I was fine with INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, but THE LADYKILLERS is a clear fumble. In anyone else's hands it would be seen as a half-decent throwaway, but the Coens are capable of much more.

It's an arch, visually stylized, southern-fried farce that's simply not very funny (except for one sight gag). It feels strained and sometimes even tiresome.

Based on the 1955 Ealing Studios comedy that starred Alec Guiness in the title role, it isn't perverse or funny enough, and the story wasn't all that great to begin with. (The intrigue of the original may have simply boiled down to the bizarre humor contained in the look of Guiness's false teeth.)

Marva Munson (Irma P. Hall) is a rhino-sized African-American widow who owns a two-story house in a small southern delta town. Along comes Goldthwait Higginson Dorr (Tom Hanks), a dandified loquacious bullshitter who rents a room so he and a crew of four can use her cellar to tunnel into a nearby floating casino.

Dorr's accomplices are Gawain MacSam (Marlon Wayans), The General (Tzi Ma), Garth Pancake (J.K. Simmons) and Lump (Ryan Hurst). The only one among them who's half-amusing is Simmons, although his constantly having to cope with I.B.S. (irritable bowel syndrome) becomes less amusing with each new movement.

Mrs. Munson isn't very well educated but has plenty of horse sense and can see through a charlatan like Dorr at the drop of a hat. Or so we're led to think. Only she doesn't see through Dorr or anything else for quite a while.

The gang pretends to be musicians practicing "new Rennaissance" chamber music, but they're constantly tunneling away with picks and shovels and lugging huge bags of dirt upstairs for disposal. It's a major construction project. There are all kinds of hints that these men are up to something besides music (including an explosion and a lot of dust, and a conspicuous loss of a finger), but all Mrs. Munson does is frown and go "hmmm."

She's so dumb she gives $5 dollars a week to Bob Jones University, a South Carolina university known for its "Christian" outlook and vaguely racist admission policies.

Hanks is animated and colorful, but his prosthetic teeth aren't as amusing as Guiness's. Make what you will of this.

Aaahhhh!

Bush Licking

To what extent (if at all) will certain DVDs, documentaries and radio talk shows affect the '04 Presidential election?

Can leftie docs and other entertainments help to push President Bush out of office? Will they have a slight effect on voting patterns? Or are their creators just jerking themselves off with no real hope of influencing anyone or anything?

As much as I hate to admit it, I have a feeling that Alexandra Pelosi's HBO documentary, JOURNEYS WITH GEORGE, which came out a week or so ago on DVD, will help Bush's reelection chances more than hurt them.

Pelosi's self-narrated home movie is a portrait of how it was to cover Bush's campaign during the 2000 election, and more precisely about her relationship with the candidate as things moved along. It's mainly just footage of how the day-to-day felt and looked from the back of the plane, and how Bush flirted with Pelosi and got to know her more and more (and vice versa).

An NBC news producer during the campaign, Pelosi is the daughter of California House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. So she and Bush had a natural affinity.

Although I am not one of those who tends to confuse 'character' with 'personality,' the fact is that Bush comes off as relatively likable and relaxed within his own skin in this thing. He doesn't seem to take himself at all seriously, and seems willing to turn any comment or question into a goof-off opportunity. This is why the fucker almost got elected, I'm convinced. He seems like an okay guy -- "seems" being the dangerously variable term.

Here's what really won me, sad to say. Near the end of JOURNEYS WITH GEORGE Pelosi becomes a pariah with the other journalists for telling the NEW YORK POST's "Page Six" column that most of them are for Gore, or believe Gore will win. Their alleged impartiality is compromised by this, of course, and Pelosi has to pay.

But along comes Bush right after this happens, and he saves Pelosi's ass. He puts his arm around her shoulder and says, "When they see me talking to you, they're going to act like your friends again, but those people aren't your friends. They can say what they want about me, but at least I know who I am and who my friends are."

I know, I know -- he's still a terrible President who's shilling for the corporate bad guys, and he lied over Iraq and he's letting terrible things happen to the environment, but his comments to Pelosi about friendship ring true.

