• A strange, 800-word “how I spent my summer vacation” piece from Todd McCarthy in Variety. The critic apparently stayed in a hotel in Barcelona adjacent to the set of the film Woody Allen’s currently shooting there. He spotted Allen and Harvey Weinstein from the other side of the barricades; he tried to get on the set, but the production assistant he spoke to was unyielding. Very bloggy, but in a depressing way — if this is the closest Variety’s film critic can get to Woody Allen, what chance do the rest of us have?
• Speaking of Harvey, at a party for The Nanny Diaries in New York, he explained the decision to bump the film’s release date up two weeks to August 24: “There is nothing for females right now.”
• Jamie Foxx will star in The Soloist, a musical biopic about “a homeless musician with schizophrenia who dreams of playing at Walt Disney Concert Hall.”
• With a major Communist conference coming up this fall and the Beijing Olympics on tap for next year, writes Clifford Coonan, “Anything controversial is being delayed in favor of patriotic propaganda movies.” This includes Lost in Beijing, one of the most talked about films from the Berlin and Tribeca film festivals, which is currently on its third release date. With it’s realistic depiction of modern sexuality, the film has already rankled censors–the distributor even pushed it back once to “make room” for TMNT– and now it’s unclear whether or not the internationally-acclaimed drama will hit local theaters at all.

Rare is the year that a studio moves up a release date, in order to ensure that their film is “the first Western in the marketplace.” But such is the case this fall, as Lionsgate has decided to open James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma a month ahead of schedule, in order to get a jump on the competition (ie: The Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, and The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt). But while Lionsgate might have dodged their genre competition, September’s an increibly crowded month for “prestige” releases; still, 3:10’s biggest competition on that particular weekend will be hardly-fearsome The Nanny Diaries.

Spike Lee held another press conference in Italy yesterday, in which he wowed the local journalists with his usual “don’t call me mainstream, I’m just here to scout locations for my $45 million film” bon mots. Amongst other revelations, Lee intimated that recent success has hardly made his life in Hollywood any easier. “My last feature film, Inside Man, was my most successful so far, and I was naive enough to think that that meant I could go from there and make any film I wanted to make. But I was very, very wrong about that.”

Apparently attempting to replicate the, um, success of Bewitched, Nicole Kidman will produce and star in a wacky romantic comedy called Monte Carlo.