If you're wondering what PSH and The Linney are doing right now

My brother just called from Buffalo. Hoffman and Linney pulled up next to him near Delaware Park while filming a scene for The Savages. Their car (weighed down by pedigree?) was mounted with a camera and being towed by a truck. The king and queen of the A-list (who, shockingly, have never worked together) must've been engaged in a talent-off. Who wins?

Assassination Thursday

Twenty-five years ago today, a "disturbed drifter" fired six shots at Ronald Reagan, all because of a little movie called Taxi Driver and its little star. This weekend, Jodie Foster will no doubt remain atop the box office, adding another blockbuster jewel in the crown of her career. And look -- it'll be Crash Day in Los Angeles on Tuesday, the anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination. (Hey, anything to sell the new director's cut DVD!) And happy birthday Warren Beatty, a maverick who knows something about contracting and enduring assassinations.

I want these motherf*cking snakes off the motherf*cking plane!

The Internet is too powerful. Rabid interest in Snakes on a Plane has prompted producers to reshoot to get an R rating and add a curse-laden speech by Samuel L. Jackson that is "expected to take on cult status." The damn thing hasn't even come out -- let alone percolate for years in obscurity -- and already it's a cult fave? This is mass madness! Although, given the still at left, we might get to watch Kenan Thompson expire painfully by poison. So that's a bright spot.

Free association Friday

1. First things first. Inside Man is fun, even for someone who is generally nonplussed by Denzel. It's smartly written to a fault, has a bitchin' score by Terence Blanchard, and is infused with the snappy authority of Spike Lee, who actually paces the movie like a seductive slow dance. Imagine that: a heist movie with some grace and reserve. Plus, it appears its primary function is to give Jodie Foster a platform to be a gorgeous badass. Fine with me. Let's just say a great time was had by all -- "all" being me, and a theater full of greasy suburban oblivionites, but that's another story.

2. Speaking of former child stars, Quinn Cummings -- an Oscar nominee at 10 for The Goodbye Girl who subsequently quit the biz -- has her own blog. I read a couple sentences about her thinning hair, and probably won't return for seconds. I mention it just because it's funny; we're all online now, aren't we? I earnestly await tatumoneal.blogspot.com.

3. Tatum O'Neal...Peter Bogdanovich...The Last Picture Show...ah, Randy Quaid! The eldest, pudgiest Quaid is suing Oscarless James Schamus because he was duped into working for peanuts on Brokeback Mountain. Oh, the perils of stardom. The man with the $2 billion box office is upset about chump change. Let's forget Randy. Dennis, anyone?

Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?

This 1969 X-rated bildungsroman starring Playboy's playmate of the year (and featuring Joan Collins, Milton Berle and George Jessel as characters named Polyester Poontang, Goodtime Eddie Filth and The Presence) has the worst movie title ever, according to readers of The Chicago Tribune. I haven't seen Hieronymus Merkin -- it's strangely absent from the Netflix cache -- but it sounds like an apt name for what appears to be a John Waters progenitor. The Tribune's runners-up are equally verbose and esoteric, but no less fitting (like To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar).

For me, bad titling isn't about lengthy weirdness, but gross misrepresentation and a soul-sucking lack of creativity. There are plenty of movie titles worse than Hieronymus Merkin: It Could Happen to You (good movie, disastrous title), Crush (fine, if you mean "soul-crushing"), The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (features Zellweger and McConaughey, but how can a massacre "return"?), Swimfan (what the hell is a swimfan?), Honey, I Blew up the Kid (on second thought, this title is great).

You see what I mean? A title heralds the movie, and must be so judged. Can't Stop the Music might be a relentless crapfest, but the name is utterly perfect. And everyone in the blogosphere agrees about the next candidate for Best Movie Title Ever: Snakes on a Plane, starring Samuel L. Jackson battling...snakes on a plane.

Wallace & vomit?

I sometimes find myself in Manhattan. I found myself there last January through May, interning for a prominent national entertainment weekly (how cryptic). I found myself there in October to see Elaine Stritch, Woody Allen and Sweeney Todd. And I found myself there this past weekend to see a bizarre trio of folks: Wallace Shawn, Phylicia Rashad and Cynthia Nixon. Let us ponder the shortest, squealiest of them.

Wallace Shawn. So I didn't actually see him, but Shawn and his brother Allen have finally produced The Music Teacher, a play-opera (plopera?) of theirs that's been shelved for decades, at the Minetta Lane Theatre in the Village. It's a blithering/fascinating trainwreck. Shawn is like a more specific Woody Allen: nebbish, monologue-ish, but focused purely on existential matters (whereas Woody broadens his nerves to romance and pop culture). Sometimes Shawn and Allen work together, and the result is good.

I recently watched Shawn's Vanya on 42nd Street, a pseudo-experimental bit of theatre-film (thilm?) that gave us Julianne Moore (can you believe she's just now readying her Broadway debut?). Vanya is a satisfactory experiment that halfway succeeds, and The Music Teacher is a satisfactory experiment that fully fails. Both are steered by the same narrative force -- a vastly preoccupied man vocalizing absurdist concerns about his place in the universe -- and both emerge half-baked, quasi-realized, etc. Now I'm starting to write like Shawn, so it's time to stop. I'm going to go play with my My Dinner with Andre action figures.

