WHAT'S NEW: Want it or not, Michael Bay's reboot machine has spit out Friday the 13th for a new generation — the one for whom the 1980 original's quaint, arrow-through-Kevin-Bacon's-throat charms no longer do the thrilling trick. And while director Marcus Nispel is likelier to perpetrate even more crude, quick cuts than Jason Voorhees himself, there's no denying he'll be rewarded with a No. 1 opening somewhere around $36.9 million for the long President's Day weekend.

Trailing a distant second will be Confessions of a Shopaholic, Isla Fisher's troubled, mildly anachronistic ode to retail profligacy fiscal responsibility; it faces competition from He's Just Not That Into You, but should nevertheless ride its PG-13 counterprgramming boost to $23.9 million. Clive Owen rounds out the wide releases in the bank-intrigue actioner The International, which is tracking like shit but still has enough muscle to surmount Taken with $17.9 million and a top-five finish.

Also opening: Warner Bros. gives us ocean life as God intended it — in nausea-inducing IMAX 3-D — with Under the Sea; the Oscar-jilted, critically lauded Italian mob epic Gomorrah; the Indian tandem of Billu Barber and Dev D; and the Roman Polanski biopic (!) Polanski Unauthorized.

THE BIG LOSER: Again, we're not hearing especially promising things about The International's prospects, but hey: It's a holiday weekend, nothing is roundly reviled, and unless you count last week's loser Push dropping to $5 million, things look relatively rosy out there. Of course, there's always...

THE UNDERDOG: Two Lovers, which is just as vulnerable to a Joaquin Phoenix backlash as it is to his batshit momentum. On one hand, it did botch its best outreach opportunity Wednesday night on The Late Show — not necessarily by thrusting its aloof star onto national-TV and YouTube infamy, but by airing one of the film's most unappealing clips. On the other, it's hard not to like director James Gray's moody melodrama about a suicidal 30-something Jew holed up with his parents in Brighton Beach, where he wrestles with romantic devotion to both the clinically crazy shiksa upstairs (a great Gwyneth Paltrow) and the sweet daughter (Vinessa Shaw) of his father's business partner. In their third collaboration (after The Yards and We Own the Night), Gray and Phoenix finally take real advantage of their rapport, trading crime-flick conceits for a more humane, way less self-serious survey of love's utter impossibility. We'd say, "More like this, please," but, well, you know. It deserves better.

FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD's this week include Barry Levinson's beleaguered Hollywood satire What Just Happened, Spike Lee's even more beleaguered war epic Miracle at St. Anna, the ultimate indie Oscar underdog Frozen River, your parents' seventh-favorite film of '08, Nights at Rodanthe, Oliver Stone's W., and the autistic martial arts milestone Chocolate.

The man in question is Phoenix's Two Lovers director, James Gray, who we once sympathized with—after all, the film's publicity tour has become a circus of late adopters who just watched Letterman and don't realize that this rapping enterprise is so hoaxy, it could have been brainstormed in a committee made of Rosie Ruiz, the Nigerian email scammers, and the Backwards "B" Girl.

Now, though, Gray is telling ABC about fears that he set off Phoenix's "rap career" by asking him to freestyle poorly in Two Lovers:

"That rap thing ... in the movie actually comes from something I played for him," Gray said. "I had an obsession with doing that sort of thing as a teenager. ... It turns out that Joaquin is imitating me in a lot of the movie. He said, 'I want to do that, I want to steal from that, I want to do the rap that you used to do.' I said, 'OK.'

"And now I'm seeing him do this thing, and I feel like I've ruined Joaquin Phoenix for the world," Gray added. "I don't want to be the guy that destroyed Joaquin Phoenix's acting career." [...]

Gray saw Phoenix Wednesday night, after the star taped his appearance on "The Late Show," but before it aired. Gray asked how the interview went.

"He said 'Oh it was good, it was really good," Gray said. "I watched it this morning ... I don't know what to say."

How about: made up, made up, it was made up, it was made up. But at least he'll get an US Weekly cover sidebar out of it!

