Odds: Tuesday - Southland Tales and such.

By Alison Willmore on 06/27/2006

The latest issue of Cinema Scope has the expected Cannes focus, with Mark Peranson grumbling

“How was Cannes?” For about two weeks after the Fortnight, that’s the question a returning Cannes cavalry soldier receives from whomever he comes in contact with on the homefront. They might as well be asking, “How was the root canal?”

Peranson also weighs in on the CriticGate 2006 crisis and interviews Richard Kelly. And there's the usual dozen smart offerings.

[On the topic of CriticGate, canned New York Daily News critic Jami Bernard has gone blogger over at Movie City News.]

At New York, Logan Hill interviews Woody Allen and his newest muse, Scarlett Johansson, and as you'd expect, it's slightly creepy:

When asked if he wrote those lines to impress Johansson, Woody doesn’t disagree—but he offers a caveat: “It’s very hard to be extra witty around a sexually overwhelming, beautiful young woman who is wittier than you are. Anytime I say anything amusing, Scarlett tops me.”

Also at New York, Emily Nussbaum checks in on "Strangers With Candy"'s Amy Sedaris. Speaking of, Reyhan Harmanci of the San Francisco Chronicle shares this from the film's premiere at the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival:

To promote the screening, Frameline put on a Jerri look-alike contest inside the Empire. Sadly, it had only one entrant. "I think it's a hard look for many drag queens," says local celebrity Heklina, who was the host. "You want to look gorgeous -- helllooo, look at me -- and Jerri is so hideous."

The daily trash: the New York Post's Page Six quotes Pat Dollard, the former agent of Steven Soderbergh who left to make "Young Americans," a pro-war documentary about U.S. Marines fighting insurgents in Iraq.

"I read something on the Internet in which someone was patting himself on the back for having the courage to oppose the war," Dollard recalled. In an obvious reference to [George] Clooney, who owns a villa in Italy, he said, "They actually equate bravery with speaking out against the president because [losing fans] might cost them one less servant at their Italian villa . . . It put me into a black rage and made me sick to my stomach."

Yeah! We bet he takes every penny he made off of Clooney in "Ocean's Eleven" and just hurls it right back in his face! Right!

Trailer for "Clerks 2" is here; teaser for "Spider-Man 3" is here (look, it's a slow news day, okay?).

At Salon, Farhad Manjoo takes a detailed look at 22-year-old Dylan Avery's "Loose Change," a feature-length film (and the self-proclaimed "most provocative 9-11 documentary on the market today") that proposes a complicated conspiracy theory alleging that "the 9/11 attacks were an 'inside job.'"

"Loose Change" may traffic in fiction, but it sinks its hooks in. If you're unfamiliar with the official story -- if you haven't, say, perused the hundreds of pages of documentation supporting the 9/11 Commission's conclusions -- you may well find the movie's false reality strangely seductive. And going online to debunk "Loose Change" doesn't necessarily boost your faith in the 9/11 Commission's story; following the path that Google presents in response to queries like "pentagon plane crash" or "world trade center collapse" could make matters worse. While discovering flaws in the movie's claims, you'll find yourself bumping up against entirely different 9/11 theories, some of which propose a theory of the case that's far stranger than you'd ever imagined. Once you jump down the rabbit hole, you find it goes only deeper.

There seem to be dozens of Johnny Depp profiles in print and on the web at the moment, all covering the same themes of superstar heartthrob angst and rebellion; Sean Smith's at Newsweek is pretty decent.

Finally, Ray Pride at Movie City Indie points to Robert Abele's interview with "undersung, overly talented Walter Hill" at LA Weekly — Hill's two-part Western "Broken Trail," made for our sister network AMC, premiered to astounding ratings on Sunday. But who cares? This is really an excuse to relay the following — often, wandering around the offices here at 11 Penn Plaza looking for leftover sandwiches from meetings to eat (day-and-a-half-old, tops — we have our standards), we'll come across detritus or intentional offerings from one of the other network housed here: old promotional items when someone's cleaning out a closet, cupcakes on Valentine's Day. On Friday, there were enigmatic baggies of M&Ms mixed with sunflower seeds and raisins sitting out in the lobby. What could it mean? We stared. And then we knew.

It was Broken Trail Mix.

And someone is still patting themselves on the back somewhere over that one.

+ Issue 27 (Cinema Scope)
+ Critic sans portfolio (IncredibleShrinkingCritic)
+ And God Created Scarlett (New York)
+ Amy Sedaris Gets Up in Your Grill (New York)
+ It gets a bit kooky in line for the 'Strangers With Candy' premiere in S.F. (SF Chronicle)
+ H'wood Warrior Rips Clooney (NY Post)
+ Clerks 2 (Apple)
+ The 9/11 deniers (Salon)
+ A Pirate's Life (Newsweek)
+ Hill and trail: on Walter Hill's Broken Trail (MC Indie)