There's a funny and half-a-thought provoking piece at FilmWad that looks at actors who have spent their entire careers playing variations of the same character. Topping the list is Bruce Willis, who has made a mint from roles as a flinty retribution-seeker with a soft side but, alas, there's no mention of "The Sixth Sense" ...which turns the piece's premise on its ear.

And no Christopher Walken?

C'mon....

Twelve movies open today in the Boston area -- it's the kind of week where Wesley and I fall back exhausted in our corners and get sponged off by the trainers. So where to begin?

The mainstream stuff, I guess, which this week means "The Nanny Diaries." Disappointing, to say the least -- think "The Devil Wears Prada" with Laura Linney instead of Meryl Streep (acceptable), Scarlett Johansson instead of Anne Hathaway (not even close, surprisingly), and no Emily Blunt (fatal). How chicken is this movie? The heroine delivers her big, fiery you-can't-handle-the-truth speech to her employer on a videotape. At least Paul Giamatti delivers a big chunk of nasty as Mr. X.

"Mr. Bean's Holiday," starring Rowan Atkinson (above) as the silent little prat he has played on TV for years, gets a U.S. release months after opening in Europe. Either you love this guy or you wish the earth would swallow him alive. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie -- it ain't art, but it delivers the laughs in an airy, almost graceful fashion -- and, more to the point, my kids adored it. Fans of Willem Dafoe, who plays a meanie film director, may want to avert their eyes.

Some good documentaries are in town: "The King of Kong," about videogamers, and "The 11th Hour" -- more grim news on the global warming front. A portrait of artist "Alice Neel" and "The Cats of Mirikitani" at the Museum of Fine Arts.

On the fictional front, two excellent Hong Kong action flicks arrive at the Brattle: "Election" and "Triad Election," from Johnnie To. Julie Delpy writes, directs, and pairs herself with ex-boyfriend Adam Goldberg in "2 Days in Paris." There's a weird little Latino action-drama called "Illegal Tender," from the writer-director who gave us "Empire" and featuring Wanda DeJesus as a pistol-packin' suburban mutha. A movie about a 1857 Mormon massacre, "September Dawn," is playing in a few North Shore theaters where the distributor apparently hopes you won't see it (fans of Jon Voight in unconvincing facial hair will want to check it out). And Philip Baker Hall and -- so help me God -- the AFLAC duck starring in "Duck."

A weird weekend in other words: a last late-August exhale before the post-Labor Day serious season begins. Even the Harvard Film Archive has closed up shop for the duration. Someone there must be French.

According to reports, Bill Murray was arrested in Stockholm for driving while intoxicated. He was in town for a golf tournament. He was driving a golf cart. Read more.

This one, from Total Film, ranks the 100 Greatest Directors of All Time. I'll save you a little work: Alfred Hitchcock at #1, fine, whatever. Scorsese at #2, Spielberg at #3... okay... Hawks at #4, Welles at #6, Ingmar Bergman at #7 (thanks for dying, Ingmar; it got you into Total Film's Top Ten).

Then we get squiggy. Peter Jackson (above left) at #9. David Fincher at #10.

Say what?

Those two above Kurosawa (#11), Michael Powell (#15), Jean Renoir (#23, above right), Jean-Pierre Melville (#29), Bunuel (#30), Ozu (#33, for pete's sakes), Leone, Truffaut, Herzog, Kieslowski, Lang, Fuller, Nick Ray, Satyajit Ray, Jean-luc Godard, Bresson, Eisenstein, Mizoguchi, Dreyer, Buster Keaton, D.W. frickin' Griffith (#91, right below Curtis Hanson).

Really? "Lord of the Rings" and "Fight Club" over the combined filmographies of all those other directors? Dudes, I know their movies like totally blew you away, but are your baseball caps actually screwed on backwards that tight?

But the whole list is like that: modern entertainers and provocateurs mixed willy-nilly with classic greybeards and foreign visionaries. It's the ADHD approach to film history and consequently rates cultural sensation and commercial success as equal variables to insight, art, craft, and lasting impact in the Total Film algorithm. Yep, Ozu's "Ohayo" and Renoir's "The River" came out way, way back in the 1950s. They're still greater -- by which I mean better directed -- than anything Jackson and Fincher have done to date.

The irony is that Jackson and Fincher would be the first to agree.

