walt Becker, an actual guy, directed Van Wilder.

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“Page Six” says in a lead item today that “embattled Paramount chief Brad Grey‘s days seem to be numbered” and that “speculation on a possible replacement for him is running rampant.” Okay, maybe…but does anyone really think Viacom president and CEO Tom Freston and the Paramount board are going to jettison Grey because federal prosecutors are rattling their sabers about some wiretapping mucky-muck that went on back in the ’90s when Grey was a talent manager, and because reporters are writing stories about this? LA Indie‘s Ross Johnson believes that upper-level executives relish wrestling matches of this sort, and that the pressure from the Pellicano case may actually strengthen the bond between Grey and Freston, who hired him. But all bets are...

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A seasoned talent who has his alliances and enemies like anyone else in this town, but in my estimation has always had a fairly profound understanding of Hollywood power games, and who now enjoys a certain priveleged insight into upper-stratosphere Hollywood maneuverings…this guy told me something yesterday about Paramount chief Brad Grey‘s former attorney Bert Fields, who’s being pressured these days by federal prosecutors over suspicions that he may have been doing the bidding of Grey (and possibly others) when he allegedly hired indicted investigator Anthony Pellicano to wiretap certain persons in order to provide Grey and other clients with information that could help them in negotiations over this and that. This guy, in any event, declared that Fields, a man in his mid ’70s who’s lived a very elegant Hollywood poobah life for decades, is “going down” and may actually be looking at hard...

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I rather liked Greg McLean‘s Wolf Creek upon seeing it at Sundance ’05, and I said so right away. Very few in my journo circle agreed, though, and more than a few despised it. Which is why it feels oddly comforting, way after the fact, to read Christopher Kelly, film critic for the Dallas-Ft. Worth Star Telegram, give it a thumbs-up. Mat Zoller Seitz was startled by Kelly’s piece, and then challenged him to discuss it online.

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That guy who’s worked with N.Y. Times Manohla Dargis and has more to the point trashed the idea of her being worthy for the Pulitzer Prize in that Women’s Wear Daily piece has an enemy in L.A. Daily News critic Glenn Whipp. “Whoever this source is has a serious case of professional jealousy,” Whipp wrote this evening. “This person never hears that Dargis is the best critic the Times has? I hear it all the time.”

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I’m watching the PBS DVD of Ric Burns’s two-hour Eugene O’Neill documentary, and it has a clip from a 1960 televised production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, and suddenly there’s a dissolute Robert Redford playing Don Parritt….

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“Now that Peter Jackson’s King Kong has been released as a two-disc DVD, enterprising fans will undoubtedly find a way to upload the 188-minute film and trim it down to a more dynamic running time,” writes DVD/Laser Newsletter editor Doug Pratt. Please! If someone does this soon, I will provide a link and do my part to bring viewers to it. Jackson’s Kong is the ultimate example of a film that plays pretty well the first viewing (exciting after the 70 minute mark!…that fun dino run!), and gets weaker and weaker the more you think back upon it. Repeat after me — Jackson has no discpline, has no discipline, has no discipline. “As it stands, the film plays like Jackson had gotten confused in the production rush and released the...

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Film critic Manohla Dargis has been been submitted by her N.Y. Times editors as a contender for a Pulitzer Prize, and someone “whos worked with her there” trashes her, saying “by no means do you ever hear that [Dargis] is the best critic [the Times] has…she’s known for synopsizing and giving stuff away. You’re not supposed to read her if you don’t want to know what’s going to happen.”

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Universal Pictures has agreed to hand over 10% of the opening weekend grosses of United 93 (opening 4.28) to the Flight 93 National Memorial. The proposed $30 million memorial will be located in a field near the spot where Flight #93 crashed on 9/11, near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. This seems like a good move, right? The Universal donation, I mean.

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With Basic Instinct 2 arriving this Friday, here’s an amusing piece about unwanted sequels by L.A. Daily News critic Glenn Whipp. One of the the misbegotten is Oliver’s Story, a 1978 sequel to Love Story. I remember this film’s poster fondly, or rather a dialogue- added variation. I saw it on a New York subway station wall just after the film opened in December ’78. The graffiti dialogue made me laugh, and I’ve told people about it for years and they’ve laughed, so I’ll try it out on the readership. This isn’t a family column, but I’m going to use polite language anyway because it won’t be very funny if I use the original terminology. Consider the image on the poster and that famous “love means never having to say you’re...