At least Pelosi's doc isn't the only thing out there.

I can't imagine Michael Moore's anti-Bush doc FARENHEIT 9.11, which will be out in August, not persuading some voters out there that Bush is a stooge, or that his response to the September 11th disaster wasn't quite as righteously decisive and patriotic as you may have heard.

And while I suspect that Al Franken's "The O'Franken Factor," a three-hour radio talk show that'll debut on Air America Radio in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco on March 31st, will initially play only to the converted, it's conceivable that Franken, who's funny as well as brilliant, will win over some fence-sitters in the coming months.

If you're not in one of these four cities, you should know that programming will also be streamed at www.airamericaradio.com. Franken's slot is from noon to 3 pm, five days a week. Janeane Garofalo will co-host another three-hour show evenings. Other shows will be hosted by Randi Rhodes, a radio personality from southern Florida, and Lizz Winstead, a co-creator of "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central.

Lays Will Play

After a near-total absence in all media for most of the last 30 years, Frank Perry's PLAY IT AS IT LAYS (1972) is being shown at the American Cinematheque on Sunday, 3.28, at 5 pm. And hooray for that. I'll be there with bells on. I'm urging every film nut in the L.A. area with any kind of affection for out-there '70s movies to attend also.

This nihilistic, strangely sexy Hollywood drama is being screened as part of a program called "Films Not On Video." The A.C.'s chief programmer Dennis Bartok tells me the 35 mm print that'll be shown, supplied by Universal, is in "good" condition.

Early last November I ran a piece about PLAY IT AS IT LAYS. I was lobbying Universal Home Video execs to consider putting it out on DVD, and...well, why paraphrase? It was a well written thing, so here it is again:

"There's this better-than-pretty-good film about a kind of jaded existential despair among wealthy Hollywood types called PLAY IT AS IT LAYS (1972), and I'll bet $50 bucks right now almost no under-40 person reading this column has heard of it, much less seen it.

"The director was the once-very-hot Frank Perry (DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE, RANCHO DELUXE, MOMMIE DEAREST), and it was based on a respected 1970 Joan Didion novel of the same name, which Ben Stein once called 'the best novel about Hollywood ever.'

"The stars were Tuesday Weld, Anthony Perkins (playing a cynical gay producer and giving the second-best performance of his life, after PSYCHO's Norman Bates), Adam Roarke (best thing he ever did), Tammy Grimes, Ruth Ford and several others you've probably never heard of.

"It stood out, as I recall, for its unusually dark and nihilistic portrait of some very skewed souls in the employ of the film industry, and for Perry's fragmented, back-and-forth cutting that was not only in keeping with the style in which Didion's book was written, but with the randomness of thoughts flicking around inside the head of its main character, Maria Wyeth (Weld).

"It was gloomy, ambitious, 'different' (even by unconventional '70s standards), and PERSONA-like. It had a chilly, almost spooky fascination with downer attitudes among affluent people. Some of the big gun critics bashed it, but others were admiring and spoke of Oscar-level achievement.

"And to judge by press clippings I read at the Academy library on Monday, it enjoyed a particular popularity among smart cultivated women, as it seemed to express a certain painful something-or-other about female suffering in rarified circles in the early '70s. It also seemed to play fairly well with gay guys.

"I caught PLAY IT AS IT LAYS sometime in the late '70s at a Manhattan repertory house, and I remember being struck by the total absence of a musical score. Not a damn note. The most persistent aural effect is the sound of traffic. That's the '70s for you, baby.

"Now, it's one thing for a good or interesting film to slip into semi-obscurity, but PLAY IT AS IT LAYS has flat-out disappeared.

"That's because it's been out of circulation for 30 years. It's never seen the flourescent light of a video store (as a VHS, laser disc or DVD), and there's no mention on the internet of it ever having played on television. Search for it on the Movie Review Query Engine (www.mrqe.com) and not a single capsule review turns up.

"Calls to Universal, the negative and rights owner, indicated there's not much awareness of this film, much less any intention to put it out on DVD. But you never know.

