What's next on "The Wire," and then for David Simon?

I know I promised reviews of two movies that left me more than a little cold, but I'd much rather talk about something much more exciting: the upcoming final season of "The Wire." So, I'll get the movies over with very quickly.

"We Own the Night" was one of the most disappointing movies I've seen in many years. James Gray, who showed such promise with "Little Odessa," has clearly run out of new ideas, instead choosing to pile up all the cop cliches he could find for this extremely tired tale about NYPD cops and familial ties. Despite strong performances from Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix and Robert Duvall, there's no reason at all that I can recommend anyone see this failure.

"Elizabeth: The Golden Age" was more of a mixed bag. When Cate Blanchett's queen and Clive Owen's Sir Walter Raleigh share the screen for some silly flirting it is a true guilty pleasure, but when it tries to tell anything approaching a broader story it really falls apart fast. Worth a rental at best, in my opinion.

OK, now on to the good stuff. The New Yorker, in this morning's issue, has a very long (12 pages!) story about David Simon and "The Wire." I have to admit that, crunched for time, I had to stop anything but skimming at about page 7, but will go back this afternoon for the rest. Here are some highlights I garnered about the fifth and final season, coming to HBO in January:

This newest season, as has already been widely reported, will focus on the declining role of newspapers in our society. What I didn't know is that The Sun, along with letting its office be used in a few scenes, has also let its name be used in the new season.

The great Clark Johnson, pictured here and who played Meldrick on "Homicide," will be both a director of several episodes in the new season and also star as Gus Haynes, "a city editor who tries to hold the line against dwindling coverage, buyouts, and pseudo-news." Here's one excerpt that shows Simon, as he has with other aspects of Charm City in past seasons, really understand just what's going wrong with newspapers in America:

He complains about a photographer who invariably gooses the poignancy of fire scenes by positioning a charred doll somewhere amid the debris. (“I can see that cheatin’ motherfucker now, with his fucking harem of dolls, pouring lighter fluid on each one,” Haynes fumes.) And he patiently explains to a junior reporter one of those house rules which arbiters of newspaper style cling to with fierce persnicketiness: a building can be “evacuated,” he instructs, but you cannot evacuate people. “To evacuate a person is to give that person an enema,” one of the old-timers chimes in. “At the Baltimore Sun, God still resides in the details.”

Just as past seasons of "The Wire" have been populated with real drug-dealers that Simon and co-creator Ed Burns (a former Charm City cop) knew from past encounters, the new season will be packed with former reporters that Simon knew from his days as a crime reporter for The Sun.

Here's how he summed up his view of newspapers for "The New Yorker": “It’s like, find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing. That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems — newspapers are not designed to understand it.” Sad but, I fear, true.

To read all of Margaret Talbot's fantastic reporting, click here, but remember that it will probably take a small chunk of time to read it all.

If you get far enough, you'll find Simon has also talked about what he'll be doing next, also for HBO, and it should be great. He's currently filming, or at least getting ready to film, a miniseries about the Iraq war called "Generation Kill," but after that he wants to head to the Big Easy.

Simon, who with "The Wire" has shown an acute eye for detail, has already been down there doing research for a series he hopes to produce about musicians rebuilding ther lives in post-Katrina New Orleans.

"This show will be a way of making a visual argument that cities matter," Simon told The New Yorker. " 'The Wire' has never done that. I certainly never said or wanted to say that Baltimore is not (worth) saving, or that it can't be saved. But I think some people watching the show think, Why don't they just move away?"

It's sad that the argument needs to be made that American cities are indeed great and worth protecting, but I fear he's right. And I certainly look forward to him making the case.

No respect for this "Jezebel"

When I first heralded the imminent return of "Gilmore Girls" creator Amy Sherman-Palladino to TV with "Jezebel James," several people wiser than me warned that Fox would treat this new show - as it has with many others - very poorly. Alas, they were right.

It seems that Fox has already cut the order for ASP's new show, set for a midseason replacement to debut sometime in January, from 13 episodes to seven. I'm fairly confident that, rather than this being a sign that the show isn't any good, it's instead yet further proof that Fox does indeed just suck.

For anyone who doesn't know, "Jezebel James," if it ever indeed makes it your TV, will star Parker Posey (huzzah!) and "Six Feet Under" vet Lauren Ambrose (both pictured here) as, respectively, a woman who wants to get pregnant but can't and the estranged sister who agrees to have a child for her.