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Hollywood Elsewhere’s technical ally Jim Stanley has constructed a special search engine that’s aimed at only the WIRED section. He’s eventually going to put up a regular link to this on the main page, but in the meantime here it is.

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Many people have written in and asked if I’ve seen Dylan Avery and Korey Rowe‘s Loose Change (2nd edition), a documentary that lays out a lot of suspicious maybes, intriguing indications, and clues of different shapes, weights and sizes to support a premise that neocons in the U.S. government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks for their own political benefit. A lot of readers think it’s at least a disturbing piece (smart, disciplined, well-ordered), and probably the most famous member of this club is Charlie Sheen. Anyway, I’ve seen it and thought about it, and I know a lot of bright people who seem genuinely jazzed about it, but I just don’t accept — okay, won’t accept — the notion that this kind of...

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Oh, and by the way: the allegedly brash nude footage of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct 2 isn’t that brash at all. I guess Columbia had to trim it down to satisfy the MPAA. All I know is that is that your eyes barely have a chance to feast before the editor cuts back to David Morrissey. It’s basically blink-and-you’ll-miss-it. There’s a nice boob shot that lasts maybe four or five seconds, and I don’t know what that New York guy was on about when he told “Page Six” that “the only thing worse than the dialogue were Sharon’s implants,” one of which seemed “lopsided.” Bullshit — they’re fine. And they’re not over-sized, which is what’s wrong with 95% of the tit jobs out there.

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Paul Greengrass‘s United 93, the 9/11 thriller hitting theatres on 4.28, will open Manhattan’s Tribeca Film Festival on 4.25. Tammy Rosen’s press release says that people whose family members died on Flight 93 will be there. Also attending will be “other 9/11 groups and family organizations and first responders whose lives were forever altered on that day.” (After I read this last sentence to a friend, he asked, “Will they be flying them in on United?”) It’s obvious why this downtown Manhattan film festival is looking to show United 93, but I sense a vague strategy in the presence of the victims’ families. There almost seems to be a selling-point message in this: “If these people who really suffered that day can roll with this film, all of you folks out there saying ‘no, no…too...

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David Fincher‘s Zodiac is absolutely going to be called that. Chronicles is just what it was called during casting and shooting, apparently…as a ruse. Movies do this sometimes. Just yesterday a breakdown came out for Transformers under the name Prime Detective.

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Columbia had an all-media screening last night of Basic Instinct 2 (Columbia, 3.31) at the new AMC Century City plex. The hope was that it might be Showgirls bad…something deliriously awful…so bad it would make middle-aged men squeal like pigs. Alas, the verdict is that it falls short. At best, it’s Catwoman bad, which is what gossip columnist George Christy said to me after the show. But of course, that movie wasn’t bad enough either. The New York Post‘s “Page Six” reports that people laughed at some of the BI2 dialogue at Monday night’s premiere screening in Manhattan. Two or three times, I noticed, the L.A. crowd chortled at activity that seemed intended to elicit just that response. (Although you know something’s not quite working correctly when they giggle at a guy taking two slugs in the chest.) The usually...

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It’s not just David Fincher‘s Zodiac (Paramount, 9.22) that’s probably going to run about three hours, but also Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Warner Bros., October), which stars Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard and Sam Rockwell. I don’t know anything rock-solid, but it seems fair to deduce that the James film will run long because Dominik’s script is a whopping 210 pages, whereas James Vanderbilt‘s Zodiac script runs about 190 pages…do the math. Here, by the way, is a well-written appraisal of a 2004 draft of the James script, posted six days ago by novelist and historian Frederick J. Chiaventone, a Missouri resident who’s been interviewed for an “American Experience” documentary about James.

