But an exhibitor friend says he's hearing BILL is likely to appear at either Toronto or the Venice Film Festival (maybe), and that it shouldn't be counted out.

Jacobson also sounded the alarm about Bernardo Bertolucci's THE DREAMERS, a Fox Searchlight release starring Jean-Pierre Leaud about chaotic happenings in 1968, but I've heard there's a fair-to-decent chance it will play either Venice or Toronto, or both.

Jane Campion's femme-slanted crime thriller IN THE CUT is also on Jacobson's uh-oh list, but there's a distinct possibility it may go to Toronto to help fortify a push for awards. It's based on a page-turner by Susanna Moore about a Manhattan woman (Meg Ryan) having an affair with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) on a grisly murder case. It costars Kevin Bacon and Jennifer Jason Leigh, and is said to be splendid. The glitch, I'm told, is that the film's U.S. distributor, Screen Gems, is reluctant for some reason to take it on the festival route.

A usually-reliable source also tells me that Ingmar Bergman's SARABAND, a sequel to the legendary Swedish filmmaker's SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE ('73) with Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson, is a "near-lock" to at least show at Venice, and may turn up at Toronto as well, Jacobson's warnings to the contrary.

If nothing else, I'm looking forward to the much-talked-about THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS, from Canadian director Denys Arcand. Miramax's Harvey Weinstein praised this quasi-sequel to Arcand's THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE during a brief chat we had towards the end of the Cannes festival. An opening-night Toronto film said to be above-average and a must-see! Talk about unusual.

Jacobson wrote that the Coen brothers' INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, a comedy about a gold-digger type (Catherine Zeta-Jones) marrying a horn-toad lawyer (George Clooney), isn't likely to screen at Toronto, and he may be unfortunately right. The film costars Billy Bob Thornton, Cedric the Entertainer, and Geoffrey Rush (whom no one wants to see play Peter Sellers in that forthcoming HBO flick).

In any event, Jacobson didn't mention a couple of intriguing-sounding features I've heard are definite Toronto inclusions.

At the top of my list is INTERMISSION, a multi-character, GO-like Irish drama with Colin Farrell that I heard very good things about in Cannes. IFC Releasing has it slated for an early '04 release. And I'm getting really pumped about Sofia Coppola's LOST IN TRANSLATION, a relationship drama set in Japan costarring Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson. A journalist friend has seen it and passed along high praise.

(My only concern is that she said it was in the same quality realm as Coppola's THE VIRGIN SUICIDES. Hmmm...maybe she didn't mean it that way exactly.)

Toronto will also be presenting Robert Altman's THE COMPANY, an ensemble piece about Chicago's Joffrey Ballet company that I've heard may put former SCREAM queen and one- time WILD THING Neve Campbell back on the map. I'm told that Campbell developed the property for years and does all of her own dancing on-screen. James Franco and Malcolm MacDowell costar, along with actual Joffrey dancers in supporting roles.

No one's said anything about this, but it would be strange if Lions Gate's SHATTERED GLASS (opening on October 17) didn't make an appearance at Toronto. A publicist friend assures me it's played very well at an early-bird journalist screening, and you couldn't get a more topical subject these days than one about a real-life journalist (former NEW REPUBLIC feature writer Stephen Glass) getting busted for making up stories in print.

Hayden Christensen's performance as Glass is said to be good enough to dampen memories of his whiney, strangle-him-now-before-he-says-another-word acting as Anakin Skywalker in ATTACK OF THE CLONES.

Lars Von Trier's contorversial DOGVILLE is also on the program, but at the wrong length, I fear. Von Trier has offered to prune the original 178-minute version shown in Cannes down to roughly 140 minutes or thereabouts for any distributor or territory that asks for it. I'm told that Lions Gate, the U.S. distributor, intends to show the longer cut at Toronto (fine), but also release this version in the U.S., which is probably a mistake. I was fine with the longer version in Cannes, but when I took a visiting American friend to see DOGVILLE here in Paris she was moaning about how slow it was. This strongly anti-American Nicole Kidman flick is going to run into resistance anyway from American audiences for its political views. If I were Lion Gate's Tom Ortenberg I'd think twice about making their butts ache on top of this.

