Which is why a revealing London Times profile of Lucas has us so torn today. Yes, we can accept Lucas's preoccupation with raising a female cagefighter by himself as a likely contributor to Howard the Duck's downfall. Fine. But, no — no, no, no — we cannot believe he actually thinks Indiana Jones 5 is an idea worth squabbling over with anyone, let alone Steven Spielberg:

Really, though, [Indiana Jones 4] was a challenge getting the story together and getting everybody to agree on it. Indiana Jones only becomes complicated when you have another two people saying ‘I want it this way’ and ‘I want it that way’, whereas, when I first did Jones, I just said, ‘We’ll do it this way’ — and that was much easier. But now I have to accommodate everybody, because they are all big, successful guys, too, so it’s a little hard on a practical level.

“If I can come up with another idea that they like, we’ll do another. Really, with the last one, Steven wasn’t that enthusiastic. I was trying to persuade him. But now Steve is more amenable to doing another one. Yet we still have the issues about the direction we’d like to take. I’m in the future; Steven’s in the past. He’s trying to drag it back to the way they were, I’m trying to push it to a whole different place. So, still we have a sort of tension. This recent one came out of that. It’s kind of a hybrid of our own two ideas, so we’ll see where we are able to take the next one.”

Wow. Just as we think that's a thinly veiled acknowledgment of the film's inarguable awfulness, we know it portends a billionaire battle royale between Spielberg's hoary throwbacks and Lucas's planned '70s-era LeBeouf showcase Indiana Jones and the Doomed Left At LaBrea. With another trillion at stake (give or take; according to the still-active Indiana Jones PlunderWatch Ticker™), here's hoping for an inevitable resolution we can all tolerate through nubby, ground teeth.

• George Lucas: Mr. Emperor strikes back [Sunday Times]

But still, Get Smart versus Love Guru is a hell of a quandary. So just for the hell of it, let's hear what the put-upon, overproducing likes of Alan Horn and even Dick Cook are complaining about today:

Adding to their costs, movie companies spend huge sums to globally promote and release their films — as much as $150 million for some big event pictures.

"In order to break through the clutter, we all feel the pressure to spend more in marketing," said Warner Bros. President Alan Horn. ...

This summer, Disney's much-anticipated sequel The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, got upstaged by two behemoths opening in proximity, Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

"There were these giant vacuum cleaners on either side of us, and it took significant amounts of business away for our movie," said Walt Disney Studios Chairman Dick Cook.

In fact, pretty much everyone's a winner in the Times's parallel universe — even the beleaguered Weinstein Company and MGM are piling on! Meanwhile, Picturehouse is winding down its staff buyouts as we speak, and ThinkFILM is still battling rumors of its own demise. "Who?" you ask. Don't worry — the LAT will cover them after they and their, ahem, vacuums are safely liquidated.

[Photo Credit: Paul Duginski, Los Angeles Times]

• Movie release dates become tough for studios to script [LAT]

WHAT'S NEW: We've heard Sex and the City referred to as everything from a "women's cultural moment" to "plow donkeys wearing lipstick," a fantastically diverse spectrum of hype that reflects a true phenomenon — if not necessarily guaranteeing a box-office windfall. But we'll stick with the conventional wisdom on this one, especially after a number-crunching source sends word that it's already over 1,000 sellouts and pushing $6 million before noon. With Indy 4 dropping at least 50%, and even with male moviegoers calling in dead, we're calling SATC for $51.5 million, Indy for $49 million, and the never-say-die Speed Racer hanging in there with about $200.

Also opening this week: the Mena-Suvari-in-cornrows horror/drama Stuck; the martial arts comedy The Foot Fist Way; and the gonzo steroid doc Bigger, Faster, Stronger*.

THE BIG LOSER: Universal thinks it's playing The Strangers just right, with the Liv Tyler/Scott Speedman home invasion thriller offering ideal counterprogramming against the estrogen-skewing SATC. We're a lot less optimistic, with critics pummeling it and the R rating thwarting a young (particularly male) audience that has nowhere else to turn. If it does more than $8 million we'll be stunned.

THE UNDERDOG: Now this is counterprogramming: Fifteen years after his queer tabloid romp Swoon, filmmaker Tom Kalin returns to true crime with the luridly omnisexual Savage Grace. Julianne Moore is in top form as Barbara Baekeland, whose marriage into the Bakelite fortune yields a roving husband (Stephen Dillane), a tormented gay son (Eddie Redmayne) and her own psychosis over years of imploded family ambitions. Moore's riveting interface with Redmayne — an essentially symbiotic passive to her aggressive, until an intimate coupling one must see to believe torpedos everything — is ripped straight from the scandalous headlines by Kalin, who orchestrates it all as one of the most dynamic melodramas in years.

