Have you noticed that it’s a crappy moment for movie news? 

The July 4 movies have been seen, but no one is supposed to write about them.  (Men in Black II is going to be a success… peace, out.)  Variety’s Timothy Gray is scooping out the bottom of the barrel to do an Oscar contenders story , even though there have been no serious Best Picture candidates out yet and, besides Road to Perdition, we are quite literally more than three months away from the next Best Picture candidate.  The it-feels-right-even-if-it’s-bullshit box office story from Rick Lyman last week is actually being discussed.  (Again… remove the differential between The Mummy Returns and Pearl Harbor versus Spider-Man and Attack of the Clones and the year falls back into the classic cycle, with a little bump from Ice Age.)  Thank goodness that The Idiot Whose Name Need Not Be Typed is on vacation and John Lippman is filling the slot in the WSJ this week.  I’d actually say that the Tom-Hanks-As-A-Bad-guy thing is overstated, given that Road to Perdition is ultimately a morality tale in which Hanks is more a grounded father than a hit man.  He’s not bad, though he is vengeful… but with reason that every audience will understand.  I mean, compared to whacking Fredo… That said, Lippman delivers one of the best tidbits ever in the Hollywood Journal column, about the disconnect between wind-talking G.I. Joe dolls issued by Hasbro a couple of years ago and MGM’s Windtalkers, the R-rated car wreck. 

So, I’ve been reading gossips.  Yoikes!  It’s ugly there too.  Not as ugly as the very nice, very lovely Guliana di Pandi trying to get away with going with just her first name… what the hell was she thinking?  And, for that matter, what the hell is E! thinking, putting Ted Casablancas/Bruce Bibby on air?  His column is one of the best gossip reads, but besides the fact that he sounds like a gay John Wayne, his writing is not meant to be read aloud… it’s terrible as TV copy.  Either hire the guy a producer/writer who can convert him in a way that actually will draw viewers or put Andy Jones, who knows how to write TV copy, on the air.  E! is in a dangerous place.  They want to be taken seriously, yet with the exception of David Adelson, who covers music, the rarely seen Greg Agnew and the always-seems-intellegent-no-matter-what-drivel-he’s-reading Steve Kmetko, the on-air staff is still pure T&A, male and female, and fashionistas, male and female.   Their audience is not as big as E.T., Access Hollywood or any other syndicated entertainment show that stays on the air.   Realistically, studios have a bigger number coming from Byron Allen’s Entertainers or Good Day Live. 

What’s a niche network to do?  Well, if I were in charge – not gonna happen – I’d either push harder towards what has worked for them, going after teen boys and horny aging men or really get off the tit, literally.  E! could be the MTV movie network.  But while E! is trying to convince us that Jules Asner has the skills and/or interest in “uncovering” anything for real, MTV is building the show that E! should have had on it’s air years ago, Movie House, which is a great studio promo opportunity and a fun, advertiser friendly movie show.  The funny/scary part is, E! could produce a better show.  American Idol should have been on E! two years ago and, at the very least, they should have a deal with Fox to do off-day coverage of these kids.  But E! has a classic sophomore problem… E! is too well established to go back to square one, too steeped in crap, like Wild On, to grow up and too high on themselves to admit that

Oy… didn’t really mean to write a treatise on E!  On to the other gossips…

PAGE SIX:  There were three “interesting” stories in recent days.   First was a story about James Toback and New Line’s Bob Shaye.  According to Toback, Shaye passed on Toback’s soon-to-kind-of-be-released Harvard Man because Toback was late with a draft of Bugsy.  According to Toback, the film went unmade for eight years because of Shaye’s decision.  Or perhaps Shaye realized that The New York Times would hire A.O. Scott as a film critic and that he would bury Harvard Man with bizarre praise:  “If John Hughes and Jean-Luc Godard had teamed up to direct a third-season episode of The Sopranos, they might have come up with something like this film. Buried under the gangster bravado and the avant-gardist's disdain for narrative coherence and dramatic effect that are the hallmarks of Mr. Toback's style, is an earnest coming-of-age story, and a cautionary tale about the perils of drug use, gambling and existentialist philosophy. Or, to put it differently, Mr. Toback uses his improbable, conventional story as the trelliswork for a series of wild and florid riffs about sex, ethics and the delirium of renegade moviemaking.” 

Translation:  Toback is selling the same shit he’s been selling for years and if you like your movies incoherent and pretentious with a celebrity or two engaging in oral sex on screen, this movie is for you!!!” 

Were it that Toback would make a movie as interesting as he is in real life.  Were it that he could have as critical an eye about himself as he shown brilliance in having about others. 