In short, Toronto is looking far from anemic to me.

But let's be extra-candid and admit I can be sort of an easy lay. I wasn't even that bothered about Cannes. I was happy with ELEPHANT and DOGVILLE and three or four others, along with the parties and the luscious food and the beautiful blue Mediterannean to gaze upon whenever things got difficult or exhausting.

Okay, so a lot of the films were flat-liners or so-so's, but life disappoints occasionally. I sucked that in and rolled with the punch. In any event, I had the wonderful, very personal compensation in my head of simply being on the Cote d'Azur and not in the minimum-security, one-note penal colony known as Los Angeles.

Toronto will also be showing YOUNG ADAM, which I caught one and a half times at Cannes. (I slept through half of it during my first attempt.) It's hard to explain, but it's somehow comforting to know I'll have yet another shot at watching Ewan MacGregor spread ketchup and mustard on Emily Mortimer's naked torso.

Le Hulk

Okay, I finally saw THE HULK last night. Okay, it wasn't as bad I'd heard. Okay, Ang Lee has made a superficially sensitive, somewhat more thoughtful, certainly more ambitious comic-book movie than others of its type. But I wasn't especially turned on by it either, and I can't imagine too many genre fans out there wanting to see it more than once.

The obviousness of it (wham....do you get it? No? Wham, wham!!...do you get it now? You still don't? Wham!, etc.) and the difficulty of following or making sense of certain parts of the story are the two main problems. I liked the brilliant opening credits and the first 25 or 30 minutes, but after this I was clearing my throat and rubbing my face over the wack- job dialogue and the mostly-unrecognizable human behavior. People living outside of homes for the mentally unstable speak like this? And react in these ways?

Most of the CGI Hulk stuff looked ludicrous, but some of it (in the third act, mainly) looked okay. That or I was getting used to the cartoony aspects. Let me explain again how the system works: If a visual looks like it came out of a computer, it's shit. If you're even momentarily persuaded what you're seeing might be something biologically real (or if it looks like a first-rate, beautifully detailed imitation of same), it's great. Very simple.

My biggest beef was watching the Hulk leap waaay into the air like a 1500-pound pogo stick, hundreds of feet in a single bound. But why not thousands? Why not have Hulkie leap dozens of miles, for that matter, or even fly around like Neo? Well, why not? Why not have him get so mad that he swims down to Central America and make friends with Predator and then swims to Japan to hook up with Rodan and Godzilla, so they can all team up and steal plans for building a nuclear device and come back and bomb the shit out of the U.S.?

None of this is grounded in any kind of logic or reality-system, and there's no mythological logic or physiological root to any of it, so what's the difference? It's all bullshit anyway.

Hold on... I didn't mean that. The themes that drove Stan Lee's classic comic series (manifested repressed anger, deal-with-your-anger-or-it'll-hurt-you, don't provoke people, girlfriends can be soothing to be with) are cool and interesting. But the tendency of filmmakers making comic-book movies to always try and top the last big comic-book flick is a miserable thing to endure. Okay, Sam Raimi did this so we should go back to ILM and have them do that. Ben Affleck came crashing down on a window-washing scaffold at 120 miles an hour from sixty stories up in DAREDEVIL and the scaffolding didn't collapse, so let's make our big action stunt even more dumb-assed.

What the hell did the young Nick Nolte stab Eric Bana's mother about again? He's a scientific genius unable to contain his building rage, and his caring, devoted wife is...what? Just the unlucky recipient? Because he was pissed at the military or himself...something along these lines? It makes zero sense...none. The movie is just throwing childhood trauma at us so we can feel childhood trauma. I actually said out loud at this point, "Whaaat?"

