* As of tonight, corporate raider Carl Icahn appears to be a majority stockholder in Lionsgate.

* I’ve never been a fan of the seventies movie of the silly seventies film version of “Logan’s Run,” but with Carl Erik Rinsch directing, my interest in the new film perked up considerably. Now, Alex Garland — who wrote and produced the not-entirely-unrelated upcoming version of “Never Let Me Go” which I discussed yesterday — has jumped on board, making it even more interesting. Better, they’re approaching it as a new version of the book, not a remake of the film. In the 1976 film, by the way, no one in the futuristic society was permitted to live past 30. In the novel, it was 21.

* Sam Raimi has been confirmed as the director of “Oz: The Great and Powerful.” Apparently Robert Downey, Jr., who just formed a new company with his producer wife, Susan Downey, is the most likely Oz at this point.

* Be sure and check out Will Harris’s terrific interview with one of the best, Isabella Rossellini. Easily one of the most fascinating  actresses of the last thirty years or so, with quite a backstory behind her. Don’t miss it.

*Though Ms. Rossellini seems perfectly at home in a very humorous way with her fifty-something status, that is not really always the case for actresses. This month’s conversation between Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard at the House Next Door underlines that point as the cinephile thinkers discuss two of Hollywood’s greatest show-biz based films, “Sunset Boulevard” and “All About Eve,” both released in 1950 and both dealing with actresses who struggling with this whole passage of time thing.

* That film geek Ahab, Quint, manages to capture the elusive Ridley Scott and discusses “Alien” stuff, specifically the proposed 3-D prequels and Scott’s attitude towards the process, not to mention the brilliant advertising campaign for the original film.

* The White Elephant Blogathon has taken place. It’s a deeply sado-maschistic ritual in which film bloggers fob off films they wouldn’t inflict on their worst enemies to other film bloggers, and then have to review one such film themselves. Dennis Cozzalio caught the “Mannequin 2: On the Move,” and let’s just say the results border on the psychedelic.

*If Tom Tyker’s Wachowski-produced film version of the novel “Cloud Atlas” ever gets made, it’s likely going to be big.

* I’ve had some obvious mixed feelings about Nikki Finke since starting this here gig, but director Joe Carnahan’s idiotic attack on her confirms my initial unflattering hunches about him. I never understood why his film “Narc” got the praise it got. I found it merely irritating.

* One of several reasons I’m scaling back the blogging fairly radically for a couple of weeks is so that I actually would like time to catch some movies at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival. Karina Longworth and the gang at the L.A. Weekly are helping me to make some selections.

* RIP film scholar and freelance writer Peter Brunette, who died suddenly at a festival in Italy at age 66. Glenn Kenny has a nice remembrance up.

* The trailer for “Bagman,” retitled from “Casino Jack,” is anything but promising. Also, isn’t it time for an indefinite moratorium on the use of “Gimme Shelter” in trailers and even movies? I’m talking to you too, Mr. Scorsese!

Even though I had my quibbles, it seems pretty likely that “Casino Jack and the United States of Money,” also about the Jack Abramoff affair, will prove to be the better film.

* I think Leo the Lion just digs torturing fanboys and fangals.

* OMG! OMG! It’s the dark Miley!

* If you haven’t absolutely nothing better to do, you can watch the new Smurf  movie’s teaser trailer. It’s looking like a real clustersmurf to me.

* Michael Winterbottom’s “The Killer Inside Me,” based on a the ultra-ultra-dark novel by Jim Thompson, has been the talk of the festival circuit for some time because of some scenes of extreme violence (just how graphic they actually are remains slightly unclear, though their emotional impact is clearly extremely strong) that have raised some hackles. Over at the the Daily Beast, Allen Barra marks its release by taking a look at Thompson’s works and wondering if they’re ever truly been filmable.

* Speaking of films that made their names with a single scene of violence against a woman, Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of “Psycho.” While there is no doubting that Hitchcock’s film is a hugely important milestone and its first forty minutes or so are a kind of perfection. Louis Vertel at Movieline is absolutely correct that it’s not his best — I’m not sure who thinks it is, except for people who haven’t seen many other Hitchcock movies. In fact, I’d rank it significantly lower than Vertel does. For me, it’s not even in Hitchcock’s top 10, though that less a knock on it than praise for a number of truly great films by of one of the real geniuses of the movies. It is, however, one of Bernard Herrmann’s very best scores.

On a separate note, if you’re a real movie geek, make sure you don’t miss another chapter in the long running Glenn Kenny v. Jeffrey Welles moviegeek smackdown, this time over “Psycho” and, wait for it, aspect ratios. Both enlightening and entertaining if a bit more polite than usual.

And, okay, “Psycho” is kind of amazing.

* 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

Director and co-writer Ryu Seung-Wan’s 2002 thriller deserves some credit for mixing things up a bit. It attempts to blend Guy Ritchie-style crime-comedy with heavy dramatic elements, the feminist ethos of the Wachowski’s “Bound” (minus the hot actress-on-actress sex), bonecrunching martial arts, and a healthy dose of the semi-mandatory sadism of Korean action films. The only things missing from the exercise are a heart and a point. “No Blood, No Tears” brings us Lee Hye-yeong as a down on her luck cab driver with a criminal past who teams up with a younger woman (Jeon Do-Yeon) trapped in an abusive relationship with her despicable gangster boyfriend (Jung Jae-Young). Their plan is steal a sack full of money during one of her boyfriend’s illegal dogfights and abscond with the loot. The dangerous job turns out to be even trickier than you might think.

Though Seung-Wan tries to goose things along with an endless parade of irritating fancy camera tricks, his film takes an unconscionably long time to get started, the comedy is never funny, while the drama and thriller elements are doomed by paper-thin, almost soap-opera characterization and an overly complicated heist-film plot. On the other hand, some of the hardcore fighting that comes late in the story is impressive, but these fights are so brutal and elongated that they comes across as not much more than nasty mayhem for its sake. Add to that an inexcusable lame non-twist twist ending, and you’ve got one heck of a fancy but kind of revolting piece of non-entertainment.

Click to buy “No Blood, No Tears”