Take away the four-hour-or-longer-cut rumor, and Miramax is left with a building consensus among journalists that the Solomon-like decision to cut BILL in two is motivated by pure greed. This is how N.Y. DAILY NEWS columnist Jack Matthews put it two days ago when he said Weinstein "is releasing [BILL] in two parts because he thinks it will make more money that way."

The first BILL installment will hit theatres on October 10th with the second half due sometime between January and April of '04. Matthews called the scheme "a very, very bad idea...not just because it will cost twice as much to see it, and burden us with a months-long intermission, but for the precedent it might set.

"Sequels and prequels are bad enough," he explained, "[but] if studios start packaging single stories in multiples, the movies will be diminished, not enhanced. Can you imagine if every lazy filmmaker who doesn't believe his four-hour masterpiece can be further edited without befouling Western culture were given an extra movie or two to languish in his story? We'd be up to about Part 5 in TITANIC."

Okay, but if the BILL that Tarantino now wants to chop in two is in fact four or five hours long, that's a whole different equation. A distributor saying a three-hour film is going to be cut in two because an all-in-one version might make audiences shift in their seats -- that sounds like crap to me. But the two-part solution sounds at least half-palatable if the film is in fact an hour or two longer.

As I wrote Wednesday, I read Tarantino's KILL BILL screenplay last year and it didn't feel like an epic-length thing. After putting it down I thought the finished movie might end up as long as PULP FICTION, maybe. Are films generally better when shorter? Yes. Have they ever turned out better in extended cuts? Yeah -- just watch Cameron Crowe's "bootleg" version of ALMOST FAMOUS or James Cameron's longer version of ALIENS, both on DVD.

I'm just a little hesitant about the longer-cut rumor, given the source. It was told to me as information that came straight from Quentin by way of Harry Knowles. Okay, okay...but I know for a fact Knowles and Tarantino are friendly and that Quentin passes stuff along to Harry all the time.

Besides, a senior Miramax spokesperson, whom I spoke to about this Thursday, told me that the notion of KILL BILL running three hours had been "misreported' and that the final combined length of the two films hasn't been decided upon. I gathered from this that the two BILL's could in fact run longer than indicated by TIMES reporter Laura M. Holson.

I asked the tipster who passed along the much-longer-cut story on Wednesday how reliable his information was, and he answered: "All I know is what Harry told me after getting off the phone with Quentin (and Harvey, actually). My understanding is that Quentin has final cut, and that his cut is about five hours -- hence the need to divide it into two films (which is workable, given the episodic structure of the film)."

So I e-mailed Knowles but heard back from his father, Jay Knowles (a.k.a. "Father Geek"), who's watching the shop for Harry during his current vacation in Prague. Jay said he doesn't remember the details "but KILL BILL was running four-plus hours [the] last I heard."

So I called the Prague Hilton and left a message for Harry. (I've been to Prague a few times, by the way, and of all the empty faceless bullshit places to stay in that fair and beautiful city, there is nothing more lacking in soul or intrigue than the Prague Hilton....except maybe the Intercontinental.) Knowles didn't call back so I called again this morning around 8:30 Paris time and woke him up. He'd been visiting the set of Guillermo del Toro's HELLBOY until 4 ayem or so.

I apologized to Harry for cutting into his vacation time, but then I asked about this four-or-five-hour BILL thing, and whether he got it straight from Quentin or what.

"Uhhm...it didn't come from Quentin," Harry half-whispered.

Okay, not from Quentin. Who then?

"Uhhmm..."

Can you tell me, Harry? I'd kinda like to straighten this out.

"Well, I'd rather not."

Okay, but your dad told me that his understanding, which I naturally presumed came from you, was that Quentin's KILL BILL cut was running over four hours.

"Well, I'll have to deal with [my father] about that when I get back to Austin."

I've been down this road before with Harry. I hear something he's supposedly told others, and then I call him about it, and if there's any kind of political heat bearing down upon the topic he starts in with the Austin two-step. And as I listened to Harry's equivocations, a thought began to take shape. The hell with this -- the hell with all of it. I'm being played or jerked off, or I'm just wasting my time.