And then there was that droopy black forelock that kept falling over the right side of Jennifer Connelly's forehead, and the way she kept looking at Eric Bana like she was faintly stoned with her mouth slightly open and her white teeth showing and her eyes saying, "Huh? Am I missing something? Could you repeat the question? Well, at least I'm radiating a serene soulfulness."

That big, thick, strangely contorted face of Bana's bothered me, along with that dog-that's-been-scolded expression. And that droning, gravel-gut, I'm-your-dad-and-I-care crap Sam Elliot had to say to Connelly...no end to it! And that dreadful military response thing that always happens in big-budget movies when a malicious life form goes on the rampage, and hundreds of armed soldiers and tanks and cop cars and choppers have to converge on the poor misunderstood beast and blast away.

I'm asking this question and I'd like MOVIE CITY NEWS critic Ray Pride (a major HULK fan) to answer it: How many dozens of times to we have to watch this same butt-numbing spectacle? I was sitting there defeated and spent and saying to myself, "I've been watching this crap for 29 years. Spielberg was the first director to show 100 cops in 100 cop cars ganging up on a single perpetrator in THE SUGERLAND EXPRESS (two perps actually, played by Goldie Hawn and William Atherton), and we've been stuck with this cliché ever since."

I didn't realize it when I left to go to the screening last night, but the 8:30 pm showing at the UGC Cine Cite Bercy was a big lah-dee-dah premiere. Ang Lee and Eric Bana showed up to speak to the audience and take bows. Gaspar Noe (IRREVERSIBLE) was there, making calls on his cell phone in the lobby. ("Yo, Gaspar...we talked at Sundance!" Totally dead reaction. "Oh, yes...hi.") The jacket-and-tie security goons were wearing those big plastic Hulk hands they're selling in the toy stores. There were three or four guys dressed as U.S. soldiers with shouldered military rifles standing near the main entrance.

The coolest thing by far was an innovation that people throwing industry premieres in the U.S. should think about borrowing. Live video footage of the arrivals was shown on the big screen inside the theatre. You couldn't hear anything anyone was saying -- they played HULK theme music to accompany the footage -- but it's a brilliant idea. People were chuckling at this and that arrival. Imagine the response at an L.A. screening. Wow, there's my ex-girlfriend...who's that asshole she's with? Hey, there's Ray Pride! And there's Anne Thompson! Whoa...who's the babe? There's Richard Schickel frowning again...

Jugger-knot

I'm dying to get my hands on a copy of the soon-to-be-released MGM DVD of Richard Lester's JUGGERNAUT (1974 - out July 15th), which I've been waiting for a long time. But I've got a slight problem putting my hands on a copy, and I'm trying now to figure a solution so I can see and review it and, you know, go to town.

Problem #1: An MGM Home Video publicist is refusing to mail me a copy, despite my repeated praisings for the film in this space over the years, and apparently due to concerns about sending a DVD to a foreign address. (Other DVD publicists haven't taken this attitude and in fact have been quite gracious in sending me stuff here -- thanks, fellas!) Problem #2: two mail-order houses I've contacted have told me they either don't send PAL-formatted DVD's from the States (where NTSC rules), or they don't send DVD's overseas period.

So if anyone knows of a mail-order house willing to send copies here, or can suggest any other workable remedy of any kind, please share.

Easily one of slyest and most self-assured thrillers ever made, and abundant with one exquisite performance after another from a seasoned, mostly British cast (Richard Harris, Omar Sharif, Anthony Hopkins, Freddie Jones, Ian Holm, David Hemmings, Roy Kinnear, Shirley Knight), JUGGERNAUT was intended by its producers to be just another disaster movie in the vein of THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE and THE TOWERING INFERNO, but what resulted was something much finer and absorbing than one of these run-of-the-mills.

The JUGGERNAUT DVD is just another one of MGM's cheapie releases costing $14.95 with no extras and with probably not too much extraordinary effort in the digital mastering, but it has to be an improvement over the videotape, which is the only way I've been able to see it over the last couple of decades. The aspect ratio is 1.66 to 1, a favored British format.