The call sheet for my worst nightmare

Celebrity reject Norm MacDonald. Bottom feeder Rob Schneider. Talentless Craig Kilborn. Sellout Jon Lovitz. Non-entity Tim Meadows. Adam Sandler, lord of diminishing returns. The omni-misused David Spade. And that guy, from The Movie That Shall Not Be Named (and his name is above the title?). I always refrain from judging until I've actually seen a movie, regardless of how bad it looks. But I will not refrain from judging this. I have seen the face of evil, and it is middle-aged and moronic.

Still mad as hell after 30 years

Everything Paddy Chayefsky wrote about in his screenplay for Network -- the all-powerful college of corporations, the devaluation of human life, the culture hungry to articulate its rage -- was true then, and is true now. People gush about the film's prescience and, in small ways, it was prescient.

But in the commentary and archive footage of the new two-disc special edition of Network, Lumet and Chayefsky (who both started in live TV) stress that the movie is "sheer reportage," not satire. Everything is dramatized fact. The only part of the movie that had not occurred in 1976 and has yet to occur is the coordinated assassination of a TV personality because of poor ratings.

The new DVD is long overdue. I devoured its special features (they are adequate) this past week. The driving force is Lumet, of course, one of our dearest directors and human beings. Thankfully, Faye Dunaway participated enthusiastically in the making-of documentary (which bothers to feature bit player Lance Henriksen but not Ned Beatty or Robert Duvall). And there's a ridiculous clip of Chayefsky on "Dinah!," which was apparently a talk show back then. How Dinah Shore had a career I'll never know, but the clip is worthwhile because it's proof of how the film was received upon its release: as a shocking and controversial "satire."

But Network, the greatest movie ever made, is much more than a stinging indictment of humanity's assault on itself. It is first and foremost a marvelous story told marvelously. The mechanics of Chayefsky's screenplay are breathtaking. It's like he's juggling a hundred balls, catching some with his feet and in the crook of his neck as he sends others even higher, until he's able to let them all drop at once into a neat, manicured square on the floor. If a screen story has never made love to you -- or if you don't even know what I mean by that -- consider submitting to Network.

I could devote this blog to examining the film's prescience, line by line and plot point by plot point, and never run out of material. I'll just offer this penultimate sermon by Howard Beale, the mad prophet of the airwaves, played by Peter Finch like he had only months to live (and he did):

At the bottom of all our terrified souls we know that democracy is a dying giant -- a sick, sick, dying, decaying political concept writhing in its final pain. I don't mean that the United States is finished as a world power. The United States is the richest, the most powerful, the most advanced country in the world, light years ahead of any country. And I don't mean the Communists are going to take over the world because the Communists are deader than we are. What is finished is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's the single solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of 200-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies -- totally unnecessary as human beings and as replaceable as piston rods. Well, the time has come to say "Is dehumanization such a bad word?" Whether it's good or bad, that's what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid -- creatures that look human but aren't. The whole world, not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first. The whole world's people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things.

Speaks for itself, as it has for 30 years. And this is the calmest, subtlest speech in the film, which builds with such sheer confidence and sleekness toward its climax. I mentioned above that the climax -- the on-air assassination -- is the only thing that isn't based in fact. The last line of Lumet's audio commentary?

"But I think it's still to come. I wouldn't be surprised to see it. On one of the reality shows, it'll happen. There will be real death. And it will be shown to you, I promise you."

I know I said no more Oscars...

...but something set to be published tomorrow bothers me. [But first, to sum up: reaction to Brokeback's loss has been both blindly constructive and resoundingly destructive (and somewhat amusing). Pitiless tirades against (and defenses of) the Academy's choice have been issued by the literati, even by Los Angelites like Ken Turan and Steve Lopez.] But what do you think of Brokeback author Annie Proulx's bitter rant? I find it sad and disturbing that this writer's mood is fouled by a Hollywood fart.

Can a film composer sell out?

Or, If John Williams falls in the woods, is it underscored with strings?

Rolfe Kent's work first wormed its way into my aurality with About Schmidt (a superb score that sticks in the mental playlist to this day). But when I saw Wedding Crashers in August, I started to get suspicious. Seems Kent -- an Alexander Paynester, Brit, maverick composer and blogger -- maintains a duplicitous lifestyle, recycling the scores for his indie films into themes for fluffterpieces like Just Like Heaven and the Legally Blondes. But I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Everyone needs a paycheck.

Then I saw his name attached to Failure to Launch. A vanity project for SJP and McConaugheyheyhey? Co-starring Terry Bradshaw? Surely, I thought, Kent doesn't need the money that badly. Surely he has sunk to a career low (while perhaps attaining a career high, with the yet-to-be-heard Thank You for Smoking). But let's not judge the score by its film. Launch may not be a sellout for any of the filmmakers, given that it's being proclaimed "Wilderean," "one of the best American films in months and the best comedy since I don't know when." I mean, if this is anywhere near accurate, then the peon who composed the vacuous trailer should be sacked, and promptly.

That said, I'm waiting for the day when Jon Brion scores Bringing Down the House 2: Straight Trippin' Back in the 'Hood and Carter Burwell scores I've Grown Accustomed to This Weight, a My Fair Lady update focused on the bulimia plague affecting today's vulnerable stars, featuring Ashton Kutcher and The Lohan.