"Superbad,"the latest raunchfest from Judd Apatow and company pulled in $31.2 million over the weekend, remarkably close to the $30.7 million "Knocked Up" made when it opened earlier this summer. So I guess there's a well-defined audience there.

"The Invasion" (in photo above) died on the pod-vine, making $6 million in almost as many theaters as "Superbad". Pretty amazing example of the unimportance of star power, if you ask me. Teen comedy with mutt-and-jeff nobodies goes wide, while Nicole Kidman and Daniel "Jimmy Bond" Craig can't fill the seats.

But, anyway, everyone was watching "High School Musical 2".

Box Office Mojo and Leonard Klady for more movie earnings.

This is how the Hollywood Overhype Machine works.

The drumbeats for "Superbad" have been pounding louder and louder all summer. Sony has been holding so many word-of-mouth screenings over the past two months that you'd think they'd already churned through the movie's initial paying audience.

And word has grown: "Superbad" is the big one, the be-all and end-all of teen gross-out comedies. "American Pie" with heart and a brain instead of a pie. An "Animal House" for our generation -- if you're 15 years old.

It's not, of course. But it is pretty damned funny, and it cracks the smug spine of most youth comedies to get at some sweet and smart observations about the mating habits of Americanus Suburbus Teenus. I had a ball with the film and so did my wife, who's generally not swayed by the young and the crass; she noted that it was one of the few teen comedies she'd seen that got the girls right, more or less.

My wife was less enthralled with "Knocked Up," though, from much the same crew of filmmakers and actors. And that's partially my point: She saw it on the other side of the overhype bell-curve (and to be fair, there was a huge guy with really bad B.O. sitting next to her in the packed theater -- no, on the other side from me).

Similarly, "Superbad" has been on the wind for so long that if you're under 30 it must feel like you've already seen the movie and are congratulating yourself on your farseeing hipness. How can the actual experience live up to the "Redline" trailers on YouTube? How many people are already wielding the word "McLovin" as a secret handshake, draining the juice from a very funny but one-shot joke? Is it possible to watch this splattery, cheery comedy without self-consciously feeling you're watching a self-anointed classic, and boo to you if you don't play along? Has "Superbad" already lost its virginity?

Probably, which brings me to Wesley's review this morning. He saw the film late in the bell-curve, too, which is unusual for a movie critic and indicates how relentless Sony has been with the promotional screenings. And by the time he got there, he had been assured many times over that this was going to be the best dang thing since Elvis. I'm not saying my colleague let the Hollywood promo boom/bust mentality affect his critical thinking; on the contrary, it's our job to describe the emperor's clothes as they are, not as the PR flacks say they are. But Wes had a problem with Jonah Hill's character -- some find Seth grating but comical, others just find him grating. Really grating. And if you don't sign up for Seth, you're not going to sign up for "Superbad," McLovin or no.

Me, I say see it for Michael Cera and the painfully comic/comically painful party scene between his character, Evan, and the drunken good-girl of his dreams. See it for Christopher Mintz-Plasse's roistering nerd-god, Fogell. Skip the dumdum comedy with the cops played by SNL's Bill Hader and writer Seth Rogen; those scenes are just too close to "Porky's 3" outtakes for comfort. See it for yourself, in other words, but forget everything you've heard. Including what I just wrote.

In other movie openings this weekend, "Rocket Science" is all that "Superbad" is not: a teen movie that's dry, careful, watchful, heartbreaking, and pretty much emotionally dead-on. Occasionally very funny, too, especially when Anna Kendrick is onscreen. This is the superego to the other, bigger movie's id. Which I guess makes "High School Musical 2" the Ego. Makes sense. See them all and compare notes.

For those of us living in the real world as opposed to Hollywood suburbia, the Darfur documentary "The Devil Came on Horseback," at the Coolidge, is rough stuff but thought-provoking in all the good ways. It's not only about the genocide in Sudan but about one American's coming of age as he documents it -- and by extension the moral responsibility of the West itself. Yeah, I know, you don't want to know. But, really, you do.

Cute little British comedy of embarrassment at local arthouses, "Death at a Funeral," worth seeing for Alan Tudyk as a stoned naked guy on the roof and Peter Dinklage as a mystery guest. Wesley likes "Blame it on Fidel," about a young girl growing up with socialist parents in 1970s France.

