In a nutshell, Balsmeyer's script is about wanting to abandon the dreary regulation of one's life for something fresher, spontaneous and more impassioned, and managing to do just that by accident, and then having the ravishing Miranda Otto become your life partner and soul mate right at the point when you really need her, and without having to sweat the transitions very much.

You may feel a very slight regret at having paid $10 bucks to see DANNY DECKCHAIR -- it feels more like a nice Sunday evening DVD thing than an uptown Friday-night date movie -- but I found it more pleasing and diverting and down-to-earth than several.... no, most of the summer's big-studio crap rides.

(Can anyone imagine anything worse than being forced to watch HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN again? Okay, maybe KING ARTHUR, but can we talk plainly now about all the Alfonso-blowing puff pieces that greeted AZKABAN a week or so before it opened? What was that? Cuaron is one of the south-of-the-border good guys, no question, and we all loved the way he directed Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN, and AZKABAN was a little less tiresome than the other Potters because of his creative input...and that was reason to celebrate?)

I just wish Balsmeyer cared more about selling the rough portions. Either he doesn't try hard enough, or he doesn't have the chops.

The first 15 minutes of DANNY DECKCHAIR tell us what's making Danny Morgan (Rhys Ifans) unhappy and anxious. It doesn't explain how this hippie-ish cement-truck driver came to share a suburban Sydney pad with Trudy (Justine Clarke), his real-estate agent girlfriend, as they couldn't be less compatible, but Danny's repeatedly expressed longing to fly off to some exotic place makes it clear he's quite miserable. Trudy thinks he's a loser and she's starting an affair with a local TV reporter named Sandy (Rhys Muldoon) and so on. Things aren't working.

And so Danny, in an understandable act of nihilist rebellion, impulsively decides to be Phileas Fogg. He inflates several big yellow balloons with helium, ties them to a lawn chair and floats into the sky in the middle of an outdoor barbecue. I found this sequence exciting and actually scary. Danny is hundreds of feet high without a seatbelt, and just a seat-shift away from falling. I was feeling it mightily...and then the crap started.

You can spot the CG work almost immediately. (Is it that hard to make a floating guy in a deckchair look real?) And then Balsmeyer has Danny fall out of the chair but manage to grab hold of the bottom with one hand as he's falling and pull himself back up, which a chimpanzee couldn't manage if he went into training. It's too bad because up to this point you're taking the story half-seriously.

Danny's ride lasts a long while. He floats over Sydney, through a thunderstorm and over country turf, and finally comes down (in another fake-looking CG sequence) into a small town called Clarence, and more precisely into a tree growing in the back yard of Glenda (Otto), Clarence's only parking cop. Danny's landing (including a fall from at least 50 feet up) would obviously kill anyone in real life, or at the least land him in the hospital with multiple fractures. I'll accept a guy crashing after a balloon flight without dying, but not this way. It's shitty directing.

Then the LOCAL HERO-type stuff kicks in and Balsmeyer gets some of it right. He's really into the notion of a guy from another place fitting into a small community and finding a new sense of himself, and he's got a knack for making the emotional current in some scenes feel warm and soothing. I even got through a saccharine speech that Danny gives to the locals about how it's rewarding to be a small-town nobody as long as you're into your own uniqueness.

I might have gone with more of DANNY DECKCHAIR if someone other than Ifans had the lead role. There's something weird and geeky about him. And while I understood his long hair and raggedy beard look in HUMAN NATURE, I don't get it here. For me, it strains credibility that an Australian blue-collar guy in 2004 would walk around like it's 1971. I think it's because Ifans likes the look himself.

I also don't like characters named "Danny." It's a dorky-sounding name for a street kid who plays stickball. "Danny! Danny!"....I hate it. One of the very few things I didn't find appealing about Sydney Lumet's PRINCE OF THE CITY was the fact that Treat Williams' lead character was called Det. Danny Ciello. There were parts of PEARL HARBOR I half-enjoyed, but hearing Ben Affleck say "Danny, Danny" all the time while talking to Josh Hartnett was bad. I never liked Elton John's song "Daniel" very much, and now I know why.

Wow, this is really a vein here. Elvis Presley's character in KING CREOLE was named Danny since the film was based on Harold Robbin's book, "A Stone for Danny Fisher," and it never felt right. I never liked Danny Bonaduce. Daniel Baldwin always seemed to tick me off for some reason. I'm telling you, it's the damn sound.

But Miranda Otto helps a lot. She's one of the most engaging and attractive actresses around right now. I had trouble paying full attention to her in the RINGS films, but she was heartbreaking in Agniezka Holland's JULIE WALKING HOME, which I saw at the 2003 Sonoma Film Festival (during which me and a couple of other guys voted to give JULIE the festival's top prize). She's next in John Moore's FLIGHT OF THE PHEONIX.