Another truth-in-subtext was Christina Ricci’s comment regarding Prozac Nation: “During the entire shoot, which ran for eight weeks, there were only five days in which I was not being filmed weeping. The crying came as part of my character. I didn't have to use any actor's cliché trick like imagining my dog had died to get the tears to come. It was just total hell." 

The viewer version:  “During the entire film, which seemed to run for eighty hours, there were only five minutes when I was not yawning.  The yawning part became part of the experience.  It didn’t help to use any critics’ tricks like imagining watching a good movie or shifting from one side of my butt to the other every five minutes to keep the yawns from coming.  It was just total hell.”

Then there is an odd attack on Tommy Lee Jones that starts, “LOUD-mouthed Longhorn Tommy Lee Jones,” which suggests that the author has never been in a room with Tommy Lee Jones.   After rambling on about how crazy Jones is and what crazy demands he had on an EW photo shoot, they tag the story by admitting that the publicist was pushing these silly buttons without Jones’ knowledge, trying to avoid any problems.  But that’s not much of a story, is it?  Nor is the insight that tags on new clothing, particularly men’s shirts, can be irritating and that it really isn’t very bizarre to want the tags removed, when you consider the obsessive detail that goes into most photo shoots and the pampering that most movie stars live with.  Tommy Lee Jones is the toughest smart interview in the business… but we must learn to abuse the celebs we don’t like within the lines of truth. 

LIZ:  The funniest phenomenon in celebrity gossip these days is the use of Liz Smith as a salve for bad buzz.  This week, after a silly story hit the papers about Madonna’s nudity in the Swept Away remake being cut way back by her husband’s editing team because parts of her body look real, ZOOM!, there is Liz Smith’s “what a great movie!” response.  Liz expounds on a scene in the film in which Madonna, completely clothed, dances and lip-syncs.  Meanwhile, movie critics are being positioned as “demanding,” while the movie is positioned as populist by this scene - “a moment everyone can enjoy” and “For die-hard Madonna fans, it's a moment to die for.”  There is no gossip column in the business that lets you know how publicists want their stories positioned when they are in trouble than Liz’s.   (And by the way… what are Liza and David Gest going to do when their VH-1 show is cut to make him look gay, her look like an addict/fag hag and her friends look like freaks… because you have to know, that’s what’s coming… that’s what will sell.)

JEANETTE:  Stupid correlation of the month award goes to “Liz Hurley defenders,” who are claiming that Vanity Fair is going after the fetching, but box-office-challenged Brit starlet and new mom because Graydon Carter is upset that Liz and Pam Anderson were supposedly being breast buddies at this year’s Vanity Fair Oscar party.   Mr. Carter, who should be proud to be listed as producer of Nanette Burstein and Brett Morgan’s The Kid Stays In The Picture, didn’t get a whole lot else out of that party this year.  Hurley/Pam kept his magazine in the papers for a week.  He should have bought them cars if they had gone to third base… that would still be in the papers.  Wait a minute… the boob thing is still in the papers… and they are running a story this month about a three-way with Liz and Steven Bing and others… that’s the only positive press Hurley can expect!  A vendetta would be an analysis of her fame, movie history versus boob history.

THE REST:  I haven’t seen Deeds.  I haven’t seen Arnold.  And I just don’t care.  Neither film’s box office prospects means much to me.  I’m far more interested in whether Minority Report and Lilo & Stitch hold.  We’ll talk about it on Monday.

READER OF THE DAY:   The MC Hammer on IMAX:  “I only have one concern with feature films being shown on IMAX screens: IMAX theaters weren't built like standard theaters.  The screen is much larger and the seats much closer.  This means that it's harder to see the entire screen at once and your peripheral vision is filled with the movie, rather than the darkness around the screen.  This is fine in such traditional IMAX fare as To Fly, where the object of the movie is to give you the sensation that you're actually flying and can feel the motion.

However, I saw Apocalypse Now Redux on an IMAX screen in New York, and I wasn't too pleased with the experience.  It's hard to see everything that's going on in the screen, and you're either swiveling your head constantly or your senses are being overloaded.  I also saw Fantasia 2000 on the IMAX screen, and I don't recall having the same reaction, perhaps because there's less going on in "Fantasia" at any one time than in "Redux".  With today's films (especially action films) being edited with quick cuts for the MTV generation, I can only imagine feeling nauseous watching a film like XXX on an IMAX screen.

I think that the industry would be better served investing money in making traditional theater-going better, by investing in digital projection systems and better sound systems, and leaving IMAX to show it's normal fare such as Ultimate X, Michael Jordan to the Max and To Fly.”