• Director: I Feel I Ruined Joaquin Phoenix [ABC]

From what we can gather, it involves consuming a variety of birds, followed by large quantities of cheese, topped off with unlimited desserts, and all washed down with a bucket of rendered duck fat. We mean, Mario (that's Batali, celebrity chef and her Spain...on the Road Again co-star, stupids) will tell you how much she eats. Trust her. It's tons. And how does she keep off the weight? Easy—by not thinking about her weight. It's that simple.

Until this moment, God bless her, Oprah had been keeping it together by chanting the word "OK" after every hateful word to spill from the corners of Paltrow's gravy-saturated mouth. But this—this "denial diet," this "positive psychic body reinforcement" or whatever you wanted to call it, was too much to bear. A quick neck-swiping was all it took for all the cameras in the studio to switch off, at which point the audience respectfully looked away as Winfrey launched herself at her guest with the strength and fury of ten life-fulfillment gurus denied adult-sized fried chicken portions for far too long. [Oprah]

James Gray has collaborated with Phoenix on three films, and his latest, Two Lovers, is purported to be Phoenix's last EXCEPT FOR THIS HOAX MOVIE HE IS FILMING WITH CASEY AFFLECK IN WHICH HE IS CLEARLY ACTING AND WE'RE ALL CLEAR ON THAT, RIGHT? In a Huffington Post essay published today, Gray charitably describes the actor as "mercurial" (of their first film together, he notes, "I seem to remember a whole lot of torment and angst and yelling and screaming"), then recounts Phoenix's gonzo performing on the set of We Own the Night:

We worked night and day, rehearsing and discussing. Sometimes it would lead to horrible arguments — often my fault! I'm no diplomat — but in my (weak) defense, there were times I couldn't distinguish with whom I was speaking. Was it character or actor? This time, he went in, and he went in deep. Okay, you want me to see my father dead, in the street? Well then, I might vomit for real (he did); you want me to be terrified of that man? Go 'head, have him belt me, right in the face (he got walloped, but good); you want me to swallow that charcoal? Force it down my throat, man (he inhaled, with relish).

Now, Phoenix has kindly returned the favor, asking America to open its mouth while he shoves a hard, unwanted vanity project down our gullets. Expect a middling aftertaste, for it is half-baked.

• Joaquin Phoenix Retires [HuffPo]

The Playlist managed to uncover this clip of Phoenix's nascent on-screen rapping from the upcoming Two Lovers (which has already seen its publicity tour devolve into a bullshit-calling festival). In it, Phoenix attempts to woo Jersey girl Gwyneth Paltrow and her friend with a little bit of freestyling that, like its real-life counterpart, ends horribly. Yes, Gwyneth—we, too, began by laughing with Phoenix, but that stinky "WTF" face you make at :07 is the best summation of his new career that we could possibly give. Brava.

• Was 'Two Lovers' Joaquin Phoenix's Hip-Hop Training Wheels? [The Playlist via Vulture]

Meanwhile, bigger American titles — particularly Che, Two Lovers and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's mindfuck directorial debut Synecdoche, New York (pictured) — remain on the market after less-than-rapturous response from critics and industry alike. What gives?

In the case of Kaufman's film, which premieres today at the festival, an early buyers screening last weekend yielded little but scratched heads and closed wallets, though with a cast top-lined by Philip Seymour Hoffman, most observers presume a deal is imminent. The same goes for Steven Soderbergh's even more challenging Benicio Del Toro-starrer Che — a 268-minute Spanish-language epic you may have heard left more than a few people skeptical of its commercial viability.

But even the Joaquin Phoenix/Gwyneth Paltrow film Two Lovers, easily the most mainstream, best-reviewed and least-expensive (with its $12 million budget) of the three, has drawn few serious inquiries more than three days after its premiere. Buyers are increasingly content to wait for the right price (it's easier when the troubled likes of the Weinstein Company and ThinkFilm can't afford to drive up costs); they're also determined to outlast the sluggish theatrical marketplace by accruing fewer titles on their release calendars. (See Fox Searchlight and Focus Features, which expensively nabbed Choke and Hamlet 2, respectively, out of Sundance and haven't bought since.)

