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!