Oh, and before I saw this trailer, I somehow figured that the corporation best known for its tobacco products would somehow figure in the story. It’s still kind of an odd name for Ewan McGregor’s character, though.

H/t Screencrave.

* Nikkie Finke broke the news this morning of the latest chapter in the never-ending tale of the battle over the rights to the character of “Superman.” It seems DC is countersuing lawyer Marc Toberoff on the grounds of conflict of interest. Sure does sound like “hardball” but that’s what happens when millions of dollars are at stake.

* It never ends. It just never, ever ends. A new alleged victim has come forward claiming that Roman Polanski raped her during the eighties when she was sixteen. (The terms used in the article are “sexually abused” in “the worst possible way” — I have no clue how that could not be rape, at the very least, if true). The woman is being represented by, naturally, Gloria Allred.

At this time, there’s no corroborating evidence beyond the charges. If there is, I think it’s curtains for Polanski and he’ll find himself suddenly and justifiably all-but friendless in Hollywood. It’s one thing to have one extremely nasty episode in your past, it’s quite another to be a serial sexual predator.

* Here’s a bit of news from the French Riviera. Julie Taymor is, heaven help us all, making another movie musical. Now, I know the highly esteemed David Medsker dug “Across the Universe” but I can be silent no longer! I hated, hated, hated it!! Quite a bit. Oh, and she’s adapting 1929 German Nobel laureate Thomas Mann’s adaptation of an Indian legend, Transposed Heads. It’s all starting to sound a bit like a live-action version of the highly acclaimed animation, “Sita Sings the Blues,” which I personally also found just kind of irritating. Still, she’s got other stuff on her plate, like her cross-gender movie of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” which I’m actually looking forward to, and, yes, “Spiderman” on Broadway.

* Director Walter Hill (“The Long Riders,” “Deadwood”) is heading back to the big screen, and he’s got quite a good cast.

*The Heat Vision blog has two interesting writing hires: brilliantly downbeat but often hilarious screenwriter/fantasist Charlie Kaufman (“Synecdoche, New York,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) is doing a script polish on the “Kung Fu Panda: The Kaboom of Doom.” Also, 83 year-old super veteran writer Alvin Sargent (“Paper Moon,” “Ordinary People” among many others) is resuming his long-term relationship with Spiderman on the upcoming Marc Webb reboot.

* Paul Dano and Keith Carradine are joining the cast of the Jon Favreau-directed “Cowboys and Aliens.” They’re both great choices because they’d both be believable as either cowboys or ETs. I mean that as a compliment. (Okay, Dano’s a bit more alien-ish than Carradine.)

* The Cannes reaction is coming in to “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.” It’s fairly mixed but since the original “Wall Street” was one of my least favorite Oliver Stone movies despite Michael Douglas‘s legendary performance in it, I might just like this one better.

* I guess David Gordon Green’s deal with writer Josh Parkinson really does seem to further indicate the end of his career as a low-budget Terrence Malick.

* Another Deadline Cannes item…So, the idea for “Looper”  is that when Joseph Gordon-Levitt hits his fifties, he’ll look like Bruce Willis? I’m no expert on these matters, but I must be missing something.

* As a scaredy-cat gorephobe, I’ve only managed to make it through “Suspiria” so far (and I’m not sure how I did it), but I do admire Italian horror-master Dario Argento enough that when I heard he’s making a 3-D, and supposedly faithful to the novel, version of “Dracula” my first thought was “cool!” Whatever else is true of his work — and it’s been a long time since a new film by him has received much acclaim — he’s definitely got style. His actress-director daughter, Asia Argento, is also back in action after some unpleasantness over her last feature.

* Sometimes real life is just like the movies. Kind of.

* It looks like the Wachowski siblings are returning to the gay-thriller category that first put them on the map with “Bound.” But this time, it’s set in Iraq and involves a male same-sex romance. We all know there’s a huge, huge, huge double standard when it comes to male as opposed to female same-sex love on the big screen, even after “Brokeback Mountain,” so this should be an interesting test.

* The Auteurs is now Mubi. A cinephile movie/social networking site by any other name is just as great, I suppose. Anne Thompson has the details

There are times when we swear that “Entertainment Weekly” has either bugged our office or is tapping into our conference calls. Numerous pieces of ours wind up on their pages at almost the exact same time, be it a list of the best sequels, cinematic stoners, or our long-gestating piece on the Bullz-Eye Fantasy Band Draft, which will drop later this year. They’ve even named their hot/not meter “The Bullseye.” Hmmm.

And sure enough, they scooped us once again, when they put the top awards from various Academy Awards results to a new vote, to see how the current Academy would fix the previous generation’s “mistakes.” We’ve been throwing that idea around for over a year, and just when we begin to put pen to paper: boom! — they beat us to the punch. We’re not at all surprised that they saw the appeal in such a topic; every year there is at least one head-scratching moment, one that usually owes more to awarding a long-overdue actor for their overall body of work than for the performance at hand (ahem, Al Pacino, “Scent of a Woman”). Enter Bullz-Eye, Mighty Mouse-style, to save the day and make sure justice is served. We’ve examined recent Academy Award winners and their competitors, and we found a few, um, irregularities. Revisionist history begins now.

Elaine Benes summed up our feelings for “The English Patient” as well as anyone. Actually, that’s a tad unfair; we didn’t think “Patient” was awful, just long and, in the end, anti-climactic. Without Juliette Binoche carrying her co-stars from start to finish (her Oscar, unlike this one, was well deserved), we wonder if “Patient” would have received half the praise that it did. Then there’s “Fargo,” which featured invaluable contributions from its leads, the supporting cast, and even the characters who were only in a scene or two (Marge Gunderson’s Japanese high school classmate had us in tears). It’s funny, shocking, coy, and best of all, normal, an expertly crafted movie all the way around. Guess the Academy wasn’t quite ready for the Coen brothers yet.

To be fair, this one isn’t a staff pick; it’s mine and mine alone. My colleague Jason Zingale loved “Crash,” as did most people. I, however, loathed it like no movie I’ve seen since “Shrek.” The manner in which people would instantly spew the most hateful, ignorant nonsense in scene after scene was just unbearable, and I wanted to throttle Sandra Bullock’s ridiculously underwritten shrew of a character. Granted, “Brokeback Mountain” is not a perfect movie by any stretch, but I’ll take it over “Crash” any day of the week and twice on Sunday for the sheer fact that it didn’t try to beat me into a coma about what a racist pig I am. Fuck you, Paul Haggis.

Click here to read the rest of Dude, Where’s My Oscar? Bullz-Eye revisits recent Academy Award “mistakes”