"All I can say is that this stylish mood piece is too heady and distinctive and was too well-reviewed during its time (by a good percentage of the critics at least, some of whom really went apeshit over it) to warrant invisibility today.

"This article is an attempt to get the Universal crew to wake up and put this sucker out on DVD, and I'm not talking about one of those bargain-basement, no-frills jobs.

"Laurent Bouzereau, the maker of dozens of brilliant DVD documentaries over the years, should be hired to assemble a looking-back doc while the participants are still around and kicking. I'm thinking especially of star Tuesday Weld, Didion (her novelist husband John Gregory Dunne, who co-wrote the script, passed away earlier this year), and producer Dominick Dunne, a plugged-in Hollywood player before his later incarnation as a novelist and VANITY FAIR feature writer.

"Truth be told, PLAY IT AS IT LAYS sometimes feels like a bit much in terms of its despairing tone and existential hairshirt attitude. But at least it tries to disturb and provoke and point moral fingers and yet -- at the same time, perversely -- recreate the roguishly sexy aroma of early '70s Hollywood so that audiences can feel what the tingle was all about.

"I mean, listen to these tributes...

"'Once every few years, a film so spectacular and intense that it creates a whole new vocabulary for film grammarians comes along,' enthused THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER's Nick Yanni. 'Such a picture is PLAY IT AS IT LAYS.'

"The L.A. TIMES' Charles Champlin declared it a new-styled 'woman's picture...drawn from a rarified part of Hollywood....a sub-sub-subculture,' and said it 'does depict its tiny exotic world with merciless skill and sobering accuracy.'

"Writing in the NEW YORK TIMES, film critic and novelist Ann Birstein called it 'a study of nihilism' that she felt 'fascinated, moved and stunned by,' adding that it was 'one of the best movies I've ever seen.'

"THE FILM JOURNAL also called it 'one of the best films of the year.'

"COSMOPOLITAN film critic Liz Smith (back in the days when she was a reasonably tough and honest writer) said in a column she wrote in early November '72 that 'unless something extraordinary happens between now and the end of the year, PLAY IT AS IT LAYS will be my Oscar bet for just about the best of everything.'

"SATURDAY REVIEW critic Thomas Meehan said 'if nothing else, it is VOGUE-ishly chic in its vision of L.A. and environs as contemporary Hell, in the manner of Antonioni's ZABRISKIE POINT.'

"BOX OFFICE magazine called it 'an artistic triumph.'

"In her mixed review, WALL STREET JOURNAL critic Joy Gould Boyum nonetheless said it offers 'a deeply intelligent screenplay, highly sensitive direction, and exquisite photography by [dp] Jordan Cronenweth' and called it 'a very well made film.'

"There were other reviews -- some of them not friendly. (Pauline Kael ripped it to shreds.) But all things considered, does this film sound like it should have sat at the bottom of a dark well for the last three decades? When critics say 'best of the year,' it usually means something.

"My own recollection is that PLAY IT AS IT LAYS was certainly above average. I recall it taking the measure of the void in ways that seemed ripe and head-turning.

"'The corruption and venality and restrictiveness of Hollywood have become...firm tenets of American's social faith -- and of Hollywood's own image of itself,' Joan Didion wrote in an essay 30-plus years ago.

Then as now, it follows that people high up in the Hollywood food chain have a reputation for living spiritually arid or perverted lives, and more than a few of them being very sick puppies. I don't know how many books and movies have used the old Hollywood Babylon thing as an atmospheric starting point since Didion's prescient pronouncement, but I think we can safely say 'a lot.'

"Weld's Maria character (it's pronounced Mar-eye-ah and not Mar-EE-ah) walks around in a state of shutdown. She doesn't seem to be in pain as much as caught up in some kind of drifting, unable-to-play-the-game-anymore mentality. Maria's life doesn't seem to amount to anything purposeful or self-directed as she only seems to function as an enervated wife, friend or lover to this or that Hollywood player-with-a-penis. It has failed, in any event, to coagulate for her in a way that feels rooted or worth being a part of.

