He’ll always be Kelly Leak to some of us, but in his recent comeback phase, Jackie Earle Haley has played a child molester, a violent vigilante and now…a violent child killer. And he seemed like such a nice boy. Haley will indeed assume the mantle of Freddy Krueger in a new remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street. I think every Wes Craven movie has now been remade, except that one with Meryl Streep playing the violin. “Looking at his performance in Watchmen, here’s a guy playing a character under a mask yet you feel tremendous empathy for him,” director Samuel Bayer told The Hollywood Reporter. “And in Nightmare, he is going to be under prosthetic make-up. You have to feel something for the character. The greatest villains are multi-dimensional and I think he will bring that to the character.”

“Larry Charles is set to take on geriatric sex in his next project,” Variety tells me before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee. Thanks, Variety!

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One of the problems with being an atheist is putting up with the kind of people who carry the flag for you.  Get annoyed at the likes of a Richard Dawkins, and there's a doofy polemicist like Sam Harris waiting in the wings.  And hey, Camille Paglia and Marilyn Manson, don't do us any favors, okay?  Back in the day, we had clever bastards like Gore Vidal to go on television and lay down careful traps for the likes of Jerry Falwell to step into; Gore would sit there, smiling his deadly little smile, while the defenders of various sky-gods would work themselves into a frenzy.  It's good philosophy as well as good show business to make your target to all the work, while you just sit back and collect the laughs.  

That's a lesson that could stand to be learned by Bill Maher, who, with Religulous, his new comic documentary about how religious people are a bunch of silly-heads, has done the unthinkable:  he has made blasphemy boring.  Maher, who, until he discovered the millions that could be made by playing to one side or the other in the never-ending culture wars, used to be little more than a hack comic with an unrequited love of bad puns and smirky asides.  Those characteristics remain with him to this day (witness the title of the film, and his interminable playing to the camera as if he were an agnostic David Brent), but they'd be forgivable if he had an ounce of -- well, faith in the fact that his position is strong enough to let religious nuts hoist them by their own petards.  Vidal (and Robert Ingersoll, and Clarence Darrow, and even David Cross) knew that religious people would say a lot of crazy bullshit if you just let them talk long enough; he knew better than to force the point. Maher has no such trust, and when the payoff doesn't seem to be coming fast enough for him, he kills the gag by adding subtitles explaining his real thoughts on the matter at hand, or by cutting to dopey stock footage which he then rolls into a tube and beats you over the head with it.

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“Summer movie” is one of those phrases like “beach novel” or “toilet wine” that causes an immediate, involuntary adjustment of our expectations. (I was going to say “lowering of expectations,” but we make some mighty tasty toilet wine here at Screengrab headquarters.) When we hear “summer movie,” we think of explosions or aliens or exploding aliens, even though by Hollywood’s calendar, there is no time of year that isn’t appropriate for movies about exploding aliens. But by that same token, there are summer movies that feature hardly any exploding aliens at all. To kick off the season, the New York Times asked several motion picture luminaries to ruminate on their favorite summer movies, with surprising results.

Neil LaBute, who would probably like you to forget he directed the remake of The Wicker Man, selects Dr. Zhivago for what turns out to be a pretty good reason.

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Bob Dylan re-wrote the rules about what was allowed of a famous singer, songwriter, and public figure, but it turned out that he did have one normal thing about him: he liked the idea of being a movie star. Dylan was a movie star whenever he got to be himself in caught footage, as in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, but his first several attempts to pass for an actor, or to capture his magnificence himself, tended to be kind of, well, disastrous. The music he produced for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) yielded a triumph in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," but Peckinpah's attempt to incorporate Dylan into the cast, as a mysterious, knife-throwing hombre known as "Alias", only resulted in a smirking blank space on the screen. Dylan's own 1978 Renaldo & Clara, a four-hour mixture of fantasy and documentary sequences threaded through with performance footage from the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, inspired print seminars, in places like the Village Voice, on the theme, "Dylan: What Happened?"; long unavailable in its complete form, the movie will probably be seen again around the time that Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried is released as part of the Criterion Collection. Then there's Hearts of Fire, a misguided 1987 rock-'n-roll love story with Dylan as the sage old music legend who plays smitten mentor to the uni-named cupcake Fiona. The barely-released film was the last work by its director, Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle, Return of the Jedi), who had a fatal stroke before signing off on the final cut.

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