Lyndon Said It

"It's better to have the camel inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in."

No, it's not a marketing slogan. It's President Lyndon Johnson's famous explanation, uttered in the mid '60s, about why he had decided to keep J. Edgar Hoover on as FBI director for life. The line doesn't need explaining, but I've always wondered if it was Johnson's or somebody else's. I did a search yesterday and it appears to be LBJ's, but online info is never the final word.

Life is full of pissing camels. We're a nation of them. Think of the tens of thousands of people out there who've kept their jobs mainly because their bosses or colleagues are afraid of the consequences if they were to be fired or hook up with a competitor. (This enters into Hollywood deal-making quite often.) Think of the hundreds of thousands of husbands and wives who've stayed together out of fear of divorce damage.

The pissing-camel principle is America's ultimate relationship glue. Hell, the world's. If only Byambasuren Davaa and Luigi Falorni, directors of Thinkfilm's THE SAGA OF THE WEEPING CAMEL , had thought to tap into this on some level, Mark Urman would be a slightly happier man. (Not that he isn't basically content.)

I don't know why I'm getting into this, but sometimes when you write about absolutely nothing it has a way of opening up the sluice gates. I guess it didn't work this time.

Seriously!

To get advertising for your site you have to able to show the marketing and media-buy guys who your readers are -- i.e., how many, how old, how much they earn, their movie- watching patterns, etc. To this end, I've hooked up with an independent research firm called Smart Communications as a way of scoping things out.

I realize it's a slight pain in the ass, but if everyone reading this could take three or four minutes and just answer the questions, it would be hugely appreciated. At least I'm not hitting you guys up for contributions or trying to sell T-shirts. Just follow the link and do it. Imagine you're in sixth grade and it's time to do your homework. Well, not really.

The more respondents, the more credible the survey. Ask your friends to write in. Send out bulk e-mails. Organize back-yard barbecues. Make this one effort and I've leave you alone for a while .

Emphasis

I have to keep running these pieces to overcome the hyphen problem. I'm told that the hyphen in the URL for the new Hollywood Elsewhere site (www.hollywood-elsewhere.com) will be a stumbling block for some. People don't 'em. Bad hyphens...bad. If you're into this column and intend to follow me to my solo site, bookmark the URL here and now: www. hollywood-elsewhere.com.

Another change is that I may not leave Movie Poop Shoot as of September 1st. The new site will be active as of next Wednesday, 8.18,but I might hang around here a few extra weeks so readers can have more time to get used to the new URL. The column will run concurrently on both sites, and I'll keep pestering everyone to bookmark the new place.

The game is the same. Go the new page, check out the photo, and write in and identify, if you can, the name of the restaurant. (It's not in Los Angeles.) I'll give it two weeks. The person who comes closest to naming it, or at least comes the closest to naming the city or the neighborhood it's in, wins. And the prize could be...I don't know, an invite to an all-media screening and a modest dinner to follow?

Snoozer

I hate stories about troubled shoots unless someone quits or gets fired, in which case you have the challenge of digging up and reporting the blow-by-blows that led to this act.

Like the story the L.A. TIMES is said to be working on about the whacking of poor Ted Griffin from that quasi-GRADUATE sequel he wrote and was trying to direct. Nobody knows the deep-down truth (yet), but the word going around was that Jennifer Aniston lobbied the hardest to have him fired. Which is vaguely interesting, given the fact that I'm hearing (again) that her husband, Brad Pitt, has had issues with Doug Liman, the director of his still-rolling big-budget thriller, MR. AND MRS. SMITH.

Movie shoots are always trouble. If the principals (director, stars, producers) aren't arguing about the best way to make it, it's a possible indication that the film won't have that special snap. Honing things down can sometimes be a turbulent, stressful process. Which is why guys like me tend to get calls from on-set sources (or friends of same) when a big-star lead, in their view, "isn't on the same page" with the director and is "off in his own world."

It's a slow news day so I called Liman this morning to ask about this. I guess I'm not a tough-enough inquisitor. Before laying out the stories I mentioned my view that a lack of creative conflict isn't necessarily a good thing. Liman said, "Well, we're not arguing so maybe something is wrong."

Okay, so it's taken a bit longer than usual to get it finished. A thriller about married-to- each-other assassins, MR. AND MRS. SMITH started rolling last fall, and is said to have cost over $100 million thus far. New sets are being constructed on the Fox lot right now in preparation for a final round of shooting, which, Liman says, had to wait until Pitt finished his part in Steven Soderbergh's OCEAN'S TWELVE.