If KILL BILL turns out to be a much longer two-part movie than indicated by the NEW YORK TIMES, great. And if Miramax winds up releasing two 90 minute mini-BILL's, that'll be fine too. At the very least, it'll be factual.

Hand Out

I would read about French rock star and actor Johnny Halladay now and then when I was back in the States, but not with any profound interest. Then I saw him last year in Patrice Leconte's L'HOMME DU TRAIN and decided he wasn't too bad. He had that getting older, seen-it-all, barely-give-a-shit thing going on, and seemed to handle it pretty well.

Hallyday played an aging criminal who hangs out with Jean Rochefort in a somnambulant, less-is-more way (you know....saying as little as possible and smoking about 287 Gauloises during the course of the film) before joining up with some pals to knock off a local bank. Hallyday has the strangest-looking eyes I've ever seen on a biped. He looks like a timber wolf, but a friend has informed me this is mainly due to plastic surgery.

Then I read a review a few weeks back of a musical performance he'd just given with his band at a big Paris stadium, and in that review was a comment from a fan that said, more or less, "There is nothing about this guy that is in any way fake or insincere." And I decided after reading this quote this is why they like him over here. No pretense, no b.s.

But the rock music show, it turned out, was part of a big Hallyday campaign to "celebrate" (i.e., make lots of money off) his 60th birthday, which rolled around on June 15. Suddenly, it seemed, Hallyday was on every other magazine cover, and then I began noticing two or three biographies or coffee-table books about the guy in book stores. Then he started turning up in ads hawking this, that and the other thing.

And that's when I decided Johnny Hallyday is a shameless, trou-dropping whore.

I think it was the sunglass display ad that did it for me. Look at his face and that cheap-ass way he tries to look cool and above-the-hustle with that little half-grin, but at the same time lapping up those abundant sunglass-endorsement Euros. It wouldn't matter if Hallyday were just some bland pop-singer type, but throw in that admiring comment about how unpretentious and down to earth he is, and it all turns smelly .

Company Comeback

Whoa, wait a minute, hold up...things have shape-shifted a bit since I ran those snippy reactions about Robert Altman's THE COMPANY, a new film about Chicago's Joffrey Ballet troupe, in Wednesday's column. They came from a chat I had with from a New York City journalist along with a piece by a CHICAGO DAILY NEWS dance critic, but now I've spoken to L.A. TIMES dance critic Lewis Segal, who's fairly taken with the film, and I've read a fairly positive review by CHICAGO TRIBUNE dance critic Sid Smith about it, and reactions are starting to even out.

The gist of Wednesday's reactions were that (a) Malcolm McDowell, who essentially plays the Joffrey's director and co-founder Gerald Arpino (although his character is called Alberto Antonelli), is the best thing in the film, (b) star Neve Campbell's acting and dancing (i.e., she does her own) are fine but that's all, (c) the movie is "like a documentary without a narrative" and has "more Altmanesque rambling than usual," and (d) that the final "Blue Snake" dance number doesn't cut it.

Except Segal's saying these people aren't really getting the movie. They want THE COMPANY to be a NASHVILLE-type thing about dance, and they're missing what it is because of this expectation. It's not a typically audacious Altman flick with lots of quirky-comic performances and several stories functioning simultaneously, he says, and so it doesn't deserve to be seen in this light except in one respect -- country music was the soul of NASHVILLE, and dance is the soul of this one.

"Like a STAR WARS film that uses just enough plot and dialogue to get you from one special effects scene to the next, this movie is not structured narratively but structured upon its dances," Segal declares. "It's really about the dances more than the characters or what they go through ...it says the life of the company is more important than any individual lives...personal issues are not resolved through dancing or the success of a show...it doesn't follow the usual patterns and is really about the dances themselves.

"With most dance movies, dances are cut to bits, MTV-style...you can't follow them move to move...whereas when you go to a Jackie Chan movie, it's lovingly filmed with great attention to some very exacting choreography as Jackie has to fight off four or five guys while trying to keep a priceless Ming vase from being shattered.

