• It's a waiting game to see whether Vivendi will exercise its put option on its remaining 20 percent stake in NBC Universal, possibly sending the network studio hybrid into the fabled lands of IPO. While the anticipation mounts, Vivendi's chair said the company would take the next few months to make up its mind. [Variety]

• Oprah's Harpo Productions, Sam Mendes and Focus Features are teaming up to bring Joseph O'Neill's celebrated cricket pot-boiler Netherland to the big screen. [Variety]

• Spike Lee and Robert DeNiro announced plans to make a series about Alphabet City for Showtime. Alphaville will be an ensemble drama set in the 1980's. [Hollywood Reporter]

• With a mere two months until its release, pre-sales of tickets for New Moon the second installment of the Twilight saga have been brisk, with many locations reporting showings have already sold out. [Hollywood Reporter]

• What you won't read much about in the trades is the rumors about the trades themselves. Yesterday, Nikki Finke declared Variety was planning to take its website behind a pay wall and the Hollywood Reporter to cease publication entirely. The Wrap attempted to find the truth behind the rumors. It quotes a "high level" Reporter exec reacting "with amusement" to Finke's item, while Variety remained oblique about its online plans. [The Wrap]

Apart from a surprise Supporting Actor nod for Michael Shannon's truth-hoarding suburban loony, we face the life-affirming prospect of Revolutionary Road's disappearance from the awards-season scene. Think about it:

· No more shrill DiCaprio or histrionic Winslet bellowing Oscar clips under Sam Mendes's lip-licking, sadistic gaze.

· A foreseeable end to the public gang-rape of source novelist Richard Yates.

· No more Reader vs. Road chatter calculating Winslet's optimal Oscar odds.

· An awardscast without the threat of hearing its theme replayed ad infinitum lest, God forbid, Road won anything.

· The likelihood its box-office will plunge this weekend.

· The likelihood its full-page newspaper ads will cease to exist as early as tomorrow.

· An unofficial rebuke to Mendes and those audience-flagellating hacks who would follow him, cheaply defying the basic laws of art, entertainment and taste.

· Remember that lost wager with Nikki Finke? Best million dollars Harvey Weinstein ever spent.

Join our ovation, will you — piss on its shallow grave below.

So Bad it's Good: The Spirit (Dec. 25). Perhaps it's best to know as little as possible going into this adaptation of Will Eisner's classic 1940s comic series, written and directed by Eisner acolyte Frank Miller in the arresting visual style of his debut (with Robert Rodriguez) Sin City. But the silhouettes, snow and sooty (if green-screened) Central City backdrops are less-convincing a reason to have a look than the gleeful pageantry of Miller's bad taste: The Spirit (Gabriel Macht), essentially a zombie cop turned oversexed masked-vigilante enforcer, introduces himself by way of an epic fight with equally unkillable Central City crime lord The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson). Mud is thrown, balls are crushed, toilets are slammed, and expectations are dashed. "This," you should expect to mutter to yourself and/or your incredulous date, "is fucking terrible."

Well, kind of. Your first impression — that Miller has no idea what he's doing — eventually surrenders to an intrigue with what he'll do next. Will Scarlett Johansson put her beguiling badness to work as Octopus right-hand Silken Floss, or simply stand around like a line-reading cleavage prop? Will Eva Mendes (as jewel thief Sand Saref) test the PG-13 rating with her de rigeur gratuitous nudity? Will doctor Sarah Paulson ever tire of her male-slut superhero crush? Will Jackson's fat, annoying cloned henchmen ever shut up? And is that actually Sam Jackson up there in Nazi regalia, shouting about eggs?

By the time Miller answers most of these questions, you're already barreling toward The Spirit's climax — a convergence of the hero, villain and their intimates for a hyper-violent This is Your Life variant for the soul of Central City. With spectacle to spare and absolutely no interest in Iron Man's optimism, The Incredible Hulk's self-seriousness or The Dark Knight's social criticism, The Spirit instead emerges as the comics genre's semi-lucid inbred cousin. Hating this movie would be like booing at the Special Olympics.

