Ok, Nora and I went to see Spider-Man 3 on Thursday night. She adored it. I got a headache, and truth be told, I couldn't wait for it to be over. The movie is harmlessly charming and gorgeously made. (It had better be, at that price.) Nora adores Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco and Topher Grace. They sure are easy on the eyes.

But give me something, anything new. That would be Sandman, played achingly well by Thomas Haden Church, and executed with brilliance by Sony Imageworks. If you know anything about VFX, you know that all those swirling grains of sand were---expensive. But nothing tops the last installment's building-side duel between Spider-Man and Doc Ock. There's some tipping point where a big movie just topples under its own weight. It's all too much, too big, too grand. All human scale stops registering.

There are some summer flicks I can't wait to see. I was tired of Pirates last time around, and Shrek too. It's unlikely they're going to surprise me, even though I am always interested in Chow Yun Fat. (Casting has always been Jerry Bruckheimer's great strength.) I'm still curious to see what Paul Greengrass does with The Bourne Ultimatum. And a Brad Bird original --Ratatouille--is irresistible. Evan Almighty with Steve Carell as Noah actually looks funny enough to make back its outrageous $175 million cost--clearly, dinero was lavished on all those digital animals--and a lot of water. Mucho dinero.

There's a reason why Will Smith is the number one movie star in the world. Here he ingratiates himself on an Indian TV show by singing the Hindi song "Ati kya khandala" from the 1998 movie Ghulam.

Here's the original:

Aamir Khan doesn't look like that anymore!

I know, I've already watched the Helen Mirren version, not to mention Bette Davis and Erroll Flynn's Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. But I can't get enough of Queen Elizabeth, obviously. Cate Blanchett and Clive Owen? I am so there. We'll have to wait til the fall season.

The market may have shifted for ultra-violent horror. What has changed? The overall culture after the Virginia Tech murder spree. And the horror glut may have finally oversaturated the marketplace. I've been wondering how long this particularly grisly horror cycle could last. This past weekend, the boxoffice dipped precipitously, as horror flicks and thrillers like Vacancy, Fracture, Next and The Invisible failed to perform--basically knocking each other out.

The NYT's Michael Cieply looks at Lionsgate, which is planning to release the horror sequel Hostel: Part III this summer:

Given its subject matter and the marketing campaign that has already come with it — posters featuring a woman’s severed head and other grisly images are now scattered on the Web — the Lionsgate film is emerging as a test of continued audience enthusiasm for such onscreen brutality, which some commentators have connected with the Blacksburg gunman Seung-Hui Cho’s video and its possible echoes of the Korean revenge film “Old Boy.”

“What might have been traditionally acceptable exploitation in one period can be seen as stupendously bad taste in another,” said Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, which examines the links among entertainment, commerce and society.

Eight years ago, in one such case, the Columbine High School killings fed a political storm around the marketing of violent entertainment to the young, and led to stricter policing of sales practices in the movie and video-game industries.

And here's USA Today's Scott Bowles:

This year, no fewer than 39 fright films have been scheduled for the big screen, according to the tracking firm Media by Numbers. From 2004-06, the average was 20.

And given that the typical horror and suspense thrillers have at least a two-week life span in the top 10, it means fierce competition every weekend this year to spook crowds.

"I thought this was the year of the sequel," says Paul Dergarabedian of Media by Numbers. "But it's more the year of the horror film."

This weekend, three of the top four films —Disturbia, The Invisible and Fracture — were in the suspense or horror vein. "I can't ever recall that happening," says Chris LeRoy, a senior vice president at Disney, which released Invisible.

Says Marvin Levy of DreamWorks, which released Disturbia with Paramount: "You used to see these come out maybe close to Halloween. But now it's every weekend. Eventually, some movies are going to get caught in the crush."

Steven Zeitchik reports from Roger Ebert's Overlooked Film Festival, where the frail critic walked into almost every screening under his own steam, and watched the films from a recliner at the back of the theater:

Every April for the last nine years, thousands have gathered in this college town in central Illinois -- home to Ebert's alma mater, the U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign -- to bask in Ebert's movie tastes and hear his wide-ranging discussions with Hollywood and indie filmmakers in what is a big-name but still intimate event.