"But here Altman gives you a sense of what it's like to be inside these dances ...he's right in there with the dancers and really gets it all flowing, the whole cadence of being free and above the floor...so there are really a lot of beautiful ideas in this film about what it is to be a dancer."

Segal agrees with my New York journalist friend about THE COMPANY being McDowell's film, although he notes that McDowell "is the only one who's been handed a part in which he's been allowed to give one of those [arresting] Altman performances. There are other characters dealing with issues and other stories going on in the film, but they're not in high relief. If you go expecting it to be GOSFORD PARK with several little jewel-box performances, you're going to say McDowell is the only one."

McDowell "can be very withering with his British accent" and appears in the film with his own hair, Segal observes, whereas the real-life Arpino is a 75 year-old British Italian-American who goes around with "the worst toupee in the world of modern dance."

One realistic aspect, Segal says, is Altman's having chosen to look at how weight issues affect dancers and their careers. One character who's always being told to trim down decides to leave ballet for another field of dance, another is dangerously bulimic, and a third is told to leave or kicked out "because she's deemed to be too fat."

The sexy or sexual scenes have been soft pedaled or sanded down, in Segal's view. "Other than a few bare breasts in a dressing room scene, this is a very tame thing," he notes. "If it weren't for this, the damn thing could play on the Disney channel. There's definitely an interest in not taking this in [a particularly sexual] direction."

There is slight compensation, he says, concerning Campbell's romantic interest James Franco, who "doesn't have very much to do in the film" but at least there's "a lovely shot" of him with his shirt off.

Segal doesn't disagree with the naysayers about the "Blue Snake" finale, but says "it's not as if Altman shot it badly. I'm not complaining about the choreography. The piece, after all, is from Canada and not an unknown quantity...but [Altman] shoots it as a spectacle and a pile-up -- lots of scenic effects, visual effects -- and I don't think it's an interesting enough way to shoot this for a dance audience."

Campbell and Barbara Turner's screenplay "isn't arch, and the end result is not like the Altman failures anymore like the Altman successes," Segal underlines. "It's a movie about its dances, just as Altman's life has been about his movies. The narratives pull into dances, and the dances are the core of this movie."

Smith wrote in his TRIBUNE review that THE COMPANY "boasts exquisitely filmed sequences of the [Joffrey] troupe and its works as well as an ample dose of gossipy tidbits. It offers plentiful evidence of the Joffrey's talent and Altman's filmmaking skills in capturing this elusive, all-too-rarely photographed art."

Smith agrees with Segal that Altman and director of photography Andrew Dunn have labored to bring the viewer "literally inside the dance....[shooting] from unusual angles, tracking gracefully from head to toe...or elsewhere using noteworthy crane shots and other devices" to make the audience feel what it's really like to be performing on stage.

And although the film is "short on complete, start-to-finish performances," it "more than holds its own" in comparison to other dance films (THE RED SHOES, THE TURNING POINT) , says Smith, and will thereby "intrigue aficionados, especially fans of the Joffrey."

Smith describes the "Blue Snake" finale as "an often farcical extravaganza complete with smoke-puffing, WIZARD OF OZ-like set pieces and goofy dinosaur costuming...it closes the movie and serves throughout as a comic expose of the sometimes silly choreographic process."

Revisions

There's a trailer up for Mel Gibson's THE PASSION, and I don't know, dude. All I had to do was see a still of Jim Caviezel's Jesus hanging on the cross to feel queasy about Gibson's proclamation that his forthcoming film, which focuses on the last 24 hours in Christ's life, "is very realistic and as close to possible what I perceive the truth [of Jesus's last day] to be."

If I were Al Pacino writing this, I think I might say "hoo-hah!"

I've watched the PASSION trailer three times, and there are at least three things that are historically flawed with Gibson's recreation. The wrongos are (a) showing a crucified Jesus hanging from a wooden cross-shaped device that was never used for crucifixions in ancient Roman times, (b) showing large nails being driven through the palms of Christ's hands, and (c) showing Christ wearing a standard, modesty-for-modesty's-sake Biblical-era loin cloth during his time on the cross.