FOR SHUT-INS: This week's new DVD's include the Woody Allen "thriller" Cassandra's Dream; the Forest Whitaker/Sarah Michelle Gellar/Brenadan Fraser ensemble stinker The Air I Breathe; Daniel Kraus's outstanding on-the-job doc Musician; and the ultimate anti-SATC tonic, Rambo: The Complete Collectors Set.

So can an old man outperform four younger women for three days straight? Are we misreading the odds for The Strangers? Recommend something to us for a change — what's good out there?

WHAT'S NEW: There's a holiday-ready, cruise-control part of us that feels like skipping this part of Defamer Attractions, but again, Indiana Jones 4 is not the only new release demanding attention. That said, with $26 million already in the bank on Thursday, and with the Indiana Jones PlunderWatch Projection Ticker speeding toward $9.5 trillion, we should probably just get it out of the way. It's easily going to win the weekend, but can it displace four-day weekend champ Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End ($139.7 million) and five-day king Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith ($172 million) as the all-time biggest box-office bow? We doubt it; there's too much cultural competition to overcome the 19-year generation gap. Nevertheless, we're still calling Indy to break $110 million by Sunday and $140 million by Monday, thus promising a fifth installment set in 1967 and pitting our hero and his greaser sidekick/offspring against their toughest adversaries yet: Filthy, filthy hippies.

Also opening: John Cusack's Iraq satire/career nadir War, Inc.; the here-and-gone Jonathan Rhys Meyers drama The Children of Huang Shi; and the acclaimed Vice Magazine-produced doc Heavy Metal in Baghdad.

THE BIG LOSER: Despite early reads positioning Postal in the same critical class as What Happens in Vegas, Speed Racer and Sex and the City, it won't likely be enough to boost Uwe Boll's latest clusterfuck to anything approaching respectable at the box office. Granted, he's on four screens as opposed to, say, Indy 4's 4,200, but if Postal's per-screen average breaks $8,000, we'll volunteer to be the guy eating his own puke in Boll's next film. What? Stoic has already been shot? Whatever. The point is: It will not happen.

THE UNDERDOG: Fatih Akin's 2005 culture-clash stunner Head On captured audiences about as abruptly and unforgettably as its title suggested, and his follow-up, The Edge of Heaven, revisits his volatile Turkish/German roots with no less intensity. Which, considering its scope, is a bit of a marvel: A elderly Turkish man invites a compatriot prostitute into the home he shares with his son in Bremen. It ends... poorly, with the son traveling to Istanbul to find the woman's 20-something daughter. She's embroiled in political actions there, expatriates herself to Germany seeking asylum, falls in love with another young woman, and then — horror of horrors! — is expelled back to prison in Turkey. The interwoven searches and tragedies that follow in Heaven make Babel look like an afterschool special — not for their violence or viciousness (though they have that, too), but for their stoicism and, ultimately, their unalloyed compassion. And in any case, we'd never reject anything featuring both lesbians and Turkish prison.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, the latest terrible George Romero zombie entry Diary of the Dead, the Richard Gere/Claire Danes folly The Flock, and the long, long-awaited complete first season of The Bill Engvall Show.

So are we low-balling Indy's weekend plunder? Are we too generous? And is anybody actually planning to see Postal? Share your own plans, place your own bets and go ahead — tell your boss we said you could take Monday off!

But still: Indy takes the day as usual, with Salon's Andrew O' Hehir nicely setting the table for the endless courses to follow:

Part of me thinks that some flea-bitten Parisian radicals should come and close this shit down right now. And part of me thinks: You know what? Cannes needs Indy. We've had five days here of earnest and serious filmmaking, ranging from mediocre to outstanding, but nothing that feels like a movie that will rock the world. ... But if you want to know whether Ford, Spielberg and Lucas can recapture their mojo almost 20 years after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the only answers I can provide are frustrating ones, like kind of and maybe and it depends what you mean.

Such qualifications are everywhere this morning as reviews surge forth, but Harrison Ford and company couldn't seem to care less. "It is not unusual for something that is popular to be disdained by some people," Ford said at Sunday's press conference. "I work for the people who pay to get in — they are my customers. My focus is on providing the best experience I can." We have our own (spoiler-rific) ideas about the results, but even the worst lambasting wouldn't prevent Ford's "experience" from raking in upwards of $140 million over the five-day Memorial Day frame.