"The film is Maria's recollection of her recent past as she recovers from some kind of breakdown in a sanitarium. She has gotten divorced from her director husband (Adam Roarke), partly due to his rage over her having had an abortion after getting pregnant by one of her lovers (Richard Anderson). She has an emotionally disturbed daughter who barely speaks. One of her core sentiments, repeatedly jotted down during her stay at the facility, is that 'nothing applies.'

"Maria's closest friend is her husband's producer, B.Z. (Perkins), who closely shares her nihilist leanings.

"There's a scene in which Maria, B.Z. and B.Z.'s wife (Tammy Grimes) are driving in a car, and Maria has just said something very spacey and who-cares? 'You're getting there,' B.Z. says to Maria. 'Where?' she asks. 'Where I am," B.Z. answers. His wife quickly rejoins, 'Where you are is shit.'

"The movie has lots of acidic, bitter-pill dialogue like this, a good portion of it dished out by Perkins. Kael said that 'when his lines are dry, [Perkins] is the best thing in the picture.'

"I remember a scene at a party in which a gangster-producer type named Larry Kulick (Paul Lambert) looks at a young woman and says out loud, 'I'd like to get into that,' and Perkins, standing next to him and Maria and staring blankly into the crowd, saying, 'I wouldn't exactly call it the impossible dream.'

"And for some reason I've never forgotten the way Perkins delivers a smirking line about artificial lemons: 'They're not artificial -- they're reconstituted.'

"The film also has a nice assortment of sleazy second-bananas -- a grossly egoistic TV actor (Tony Young, who comes on to Maria as she's watching B.Z. and his lover play tennis by saying, 'Why don't you dump the fags?'), a pudgy assistant to an abortionist with a thing for Camaro's (Chuck McCann), and Tyne Daly (extremely slim in those days) as an obsequious journalist interviewing Roarke during a desert location shoot.

"I called John Gregory Dunne on Monday to see whether he or Joan Didion had heard of PLAY IT AS IT LAYS playing anywhere in any format, or whether they'd heard of any plans to put it out on DVD, and he said no.

"Then I rang Dominick Dunne, his brother, at his Connecticut home. He said he hadn't thought of the film in a long time ('You know, you move on...'), but he seemed to enjoy dredging up more and more anecdotes as we talked.

"Dunne reminded me that Tuesday Weld's performance won a Best Actress award at the 1972 Venice Film Festival. He also recalled that he gave Joel Schumacher his start by hiring him as the film's costume designer. 'He was doing the windows at Henri Bendel's, and he went on from this and never looked back,' he says. 'It was also Joel who brought Berry Berenson out to the set to meet Tony Perkins, and out of that she and Tony got married.'

"Berenson's life ended on September 11, 2001. She was a passenger on American flight #11 that slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

"Dunne said he's very proud of the picture and agreed it was quite admired in its day. 'It was never a hit but there were some people who were just passionate about it,' he said. 'But we also had a studio chief who hated the movie, just hated it, and he would say this to anybody...'

"'Ned Tanen, the head of Universal at the time, hated the book and called [the script] a piece of shit on our first meeting...he was the most awful man,' Dunne recalled. 'They only did it...they only made it because Frank Perry had a hit at Universal a year or two before [i.e., DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE], and Frank wanted to direct this movie... but Tanen hated ever single day's dailies, and he was the most awful person. It was so bitter.

"'I was on a coast-to-coast flight on MGM Grand a few years later, and I was seated right next to Ned Tanen -- he on the window, me on the aisle. Our elbows twice touched during lunch, but we never spoke to each other for the five-hour flight. Kevin Bacon was on the plane, and one point he came over to talk to us and he went on about this and that, thinking we were together...it was so unpleasant.'

"I called the mostly-retired Tanen to get his side of this story, but he didn't reply. For what it's worth, a former studio chief who's known Tanen for years reminded me that his behavior was partly due to his being manic depressive, or what would now be called bi-polar.