Ah, and then there's "The Invasion," the latest version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and a studio movie that clearly died in the making. The usual: Too many cooks and a meddlesome producer. You can see what might have been -- a grave, frightening essay on social paranoia, with an eerily zombielike Nicole Kidman -- but what's onscreen is a cynical mess, and the cut-and-run ending feels like a final kick in the shins.

Some interesting things going on over at the Brattle this weekend: Charlton Heston movies and folk legend Peter Yarrow. Somehow they make it work.

Two great lost 80s comedies at the Harvard Film Archive on Saturday: Jonathan Demme's "Something Wild" and Martin Scorsese's "After Hours." Talk about superbad.

Comcast and IFC are showing "uncut" versions of "The Princess Bride," "Raising Arizona," and "Napoleon Dynamite" outside in Copley Square September 4-6. They're calling it "Free Film Fest." According to a press release, there's more: "The event, will also include: important opportunities for local filmmakers; an on-site collection of new and used DVDs which will be donated to a local hospital; and a chance for attendees to win an HD camera."

Terrific series of classic Italian films starring classic Italian beauties and jolie laides starts today at the MFA, beginning with Anna Magnani in "Bellissima" tonight and including Pasolini's "Teorema," starring Sylvia Mangano (in photo above). The series runs until Sept. 9.

I know, I know, you're sick to death of the mess in Iraq. Your head hurts just thinking about it. Well, it should, shouldn't it? Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight" lays out the how and why more concisely than any documentary yet, and he talks to all the right people. A must-see, at the Kendall.

The other four-star review this morning is for Shane Meadows' "This is England," also at the Kendall, a galvanizing account of a boy's involvement with the skinheads in 1983 England. See it for the performance of 12-year-old Thomas Turgoose in the lead: he looks like Winston Churchill re-engineered as a tweenage thug.

Another fine look at childhood can be found in "Summercamp!" at the Brattle, a documentary about... well, you figure it out. It's a loosey-goosey experience that'll have you wondering why you're giving it the time of day until revelations about some of the kids suddenly deepen the film. Both "This is England" and "Summercamp!" are leagues superior to the plastic inanities of "Daddy Day Camp," but that one's in thousands of theaters and stands to make the most money. Ready, get depressed.... NOW.

Those wacky programmers at the Coolidge are offering a rap sing-a-long tonight at 11:55. At the Harvard Film Archive there's a rare chance to see Howard Hawks' "Hatari!" on the big screen tonight -- John Wayne and giraffes! -- plus a kickass double-bill tomorrow of Buster Keaton in "The Cameraman" and the surprisingly risque 1934 "Tarzan and His Mate."

Roger Ebert has read Jonathan Rosenbaum's withering Times op-ed re-appraisal of Ingmar Bergman and delivered a mighty bitchslap in response. It's articulate, it's specific, and it's personal. Great reading.

Meanwhile, ex-Globie Thomas Garvey takes my own Sunday piece on Bergman and Antonioni to task on his HubReview blog for not insisting on their greatness strongly enough and for cutting the MySpace generation slack for not knowing their movie history (or worse, not caring to know). He makes some excellent points, but his dismissal of a younger generation's tastes is awfully broad, bordering on plain cranky.

I just came from talking to a classroom full of Harvard journalism students, none of them hardcore cineastes and none of whom had heard of Bergman before last week's obituaries. This is ignorance, as Garvey says, but it's not willful: They're 20. They're still finding things out. This is how they find things out, especially when you're talking about a filmmaker who hadn't released a new theatrical film during their lifetime. It's worth noting that Bergman has been at the top of the IMDb Starmeter -- meaning he's the most searched person on the site -- for a week now. But, yeah, Zac Efron is #2.

Garvey's trashing of current film -- "Trust me, little intern - you can skip ALL that shit - Grindhouse, The Darjeeling Limited, The Host/D-Games, Once - none of them are really worth your time" -- is just obnoxious, even if you agree with him. Tom, these are the movies, or movies like them, that speak to a kid, just as "Persona" once spoke to you and still does. Maybe that's a horrible thing, maybe the standards of serious cinema have fallen precipitously, but you'll never get a college junior from Point A to point B by being a hardliner. You sound like Bosley Crowther upon being presented with "Bonnie and Clyde," unwilling to concede meaning where you see none. (Of course, I could regularly be accused of the same. I hated "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," which one normally sane critic likened to Bunuel. Let us together shriek as one, Mr. Garvey). Still, is there a movie made in the last 15 years of which you approve?