Meanwhile, down the block, Harvey Weinstein announced a $60 million adaptation of the novel The Alchemist, to be directed and produced by its leading man Laurence Fishburne. The Hollywood Reporter quotes Harvey as saying: "The book means so much to people on a spiritual level. ... I think there is a bridge to the Middle East in this story." Finally — world peace! From the Weinsteins!

It's no less ambitious than restoring Woody Allen's name, we suppose, which the Weinsteins may have done as well with his much-appreciated Cannes premiere Vicky Cristina Barcelona. (The film even has Timecritic Richard Corliss flirting with relevancy with one of his best reviews in years.) Not to be outdone, Harvey's wife Georgina Chapman is designing its stars' premiere attire. Synergy is a beautiful thing, especially when it comes in the form of a "creme silk gown with embroidered straps" on Penelope Cruz. Alas, Harvey, we have not forgotten about Fraggle Rock. You can't stop what's coming.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

What follows contains numerous spoilers, though not much that isn't distinguishable from the trailer or the word-of-mouth teeming around the Web this morning. In any case, if you want a virginal Indy experience when the film opens Thursday, we'd recommend skipping to the next item right about now. Or join in the fray as our wounded critical minds clear the air and let the healing begin.

STV: I'm reading a few OK reviews here and there.
SA: I did that too.
STV: I don't get it; that movie was not good.
SA: No. Bad. A.O. Scott said he was bored. The opening was the most engaging part, but still not great
STV: It was engaging-ish.
SA: The whole movie felt tone-deaf.
STV: But where Raiders was a throwback to the serials of yore, this was a throwback to Raiders and as such was both parodic and, yes, tone-deaf.
SA: The rambling exposition was ridiculous.
STV: SPOILER ALERT! Shia LeBeouf is his son! SHOCKER!
SA: There were no surprises, and I don't understand the plot.
STV: OK, so: Some Russians break into Area 51 with Indy and pal Ray Winstone as their hostages. They want something in the hangar there, but it's a bombing range. That sets up a nuclear bomb point that goes... poorly.
SA: Well, we return to the massive warehouse that ends Raiders. So instantly the reference is made: This is vintage Indy.
STV: OMG there's the Ark! I wish the Russians had stolen that.
SA: Yeah, me too. So the mean Russian lady cuts open the tinfoil-wrapped alien baked potato —
STV: The heavily magnetized tinfoil-wrapped alien baked potato!
SA: That only starts pulling metal towards it when Indy arrives. Action sequence, mushroom cloud.
STV: Indy escapes unharmed, but the Feds suspect him now because he aided the Russians. He gets sent out on a leave of absence from university! Blacklisted! Jim Broadbent shows up, does dignified Jim Broadbent shit: Drinks, has an accent.
SA: Indy addresses a series of framed 8x10s of actors who refused to sign on for the sequels and/or died. He boards a train — destination: unknown. Or can't recall.
STV: Here comes Shia La Brando.
SA: His hog is his steed.
STV: Who just happens to find Indy on a moving train — from the platform. They go have a burger and Cokes at the New Haven diner where the KGB also hangs out after lower-division biology class.
SA: Indiana explains the legend of the crystal skulls, but we miss it because were too preoccupied monitoring the table behind him and how they deal with the "Shia Rewetting His Comb In Their Glass of Coke" problem.
STV: Shia: "Ugh, this is Diet! Fuck!" Anyway, they fight off the KGB. A chase ensues. They lay waste to Yale, go biking through the library. Next stop Peru!
SA: Yes! The Redline Express to savage countries guarded by a loincloth-clad, brown-peopled nation.
STV: And there's Ray Winstone again, who betrayed Indy early on by selling out to the Russians.
SA: Do they find the skull at this point? Or fend off Russians?
STV: They find the skull, then are caught and taken to a Russian fairgrounds/labor camp deep in the Peruvian jungle, where comrades dance, Marion's being held hostage and Cate Blanchett digs out her Roswell space alien. The skull has mental powers — she wants to brainwash the world.
SA: Finally, we have some idea what this movie is about. Indy is in arm restraints and goes face to face with the crystal skull. This is no ordinary quartz skull that looks like an alien head! The skull hurts his brain!
STV: And mine! Anyway, they are reunited and they escape with Shia and John Hurt, who does an hour or so of crazy-man schtick. Quicksand, snakes... Fuck it, jump ahead 30 minutes.
SA: So they escape again with the skull. Are they in Incaland yet? Does all this take place in Peru, or are they in Mexico?
STV: Your guess is as good as mine.
SA: They arrive at a Mayan temple only accessible by removing stone chads. Suddenly! 50,000 dancing chihuahuas appear! Then they are certain this place has significance.
STV: I can't keep going. The end!