The skittishness is conspicuously rubbing off on sellers now as well — especially Europeans, as The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Goldstein and Steven Zeitchik discovered Wednesday:

European sellers are not necessarily sympathetic to American fears over less easily marketable product. "The Americans are lazy, they're arrogant and too scared to do any deals," said one European sales exec. "I tell them: get some balls — your companies are all going down the toilet, maybe now's the time to get some films before it all collapses." ...

[T]he word is new strategies are needed to jump-start the market. Films will need be approaching completion before they are presented to buyers. "Buyers perceive that it's a buyers' market and they don't have to buy off footage; they can wait for the whole film," [William Morris Independent's] Cassian Elwes said.

That scenario likely applies to the $61 million Che, which even with Soderbergh at the helm likely faces months of cutting and revision before a distributor would take it on. Then there's the case of Tyson, the Mike Tyson documentary over which director James Toback was heard referring to his "prospective distributor" Sony Pictures Classics — even as the company was credited only with a "lowball," then "modest six-figure bid" and co-president Michael Barker was quoted elsewhere as saying, "I'm trying to find a year when we left without buying a film. ... If we ever did it was a long time ago. There are no gems in the market." Ouch! Oh well — there's always Toronto.

Like his resilient cousins in the roach family, Roger Friedman naturally outlasted the meltdown and later delivered his sterling, tasteful review, "Gwyneth Paltrow Bares a Breast in Film":

You don't really think of Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow as the racy type. But in her new film, Two Lovers, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival Monday night, she quite surprisingly bares a single breast. The shot is, shall we say, head-on into the camera. And it's for more than a couple of seconds. This is no wardrobe malfunction. It's on purpose. (To paraphrase a great Seinfeld quote: "They're real ... and they're spectacular!")

Of course, this moment — it's the left breast, by the way — is meant to be part of the story; it's exactly what her manipulative character would do to land her man, in this case a character played by Joaquin Phoenix. In Two Lovers, Phoenix plays a mentally jumbled lonely guy who tries to juggle romances with both Paltrow's selfish car crash of a mistress and Vinessa Shaw's girl next door.

Thank you, Roger — back to the hospital, now. Other viewers including Anne Thompson, Glenn Kenny and even Jeffrey Wells (who, mere months after notoriously requesting nude stills of Shaw from 3:10 to Yuma director James Mangold, thinks she's miscast here) managed entire reviews without mentioning the nudity, expressing admiration for the film overall. It's still looking for US distribution, which we hear films featuring Oscar-winning actresses' breasts are highly likely to find.

Also seeking a buyer is Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut Synecdoche, New York. The film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director creating "the ultimate play: a city within a city within a warehouse," according to The Hollywood Reporter's interview Monday with Kaufman — who would like to object to his reputation as a recluse, damn it:

The first thing people will say to me in interviews is that you don't do interviews and I'll say "Well, I'm sitting here talking to you!" I don't particularly like to be photographed and I don't like to talk about my personal life — that doesn't make me a recluse. My feeling is that my work speaks about my life in ways that are very generous. ... I live a regular mundane life in Los Angeles. Don't know what else to say except I'm not here cowering in a corner. I don't have a veil over my head. I don't say "I vant to be alone."

Got it! Now that that's settled, perhaps Kaufman and his backers at Sidney Kimmel Pictures might want to answer Anne Thompson's fantastic question: Why the nervous rush to screen it for impatient buyers before its premiere on May 23? "If they had the goods," she writes, "the sellers would hang tough and force the buyers to just stick around and wait." It's still inconclusive to those of us stranded on this side of the Atlantic, but a new batch of clips featuring an aged Hoffman, a tattooed Michelle Williams and the word "urologist" used as a punchline has us smelling a hit. Happy selling, gang.

UPDATE: Our hunch-dar appears to have betrayed us; we've heard from Manohla Dargis herself that she was not the angry critic who fled the Two Lovers scene. We regret the misread; these blind items just get harder and harder!

[Photo: Getty Images]