I was told yesterday that some of the new lensing will include re-dos of already-shot scenes, due to concerns that Pitt and costar Angelina Jolie's characters, a well-to-do suburban couple who work as assassins for competing crime bosses, are constantly swilling drinks, hence a sense of unneeded repetition. Liman said this allegation is so ludicrous he wouldn't even comment.

The NEW YORK POST's "Page Six" column reported a while back that Pitt and Jolie's absence from the set due to " flu-like sicknesses" had caused delays. Fox 411's Roger Freidman wrote that Jolie had a series of bitter disputes with Liman and had come close to "meltdown" due to Jolie "disagreeing on just about everything [Liman] had asked her to do." Liman told me Friedman's report was rancid and way off the mark.

MR. AND MRS. SMITH, a Regency Films production, will open via 20th Century Fox on June 10, 2005. I don't care about any on-set turbulence. Nobody cares. If it's good I'll care about seeing it, and that'll be that.

Trio

I'm feeling intense nostalgia pangs for next month's Toronto Film Festival, due to the sorry-ass fact that I'm not going. As Peter O'Toole says in BECKET, "I shouldn't have mentioned it...it hurts too much." My fall-back strategy is to pester the producers and distributors taking films there and wangle myself into any pre-festival screenings they might be having. Then I'll "be" there in a sense.

The full schedule hasn't been announced, but is there a distributor with a seemingly hotter Toronto template than Fox Searchlight? The dependent distrib has Alexander Payne's SIDEWAYS (due out October 20), Bill Condon's KINSEY (set for release on 11.12) and, generating the most intrigue, David O' Russell's I HEART HUCKABEES (October 1).

HUCKABEES AND KINSEY, I've been told, will be shown at gala screenings at Roy Thomson Hall.

Impressions about KINSEY, largely stemming from the trailer, are on the vague side. You can sense that Liam Neeson's performance as Alfred Kinsey, whose studies about human sexuality led to a pair of bombshell books, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female" in 1948 and '53, respectively, will be good. Other than that, you tell me.

Chris O'Donnell plays a fellow sex researcher; Laura Linney plays Kinsey's wife. Peter Sarsgaard, Timothy Hutton, John Lithgow and Oliver Platt costar. Bill Condon (GODS AND MONSTERS) wrote and directed.

SIDEWAYS, co-written and directed by Payne and based on a novel by Rex Pickett, is said to be a smart, quirky comedy. It's about a failed writer and high-school English teacher named Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) sharing a weeklong wine-country tour with an actor friend named Jack (Thomas Haden Church). They talk about marriages, affairs, career crises, and generally spew it all out.

An IMDB guy who says he's seen it (and who could be Payne's cousin or lawyer, for all I know) says, "If you're in the mood to laugh at an intelligent comedy and not a predictable slapstick show, this is definitely one to see."

HUCKABEES, the latest from the director of THREE KINGS and FLIRTING WITH DISASTER, is some kind of offbeat middle-American comedy about existential angst and mid-life head-turning.

Russell finished principal photography under a year ago. It co stars Jude Law, Dustin Hoffman, Mark Wahlberg, Naomi Watts, Jason Schwartzmann (who will presumably be losing his head in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette movie) and Lily Tomlin. It focuses on a couple (Hoffman, Tomlin) who work as detectives, but whose specialty is basically helping people who are going through serious life crises.

Politix

"I've been a fan since I discovered your column on Mr. Showbiz, but I'm bothered by your recent political commentaries. Although I am not a Bush backer by any means (in fact I am a Canadian living in the United States and therefore cannot vote), your tendency to express disdain for President Bush is inappropriate and actually somewhat rude.

"Imagine sitting in one of your favorite restaurants, one you've been coming to for years. And then the waiter approaches to tell you the evening's specials. After listing off some unique appetizers and entrees that you find fascinating, he adds, 'By the way, I believe John Kerry is an idiot who flip-flops on the issues.' How would you react?

"I sincerely respect the work you do and plan to continue to read your work. I simply ask that you realize not all your readers care to here how you feel about politics when you are known for your entertainment expertise." - Jaret Giesbrecht. c/o NWA.

Wells to Giesbrecht: Cut to the chase, Jaret. Did you go to www.moveonpac. org/morris and look at the "Real People" ads or not? You think it's rude that I've been impressed by them? I write about any composed presentation (feature, HBO movie, doc, ad) that turns me on. Watch the Morris ads and tell me what you think or don't, but the waiter analogy misses the overall.