With all the titans of cinema dropping like flies the past few weeks, the death of Charles Lane on July 9 flew under my radar. Allow me to make amends to the man who was America's oldest living actor. He was 102; his final credit was as a narrator for the 2006 short "The Night Before Christmas."

You don't think you know who Lane was, but you do. If you've ever watched an old movie, there's a good chance he was in it. If you ever watched any of Lucille Ball's TV shows or most of the sitcoms of the 1960s, the percentage was even higher. Lane played grumpy neighbors and nosy reporters, and that's often how the movies he appeared in credited him. He was the quintessential character actor -- skinny as a post, glasses glinting over a beaky nose, lips as thin as a parson -- and his job was simple: say the lines, make an impression, let the hero get back to saving the world.

Because of his ubiquity, though -- IMDb credits him with 236 movie appearances and 104 TV episodes, and that's probably a conservative count -- we came to know Lane better than many above-the-title stars. People came up to him all the time, convinced he was someone they knew from back home, and in a way they were right -- he was a fixture of that fluid small-town America that lived in the movies, a consensual fantasy created by Hollywood and shared by millions. Lane was the guy leaning against the lamp-post by the general store, the acerbic sharpie. Chances were he might give you a ticket or at least a piece of his mind. Maybe worse: In Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," he's the hatchetfaced functionary who collects rent for Lionel Barrymore's mean Mr. Potter.

That's right -- Charles Lane was the original Smithers.

Here's the Times obit, and a nice appreciation by Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle. (Lane was a born San Franciscan and in fact was one of the last survivors of the 1906 earthquake. He also was one of the founding members of the Screen Actors Guild, which makes sense: If ever someone needed a union, it was a studio character actor in the 1930s.)

A documentary bio, "You Know the Face," was already in production at the time of his death. You could argue that such a bio already exists, scattered in pieces across hundreds of movies and TV shows.

Goodbye, Charlie. We knew you thought we were a bunch of suckers, but we loved you anyway.

It's been reported that Mia Farrow has offered to swap her freedom for that of Suleiman Jamous, a Sudanese Liberation Army rebel figure who's been more or less imprisoned for over a year. Farrow suggested the trade to Sudan's president, saying in a letter, "I am therefore offering to take Mr Jamous' place, to exchange my freedom for his in the knowledge of his importance to the civilians of Darfur and in the conviction that he will apply his energies toward creating the just and lasting peace that the Sudanese people deserve and hope for."

Groups have been trying to get him released since his capture. Farrow's gesture is certainly the most dramatic. It's unclear how many international laws this violates, if any at all (I'll ask a friend later). But she's probably not kidding. This woman has just raised the bar for celebrity activism. Angelina Jolie's gonna have a tough time topping her.

I was reminded by a reader over the weekend that of the hundreds of Ingmar Bergman obituaries published last week -- including my own -- none mentioned the great filmmaker's youthful infatuation with Nazism and Adolf Hitler. Which is odd, because the director had often admitted as much and in 1999 provided further details in an interview reported by the BBC.

Bergman's father was ultra-right wing, and both the future filmmaker and his brother were Nazi sympathizers. Bergman saw Hitler speak in Germany in 1936 and recalled the dictator as "incredibly charismatic." But he maintains he never went as far as his brother and friends, who painted swastikas on Jewish-owned buildings. On the other hand, neither did he stop them. It seems young Ingmar just went with the crowd until the very end of WWII -- not so hard, since officially neutral Sweden had a vocal pro-Nazi influence -- when the revelations of the death camps opened his eyes. "In a brutal and violent way I was suddenly ripped of my innocence," he said in 1999.

He never formally apologized -- nor was he asked to -- and there was no PR firestorm as there was over Gunter Grass last year. Was Bergman "given a free pass"?

The answer's complex. Without question, his WWII political beliefs should have been mentioned in any comprehensive obituary, my own included. (In my lame defense, I was working on a sudden and tight deadline, and blipped over the one oblique mention that turned up.)

But should he have apologized? I think he did -- with his movies. Only one of Bergman's films deals explicitly with the Nazi era, and it's not one of the good ones. But the filmography in total is wracked with moral pain, forever insisting on the abiding foolishness of man. He called one of his movies "Shame" -- tellingly, it's about life during wartime and what it does to people -- and the title extends to the whole race. The 1960s work especially is a cinema bereft of hope, "ripped of innocence," and the source seems to spring from behind the camera. The worst behavior and the most unforgivable sins in Bergman films are wholly personal, as if the director were using the lens as a mirror. He never apologized because I doubt he ever forgave himself -- his childish belief in those beautiful young Aryan men proved how deluded he and the rest of humanity could be.

