• Oh, good: Indiana Jones and the Dorian Grey-ing of Harrison Ford Into Shia LaBouf will premiere at Cannes! Maybe. No one’s seen the thing yet, but according to Variety, “The cast, which includes Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf and Cate Blanchett, have already been notified to pack their black-tie outfits for the French Riviera’s red carpet unspooling even though the fest has yet to confirm its official lineup.” Because celebrities pack suitcases 10 weeks in advance.
• Theatrical exhibition conference ShoWest will confer a special “Freedom of Expression Award” to Ang Lee and James Schamus, for releasing Lust, Caution with an NC-17 rating instead of cutting the film to get an R. National Theater Owners president John Fithian is inexplicably trying to push studios to revitalize the NC-17 market, even though even Lust, Caution made just under $5 million domestically, and in fact was a super-hit in China…where it was cut to appease the censors.
• Semi-Pro, which opens today, suddenly bears the dubious distinction of being the final release from New Line before the studio is subsumed into the clusterfuck that is Time Warner. It may not exactly send the studio out with a bang: although the comedy is said to be “tracking well among males under 25″ it’s nonetheless expected to “open well lower than Ferrell’s most recent films.”

Variety reports that Time Warner is getting rid of New Line heads Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne and is absorbing the “indie” into the general Warner Brothers machine. Nikki Finke has the full press release.

I don’t have anything to say about this, other than that NO ONE should be allowed to start a headline with the phrase “Toldja!”––even if they did, in fact, tell us.

• Informal strike talks are still slogging on––Robert Iger from Disney and Peter Chernin of News Corp will rep the AMPTP today––but without a set deadline for “officially” going back to the table, there are fears that the WGA will drag this out until June, when SAG’s contract expires, so that they can basically shut down Hollywood together until some time in the fall.
• The tech world is freaking out over Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion in cash and stock, which kind of takes the thunder from another Yahoo story from several hours before that story broke: former Warner Brothers chief Terry Semel announced he was leaving his position on the board at Yahoo. Earlier this week, Nikki Finke spread a rumor that Semel would soon leave Yahoo and possibly take over as head of New Line.
• Disney is releasing the 3D concert film Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour theatrically for one week only beginning today. The tween sensation is expected to beat the box office competition, which includes the Jessica Alba horror film The Eye, which was withheld from film critics.

New Line has sent Michel Gondry on a tour of indieWIRE events at Apple Stores to promote Be Kind Rewind. But is actual, physical globetrotting even necessary in today’s wired world? I thought it was kind of ironic that on the first stop of the tour, which took place last night in San Francisco, several of my Bay Area-based Twitter friends were essentially live micro-blogging the event––no doubt in some, if not all cases, using Apple devices.

So several days before Gondry’s tour is scheduled to come to my city, I was eating dinner in New York, and effectively getting a play-by-play of the San Francisco version of the event via Twitter updates on my cellphone. This morning, I woke up to find that Jackson West (who, in addition to being a Twitter followee, is a colleague at a site that I freelance for, NewTeeVee) had uploaded audio of the event and was making it available for download by anyone who reads his Twitter stream.

All of this says something about our new global-cultural-techno-econo-sphere, I’m sure of it; I’m just not sure what it is.

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According to The Playlist (and, for what it’s worth, Box Office Mojo is backing this up), New Line has pushed the release date of Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind back a month, from January 25 to February 22. It would be impossible not to question What It All Means. After all, this is not the first time this film has been shuttled down the calendar, but the January date sure looked sticky for awhile. The studio had planned a compressed indie film media blitz to unfold over the next three weeks, to include sending Gondry on a multi-city Apple Store tour in advance of Rewind’s Sundance premiere. New Line probably just feel like they need an extra four weeks after all that to run TV ads, and that’s fair. But let’s wildly speculate as to what else could be going on, after the jump.

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• The only wide release this weekend is New Line’s The Golden Compass, which has been frought with bad buzz since its inception, and lately has been coaxing high-pitched whines from just about anyone who cares one way or another about religion, atheism, and/or the book on which its based. Variety says it should nonetheless “easily win the weekend.” The Hollywood Reporter is slightly more reserved: “Execs will need to eke out every theatrical dollar possible if this “Compass” is to prove golden, let alone any sort of franchise starter.”
• Today’s writers strike update gets the best teaser ever: “Slow pace frustrating, holidays loom.”
• This silly Variety article about why Oscar prognostication is horseshit lumps bloggers in the same sentence as “journos”! That’s some kind of small victory, even if it’s pejorative … right?

• With the WGA strike looking almost certain to begin by the end of the week, new complications seem to arise every minute.  Now two studios, Universal and New Line, have forbidden contracted scribes from complying with the WGA’s “script validation program.” It’s a rule insisting that, in the event of a strike, writers must submit evidence of all projects-in-progress to the guild. New Line sent a letter to their writers, which flat-out stated that adhering to the WGA rule wil be considered “a breach of your writing agreement.” The AMPTP has already ruled that the WGA rule is illegal; WGA, natch, disagrees. More here.
• Heath Ledger and Sean Penn are in talks to star in Terrence Malick’s next film, Tree of Life. The project has been in development for years, but of course, nobody knows anything about it. Except, at one point, it was going to star Colin Farrell and be shot partially in India, and neither of those things are happening anymore.
• Rebecca Miller (wife of Daniel Day-Lewis, and his director in The Ballad of Jack and Rose) will direct Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder and Robin Wright-Penn in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, based on Miller’s novel. The plot concerns a dutiful wife” (presumably Wright-Penn?) “whose husband falls for a younger woman” (Ryder?), “freeing her to explore her buried sensuality and leading to a ‘a very quiet nervous breakdown.’”

• Movie theater chains in India refused to screen The Simpsons Movie over the weekend — and, surprisingly, it had nothing to do with outrage over Apu. Warner Brothers India, which is distributing the Fox film in that country, apparently demanded that Indian multiplexes book Simpsons on multiple screens, which would have squeezed out homegrown content.  In response, seven leading theater chains declined to run the Fox film at all, and even upped the ante by pulling WB’s latest Harry Potter pic from screens. Facing a projected loss of nearly $100,000 for the weekend, WB workd out a compromise, and Simpsons should open on some Indian screens today.
• After staying on in order to see through a number of “very personal projects” including Rush Hour 3 (yes, seriously), long-time New Line marketing exec Russell Schwartz has confirmed that he’s leaving the company.
• The Weinstein Company has raised $285 million to launch Asian Film Fund, through which they expect to produce roughly 30 “Asian-themed” theatrical and direct-to-DVD features. Projects already in the pipeline that are expected to receive some of those funds include a live-action version of Mulan, and “a modern-day remake” of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai.
• Dade Hayes explains why it’s a big deal for Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There to open in New York at both Film Forum AND Lincoln Plaza. Among other reasons: “The Gotham arrangement reps a rare violation of the “clearance” that typically prevents any pic playing at the Film Forum from also unspooling at another Manhattan site. The opportunity for the dual play, plus access to the Film Forum’s membership-driven mailing list of 25,000 avid film buffs, made the release a viable proposition for TWC.”