"'[Tanen] was crazy in a colorfully Hollywood way and would not fit into a studio job today,' the former exec recalled, 'but when he was up or on he was the most exciting and charming guy you'd ever want to meet.'

"I don't know how to end this except throw in another quote from the film.

"It comes at the very end. Maria, having struggled her way through into a semblance of hope or sanity after reviewing what a mess everything has been, says to herself, 'I know what nothing is, and keep on playing.' The voice of B.Z., who has committed suicide by Seconal, is then heard to ask 'why?'

"Weld looks at the camera, smiles serenely, and delivers what I consider one of the most cheerful closing lines in movie history.

"She says, 'Why not?'

Definition Gap

Astute words from NEW YORK OBSERVER columnist Frank DiGiacomo (pronounced Dijokomo) can be found in a current article about Tom Cruise's decision to part ways with with longtime publicist Pat Kingsley in order to hire his Scientologist sister in her place, and more particularly about what he's facing today, career-wise:

"[As] Mr. Cruise approaches his 42nd birthday, he has...to understand that he's fighting a difficult battle. His stardom may survive, and he seems to have joined in a productive partnership with his MINORITY REPORT director, Steven Spielberg (they are planning a remake of THE WAR OF THE WORLDS).

"But the persona he molded in RISKY BUSINESS and developed through rabbit-toothed superstardom in TOP GUN, RAIN MAN, JERRY MAGUIRE and even VANILLA SKY hasn't really advanced, as the persona of his early mentor, Paul Newman, did. Middle-aged Cruise is an amorphous movie star, unidentifiable except for sinews, good teeth and sweat.

"JERRY MAGUIRE defined him last because the scrawny, desperate, sexy ambition of the Cameron Crowe character seemed to match Mr. Cruise exactly and speak for a generation struggling to find a white-collar hero.

"But Mr. Cruise hasn't redefined himself lately. This may seem beside the point for a man who can make $448 million in a Civil War uniform in Japan [i.e., THE LAST SAMURAI], but if you look at ongoing entities like Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson, focused definition of a movie star's persona is very much to the point of his vitality as an institution.

"Mr. Cruise is fighting exactly this battle. Tom Cruise, the movie star, can only be perpetuated by great movie choices and brilliant, focused public presentation. His circumstances are mitigated somewhat by his boyish looks, intense competitiveness and his success as a producer, but Hollywood is a youth game, and already there are a couple of generations bumping up against him from underneath.

"Tom Cruise will have to re-emerge once more, inhabiting a persona that makes sense for 2004 and 2006 and 2008. He is, as Mr. Spielberg would probably be quick to point out, a participant in a Philip K. Dick version of show business, in which the future devours the protagonist unless the hero stays ahead of his pursuers. And his pursuers are time, and us. Both are gaining."

Dogville

"I don't know about the anti-American vein in DOGVILLE. It's more of an anti-homo sapiens thing than anything else. A critic I've read calls it 'a portrayal of failed Christian charity and Old Testament vengeance.' In any event, when has Lars von Trier ever been the slightest bit optimistic about anything? He's made a career out of exploring the worst in people, be it Americans or anyone else. If he hadn't stood up and said his film is anti-American, who would have accused him of it? I guess the end-credit photo montage and the David Bowie song kind of put that staple in, but still....

"Apparently by Von Trier's logic, any film set in America that contains deeply flawed characters that fail to become better people could fit under the banner of 'anti-American.' So is CITIZEN KANE anti-American? Not much redemption there. If Von Trier's major point in making DOGVILLE was in fact to say that American's inherently give in to amorality to take advantage of those whom they have power over, then he's a bigger asshole than I've always thought he was.

"The tendency to take advantage of another person for your own gain, at the cost of their dignity, is an unfortunately universal human trait. Americans have no monopoly over such behavior and he's a fool if that's what he thinks. Does Von Trier really believe that only Americans are susceptible to things like moral bankruptcy, irresponsibility and vengeance? Yes, we're guilty of such things, but so is everyone, regardless of nationality.