To me, these three images represent rigid, old-fashioned, 1950s, uptight Catholic impressions of Jesus on the cross. They come primarily from Rennaissance-era paintings of his sufferings and certain Hollywood depictions in films like BEN-HUR and Nicholas Ray's KING OF KINGS. I have yet to see THE PASSION, and I'm not saying the trailer gives anything but a sliver of the film away. But Gibson's subscribing to these antiquated images suggests that his fundamentalist, rock-ribbed religious views and temperament will have as much to do with THE PASSION as his wanting to recreate the stark historical truth about a single momentous day in old Jerusalem.

The cross thing is wrong because the Roman's didn't use wooden crosses to crucify condemned men, but T-shaped beam constructions. Watch Martin Scorsese's THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST or Franco Zefferelli's JESUS OF NAZARETH and you'll see what crosses actually looked like, according to most historical accounts. They even got it right in Stanley Kubrick's SPARTACUS, and that was made 44 years ago. Yes, that's right -- Christian mythology about Christ dying on the cross has always been historically bogus because "crosses" never existed.

Crucifixion victims didn't have nails pounded into the palms of their hands, but into the wrist area. As the bones and tendons in the palm area are weak, it was possible for a victim's hands to slowly tear free as he hung from the T-shaped device. I've read historical data in which the bones of crucifixion victims were examined, and it could be deduced from these that nails or spikes had been driven into the victim's wrist area. Again, Scorsese and (to the best of my recollection) Zeffirelli followed the historical facts.

And crucifixion victims were put on the T-squares naked, and they died that way. Scorsese didn't have his Christ (played by Willem Dafoe) wear Biblical-era briefs, but he filmed the crucifixion scene in such a way as to keep things tasteful. Look at Caviezel's loincloth and the one Jeffrey Hunter is wearing on the cross in KING OF KINGS, and they seem to have been made by the same manufacturer.

"For those concerned about the content of this film, know that it conforms to the narratives of Christ's passion and death found in the four Gospels of the New Testament," Gibson has said. That may be the case, but THE PASSION is also art, which is to say it's impressionistic. The Jesus Gibson intends to present to us isn't just from the Bible -- he also comes from a place deep inside Gibson's heart.

Polite Reminder

I ran this two or three years back, but it can't hurt to say it again. The word "actually" is a very bad word for publicists' assistants who deal with callers. As in, "actually, you just missed her" or "he actually just went into his office for a closed-door meeting." It's not the lying -- that's fine, that your job, no prob. It's just that friggin' word. I don't know why, but when I hear "actually" an immediate dark-cloud thing settles over my psyche. It triggers immediate suspicion and distrust, and generally creates a bad vibe. So be smart and think up another word to use that would precede messages about people not being available.

Nev's Record

"Why would you waste all that effort writing about Neve Campbell? From a talent-level standpoint, she is clearly running far behind other women in her age group . A short list of actresses in Neve's age range whose jock strap she couldn't hold include Gwyneth Paltrow, Chloe Sevigny, Toni Collette, Cameron Diaz, Juliette Lewis, Molly Parker, Hilary Swank, Amanda Peet, Kate Beckinsale, Bridget Moynihan, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and Thandie Newton.

"She has the SCREAM movies but only because she was 'hot' while PATY OF FIVE was on (Po5 was an awful show when you get right down to it). Not only have her film choices been horrible, but she's usually the least memorable performer in those films (THE CRAFT, DROWNGIN MONA, WILD THINGS... and her embarassingly obvious no-nudity clause). Just because she's doing an Altman movie doesn't mean it's going to be good. He's done plenty of bad work to offset his brilliant work.

"And there's probably a good reason why Cusack never hooked her up with a good project (and why he's not dating her anymore): SHE AIN'T THAT TALENTED! SHE'S BEEN LUCKY! Notice four Cusack co-stars on the above list." -- Terry Lennox