Movies and politics are all one big bowl of gumbo these days. We're in the middle of an election and all, and we've got FAHRENHEIT 9/11 and all those other political docs out there and everyone reacting and getting worked up, etc., and you want me to....what?... pretend this isn't happening? I'm glad you like the column, but I don't back off on this stuff.

Anyone who says, 'I only want entertainment' and 'leave politics out of it!' has his or her head in the sand, on a certain level. They're disturbed by what's going on above ground. And I always cock my head whenever someone uses the word "appropriate." Why do the people who say "that's not appropriate" always seem to be corporate spokespersons or others with a certain starched-shirt, status-quo tilt?

I am a passionate lefty (who happens to personally like righties, by the way...they tend to be good people), and I am also a seriously crazed movie lover, and that's that. Take it or leave it. By the way, what's 'NWA'? Niggahs with Attitude?

Giesbrecht back to Wells: I work for Northwest Airlines. The Morris ads are well made and moving. I never had a problem with you writing about the work behind the ads. I simply don't think talking about your dislike for Bush is necessary. And just because a person wants only entertainment it does not mean they have their head buried in the sand. I read newspapers and go to newspaper websites expecting to not only read articles but also the opinions of columnists. There are a number of places people can seek out (websites, coffee shops, universities) where those issues can be discussed.

"It's just that I get my fill of politics through those outlets. When I want a diversion from the current news, which has been very bleak over the past few years, I go to websites like Movie Poop Shoot or other trivial sites, or to places where I expect to be entertained, not inundated with more political commentary. There is a time and a place for everything, and I feel Movie Poop Shoot is not the right place for politics, regardless of opinion.

Wells back to Giesbrecht: If you read my column (and I hope you continue to do that), you're going to get political content every so often, which means my views of this and that if there happens to be a movie or provocative visual package of some kind making a big impression. I'm not neutral, I'm for and against certain things, and that's that. If this doesn't work for you, sorry. Hollywood Elsewhere is not and never will be "trivial." It will never be a get-away-from-it-all movie fantasy trip. I would be deeply ashamed to write such a column.

Collateral

"Thank you, Michael Mann, for insisting that COLLATERAL be shot on video. Never have I seen such great shots of street lights in my life. Film simply can't do justice to the electric glow of the almost-sacred artificial light that defines our nocturnal lives. I could go on and on about how the brilliance of the video photography brought inanimate street life to dazzling life, but a picture is worth a thousand words.

"So who cares if an actor sitting in the back of the cab looks like a muddy orange-brown mess? Who cares if they looked blurry and underexposed? Who cares if the actors look like crap as long as the streetlights look great? And who cares if it seems that most film critics seem to be utterly ignorant about the ABC's of imagery, and what high resolution looks like next to low resolution. (Here's a test anyone with an ink-jet printer can do -- print out the same photograph at 50 resolution and then at 300 resolution).

"Actually, ever since film's early days resolution has been going down. I've been told the black-and-white negatives of early silent film (c. 1908) had maybe three or more times the thickness of emulsion on them than in the present day, and if you see one of those old films, if you actually bother to look at what you're SEEING, you can see the detail on every single leaf of a tree.

"Modern film looks somewhat lame by comparison, so what the heck, let's hear it for the even lamer imagery of video, especially considering how you can see stuff that would turn out black on film if you didn't pay to rent lights to get a decent exposure. So here's a hearty thank you to everyone out there with enough of a herd instinct to go along with the prevailing view that COLLATERAL is well shot." -- Hollywood Malcontent

Thanks

"I've enjoyed your column for years, from Mr. Showbiz to Reel.com to Movie Poop Shoot. It doesn't matter to me where you'll be going to be on the move because I'll be there no matter what. A simple hyphen in the new URL will not deter me since I've already bookmarked the page.

"You are one of the more insightful, clever, and informative journalists that I have been reading for quite some time and who actually has a clue unlike some of the incompetent frauds that call themselves professionals within the business and only care to defer to every studio's wish and spin the facts to suit their own agendas. It's good to have a real Hollywood insider that knows the biz inside and out. "So thanks for keeping me educated on everything movie related throughout all these years, and I'm looking forward to the next incarnation at Hollywood-Elsewhere.com." -- Laurence Price, Toronto, Ontario.

Wells to Price: That's good to hear. It helps. If I were going to Toronto I'd look you up and buy you a drink. I'm feeling affection-starved these days, so thanks.

In Closing...

"Okay, so you've had a few tough months. I'll tell you what you do, and I don't care if you're J. Paul Getty or Irving the Tailor. You ride it out." -- Lawrence Tierney's "Joe Cabot" character on the phone to a guy in RESERVOIR DOGS, as written by Quentin Tarantino.