"I think a somewhat more fitting metaphor would be that Von Trier is pointing out how America (and Americans) advertise an enlightened and tolerant frame of mind but rarely live up to it. That is a contradiction in the American way of life worth pointing out, but I don't think DOGVILLE successfully says that.

"Nonetheless, DOGVILLE is one of the more genuinely challenging films to come around in a while, but Von Trier needs to let his film live and breathe on it's own. If he's proclaiming it's meaning to the press, then what's the point in debating about it, or even seeing it? It's a film that drew out feelings of admiration, then loathing, then shock. In a way I think Von Trier may have accidentally made a film more insightful about human behavior than he himself is. It's a film that can say something to anyone and everyone, but he's insisting on putting a cap on it and pointing a finger.

"Don't let the director make up your mind for you. It's okay to disagree with the artist. After all, this is America. " -- Red Death

"I might have some respect for good old Lars if he had actually been to America. But since he's a weenie who won't fly but likes to bully his female stars, I have to say he seems so full of shit he makes my head spin." -- Lewis Beale

"I haven't watched DOGVILLE but if Lars von Trier gets to make judgmental movies about places he hasn't been to, then I feel aesthetically obligated to review his movies without ever seeing them. Mr. von Trier's movies lend themselves quite ably to the subtitles-on/double-time-fast-forward combo feature provided by the DVD format. That way, I can digest his latest 3-hour opus-snoozer in a little under 90 minutes.

"I'll bet you a dozen doughnuts, Jeffrey Wells, there will be higher per-capita audience wristwatch-checking during DOGVILLE's theatrical run than during all The Lord of the Rings' movies (even those extended cut DVDs) combined. If as you say, the moral of von Trier's story is that 'selfishness and small-mindedness' should be punished and not forgiven, then it follows we should mock this silly little movie mercilessly." -- Donald von Trier (Lars' twin brother)

Noah's and Harry Lime

"I'm pretty sure I have seen that same photo of Times Square (with the caption claiming that THE THIRD MAN played in 1942) in a Subway and a New York Subs. I laugh every time. It definitely goes beyond Noah's -- I think all those places get the same kit." -- Craig Kaplan

"Those mistakenly dated photos of 'Times Square, 1942' have been around a long time, I first saw them on Venice Beach back in the mid-90's. Although I can't do a 'Remington Steele' by rattling off release date, studio and director on most films, I knew the date was off simply by remembering that THE THIRD MAN is set in -- hello? -- post-war Vienna." -- Steve Coppock.

"Thanks for blowing the lid off the whole Noah's Bagel 1942/1949 conspiracy. I, for one, will sleep better knowing that such egregious errors shall not go unpunished. First the time discrepancy in HIGH NOON, and now Noah's Bagels...!? God only knows where this will lead. Leave no stone unturned, my friend." -- Eponymous

"I'm glad you also noticed the horribly miscaptioned poster of New York and THE THIRD MAN. But in all fairness, Noah's Bagels should not be blamed for it. I think it must be a popular, commercially-available poster. I've seen it in a couple of friend's homes hanging on their walls. The wrong year is printed right on the poster, and yes, my friends were unaware of the date discrepency too.

"Noah's was probably just lazy and bought all the New York-y photos they could, and left them as is. The next step should be to find the poster company responsible for this dumb-ass mistake, and drag them over the coals." -- Marc Edward Heuck (former "Movie Geek" of Comedy Central's BEAT THE GEEKS).

Heart Tug

"I still think everyone who's calling David O. Russell's next film I HEART HUCKABEES is wrong. To my recollection, when the project was first announced it was called I LOVE HUCKABEE'S, then Russell changed the love to an icon of a heart and that's where the trouble started. Think about it. No one says 'I Heart New York' -- they say 'I Love New York.'

"And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. I'll bet you a DVD (under $30 please) or the equivalent amount to the Blue State candidate of your choice. (Make my donation out to John Kerry.) Can't you drop a line to Russell or something and get this straightened out once and for all?" -- Matt Morettini

Wells to Morettini: I got in touch with Andrew Lin, a publicist working for Fox Searchlight, which is distributing HUCKABEES. He said that the title "is indeed called I HEART HUCKABEES." So pay up. I want the Criterion DVD of Scorsese's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST. You know where to reach me.

