I'm busy writing review copy today (and screening one or two items: a Chinese documentary, the Zohan thing) but to keep you busy, here's a link to a blog posting by my old college film professor David Thomson on seeing the smoke rise in Burbank and fearing for the reels. Hollywood eats its young but it burns its history, and David's not the only person who saw the news footage and thought of Charles Foster Kane.

The R&B pioneer and architect of one of rock and roll's most primal rhythms has passed to that great radio show in the sky.

Dig it, from 1966's "The Big T.N.T. Show". Oh, this man was cool.

In a chat on Friday afternoon, I hazarded the guess that "Sex and the City" would gross between $40 and $50 million over the weekend, and that was being kind. Not quite kind enough, apparently; despite meh reviews, the further adventures of Carrie and company raked in $56 million at 3,000+ theaters, for a strong $17,000 per theater average. Estimates of Friday's audience put the number of women ticket buyers at 85%.

The surprise here isn't that fans of the HBO series and their dates turned out en masse to revel in the clothes and the banter, but that the film came out on top over "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," which dropped over 50% from its opening weekend to pull in $46 million. I still think the Spielberg film's a perfectly acceptable if not terribly inspired late-inning sequel, and I still think the backlash against it in some quarters (see the comment field under my review posting below) is absurdly overblown, but this blog entry by an anonymous screenwriter does, for once, articulate the case against "Crystal Skull" with scrupulous attention to detail.

The latest home invasion horror film, "The Strangers," scared up an unexpectedly strong $20 million, probably from teenage boys who couldn't get a date to "Sex and the City." Down in limited-release land, foreign language dramas "Reprise" and "Roman de Gare" have strong per-theater averages, as does the visually splendid adventure saga "The Fall." Then there's "War, Inc.," an indie political satire with a big-name cast (John and Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Ben Kingsley, Hilary Duff, and Dan Aykroyd as the Vice President of the United States); it averaged $12,000 at two theaters (one in NYC, one in LA) and comes to Boston on June 13th. Opening this coming Friday is teeny-tiny indie comedy "The Foot Fist Way," which averaged a sharp $9,000 PTA at four theaters over the weekend.

More number parsing from Box Office Mojo and Movie City News.

The fashion legend Yves Saint-Laurent died yesterday but, obviously, his clothes will live forever. At the movies, he mostly dressed the stars who wore his designs off screen, Catherine Deneuve being the most luminous and eroticized of his muses. Saint-Laurent did the dresses for her in Luis Buñuel's S&M classic; "Belle du Jour" (1967); Alain Cavalier's "Heartbeart" (1968); "Mississippi Mermaid" (1968), Francois Truffaut's idea of how shady paperback mystery novels should work on screen, (which is to say like an unhappy vacation getaway); Jean-Pierre Melville's smoldering heist picture "Un Flic" (1972), "avec Catherine Deneuve dans le role de Cathy"; and, most ridiculously, Tony Scott's "The Hunger" (1983). The big question with Saint-Laurent's clothes on Deneuve was whether she'd be taking them off, so it's OK if you don't remember what he designed for her to wear. But he helped make the most arresting skins for her to consider peeling off.