Lunch with Mr. Kaye

Director Tony Kaye (AMERICAN HISTORY X) caught my piece last week about how we need a good L.A. angst movie -- or more specifically, a Wim Wenders or Monte Hellman movie about driving in L.A. and never actually arriving anywhere. So he wrote last weekend to tell me a film he's been working on for five years fits this description. Or so he contends.

It's called LOBBY LOBSTER, a black-and-white film Kaye has been shooting for the last five years and has cost him about $1 million so far. Kaye describes as a kind of comic thriller but sounds more to me like a piece about dread and angst and deadpan absurdism. He says he has about 130 hours of footage stored away so far. He calls it an "epicomedy" due to the fact he's been shooting for so long and that one of the actors -- Skye McCole Bartusiak -- started when she was 9 and is now 14, or something like that.

Anyway, I asked Kaye in an e-mail if I might see an edited-down version of this film when I return from Paris, and he wrote back a couple of hours later and said he was in Paris as well. So last Monday I picked up my son Dylan at Charles De Gaulle airport, and after we dumped his suitcase off at the pad we metro'ed down to Kaye's hotel -- the Costes on rue. St. Honore.

The Hotel Costes is a lush, red-velvety, vaguely 18th-Century flavored place that 's currently attracting a very cool crowd. (I decided this after noticing an eccentric-looking guy in the lobby with a blonde bimbo-ish girlfriend. The guy's hair was long, gray and pony-tailed, and he was wearing a shawl and a black priest's skirt of some kind. The skirt is what settled the matter.)

Kaye, Dylan and I had lunch in a open-air terrace located in the hotel's center. We had club sandwiches and potato chips and Cokes. It was absurdly expensive, but we weren't paying.

Kaye was in Paris, he explained, to meet with a European producer about directing a sizably-budgeted movie (in the mid $30s) that I'm not permitted to describe. Kaye is trying to play things carefully and conservatively these days as a way of making a statement to the Hollywood crew that his days of acting like a loose cannon (the contretemps with New Line over AMERICAN HISTORY X, the fight with Marlon Brando over that acting video they made together) are over and done with.

For what it's worth, he seemed completely lucid, reasonable and pleasant-mannered to me.

Anyway, lunch was great and when we were done, Kaye escorted us out front and told his driver (a guy paid for by the European producer, to be used at Kaye's discretion) to take us home. Dylan and I jumped into the back of the man's nicely maintained, recent-model Mercedes coupe, and were driven back to Montmartre.

Gigli Ain't Sellin'

"Does anyone in Columbia/Revolution's marketing department have brains? Seems like a valid question following a viewing of the GIGLI trailer. Anyone who runs a studio and lets a dog of a trailer like this released to theaters deserves to have their competency questioned. Looks like the second coming of Madonna and Sean Pern's SHANGHAI SURPRISE.

"Newsflash to Amy Pascal/Joe Roth and whoever else worked on the trailer: curious as this may sound, the goal in marketing a film is to convince audiences that it's worth their time.

"People have seen Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez lock lips on ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT, EXTRA, ACCESS HOLLYWOOD, E NEWS LIVE, and in ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, PEOPLE, US WEEKLY, MOVIELINE (sorry....MOVIELINE HOLLYWOOD BILE, or whatever the new title is), so why use their romance as the sole selling point? "Why not cut a trailer with an Elmore Leonard/GET SHORTY vibe - you know, cool? (Even if the movie is far from it, you actually are allowed to create the misconception)

"Why not utilize a catchy piece of music to give a sense of the tone (like the MATCHSTICK MEN trailer so expertly does with that piece of music from "Brazil") "Why not send Al Pacino and Christopher Walken (who have cameos in the film) some wine with notes begging to glimpse their images in the trailer in effort to promise a bit of class?

"I hear the mispronunciation of the title character's name is an ongoing joke in the movie, so why not play that up?

"Why not have someone say Lopez's character's name once in the trailer insead of declaring she's beautiful three times? And why not reveal she's a lesbian?

"Why not think?