Robert Redford to resurrect the big baseball movie

Where to start in a baseball season in which, while the Orioles have lost a game, they're still in first place in the American League East, and for once by power of something besides sheer alphabetical order? With talk of a grand baseball movie, of course.

It seems that Robert Redford, who has been shopping the idea of a Jackie Robinson movie for some time now, is finally getting things rolling with the choice of a writer/director, Brian Helgeland. And being Robert Redford, he's scooped up a choice role for himself: Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager who brought Robinson to the big leagues.

The movie will apparently focus on the complicated relationship of Robinson and Rickey rather than specifically on Jackie's breaking of the MLB color barrier, but no matter what the focus, there are few genres of flicks I love more than the big baseball movie, so bring it on!

It will be a short report today because I was up rather late (well, by my standards, anyway) watching "Spamalot" (thanks, Stephanie!), and therefore got up late too. There is, however, some big news out there about just who might be the new boss of "The Office" when Steve Carell steps down at the end of this season.

Following Michael Scott's rather nifty proposal to Holly (Amy Ryan), it was revealed that Will Ferrell will at least be serving as an interim boss, but that's apparently only for a few weeks. Shame, because he's a better candidate than just about anyone else set to interview on the show's season finale (or at least better than anyone who could actually get the job.)

Now scheduled to interview to be the next boss of Dunder Mifflin, according to the seriously TV-obsessed Michael Ausiello, are these five people: Ricky Gervais, Gob Bluth, Ray Romano, James Spader and Catherine Tate.

While having Gervais be the boss for a season or two would certainly be a scream, I really can't see him doing that. And, as Ausiello points out, Ray Romano already has a fairly great show of his own with "Men of a Certain Age," and Arnett is already committed to some kind of other pilot for NBC.

That leaves Spader and Tate, I suppose, and I'd have to say the latter would be the FAR superior choice. Nothing against Spader, who could potentially be very funny, but Catherine Tate is simply great. Perhaps best known for her role as Donna Noble on "Doctor Who," she was also fantastic in "Starter for 10," a rather criminally underseen British romantic comedy starring James McAvoy and Rebecca Hall (rent that one already!) She certainly gets my vote, but no matter how it turns out, this should just be a really fun finale.

OK, I was going to post the New Yorker's profile of veryfunnywoman Anna Faris, but it's behind a pay wall, but just trust me: If you don't get the magazine, it's worth buying this issue, just for that.

And the last thing I have today is the latest Funny or Die production which, though it starts a bit slowly, falls solidly into the former category once it gets going. The "When Harry and Sally 2" of sorts clip stars Billy Crystal, Dame Helen Mirren, Rob Reiner, Adam Scott and even Mike Tyson (but no Meg Ryan), and is pretty sublimely silly. Enjoy, and have a perfectly pleasant Thursday. Peace out.

When Harry Met Sally 2 with Billy Crystal & Helen Mirren from Billy Crystal

Pity for Tom Cruise? I think not

To anyone who bothered to see the simply wretched "Lions for Lambs," please accept my most sincere apology, even if i didn't have anything to do with the making of it. Luckily, it seems almost no one made that mistake.

It seems that the flick, the first for Mr. Cruise and producing partner Paula Wagner, will not even hit $20 million at the domestic box office, and less than $60 million worldwide. Here are the hard numbers from through last weekend, according to the great Box Office Mojo site: Still playing on 1,527 screens, the flick had managed to take in just a meager $13,795,571 domestically. For a bit of perspective, the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men" has already taken in $16,313,580 playing on only 860 screens (though that is expanding further this weekend, with it even playing at one theater in Macon, the Regal Rivergate 14, so go see it if you're here!)

Cruise's rather embarrassing debut as company runner might not have looked so bad if "Lions for Lambs" weren't such an extreme act of hubris. Playing the senator supposedly selling a new front in the war on terror, Cruise was unable to for even one second hide the smugness he felt in knowing it was all hogwash. And I'm certain that if Robert Redford, who wrote and directed this mess, takes a second to more properly channel his still righteous anger he will be able to come up with a much better movie than one in which he spends the whole affair yelling at a slacker student who just doesn't "get it."

One thing you shouldn't take away from this epic failure is that there isn't a hunger out there for bold movies that take on the war in Iraq and its many consequences, but is it too much to ask that at the same time these flicks be entertaining? In Cruise's case, clearly yes, but I had a slightly better time watching Tommy Lee Jones mope his way through Paul Haggis' "In the Valley of Elah" (But Mr. Jones, like me, definitely had a lot more fun with the Coen brothers.)

Will Cruise recover? Judging from what's up next at United Artists, the answer is yes. There's a lot of cool stuff in the pipeline for next summer, but I think Bryan Singer's "Valkyrie," starring Cruise (natch) as the German colonel who launched a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler may be among the best. It's being co-written by Christopher McQuarrie, who penned Singer's sublime "The Usual Suspects," and has a tremendous supporting cast that includes Bill Nighy, Carice Van Houten, Kenneth Branagh, Stephen Fry, Terrence Stamp and Tom Wilkinson.

After that he's clearly landed a titan in convincing Guillermo del Toro to direct "Champions," based on an old British TV show I've never heard of. The original series apparently starred Stuart Damon, Alexandra Bastedo and William Gaunt as members of a United Nations-affiliated organization called Nemesis. After a plane crash in the Himalayas, all three are saved and given supernatural powers including ESP and precognition.