But the fest was almost scrapped this year. Last fall, Ebert was in the midst of an eight-month hospital stay in Florida, fighting for his life, and was about to call it off when he heard organizers had sold out the entire run of 1,000 festival passes within days, five months before the fest would even start. He changed his mind, and the show was back on.

With Ebert unable to assume his role as moderator, Chaz, fest director Nate Kohn and others compensated by having a host of guests stand in during his famous post-screening Q&As with filmmakers, which have been known to run as long as two hours.

Kohn and Chaz also did what Ebert never would have allowed them to do in previous years: schedule a Sunday screening of "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," Russ Meyer's 1970 cult sequel, for which Ebert penned the screenplay.

"I was very depressed. It's been a long process, and in a way this festival is my rebirth," Ebert said in an interview via a notepad on which he pens quick, assured strokes.

UPDATE: Jim Emerson from Ebert's website.

James Ellroy presents the Payback DVD.

Jack Valenti died Thursday:

Jack Valenti, the colorful, charismatic head of the Motion Picture Assn. of America for almost four decades and the prime mover behind the movie ratings system, died Thursday. He was 85.Valenti had checked out of Johns Hopkins University Medical Center on Wednesday where he was hospitalized after suffering a stroke.

A private mass celebrating the life of Jack Valenti will be held in Washington. The family will announce details in the coming days.

UPDATE: Here's Variety's political blogger Ted Johnson on on Valenti. He has several posts--and one on Barack Obama's clubbing plans this weekend. And Valenti's memoir stays on track. My favorite thing about Valenti was his old-fashioned, florid, oratorical use of language. They don't make them like him anymore.

The next book section on the chopping block is the LAT's: just as they prepare to mount this weekend's Festival of Books at UCLA.

Talk about self-destructive.

It takes guts to be a transsexual sportswriter. The LAT's Mike Penner is taking a leave. When he returns he will be Christine Penner Daniels.

The NYT's Sharon Waxman reminds us that all is not right with Hollywood's male infatuation. Braver than most, Lynda Obst and Cathy Schulman speak on the record, as does Sherry Lansing. No longer muzzled by being a pioneer female studio head, she cuts to the chase:

Ms. Lansing, who was the dean of female Hollywood studio executives, said she believed that lifestyle choices, along with the dumbing down of Hollywood movies, was affecting the number of women in the running for top jobs.

“Most people who got into the movie business wanted to make a certain kind of movie: movies that were character-driven, that affected the way you thought, that had social content, political content,” she said. “But now it’s about opening weekend.”

“At a certain point,” she continued, “some women will say: ‘I’ve done this enough. I have enough money. How long am I going to get up at 6 a.m. and go to bed at 11 p.m., six days a week?’ Women also want to be in love. A huge percentage want children. They want friends. They want life.”

Glenn Kenny responds. So does Michael Blowhard. Amusingly.

Graydon Carter may reign over the super-slick glossy magazine Vanity Fair, but all is not as it seems at his trendy West Village restaurant The Waverly Inn, reports the NYT:

But on March 28, the restaurant failed an inspection with the city’s health department, with a total of 38 violation points. It takes a minimum of 28 points to fail. The restaurant was cited for nine different violations, including “mildew buildup” inside an ice machine; “facility conditions conducive to the existence of pest life” (this had to do with debris and old equipment on the basement floor); and the absence of a sign at the bar instructing employees to wash their hands. And the restaurant was reprimanded for not having adequate warning signs regarding first aid for choking patrons and the effects of alcohol on pregnancy.

Also: “Mouse activity present in that approximately 20 fresh mice excreta observed on floor under flavor syrup storage racks in basement.”

The violations were not significant enough to order a shutdown of the restaurant, said a department spokesman, Geoffrey Cowley. “Once the restaurant score hits 75 points, the protocol is to determine whether a shutdown is in order,” he said.

Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) had an opportunity to scrutinize U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for his new doc Taxi to the Dark Side, which examines torture in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq. Incorporating never-before-seen images from inside the Bagram, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons and interviews with high-ranking officials such as John Yoo, Alberto Mora and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, low-ranking interrogators at the Abu Ghraib and Bagram Prisons, NYT reporters Tim Golden and Carlotta Gall and the families of tortured prisoners, it is the first film to detail the arc of the Bush Administration’s policy on torture. Executive produced by Sidney Blumenthal, the film debuts Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival.

At The Huffington Post, Gibney answers the question: Is Gonzales stupid? The answer is no!

Here's one early response to Taxi to the Dark Side from The Village Voice:

Taxi to the Dark Side, which Gibney teasingly introduced to the crowd as a "murder mystery that leads from Afghanistan to Washington," is an indictment of U.S. torture culture that employs much of the same material as Rory Kennedy's recent Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, although its approach is less psychological than brutalizing. To its credit, Dark Side's eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye tale forgoes intellectualism in favor of blunt trauma; the only appropriate response to its punishing litany of abuses, unmistakably ordered by Pentagon and White House bullies, is...well, rage.

UPDATE: Here's Andrew Sullivan's response to Taxi to the Dark Side:

Alex Gibney's new documentary on the legalization and authorization of torture by the Bush administration debuts this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival. See the trailer here. It's a well-crafted piece of work and a devastating exposure of the denial that still runs rampant in some quarters about what has actually been done in the name of the American people these past few years. Longtime readers of this blog know all too well many of the details - but this film does what a parasitic blog cannot, and what even all the innovative reporting on the subject has not yet been able to do. It puts it all together. It represents a moment in this war when we can actually stop and look back from rising ground, and see how far we have come from the civilized norms of warfare that the United States represented in the last century. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld tore off that civilized veneer and repudiated that long and honorable history. From the details of approved interrogation techniques replicated by scapegoats at Abu Ghraib to the self-conscious attempts to dissemble and deceive about the Rubicon we've crossed to the simple facts of the percentage of captives at Gitmo who were actually seized by U.S. forces - a small fraction of the total - you see conscious, orchestrated sadism at work. It's a film that enrages and shocks. But it has all been in front of our noses.

I watched the whole thing intently and quietly to the end. But its final coda contains a small clip of Gibney's late father, a longtime military interrogator, and his views on what has been done to his honorable profession by the Bush White House. Alone, it made me weep. It struck a chord that still resonates: of one thing mainly, and one thing still unavoidably. Shame. Almost unspeakable shame.

Mediabistro wraps up the life and death of David Halberstam:

Halberstam's Skeptical Vietnam Voice Still Echoes in the Fog of Iraq (NYT). Dexter Filkins: During four years of war in Iraq, American reporters on the ground in Baghdad have often found themselves coming under criticism remarkably similar to that which David Halberstam endured: those journalists in Baghdad, so said the Bush administration and its supporters, only reported the bad news. They were dupes of the insurgents. They were cowardly and unpatriotic. NYO: Halberstam was a reporter who roared. E&P: Halberstam gave good quotes — and autographs, writes Joe Strupp. WaPo: Halberstam saw journalism as a calling, like later reporters who took him as a model in the mightiness of their efforts. Slate: Jack Shafer's portrait of the prize-winning reporter as an engorged ego.

Unnaccountably, Mediabistro omitted the LAT's exemplary Tim Rutten, who inspired me to continue to get lost in the details:

The joy of legwork
We have an expression in journalism to describe the sort of lethargy that comes on reporters of a certain age: "losing your legs." David Halberstam never lost his legs. He was 73 when he died, and he was on his way to an interview for his next book. He maintained not simply a faith in reporting as an honorable public service but an elemental joy in the experience itself.

At Columbia University not long ago, he spoke to students about what he took from those early years in Mississippi: "I learned how to work a story, how to talk to ordinary people, and what a joy doing legwork was. I learned the best question of all for any interview: 'Who else should I see?' To this day, the back cover of my notebooks is covered with lists of names of people to see. I learned that the more legwork you do, inevitably the better the writing seems because you have more details, more anecdotes, and more authority. And I learned that the great fun of journalism was talking to people, that it was where you kept learning. What a marvelous way to grow intellectually!"

