If you missed yesterday’s full column, looking at Insomnia and Spirit: Stallone in a Cimmaron, you can still catch it here.

SHAFT MEETS THE MOYL:  Are you looking for the re-quel to Undercover Brother even before it happens?  Well, they are in production on The Hebrew Hammer, also know in the screenplay by Jonathan Kesselman as "a baaaad Jewish brother," "the baaddest Heeb this side of Tel Aviv" and a "Semitic super stud."  The film will star Adam Goldman and The New York Observer’s Rebecca Traister breaks the jews… uh, news. 

WOW!!!:  Fox and LucasFilm have come out fighting for weekend 2 of Clones.  They are running an ad touting the summer’s biggest action hero, using Columbia’s Spider-Man signature font, then delivering Yoda, kicking ass.  Very clever.  Very tough stuff.  I don’t know whether this shows that the Star Wars team is cocky or nervous, but this is the kind of stunt you’d expect for a big new comedy, not The Force.  Amazing.

KING ME:  Is it possible that the Wall Street Journal’s Tom King is an aspiring employee of DreamWorks?  Could he be trying to make it up to David Geffen by key-stroking Geffen’s studio?  And who at Universal pissed in Tommy’s Corn Flakes?

The Weekly Tom King Horror Show continues, as he makes up yet another trend that isn’t happening for some unknown reason.  It’s a little bit suspicious that he ran a brown-nosed interview with Jeffrey Katzenberg last Friday and now he is essentially making an excuse for the dud that is DreamWorks’  Hollywood Ending, while completely disregarding Universal’s claim that they were happy with the opening of About A Boy.

Y’all know me and my anal attitude about those nasty things called facts.  No offense to Terry Press, who is doing her job by telling Tom what to write, but Spider-Man had as much to do with the new Woody tanking as Sammy Davis, Jr. had to do with the development of 3-D film. 

One of these days, Tom is going to look before he leaps.  DreamWorks has released three Woody Allen movies.  The first, Small Time Crooks, had the best opening of any Woody Allen film in the last 20 years ($3.9 million) and the highest domestic gross in the last decade ($17.1 million).  Good movie.  Good trailer.  Good buzz.

A year later, DreamWorks released The Curse of the Jade Scorpion on 38 more screens, hoping to capitalize, I suppose, on Crooks’ success.  The opening was just $2.5 million on its way to less than $7.5 million domestic.  Bad movie.  Iffy trailer.  Bad buzz.

And what happened to Hollywood Ending against the amazing Spider-Man?  Well, DreamWorks showed less belief in the film by going out on only 765 screens, which would be nothing to Spidey, but represented a 15 percent reduction between Woodys.  Not only that, but Hollywood Ending’s per screen was $85 lower than Jade Scorpion’s.  And the film lost 45 percent in its second weekend and 50 percent in its third.

What conclusions would you come up with?   Let’s see… it could be that Spider-Man was too dominant for any other film to have a chance.  That doesn’t explain why a hideous film with a smaller advertising budget than Hollywood Ending, Deuces Wild, opened to $2.7 million.  But let’s forget that for a minute. 

How about this idea?  Woody Allen is in a distinct decline at the box office.  His best movie in the last decade, Bullets Over Broadway, managed only $13.4 million domestic.  Sweet & Lowdown, which sported two Oscar nominated performances, managed only $4.2 million domestic.  Hollywood Ending was generally pilloried by critics, was about Hollywood – a notorious box office danger zone – and the trailer made it clear that Woody is involved with two women of less than half his age, an issue that is becoming less amusing with each film.  Could that be why the movie made The Sweetest Thing look like a cash cow?

Meanwhile, over at Universal, the studio opened About A Boy in just 1207 theaters, fully planning to expand their screen count by over 500 in weekend two.  It’s called a strategy, Tom.  A plan.  Building word of mouth for a good movie.  Crazy!  Almost as crazy as waiting to see The Bourne Identity before trying to bury it in a blur of innuendo about the production.  Are you going to run a retraction if About A Boy does $15 million over the holiday weekend?  And what if Spirit, Insomnia and Enough manage more than $75 million between them?  Where’s your theory then?  And what of Fox’s Unfaithful, which dropped only 29 percent last weekend and could kick in another $15 million over this weekend to close in on $50 million?

GORING THE INDIES:  Film Threat master Chris Gore has a good piece up this week on what not to do if you want to make an independent film that doesn’t suck.  It’s a Top Ten list that does a good job of wrapping it up. 

FOXY:  Okay, so Fox has pushed the release date for Daredevil to the second weekend of February.  Fine.  No biggie.  But instead of tap dancing around and having Avi Arad say something dumb, like, ”The summer is starting earlier and earlier,” and throwing out numbers from John Q, which opened in this slot to $23.6 million, why not just tell the truth.  That weekend is Hannibal Weekend.  They aren’t fishing for $25 million. They aren’t even fishing for the $46 million that Ice Age did this March.  Hannibal, on the second weekend of February, is the eleventh biggest opening of all-time, with $58 million, more than 25 percent ahead of Ice Age, the second highest first-quarter opening ever.  I guess that Fox doesn’t want people associating their PG-13 comic book film with a guy eating Ray Liotta’s brains.  One could also figure that Fox knows that there will be MLK Day competition from December movies that are going wide and that they don’t want this year’s Black Hawk Down keeping them from a single prime-time screen.  That said, one would have to figure that the mythology of distribution, which relies, outside of summer and the Thanksgiving-to-New Year’s corridor, on very specific history, lives on.