CC Shredder writes:  “God, I hope nobody in the industry ever talks about Armond White. For years, he has inspired in me the classic "I hate him so much that I am compelled to read him every week so that I can shout at the newspaper" reaction. He holds films to an unstated aesthetic standard, which appears to be: everything that Steven Speilberg and Robert Altman do is genius and anyone who disagrees with me is a cretin. He never likes a move without using it to club some other movie he hates. And if he's in the mood, he can turn any movie on any topic in any genre into a rote essay on racial politics.

On the topic of New York Press film critics, do you know where Godfrey Cheshire has gone since he was unceremoniously dumped from the paper last year? He was truly one of the most interesting critics I've ever read. His piece on digital cinema was brilliant.”

J Exclamation writes:  “I'm not sure how I feel about big budget Hollywood movies in the IMAX format.  I can certainly understand the appeal, and seeing Fantasia 2000 in IMAX was an overwhelming experience that I'll never forget.  To see Spider-Man in the IMAX format would be breathtaking, as would something along the lines of Titanic or Jurassic Park.  But I'm worried about aspect ratio.  I'm one of those people who gets his panties in a bunch when a DVD comes out that doesn't include an anamorphic widescreen presentation of the film.  To me, if it's not in the original aspect ratio, true disrespect is being shown to the director, the cinematographer, and, of course, the film in general.  The IMAX format isn't in 1.85:1 or 2.35:1, which are the two most common theatrical aspect ratios.  It's more along the lines of TV's 1.33:1, or, at best, 1.66:1.  By retrofitting a movie to be projected in an IMAX theater, are we losing part of the image?  If so, I really don't wanna see it in that format.”

DAVID answers:  Actually, IMAX is expanding the image, which is why shooting in Super 35 is somewhat of a requirement for the films that will be converted. 

And Not A Former Yankee Outfielder sent this in:  “There are other factors to consider in the "Lilo" versus "Minority" box office battle.

"Lilo" is short; "Minority" is long.  Each screen probably squeezes in one extra showing of "Lilo" per day, maybe even two on Saturdays, when some summer movies start as early as 10 a.m. 

And once a movie goes over 3000 screens, shouldn't the screen average also be a factor in calculating a winner?  It gets so complicated.  Would you rather sell 220 children's tickets to each of your seven "Lilo" showings, or would you rather sell 170 adult tickets to each of your six "Minority" showings?  (I'm an English teacher, not a math teacher, so this is already too complicated for me.)

But there is also the big draw to many of us---the bargain matinee price.  I would never pay full price for a Saturday night showing, but I have no problem rushing from work on a Friday afternoon to catch a bargain matinee on a movie's opening day.  You probably won't believe this, but there is one cineplex in my city that has a twilight bargain (from 4 pm to 6 pm) of only $3.25 for first-run movies.   They know that people feel this is such a bargain that they won't mind paying $8 for the popcorn-soda combo.   Other theaters have a policy of a nice low price for military people with ID cards. (I live in a multiple-military base city, so lots of our young military people rush to these theaters opening weekend.) One of our theaters also has a very enticing senior citizen discount that starts at age 55, so they get good business from a lot of us babyboomers who suddenly qualify as seniors.

I'm not sure that number of tickets sold is a good indicator either.  On the first day of "Clones" and "Hollywood Ending," the people who arrived for "Clones" only to learn that it was already sold out were buying tickets to "Hollywood Ending" and then sneaking into the "Clones" auditorium. (he couple behind me did this, as did the quartet behind me, but there were only a handful of people inside the Woody Allen auditorium.) 

I also remember a time that we went to a Spike Lee movie only to be told that the computerized machine selling those tickets had crashed, but we could buy a child's ticket to the DIsney movie and use it to get into the Spike Lee auditorium.  I have no doubt that when it came time to report the money amounts earned, mine was reported as Disney money, not Spike Lee money.

And Buff Jimmy closes:  “Just wondering if you've seen Finn Taylor's new film, Cherish. I had a chance to see it last weekend and I loved it. I think this film could really catch on if they would actually advertise it more. Unfortunately, I don't think these sundance films get more advertising than a one sheet with the little Sundance logo on it. Why is that? If they put up just a little more money, they could run some TV ads and get some more mainstream moviegoers in the theaters, not just the independent crowd.”

E ME:  A LOT more money.  And that’s the problem.  Indie film is all “risk vs. return” and there are not a lot of big gamblers left, throwing money on the table.  Are you all going to be throwing your money on the table this weekend?  Or are you all waiting for the Powerpuff Girls movie?