In an interview now more than a decade old, Halberstam said of his career, "It's been a wonderful life. Actually, when I think about my career I am sometimes stunned. I'm stunned by the richness of it. It gave me all the things I ever wanted. I loved being a reporter." It showed, and few people who practice our vocation ever have done it quite so much credit.

The Envelope tracks the stars' Cannes plans. Clooney will throw an Oceans Thirteen benefit on May 22 for Darfur, while DiCaprio promos his environmental doc The Eleventh Hour and Jolie will attend with Mighty Heart. Brad Pitt costars in Oceans and lives with Jolie, so we can only hope...

I've been waiting for this shoe to drop for a while. I had heard that big personalities Carrie Fisher and Brett Ratner were in the running to be judges on the Steven Spielberg/Mark Burnett reality series. Producer-directors Jon Avnet and Garry Marshall? Not a peep.

Here's the new Harry Potter trailer. Four down, this is the fifth: they haven't faltered yet. And David Yates (The Girl in the Cafe, State of Play) is a terrific director. Expected to stick close to the JK Rowling novel, this one, which opens July 13, does look darker still--which makes sense as its global fans grow up with the stars. This time, Potter falls for Cho Chang (Katie Leung). Helena Bonham Carter, Imelda Staunton and Ralph Fiennes (in the poster) co-star.

Recovering cancer patient Roger Ebert, who is undergoing many surgeries on his face and neck, is going to go to his film festival if he wants to!

The 30 Rock star has had a helluva week. Following his ex-wife Kim Basinger's presumed leak of his phone rant against his daughter--was she 11? 12?--he has now left his agency, CAA. As a loyal Aaron Sorkin fan, I initially picked Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and didn't TiVo 30 Rock until recently. The show is a winner. Tina Fey is real, funny, and someone I can enthusiastically identify with. And Baldwin deserves his kudos. Hasn't he always had anger management issues? He's still a great actor.

UPDATE: I'll be curious to hear what happens to CAA's Kevin Iwashina, an indie-friendly agent who is also deeply involved in liberal politics. In a town where agents often travel in packs, Iwashina stood out as an individual personality. Which may be why he's leaving the agency monolith.

Julia Stiles is great casting as Sylvia Plath in a screen adaptation of Plath's autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. She's smart and strong with a definite dark side. I liked her in the 50s feminist drama Mona Lisa Smile. She looks right.

Monica Corcoran, The Stylephile, who sits across from me at Variety, writes knowledgably about shoes and other fancy gear. Monica knows there are those (like Anna Wintour) who hate the word blog, so she asked her readers to come up with a better name for weblog. She offered a prize gift bag to the winner, who was will be announced at 6:00 PM PST. Some of the suggested names are fun: I voted for the French bloc, pensees, or the all-American webanter. UPDATE: Monica picked the winner: Commentini.

The new stateside movie download service Jaman will make six movies unspooling at the Tribeca Film Festival available for free download for seven days, reports Adam Dawtry.

I'm just as glad I didn't get around to posting those two shots of Heath Ledger in makeup as The Joker. It turned out to be a Photoshop prank.

While The Simpsons Movie doesn't open until July 27, Sean Smith goes to town with Matt Groening, Jim Brooks and Co. in Newsweek:

To make it on the big screen, you have to give people something spectacular. Something extraordinary. Something like Bart Simpson—full frontal. It happens early in "The Simpsons Movie," when the animated 10-year-old takes a dare from his goofball father, Homer, to skateboard naked through the streets of Springfield. Hidden by plants and picket fences, he whizzes along, past kids, down hills, through traffic lights, until, in one shocking moment, little Bart flashes his little part to the entire world. Which may make this the first Hollywood film to show that kind of skin and to escape an R rating.