Mr. Smiley

"I totally agree with you about TINKER, TAILOR,SOLDIER, SPY -- it's the best damn TV I've ever seen. I presume you're aware that SMILEY'S PEOPLE is also available from Acorn via direct order, and has been since last year. No need to wait.

"SMILEY'S PEOPLE is also an excellent series. With an ending [that] truly sums up the moral compromises that life in the shadows, no matter what side you are labouring for, entails. Karla is entrapped but only through the use of the very same methods that he employs." -- Nicholas Wallace, somewhere in England.

Wells to Wallace: I was just pointing out that SMILEY'S PEOPLE will be in video stores next August. I know it's been orderable from Acorn for a while now.

"Perhaps you recall this TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY trivia tidbit: the reason John Le Carre stopped writing novels with George Smiley in them, he once said, is that he felt Alec Guiness had come to inhabit the character so fully in TINKER and SMILEY'S PEOPLE that Le Carre felt he no longer owned him. " -- S.C.

Bat Cheeks

"Let me get this straight: you are inclined to completely write off and totally ignore a film directed by Christopher Nolan? With a cast that includes Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Gary Oldman, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy and Katie Holmes? All because Joel Schumacher and Loreznzo di Bonaventura made a mockery of the franchise a few years ago? Are you deluded or just stupid?

"Even if it's a total failure, Nolan's Batman reinvention can't help but be infinitely more fascinating than Schumacher goofy hokum. Extend Nolan and company the respect their due and give his movie a fair chance. Your automatic dismissal of it will only invalidate your opinion later. A year from now when the film is prepped to hit screens, you'll feel inclined to stick to your guns and bash it because of your ridiculous attitude now. If you genuinely like it, you'll get slammed as being a turncoat.

"Christ, what if Wes Anderson suddenly decided to tackle the Superman franchise? Would you be so quick to piss all over the endeavour? Don't hold the current powers that be responsible for mistakes from the last regime. Warner's obviously realizes their complete mishandling of the Batman series, why else would they let a filmmaker of Nolan's credibility into the Batcave in the first place?" -- Othello 6

Wells to Othello 6: Yes, almost certainly: Chris Nolan's Batman flick is going to be better than Joel Schumacher's. It's just that I have no interest in the franchise any more...donut. Yes, I'll see it, and if it's well crafted I'll acknowledge this, but I don't care about friggin' Batman and Bruce Wayne and Alfred and the Batmobile any more. I'll bet there are thousands and thousands out there who feel the same way. The mere notion of sitting through another one of these things makes me twitch. The idea of Wes Anderson being offered, much less deciding to tackle, a Superman movie is comparable to Robert Bresson being handed the reins on a mid 1960s James Bond film.

"Where does that blatantly homoerotic Batman picture at the end of Wednesday's column come from? Actually, don't tell me. I am disturbed. While you are certainly entitled to expect nothing from the franchise, I hope Nolan can put together a good picture. Based on his track record, I expect he will. Superman is dead so long as McG is attached." -- Adam Schucher

"So you're saying that because of the infantile efforts of that ass-clown Shmuckmacher that the entire Batman mythology has become worthless? C'mon, Jeff...that just ain't fair. Kick the no talent fucktard that left you with the sour taste but give Nolan a chance.

"As for Superman, I need only remind you that another another ass-clown is involved with that series, namely hairdresser extraordinaire Jon Peters. I agree that this franchise should die rather then be resurrected by that idiot." -- Joel Sadler

"...and by the way, adding a doctored photo of Batman and Robin in some kind of, I dunno, homoerotic embrace? Seems kind of like a dig on the fans who hold a little more esteem for these cultural icons of the last 50 years. Kind of crass." -- Tom Brazelton, West Des Moines, Iowa.

Wells to Brazelton: If nothing else, Joel Schumacher made Batman and Robin into homoerotic icons. That ass shot, those nipple points on the Batman suit...I was just acknowledging the influence.