SA: Shia didn't need to be in this movie; nor did john hurt. WTF was that?
STV: Shia is the future of the franchise.
SA: The whole skull thing — carrying around a Lucite skull that seems to have 1,000 purposes? Repels ants! Scares savages!
STV: The ants were horrifying.
SA: That was at least, like, something to watch.
STV: SPOILER ALERT! Those fucking ants pulled that big Russian dude INTO AN ANTHOLE AND ATE HIM.
SA: That was cool; it at least had some bite. And did you notice how Indy doesnt put up a fight? He just keeps answering every question that she asked him. Right from the first scene! 'Where is it?' 'Well, it's over here!' Or, 'See theres this legend that goes...' I mean, what happened to spitting in their faces and saying, "Never!"
STV: Yeah, fuck that.
SA: I want the old Indy.
STV: I want the Indy who steals artifacts, destroys everything in sight.
SA: It felt like Invasion of the Indy Snatchers. And the end was a mess. I have no idea what the fuck that was nor did I care.
STV: I mean, that whole alien subplot was literally laughable.
SA: What about the triple waterfall sequence? I could hear an audible groan. I mean, if you're going to just have a car tumble down three waterfalls like a pachinko machine, don't warn us ahead of time
STV: But I love, love, love that long shot of the valley below them collapsing and the spaceship flying up. Storywise, it was absurd, but the shot was fantastic.
SA: I got angry when I saw the spaceship. I felt they ruined the franchise by making it so sci-fi
STV: Maybe so. But technically speaking, it was really well-done. But then there were the monkeys.
SA: Oh yeah. Shia turns into Tarzan. They really lost their minds, kind of.
STV: Shia as Marlon Brando as George of the Jungle. I'll take at least two more installments of that.
SA: What about the cactus-LaBeouf-cockballtorture sequence?
STV: Cactus is an interesting plant variant in the jungle.
SA: Indiana Jones and the Ow LaBeouf's Balls.
STV: And poor John Hurt!
SA: I wonder what he thought when he read the script: "He caresses the crystal skull again and mutters an unintelligible phrase."
STV: His character's name is "OX." Better than "THE ELEPHANT MAN," I guess
SA: The audience was mostly dead silent for the movie. There wasn't one moment when you felt joy. I mean, there's a few stunt sequences that were well-done. That first five minutes, I liked.
STV: The drag race was a good tone-setter.
SA: Oh! Get this: our sound was out the first minute of that, which is like an eternity when fanboys are rioting.
STV: Who were those people who came out of nowhere to beat up Indy and Shia with the Parkour action moves and the blowdarts?
SA: Oh, that was killer blowdart skull mask killer pygmies! They were guarding the sound stage!
STV: I think they symbolized the fans who were down on the whole idea of Indy 4 from the start. They kick LeBeouf's ass until Ford, symbolizing Lucas, shows up to blow a poison dart in their mouths.
SA: At least a blow dart was a reference point I got.
STV: And then there's M. Night Spielberg, who must never touch the franchise again. If LeBeouf comes back, as it seems he will, give it to someone else.
SA: My friend asked why he needs to have Transformers and Indy. It's true. How much LaBeouf can one nation swallow?
STV: This movie is gonna make so much money. Paramount is going to win the summer easily.
SA: I mean, my friend liked it. Maybe it was actually a fun summer movie, and we both need attitude readjustments. The problem is that Iron Man opened two weeks ago. If it hadn't, I honestly wouldn't have remembered that a summer movie can be good.
STV: I refuse to accept responsibility for a blockbuster sucking.
SA: Even Transformers seemed more emotionally true. Giant alien robots — something to care about. I wonder if the fanboys will revolt.
STV: This movie's gonna make $400 million next weekend.
SA: How much will it really make?
STV: This is Pirates/Spider-Man territory. If they're counting over Memorial Day, easily $140. Anyway, let's end on a positive note. Man, wasn't Iron Man great?
SA: Get Smart: In theaters soon!

And why bother traveling thousands of miles and spending thousands of dollars just to hear Glenn Kenny call Sean Penn a dick in person? Look at it this way: Spout's Karina Longworth is doing some of her best writing from the airport, and her subject — Vogue's recent Sex and the City issue — addresses a movie not even screening at Cannes:

The Vogue spread restores a bit of the legitimate, grown-up class that has seemed to be lacking from the SATC campaign all along. ... Cannes likely would have been able to accomplish the same thing; the Vogue spread is probably cheaper, and it has the affect of reaching an audience of comparable demographics as those who would be exposed to as Cannes coverage, without ever having to make the actual quality of the actual film an issue. ... New Line just fired hundreds of people. Such frugality on their part is almost respectable.