In more bad news, however, UA was forced to postpone Oliver Stone's next Vietnam flick, "Pinkville," because of the writers' strike, and then star Bruce Willis pulled out.

And in case you were wondering when a Tom Cruise movie last managed to take in less than $20 million domestic, it was a heck of a long time ago. Released in 1986, the fantasy/adventure "Legend" (which does have some charms) grossed $15.5 million domestically, but of course expectations were much lower way back then.

Please, if you take nothing else from this admitted screed, at least promise me this: When "Lions for Lambs" comes out on DVD, please, please, please do not even bother to give it a rental. It's just that bad.

Actors on actors

Faced with little actual news to report thanks to the ongoing strike, Variety this morning published a series of predictably self-congratulatory pieces in which some of Hollywood biggest stars talked about their co-workers. If you can cut through the cheese, it's actually not a bad way to waste a few minutes at work. Here are two snippets that didn't make me just hurl, Julia Roberts talking about the great Paul Rudd and Matt Damon talking about rising star Amy Ryan, and you can read the rest here.

"Paul is the most unexpected movie star. For his facial hair in 'Anchorman' he probably walked around like that for months. The people at the grocery store don't know why he looks like that. They think he's nuts. He's not scared to do those things. ... At a dinner party, if you're seated next to Paul, you'll leave thinking, I'm so funny. I always want to be seated next to Paul."

"I sat dumbfounded watching this performance in 'Gone Baby Gone.' Every moment, every detail in Amy Ryan's performance is spot-on. In fact, I've never seen an actor from outside Boston come to our city and be this convincing - and a lot of great actors have come here and given award-worthy performances. This is at another level, though. It's that place actors hope to get to at least once in their career, where they completely disappear into someone else -- that place that made me ask, 'Who the hell is she and why hasn't she worked more on film before this?'

New pictures of Iron Man

The more I see from Jon Favreau's first foray into superhero flicks, the more I'm convinced he's gonna deliver a real winner next summer with "Iron Man." After all, I don't think you can go wrong with Robert Downey Jr. as our hero Tony Stark, and the supporting cast of Terrence Howard (who seems to work a heck of a lot), Jeff Bridges (huzzah!), Gwyneth Paltrow, Samuel L. Jackson and even Ghostface Killah ain't shabby either. Anyways, Comingsoon.net has managed to get its hands on several new pics, of which I swiped just one. You can see the rest here, and have an entirely enjoyable weekend. Peace out.

Lions for Lambs: Hardly a blunt instrument

Coincidentally enough, I had to go to work directly after seeing Robert Redford's far-too-ponderous "Lions for Lambs" and was confronted with an AP story pointing out that, with six soldiers dying Saturday in Afghanistan, this is now the deadliest year there for American troops since the invasion began. And in the minute or so it took me to read that story I learned much more than I did from Redford's flick.

Which, in many ways, is a tremendous shame. Though I read a lot of newspapers, with the New York Times and Washington Post (call me pinko if you want to) being my usual first choices, I usually skip right over the headlines about war and go right to the stories about the 2008 campaign. They just interest me more, as wrongheaded as that might be.

So, in a way I suppose I should be among the target audience for Redford's salvo in the war of (many, many) words, and I certainly get his point. How in the world could you miss it when it's made even less subtly than Laurence Fishburne running around campus at the end of "School Daze" (which for the record, I enjoyed a lot more than this flick) screaming "wake up!"

To beat us over the head with this mantra, Redford uses a quasi-real-time triptych of stories, which if he weren't so consumed with righteous anger would have made for a much more clever conceit. In the first, and best, storyline we get Tom Cruise (whose United Artists studio put this out) as a GOP senator and rising star who is pitching a new front in the war on terror to a reporter who has helped him out in the past, played with her usual finesse by Meryl Streep.

Just in case you somehow missed the point that he was supposed to represent our current president, Cruise's senator uses "enemy" constantly, just as Mr. Bush does to pitch his war on TV. What made this segment the most interesting was that, with Streep effectively playing the Judith Miller character in this game, it presented a plausible enough scenario about how the Media can get seduced into becoming a watchdog with no fangs.

From there, however, it just goes downhill fast. The second scenario? We essentially get Robert Redford as, well, Robert Redford, berating a student (played by Tom Garfield) who doesn't care enough about the future as he should. OK, fair enough, but if the student is supposed to represent us, that's exactly what we get: Robert Redford yelling at us to pay attention, and it's often even less entertaining than it sounds like it would be on paper.

And the third story goes from simply wordy to weird. As Cruise is pitching his new front in the war, it is seemingly simultaneously being put into action, with director Peter Berg leading the troops. Berg, of course, directed a much more entertaining flick about this subject, "The Kingdom," this year, which like "Lambs" was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan (which I assume is why Berg is in this to begin with.) In case you couldn't guess from the title "Lions for Lambs," the mission doesn't go too well, but I won't tell you any more than that in case you still want to see the movie.

As he did with "The Kingdom," Carnahan wraps up "Lions for Lambs" with a very clever punch, this one about the state of our Media. But the verbal torture you had to sit through to get there just wasn't worth suffering through for that little payoff.

Now, I can respect that Robert Redford is angry, and I can understand why. If he wanted, however, to win over any "hearts and minds" (as Cruise's character so mockingly puts it here), this certainly wasn't the way to do it.