In a summer bursting with comedies—including major animated fare "Shrek the Third" and the new Pixar film, "Ratatouille"—"The Simpsons Movie," which opens July 27, is both the least hyped and the most anticipated. Since "The Simpsons" debuted in 1989, it has built a fanatical fan base, earned 23 Emmys and generated more than $2.5 billion in revenue, if you include the never-ending selection of T shirts. Now in its 18th season, "The Simpsons" is the longest-running sitcom in history, and it's broadcast in more than 70 countries. An online poll conducted in 2003 by the BBC declared Homer Simpson "The Greatest American." No. 2: Abraham Lincoln. "Homer is what other countries think America is like," says writer-producer Al Jean, who has been with the show since the beginning. "Voting for Homer was like saying, 'Screw you, America.' It's probably part of our success."

For years now the studios have effectively gotten away with betting the farm on their in-house sequel tentpoles. This summer will prove a crucible for that strategy. Which ones will go down in flames? The whole idea of a tentpole is to pay your other bills with its profits---not to barely break even. The costs on Spidey are astronomical. Variety's Diane Garrett and Radar's Kim Masters look at the numbers.

Variety: For Sony's webslinger franchise, a huge sum like the admitted $258 million may be pricey, but it's considered more investment than risk, since the first two films took home $1.6 billion in box office alone, before DVD, ancillaries and merchandising were added in. But some skeptical studio rivals say "Spider-Man 3" has actually topped the $300 million budget mark. The whole guessing game provides a timely reminder of the other rules of talking about tentpole budgets:

1) Take all figures with skepticism. No matter what a studio avows, rivals say the real budget is at least one-third higher than the reported one.

2) Time heals everything. Last year, Bryan Singer said on TV that "Superman Returns" cost $250 million. The studio and the director immediately said, no, it's under $200 million. Now that all the returns are in and it's made a profit, they're more open to acknowledging the high figure.

3) Keep it all in perspective. Back in the 1950s, nobody talked publicly about budgets because most outsiders didn't care. But when TV threatened to erode filmgoing, studios actually exaggerated the costs of movies: "Filmed with a cast of thousands! At a cost of millions!"

4) Only the accountants know for sure. With Hollywood's famously pliable bookkeeping, studio accountants can easily make a budget come out higher -- or lower -- than the real tab, depending on the studio's needs.

This summer, "Spider-Man 3" isn't the only tentpole pushing the budget envelope. The latest installments in the "Pirates of the Caribbean," "Harry Potter," "Rush Hour" and "Die Hard" franchises, as well as "Evan Almighty" and "Transformers," are all drawing scrutiny.

Universal is already weary of defending its $175 million budget for "Evan Almighty," which some consider too high for a comedy. The studio counters that the "Bruce Almighty" sequel is designed as a four-quadrant film, and therefore poised for bigger B.O. returns than typical comedies.

New Line's assertion that the "Rush Hour 3" budget is $125 million seems suspiciously last decade -- especially after factoring in the cost of reuniting stars Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, with director Brett Ratner six years after the series' previous installment.

The meter is still running for "Pirates of the Caribbean 3," which has been bedeviled by costly overruns and last-minute f/x work leading up its May 25 bow. Pic's actual tally is hard to compute given the overlap between the second and third installments in the franchise, but before the overruns, the budget for both sequels was already closing in on $500 million.

Radar:

Even before filming began in January 2006, Sam Raimi promised to pull out all the stops for his third Spidey film (likely the last he'll direct in the series). He wasn't kidding. As production dragged on into late summer—it had been scheduled to conclude in June—stories about the project's ballooning budget started popping up all over town. But in the end, even the most hyperbolic of observers may have underestimated the final tab. Industry insiders claim that Sony spent $350 million or more on production alone. With marketing and promotion factored in, the total price tag will approach half a billion dollars—positioning Spider-Man 3 as the most expensive movie of all time. (Cleopatra, the 1963 epic that has long held the title of priciest picture, had an inflation-adjusted budget of $290 million.)

Still reeling from a flurry of bad press on its PlayStation 3 gaming console, Sony isn't eager to claim this honor. A studio spokesman angrily rejects the $350 million estimate as a "complete fabrication," insisting that production costs didn't exceed $270 million. One of the film's producers, Laura Ziskin, also disputes the higher total, albeit in a less forceful manner. "I refuse to say the [real] number because it makes me choke," she tells Radar. "Spider-Man 3 was a super-expensive movie—the most expensive film we've ever made. But there's no way you can get to $300 million."