The Screengrab

A new David O. Russell film is in production, which must mean that the notoriously prickly filmmaker isn’t getting along with somebody. George Clooney was the first to report that Russell might not be all sunshine and roses on the set; actor and director famously had “creative differences” while making Three Kings. Clooney elaborated in an interview with Playboy in 2000. “David is in many ways a genius, though I learned that he's not a genius when it comes to people skills...He yelled and screamed at people all day, from day one...he screamed at the script supervisor and made her cry. I wrote him a letter and said, 'Look, I don't know why you do this. You've written a brilliant script, and I think you're a good director. Let's not have a set like this. I don't like it and I don't work well like this.'...He turned on me and said, 'Why don't you just worry about your fucked-up act? You're being a dick. You want to hit me? You want to hit me? Come on, pussy, hit me.' I'm looking at him like he's out of his mind. Then he started banging me on the head with his head. He goes, 'Hit me, you pussy. Hit me.' Then he got me by the throat and I went nuts. I had him by the throat. I was going to kill him. Kill him.”

So that went well, and although it’s sad that there’s no video evidence of this dust-up – at least, none that’s surfaced so far – the same can’t be said for I Heart Huckabees.

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If you've been to the movies a few times in the last twenty years, you've probably seen Richard Jenkins. Trust me. Jenkins isn't a household name, and he doesn't really have a household appearance, either: he's tall, bald, and bland-looking, and at 60 doesn't appear all that different from when he first started popping up in movies, in such roles as the doctor in Hannah and Her Sisters who gently breaks its to the hypochondriac played by Woody Allen that he doesn't have a malignant brain tumor. Yet Jenkins is a crackerjack actor, capable of using what God gave him to surprising effect. His ability to suggest something cracked or wild inside a businesslike frame has made him a favorite of such directors as the Coens and the Farrellys, and David O. Russell, who used him in Flirting with Disaster as an FBI agent who wanted to adopt a baby to raise with his professional partner and lover, Josh Brolin. His best-known role may be the patriarchal undertaker in the HBO Six Feet Under, where his character was dead from the start of the series and still usually seemed to be the only person on the show who was having a good time. In the new movie The Visitor, which was written and directed by Thomas McCarthy, Jenkins has his shot at carrying a movie, playing a widowed economics professor who has disappeared inside his own orderly world.

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The Associated Press just got the memo: the 1970s are funny! "Platform shoes, leisure suits, fondue, fro picks. What used to be cool is now the stuff of comedy. When it comes to period comedies, the '70s are the equivalent of Victorian-era costume drama. While serious-minded filmmakers are forever reaching back to the time of royalty clad in waistcoats and dressing gowns, comedians are more likely to cull from the less halcyon days of disco and sideburns."

The AP article runs through the history of Me Decade-based comedy, from movie parodies like I'm Gonna Git You Sucka! to the long-running sitcom That '70s Show to the one movie that really got it right, Dazed and Confused. Not surprisingly, Will Ferrell is singled out as one of the movement's leaders, given his retro roles in Anchorman and now Semi-Pro.

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