I really hope this eventually gets more respect, but in news I managed to miss about a week ago, Amy Sherman-Palladino should have more luck with a big-screen project she's just signed on to write and direct. With Sarah Jessica Parker in the lead, she's adapting the chicky book ""The Late Bloomer's Revolution" by Amy Cohen, an autobiographical tale about about how Cohen, after the death of her mother, developed a bond with her father as they both tried to get on with their lives in the dating world. More than a bit too girly for me, but hopefully also extremely funny.

Fun with pictures and trailers

OK, this has already gone on a bit longer than I had planned, but I have to share two things that should make everyone smile. Every picture I see from Michel Gondry's "Be Kind Rewind" just makes me want to see the flick right now, and this latest shot, which I have to assume is a sendup of "Driving Miss Daisy," is no different.


And finally, here's a rather poor-quality but still enjoyable trailer for "Charlie Wilson's War," the Mike Nichols film coming in December. Before seeing this trailer, I hadn't been too excited for this one, even though it was scripted by Aaron Sorkin, but now you can put it right up there with "American Gangster" and "Juno" among the movies I'm most jazzed about for the rest of this year. Enjoy!

A movie world without women? No thanks

When I first saw this, I assumed it had to be a joke. Did the head of a major American movie studio really say he would no longer greenlight any movies with women in the lead role?

And knowing this comes from Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily column in L.A. Weekly, it should perhaps be greeted with skepticism, but since I've yet to see any kind of denial I have to assume it's true.

It seems that Warner Bros president of production Jeff Robinov has made a rather bizarre new decree: "We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead."

In case this weren't sick enough by itself, you need only look at what evidence he used to reach this conclusion to see just how wrong it is. What drove this man over the edge? The poor box-office performance of two movies, "The Brave One" and "The Invasion."

Now, I didn't bother to see "The Invasion" because, well, I've seen "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and didn't need to see it again, but I can speak with authority on "The Brave One." Having had about a month to digest this one now I can state firmly that it was the worst movie I saw this summer, and is a strong contender for the overall title for the past five years or so. Is he really proposing we condemn women to the role of sidekick simply because these two awful movie underperformed at the box office? (Yes, apparently.)

Forgive me if I'm unable to come up with much of a cogent argument here, because this just pisses me off and it's still rather early in the morning, not a great combination. But rather than go on a rant about the virtues of women (if you don't know what they are, I'm 100 percent certain I can't help you), I got to thinking about whether or not there is anything we can do about this.

A viewers' boycott of Warner Bros. would make sense, but I'd advocate instead a conscious effort to support what few big box-office movies there are with women in the lead. I could only think of two for the rest of the year, but if there are any others coming up that I've missed please let me know (and I'm not counting conventional romantic comedies here because, well, it would be rather hard to make one of those that wasn't, well, gay without at least one woman in a prominent role.)

The first that comes to mind, and yes, I'm gonna mention it again, is "Juno." If you make the sacrifice of seeing adorable Ellen Page in the lead role (gasp, a woman!), I can virtually guarantee you'll get one of the smartest and funniest movies of the year.

But it starts earlier than that in wide-release land, this weekend in fact. It's a busy fall weekend with a lot of good titles. Personally, I'll be going to see as many as four movies: "We Own the Night," "Michael Clayton," "Tyler Perry's Why Did We Get Married?" and "Elizabeth: The Golden Age." Though I can't believe this would actually be necessary, I'd like to make a plea in honor of Mr. Robinov that out of this crowded slate everyone at least take the time to go see "Elizabeth."

With (gasp again!) perhaps the world's greatest actress in the lead role of Queen Elizabeth I, this should be a rousing period tale about Elizabeth's relationship with Sir Walter Raleigh and its impact on the world. There's exactly one review at the IMDB calling it an "awful, boring film," but I'm betting that once a more representative sample comes in the scorecard will tilt back in its favor.

Even if "Elizabeth" does somehow turn out to be horrible, however, that doesn't change the fact that Robinov is a moron, even if, looking at the current slate of movies, he simply was stupid enough to say out loud what must run through the minds of most movie studio chiefs as they greenlight movies. I guess the most I can ask is that you go see as many good movies as possible, and if you do get lucky enough to see one with a woman in the lead role enjoy it while you still can.

"Futurama" to the rescue

Well, that was all rather depressing, so here's a YouTube clip sure to make at least a few people laugh. I'd already seen a rough cut of this, the trailer for the upcoming "Futurama" DVD movie "Bender's Big Score," from ComicCon, but this is of much higher quality. Peace out.