Bergman consequently never set himself up as a moral arbiter, as Grass did in his writings. (Nor had he actively served in the Waffen-SS during WWII, as Grass had done.) How was he going to tell you what was right when he'd been so wrong? Better to start from scratch, his films say: Assume the worst of the human race, assume that God has left the building, and sift the ashes for the few coals of grace still burning. Bergman's career consisted of wondering how they could possibly be fanned into flame.

Yikes: $70 million for the third Jason Bourne movie. "The Bourne Ultimatum," starring smilin' Matt Damon, kicked butt at 5,200 multiplex screens in spite of shake-rattle-and-roll cinematography that apparently puts some moviegoers off their Junior Mints. Why is this series one of the very few to actually increase its weekend box office from installment to installment? "The Bourne Identity" opened with $27 million in 2002, "The Bourne Supremacy" kicked in with $52.5 million in 2004, and the third film tops both -- although it should be pointed out that "Supremacy" opened in fewer theaters. Still, "Ultimatum" had a stronger per-theater-average ($19,175k vs $16,594k for "Supremacy.")

Two reasons for the continual upgrade: Matt Damon and quality control. Damon has become that very rare movie star who audiences instinctively trust. He's not lovable (except in the "Oceans" movies), he's not a show-off (like Ben), he just plugs along doing thoughtful, smart work in film after film. Similarly, the scripts and direction for the "Bourne" series are consistently a notch above, and they always manage to stay two steps ahead of us. They're thinking-moviegoers' action films for mass audiences -- a neat trick, that.

"Underdog" squeezed out a passable $12 million, but "Hot Rod" ($5 million) and "Bratz" ($4 million) died a-borning. Salsa biopic "El Cantante" is getting burned off in suburban theaters by its distributor, made a fair $3 million. Miramax's Jane Austen film "Becoming Jane" made a proper $10k per theater at 100 houses, will roll out further in the coming weeks.

More box office fiddling from Box Office Mojo and Leonard Klady.

The 2007 Roxbury Film Festival gets going in earnest tonight at Hibernian Hall on Dudley Street, the Mass. College of Art, and Northeastern, among other cool venues. (I mean that literally.) Among the films dealing with the black experience locally and globally is "Shot in the Hood," a 50-minute documentary and dialogue-starter by Boston cop Bill Willis about gun violence in Roxbury and Mattapan. I wonder if Mayor Menino is going to show for that one. Also, Vanessa Williams stars in the feature drama "And Then Came Love," tonight at 8 at Mass. College of Art's Tower Auditorium. It's a good festival and getting better every year.

Elsewhere, the Brattle hosts a Raymond Chandler Weekend: Here's your chance to see Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman's revisionist "The Long Goodbye". Too bad they couldn't get Robyn Hitchcock to play between films.

Lot of new releases, too, the best of which is "The Bourne Ultimatum," believe it or not. Damon (in photo above) never cracks a smile, as Wesley has noted, but this is state-of-the-art international thrillery, and refreshingly not-stupid.

Wish I could say the same about "Bratz." Actually, I'm delighted not to say the same about "Bratz." This is why I do this, folks: 90 minutes in the pit of hell so you won't have to suffer. Take the little ones to "Arctic Tale" instead, and the older girls to "Becoming Jane." Seriously, think about the role modeling choices here: would you rather your daughter be a plastic mall trollop or a sane, self-aware observer of life?

They didn't even last a year. It was the best time I had in a movie theater all year, but according to publicists "Grindhouse" is getting a divorce. Just in time for their separate home-video release dates, too. Now "Death Proof" (September 18th) and "Planet Terror" (October 16th) they'll live on different shelves and occupy separate slots in the Netflix/Blockbuster online queue. Yes, the Brangelina of Schlock is calling it quits. I was nervous this spring when "Death Proof" arrived at Cannes alone, but I ignored it, knowing, guiltily, that it was really "Grindhouse"'s better half. They gave us all something special, a reason to believe in movies, the long, dirty, cheap, awesomely kitschy kind.

Could a custody battle be far behind? Seriously: who'll get the fake trailers?