So Bad it's Bad: Seven Pounds (now playing). At some point one might expect an ebb to the extraordinary critical tsunami that helped devastate Will Smith's morality play. Or at least a backlash of some kind, anything pledging some redeemability to the story of a purported IRS agent making a set of mysterious rounds to help an ensemble of sick, blind and otherwise downtrodden strangers.

Alas, we won't be the ones inaugurating that movement. Seven Pounds is everything its detractors say, with baffling plot contrivances and dramatic ineptitude compounded by the cardinal sin of utter boredom. As Smith's mission crystallizes and his motivations surface — in a twist so random it really does defy spoiling here — the likelihood of any emotional payoff diminishes behind the vast horizon of its star's ego. We imagine Seven Pounds' final 40 minutes may someday acquire some esteem in the Cult-Classic Canon for its adroit interweaving of printing-press repair, bone-marrow transplants, bad sex and killer jellyfish. But for want of anything worthwhile preceding them, it begs the question: If Will Smith falls in the forest and the audience walked out around the one-hour mark, does he make a sound?

So Bad it's Ugly: Revolutionary Road (Dec. 25) . While novelist John Cheever traced the glide path of America's fall from post-WWII euphoria to disillusioned ennui, his contemporary Richard Yates was the black box that captured every primal, panicked cry in the seconds before the crash. Nearly 50 years on, Sam Mendes likely fancies himself to share a little of each man's qualities, with his decade's worth of moodily revisionist entries surveying suburbia (American Beauty), crime and the Depression (Road to Perdition), the first Iraq War (Jarhead) and now Revolutionary Road, Yates's debut novel about an idealistic young couple's suffocation in the Connecticut suburbs.

But Mendes crafted not so much an adaptation here as he did a stunt. It was one thing to reunite wife Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, tricking the Titanic generation into a bit of po-mo awards-season whiplash; it was another entirely to impose his semi-literate condescension on Frank and April Wheeler, Yates's doomed ad man and his housewife, whose shared yearning for a life beyond the social constraints of their titular street capsizes in devastating slow-motion. Their unraveling was a symbolic end to the optimism of Eisenhower's '50s, no less nightmarish for its yowling, virtually unprecedented depiction of complacency's costs. It created a stir that never altogether faded, influencing American Beauty itself and prompting no fewer than a dozen failed screen attempts before Mendes and Scott Rudin coaxed around $40 million of DreamWorks' money to smear their quasi-pedigreed patina over the Wheeler family's implosion.

It would have been bad enough with screenwriter Justin Haythe digesting Yates's piercing dialogue into compact, Oscar-clip-compatible bursts. It would have been bad enough with DiCaprio and Winslet, each miscast, delivering those bursts in furrow-browed, you-shout-now-I-shout order. It would have been bad enough with Michael Shannon dropping by as the neighbors' candid loony son, the Connecticut equivalent of Southern dramas' "magical Negro" whose cruelly omniscient nuggets coincide conveniently with key junctures of the Wheelers' dissolution.

But Revolutionary Road's real failure transcends tone-deafness. Here, Mendes actively perverts his source's vanguard qualities — grossly commodifying the Wheelers, fetishizing their anguish, and in fact reveling in the excruciating emotional turmoil that tormented Yates until his death in 1992. We knew Mendes was a bit of a serial masturbator, but a necrophiliac? Moreover, a cold-blooded cultural murderer? Quick — someone save Kate.

In fairness, her husband, Sam Mendes, was the director — a first for Winslet that seemed to bother her in ways that her Titanic leading man Di Caprio more readily shrugged off:

Did some of those intimate scenes get a little awkward? "Not a problem in this department," Leo says. "It was right for the characters."

"You know what? Yes, it was (awkward)," says a candid Kate. "I did feel weird about it — [but] you get over that quickly. You really have to." She adds that her husband "really treated me like the actress playing [the character]," and that during one of their more heated scenes, "Sam would sort of yell from the other room, 'No, Leo really grab her thigh! Really grab her thigh!' I thought, 'This is really strange, but I'm gonna go with it.'"