There are some actual reviews floating around as well — Jeffrey Wells loves Three Monkeys, while Manohla Dargis is over the moon about Waltz With Bashir, an animated documentary about a massacre at Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon in 1982. The grim gets grimmer at Variety, where Leslie Felperin has a long shrug over Hunger, which chronicles IRA leader Bobby Sands' imprisonment, hunger strike and eventual death in 1982:

McQueen really overeggs the pudding is in the final reel, where (and this is no spoiler for anyone glancingly versed in Sands' story) the protagonist wastes away, the camera focusing intimately on his bedsores and emaciated frame. Tawdry, cliched images include Sands' vision of himself as a child sitting in the room, topped by a near final image of a flock of birds — free at last! — that seemingly symbolizes his soul's last flight. It's a disappointing last gasp for a film that otherwise demonstrates confidence, guts and the abundant promise of its helmer.

And which will likely be coming to a theater near you as distributors kick its tires today and tomorrow. The busy weekend ahead brings the world premiere of Indiana Jones 4, followed by another throng of reviews carrying over into Monday. We'll have ours then as well — we know, we're not holding our breath either.

[Photo Credit: Hollywood Elsewhere]

Or that he was very nearly devoured by hungry police dogs on the set of Transformers, a tragedy that easily could have shut down production for up to three days while a deal for Boy Meets World's Ben Savage to replace the fallen hero could be closed? Spending just a few minutes with the above clip of LaBeouf's Friday night Late Show appearance or perusing this in-depth LAT profile will reveal these and other equally fascinating biographical facts about the interesting young man who is currently freshening up Harrison Ford's glass of Chivas between takes on Indiana Jones 4.

• Late Show with David Letterman [CBS.com]
• Fast action hero [LAT]

Having long ago seized control of the dissemination of Indiana Jones 4 news from the gossip-prone media, Lucas Online'sIndianaJones.com strikes again with another appetite-whetting tidbit: They've released the first photograph of a glassy-eyed Harrison Ford wearing his "familiar" Indy costume while slumped in a director's chair taken since 1989, when a set photographer on The Last Crusade captured the actor reclining with a half-empty bottle of Jameson's following the completion of what he believed would be his last scene as the iconic adventurer, moments before being shooed away with the gently slurred words, "Take your photo, monkey! I'm finally free of this stupid. Fuck-ing. Hat! Never again! I have Oscars to win." Though there have been some concerns that the sexagenarian Ford might be a little too old to convincingly reprise the physically demanding role, the final version of this official inaction photo should completely quell those fears once post-production on it has been completed; to this point, Industrial Light & Magic's best age-reversing effects engineers have only had the chance to remove conspicuous liver spots from the back of the star's lone visible hand, but after the jump, we present a rough cut of what the image will look like once they're finished:

• The Man With The Hat is Back [IndianaJones.com]
• Previously: Lucas, Spielberg, And Ford Finally Ameliorate Your 'Indy 4' Blueballs [Defamer]

Late yesterday, word surfaced that CAA trained its poaching tractor beams on rivals Endeavor and ICM, extracting Babel director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and V for Vendetta's James McTeigue, who now are safely floating in animation-suspending glass vats in a sub-basement of their new agency's stronghold until they're attached to huge commission-generating projects. And this morning, THR announces that they've also placed prized client Cate Blanchett in the cast of surefire blockbuster Fourth Installment of the Indiana Jones Adventures—a film helmed, of course, by CAA über-earner Steven Spielberg—a strategic move that that agency hopes gives it enough leverage to threaten to shut down the entire project unless star Harrison Ford agrees to immediately defect from UTA. Once in their greedy grasp, they'll immediately negotiate the aging action star into a lucrative commitment to Indiana Jones 5-12, despite the fact Ford likely won't survive past the eighth sequel.

While this latest round of news concerning CAA's relatively unimpeded march through Hollywood is certainly dispiriting, there is some hope today: We're told that most of the agency is away on a weekend retreat in Ojai, leaving the Death Star defended solely by some call-rolling drones; now is clearly the time for rebel forces to strike, while CAA's leaders are off complacently celebrating their latest victories by gnawing on decadently battered, plump baby legs at infinity-poolside, dreaming of the refreshing full-body money-wrap their bosses have arranged for them later this afternoon.

• CAA signs two film directors [Variety]
• Blanchett on crusade to 'Indiana Jones 4' [THR]