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Fox 411's Roger Friedman has seen Frida, Julie Taymor's biopic about Mexican artist Frida Kahlo which Miramax is opening in October, and proclaimed that Salma Hayek is going to get an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Taymor "has at last found the proper material to establish [herself] as a film director. At the same time, Hayek and co-star Alfred Molina, who plays Kahlo's husband and fellow artist Diego Rivera, keep the action moving." The Riveras, he says, make for "such an odd, unusual and romantic relationship Š they rarely have any lulls. They are either fighting or making love — or both." A big plus for the film, Friedman adds (and which is also reported in a current Premiere piece), is the fact that Hayek's boyfriend Edward Norton "did a top-to-bottom rewrite of the finished script after many other screenwriters, including Gregory Nava, Walter Salles, and Clancy Sigal among others, contributed enough to get their names on the credits. But Norton apparently had fresh enough eyes, and good enough sense of Hayek, to reshape parts of the script to suit her. It was a good gamble." Frida is debuting at the Venice Film Festival Š but what about a showing at the Toronto Film Festival also? It would certainly make sense. "Director M. Night Shyamalan is a very young man who understands a very old lesson (one most of his peers have forgotten)," writes David Ansen in the current issue of Newsweek. "It's what you don't see that makes a scary movie scary." Or, as I would put it, the less you show, the more the imagination kicks in Š and that's what truly frightens. Signs is an exceedingly well-crafted haunted-house movie, such that my terrified 12-year-old son Dylan left his seat at the two-thirds mark so that he could stand at the back of the theater and duck out if things got too scary. Director M. Night Shyamalan is one of the few directors who isn't afraid of silent passages with nothing going on. Nothing, that is, except our fear about what may be around the corner. Signs is completely gripping because we can feel from the get-go that scary things are going to happen — we just don't know how or when. It's amazing how Shyamalan manages to create a sense of an entire world being enveloped by terror by showing just a few characters in a small Pennsylvania farm town and a few video clips on the family TV. The only thing that doesn't quite work is the very last shot. Otherwise, it swings away. Congratulations to former Falco Ink publicist Jeff Hill for coming up with the cleverest name of a PR agency since Š well, Falco Ink. His new agency is called International House of Publicity, which I'm calling IHOP despite what those famous pancake-makers may say. Irony of ironies, his offices are located just across the street (i.e., New York's Seventh Avenue, in the upper 50s) from Falco's. Hill's new clients include Paramount Classics' Bloody Sunday, United Artists' All or Nothing, Focus' Far from Heaven, Strand's All the Queen's Men, and UA's Nicholas Nickleby. Why did Jeff split from Falco and ex-partner Gary Hill? Something about wanting to downscale his life and having more time to pay attention to fewer clients, which is sorta like what Tom Cruise was trying to do in Jerry Maguire. Best of luck to him in this new venture. In my 7/24 review of Blue Crush (Universal, August 16), I erred in saying Lizzy Weiss' screenplay was rewritten by director John Stockwell. Weiss and UTA agent Shana Eddy have both written to point out that Weiss and Stockwell rewrote the script together. Weiss started her relationship with John on crazy/beautiful, [which] she did a major overhaul of with John's guidance. She had already been writing Surf Girls when John first read it. He subsequently attached himself, and the two of them worked to put it into shooting shape. And then Weiss and Stockwell worked for a full year together and wrote three drafts, the final being the basis of what ultimately became the movie. Universal hired a couple of people to come in for a week of polishing, only to have Weiss return at the end. Please remember to see this honest, touching, thrilling film, which may look like a babes, bikinis, and surf programmer but is a lot deeper and richer than that. Philip Noyce's The Quiet American, an adaptation of the Graham Greene novel that Sydney Pollack produced and co-stars Brendan Fraser and Michael Caine, is done and ready Š and not, as of this writing, scheduled to open in the U.S. this year. Which, of course, connotes uncertainty on the part of Miramax Films, its distributor. I read Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan's script about a year ago — I found it bittersweet, elegant, cleanly composed. But I hear the film itself doesn't work, which surprises me, given the combined pedigree of Noyce (whose Clear and Present Danger is one of the best political thrillers ever made) and Pollack. I asked Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein about the Quiet American situation when I saw him at the Full Frontal party earlier this week. He said "it's done," that it'll be opening commercially in England in November, and that it may get an Oscar-qualifying run at the end of the year prior to its theatrical U.S. debut sometime in early '03. Disney's Reign of Fire is a B-monster movie by way of The Road Warrior and the last third of Full Metal Jacket. It starts out intriguingly then falls apart about halfway through. It might have worked if director Rob Bowman (The X-Files) or his producers had pushed for a story or a reality system that added up or made rudimentary sense Š Š But of course no one connects the dots any more, monster movies are almost entirely CG-driven, and the dumb-down factor is rampant. But Matthew McConaughey achieves something interesting by shaving his head and playing a fiercely macho, bare-chested, slightly gay-inflected warrior character that seems to have been partly inspired by Vernon Wells' "Wez" character in The Road Warrior. I wasn't hugely offended by Men in Black II, but I was, on the other hand, sufficiently nonplussed to take pleasure from this partly hilarious pan by David Denby in this week's New Yorker. "I'm no longer sure what planet Barry Sonnenfeld comes from," the critic remarks. "The director of the Addams Family movies and Get Shorty and the first Men in Black has not shown much interest in human life in such recent movies as Wild Wild West and Big Trouble." "From the evidence in MiBII," he continues, "Sonnenfeld must believe that the best part of the original was not the hip, mordant jokes that were a constant surprise but the conventionally junky sequence at the end in which Will Smith got smacked around a lot and doused in slime. MiBII is mostly dull physical comedy and special effects that are no longer fresh. One scene follows another with little variation; the movie is actually boring — one fights to stay awake." Cheers to Variety's Claude Brodesser for again pointing out a pressing, unpleasant truth regarding Robert Harris' proposed restoration of John Wayne's 1960 The Alamo, which is that the nearly ruined condition of the 70mm negative of Wayne's "director's cut," which has been baking in a hothouse storage facility in Glendale in recent years, will prevent a restoration unless Harris is able to raise roughly $650,000 (to be combined with $500,000 that's pledged by MGM) and get to work on it no later than next year. Harris actually told Brodesser that the film elements necessary to save The Alamo won't last beyond "mid-2003 or 2004, at the latest" — but anyone can see the obvious marketing advantage in getting this restoration done earlier so as to time its release with Ron Howard's upcoming The Alamo, which may hit screens sometime in late '03. (Last weekend, I read and enjoyed a recent version of John Sayles' script, which is now being rewritten by Steve Gaghan.) Will some benefactor out there please come forward and help save the Duke's epic, which is admittedly not a great film but a sturdy and colorful one that doesn't deserve the eradication that unfortunately awaits? I'm just dying, naturally, to see David Jacobson's Dahmer, a movie about Jeffrey Dahmer's killing spree in which 17 men were snuffed, cut up, cannibalized and, as the press kit states, "incorporated into bizarre sexual rituals." The release also states Dahmer "is more familiar to the American public than several recent presidents. Yet little is known about the emotionally and intellectually intriguing story behind the scandalous headlines." Maybe, but in all sincerity I'd rather see a documentary about former President Jimmy Carter's experience with growing peanuts than go to Dahmer. Who would? For what reason? What can a film like this possibly do to deepen, broaden or otherwise make richer our understanding of the human condition? I've tried to make myself go to a screening out of curiosity, but I've always found a reason to duck out.