Kinky! Not to mention an improvement over those James Cameron days, when "grab her thigh" was simply something the Titanic taskmaster disgustedly spat at on-set paramedics every time the fragile Di Caprio cramped up while treading water for six hours on end.

• LEO & KATE ON AWKWARD LOVE SCENES [ET]

He was 76 when I worked with him on Road to Perdition. Conrad Hall was the cinematographer. He was about Paul’s age, maybe slightly younger, and he’d also shot Harper, Cool Hand Luke, and Butch Cassidy, so he had seen Paul from the age of 40, and there they were in their seventies, still shooting together. It was very moving. At one point he was shooting a close-up of Paul looking into a fire, and I turned round and Conrad was crying as he lit the shot.

I asked him what was the matter, and he just said, “He was so beautiful.” And I said, “Well, he’s beautiful now!” And he said, “Yeah, but he was so beautiful.” I think he was crying for both of them. But whereas Conrad, you see, was sort of not at peace with the idea of death and growing older, Paul said several times, “Yeah, I’ve had some great innings, it’s about time I give all this up. It’s all a bit silly.” There was this real sense of grace and dignity. He had nothing left to prove. He knew what a fortunate and wonderful life he had led, and he was very willing to admit that. That really lent him an aura of a minor deity to me. He had sort of ascended already.

That's just the first segment; there's much more where it came from. And while our job is to perhaps summarize this in some pithy, innocuous way, some stories really just demand telling themselves. So bravo, Mr. Mendes, and for what will in all likelihood be the last time, RIP, Mr. Newman. That is all.

• Sam Mendes Tells His Best Paul Newman Stories [Source]

We didn’t think it was possible, but the insanely dateable John Krasinski is not looking so hot these days. Due to an upcoming role in the Sam Mendes-directed Farlanders, John is sporting a nasty beard that resembles something one of the Geico cavemen would wear. And while we’d never judge an actor for tossing out their razors for months for the sake of their craft, this terrible beard inspired us to take a look back at the most cringeworthy facial hair in cinematic history. From one actor’s frizzy salt-and-pepper rat's nest to one mustache’s journey inside another man’s taint, our top five lie after the jump:

Though most Napoleon Dynamite obsessives instinctively recall that Napoleon envied Pedro's ability to quickly grow a mustache, we were far more grossed out by Kip Dynamite's stringy gelled strip. As for Daniel Day Lewis' portrayal of Bill the Butcher in Gangs Of New York, his Dali 'stache served to heighten the character's intimidation factor. And of course, there was poor Tom Hanks, whose Castaway role forced him to grow out a tangled mess of curls covering his entire mug. Though really, we feel sorrier for wife Rita Wilson. Shudder.

Insisting for months that he would only appear as Borat in public and during interviews, jet-black puffy 'stache and all, Sacha Baron Cohen claims he "woke up one morning and was quite hung over, and I accidentally shaved my mustache off.". But topping our list of the most horrendous facial hair grown for a movie role is the most tragic tale of all. After spending months growing out a woolly, scraggly beard for a role in Darren Aronofsky's sci-fi bomb The Fountain, Brad Pitt abruptly quit the picture and started work on another bomb, Troy. Rumors that Brad just couldn't jibe with Aronofsky's script abounded, but some suspected he just couldn't stand sporting that greasy uncomfortable mop on his face for so long.

• A FEW OF THE 'OFFICE' CAST AT THE NBC UPFRONTS [ONTD]

· The Groundlings, birthers of good comedy thing Kristen Wiig, have struck a deal with Sony to produce digital comedy shorts of their sketches. [Variety]
· George W. Bush appeared on Deal or No Deal last night, and no one gave a shit. [THR]
· Sam Mendes's untitled romcom, written by Dave Eggers and his wife and starring Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski, starts production in Connecticut this week, with the sublime Jeff Daniels and Catherine O'Hara also on board. Can we get this thing a title already? A Heartwarming Love Story with Staggering Credentials? [THR]