ONE LAST LUCAS HIT:  I have been staying away from the Empire Strikes Back issue, which keeps getting thrown in my face as evidence that if George let someone else direct, the movies would be appreciably better.  I hate to be forced to bash a 79-year-old man who hasn’t worked as a director in almost 10 years, but… is Irv Kershner really the guy that Lucas bashers want to hang their believes upon? 

First, the idea that because there were other names involved Lucas was hands-off is just dumb.  Obviously, he kept his hands around the series’ throat.  But look at Kershner… This is the man who made three of the worst Bond movies ever... the hideous sequel to RoboCop... a TV director who is 21 years OLDER than Lucas, who would have been completely forgotten were it not for Lucas.  Is he the hero of this story?  Really?  The man behind the camera on The Eyes of Laura Mars and Loving (the best of his work) is the visionary who made Star Wars safe from its creator? 

Do you want to argue Larry Kasden?  Great writer.  He also co-wrote Jedi.  So, the parts of Jedi that you liked were his and the parts you hated were George’s, right?

Want to get into the late Richard Marquand?  He made three watchable movies in an eight-year directing career that consisted of seven movies – Eye of the Needle, Jagged Edge and Jedi.  He was six years older than Lucas.  Did he keep George from his “bad’ instincts?  Was he the cutting edge young director of taste and insight that people keep praying for? 

Enough already.

Perspective has made the view of Empire different than it was in its time.  I have no problem with anyone not like what Lucas has done on these films.  And I'm not interested in attacking Kershner... but the idea that allowing Kershner to take the directing helm, with George close underfoot and a first-time screenwriter helping with the script was soooooo different... no.

George has always been a control freak and was on Empire too.

The reason Empire is so beloved - and why it got reamed when it came out - is that it is a dark, moody middle movie with no answers and because it ended (nearly) with the immortal words, "Luke, I am your father."  That blew up everyone's skirts and still does.

We didn't know the ending.  We know the ending of this trilogy.  Do you think there is a reason why the Wachowskis decided not to do a prequel?  Could it be that they realized that it was an impossible task to please the audience while working with the constraints of a known future? 

What was the most memorable thing in Phantom?  A new character with no known story.  What's the most memorable thing in Clones?  An old character doing something we never quite expected. 

Me?  I would have loved it if we found out that Yoda knew exactly what was going on and was letting it happen.  For me, that would have been a master stroke. To achieve balance, Darth Vader must happen.  But that's not what Lucas did.  Even Jango Fett is not a fully formed character... good action sequence, but not a very rich character.

What was thrilling about the original series was that we didn't know.  What's really tough in this series is that we do... very little room to breathe for the aging, bearded man from the wine country… who has three kids, aged 9 to 21 to offer perspective.

READERS OF THE DAY:  The Captain writes:  “"The question is whether it's good or bad. Nothing more."

That's what you said in you're recent column in reference to  'Attack of the Clones' and you are absolutely right. And as a 42 year old artist and life-long film fanatic, I've got to weigh in my 2 cents and say that 'Attack' is more than bad, it is awful. Where to begin; the dialogue in that movie was among the worst I have ever heard, especially in the romantic scenes. Hayden Christenson, Natalie Portman and even Samuel Jackson give terrible, wooden performances (although I think this probably has more to do with the way they were directed). Except during the action sequences the movie is slow... slow .. slow. My wife and I checked our watches at least 3 times while watching and that's something I rarely do with any movie. The movie is derivative copying elements from 'The Sound of Music' , 'The 5^th Element' ,'Gladiator' ,'A.I.' and others.

I could go on but I'll stop my list here. In my conversations with people about the movie I can't find a single person who rates it more than 'Okay' and most agree that it is just plain bad! These are all just opinions and not personal attacks at George Lucas. He is free, of course, to make any type of movie he chooses, but if the question posed is whether 'Attack of the Clones', (or 'Phantom Menace' for that matter), is bad; well then the answer is YES!!

Of course people are going in droves. A couple of the reasons being that; 1. Most of us are invested in the storyline having seen the first trilogy and it's a matter of seeing something through to the end and; 2. It's more like a big, thrilling carnival ride than a movie. For the non-discriminatory movie-goer it's an undemanding, fun couple of hours filled with cool images, big explosions and great effects. But, for those of us who look for something more it's just a flat-out, disappointing waste of time - AGAIN!

I'll no doubt see the final installment because how can I not, having invested so much energy and money into the rest of the series, but I will not hold out my hopes that it will be any better.”

Miles of Smiles counters:  “Everyone I know loved Episode II, some even calling the best in the series. While I wouldn't go that far, I would say Yoda fighting is the most exciting moment of any Star Wars film (just a notch ahead of the Millennium Falcon in the Asteroid belt in Episode V).

As for all those critics of Episode II (and I): if you could only watch Star Wars: Episode III or Spiderman 2, which would you choose?”

E ME:  Well?  And tell me all about your four day movie orgy.