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Here are two edited reactions to Julia Roberts‘ stage debut in the very first preview performance of Three Days of Rain in New York on Tuesday night, 3.28: Guy #1 has written that Roberts “appeared nervous in the beginning but hit her stride in the second act. Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper [were] both outstanding. A standing ovation came at the end (of course), but Julia appeared very happy to get this one out of the way. A few lines were flubbed, but the show is in good shape considering it was the first preview.” Guy #2 wrote that the show is “good, not great…but that’s the play’s fault, not the actors’. All three were very good, although Cooper stole the first act as his character is very alive and confident. Julia really got to shine in...

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Kim Voynar at Cinematical has spoken to Rebel Without a Cause screenwriter Stewart Stern, and reports that “the screen test Marlon Brando made in 1947″ — which will be included on a new double-disc DVD of A Streetcar Named Desire coming out May 2nd — “had practically nothing to do with the Rebel Without A Cause we’re all familiar with.” Stern tells Voynar that “Marlon’s 1947 test was not for Rebel Without a Cause as we know it. Dr. Robert Lindner wrote a book of that title in which there were several case histories, written in fictional form, of young offenders whom Lindner had...

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The Guardian’s Xan Brooks on how well Marlon Brando might have handled the Jim Stark role in Rebel Without a Cause.

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It didn’t truly hit me until yesterday the degree to which public broadcasting TV affiliates (like L.A.’s KCET) are operated like medieval feifdoms, totally local and unto themselves with no regard for providing viewers with shared information about options to re-view or purchase popular shows. I’m saying this as a way of explaining that I was bizarrely misinformed yesterday by both a KCET spokesperson and a WGBH media relations executive named Lucy Sholley when I called about wanting to see a re-broadcast of Ric Burns’ Eugene O’Neill, a highly praised two-hour documentary that aired on PBS stations Monday night. Neither the KCET guy nor Sholley thought it was pertinent to mention that a DVD of Burns’ doc has been available for sale for over a week on various DVD-purchase websites like

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That $10 million Randy Quaid Brokeback Mountain lawsuit filed on Thursday, 3.23 against the makers of this widely honored, very profitable film (i.e., Focus Features, James Schamus, David Linde, Del Mar Productions), now enjoys a certain enhancement by the mere fact that Sharon Waxman has examined its merits in a N.Y. Times story out today (3.29). Boil the snow out of it, and the conclusions are these: (a) Randy Quaid is in no way a whinin’, groanin’ sourpuss actor but in fact has a bright, buoyant attitude about the lawsuit, as amply indicated by the photo that...

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If anyone in Manhattan went to the first-night preview of Richard Greenberg‘s Three Days of Rain on Tuesday, 3.28 (which is being performed as I write this, the time being 9:04 pm back east) and feels like sharing an opinion about how first-time performer Julia Roberts did in the lead role, please get in touch. Roberts’ costars in the Joe Mantello-directed show are Paul Rudd and Bradley Cooper. The official opening is 4.19, and the reportedly sold-out show will run at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre for for 12 weeks. This Playbill piece claims “many critics consider [Rain to be] Greenberg’s best play,” but a theatre aficionado pal says this isn’t true. Patricia Clarkson played Roberts’ role when Rain was first mounted at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 1997.

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If you weren’t watching your local PBS station Monday night (like me) and therefore missed Ric Burns‘ Eugene O’Neill, a two-hour “American Experience” documentary about this country’s greatest playwright, you’re out of luck for a while. There are no repeat broadcasts set for the immediate future, although the widely-praised film will probably turn up on DVD sometime in the summer. Not making this show available for subsequent viewings over the next couple of weeks is a ridiculous policy. It underscores the suspicion that PBS is a very old-fashioned organization with separate feifdoms spread across the country, and basically out of touch with the world.

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Two things about David Fincher‘s Zodiac (Paramount, 9/22) — one sounding a tad questionable and the other most likely accurate. The film, first things first, is a crime period piece based on the Robert Graysmith “books” about cops and reporters on the trail of the Zodiac killer who plagued the San Francisco area in the ’60s and ’70s. Except last night a person close to the film told me it’s no longer being called Zodiac but Chronicles, allegedly due to some title-rights issue. (The IMDB lists a recent Thinkfilm release with Rory Culkin and Robin Tunney called The Zodiac, but a Paramount spokesperson says “we have the rights” allowing them to use the word “Zodiac” as a title so don’t take this one to the bank just yet. If this info turns...

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