Entertainment Weekly's Ben Svetkey: "If you could be any superhero, which superhero would you be?"

Barack Obama: "I was always into the Spider-Man/Batman model. The guys who have too many powers, like Superman, that always made me think they weren't really earning their superhero status. It's a little too easy. Whereas Spider-Man and Batman, they have some inner turmoil. They get knocked around a little bit."

Svetkey: "For instance, who's your favorite movie or TV president?"

Obama: You know who was a great movie president? Jeff Bridges in The Contender. That was a great movie president. He was charming and essentially an honorable person, but there was a rogue about him. The way he would order sandwiches -- he was good at that.

Svetkey: Is that one of the things you're looking forward to? Confounding the White House kitchen staff with obscure sandwich requests?

Obama: "Absolutely. I want to test them. I want to see if I can get any sandwich I want." -- from an interview posted on August 6th.

British comedian and radio talk show guy Joe Cornish has recorded a Quantum of Solace spoof song that isn't half bad, especially since he sounds a whole lot like David Bowie. But the best lyrics have been tapped out by Cornish's radio partner Adam Buxton: (a) "I want a quantum of solace, but just a quantum / I know they do big bags of solace, but I don't want 'em" and (b) "I met a lovely lady, but found out she was a rotter, so we exchanged some saucy quips, I snogged her, then I shot her".

"And now -- right before she stumps for Obama tomorrow in Nevada -- comes a YouTube clip of Hillary telling her supporters that she wants a 'strategy' to have her delegates heard at the Democratic convention. Watching the video clip, you can tell that Hillary still hasn't gotten over losing, and given all of the people she had telling her that she'd be the next president, we can understand the denial; she had been preparing for this moment for nearly four years.

"But we've asked this question a million times and we ask it again: Would the Clintons have been as deferential (or be expected to be as deferential) to Obama if the roles were reversed? What has happened over the last few days has given Obama the high ground here. " -- from this morning's "First Read" on MSNBC.com.

This also from Time's Karen Tumulty, filed ysterday (8.6): "Clinton has been giving tacit encouragement to suggestions that her name be placed in nomination at the convention, a symbolic move that would be a reminder of the bruising primary battle. 'No decisions have been made,' Clinton said when asked in California -- to whoops and applause -- about that possibility. Still, it was hard to miss what Clinton would like to see in the pointed way she added, 'Delegates can decide to do this on their own. They don't need permission.'"

I can't resist posting this [edited] reader response on the "First Read" blog, to wit: "The Clintons have become like the Night of the Living Dead zombies. Hillary and Bill: take our advice. We are wealthy, white, middle-aged and female, but we REJECTED you. We are also well-educated and we know that Obama is the future and you are the past. When we do elect a woman, and we will, it will be one that has won on her own merits, not by staying married to a serial womanizer and saying anything to get elected.

"And just so you know, you are on the cusp of ruining any chance of a political future if you don't STFU." -- LB, Virginia.

Slate's Mickey Kaus has written very strongly and (I have to admit, distasteful as this whole mess is) persuasively about why the mainstream media should be covering the apparently for-real John Edwards paternity scandal with his alleged girlfriend Rielle Hunter.

I heard months ago through persons I trust with close-to-the-source knowledge that this story is on the level. Photos and mounting evidence are included in this week's National Enquirer. Read Kaus and tell me he's wrong.

The Weinstein Co. has won its appeal with the MPAA ratings board over a disputed NC-17 previously given to Zack and Miri Make A Porno, resulting in an R-Rating. The less ferocious rating nonetheless stands for "crude sexual content including dialogue, graphic nudity and pervasive language." Graphic nudity involving...? No, don't even think it.

Great -- another recycled Grindhouse-style B-movie from Quentin Tarantino starring the craziest and emptiest Holllywood ding-dong of the 21st Century. Beyond help, beyond redemption and out of control, Tarantino just keeps sinking deeper and deeper into the trash pit, a little bit like that Arab kid drowning in quicksand in Lawrence of Arabia. The fact that I can't wait to see this is immaterial.

No question about it -- John McCain's admission yesterday that his wife Cindy might be good enough to win the Miss Buffalo Chop contest at the Sturgis motorcycle rally ("She could be the only lady to serve as first lady and Miss Buffalo Chip!") showed he's either a crusty old mysogynist or clueless about the actual nature of the Miss Buffalo Chip rites (wet T-shirts, orgasm simulating, etc.).

I suspect it was a half-and-halfer. McCain probably just meant to say that Cindy's dishy enough to compete ina biker beauty contest, but he wound saying that she might just be good enough to beat out the other biker babes at pickle licking. Here's a Daily Kos opinion from "Eagleeye"about the MSM's coverage of this.

For those who responded the other day to that Carousel/"I Walk Alone" YouTube clip, here's a wav file of Frank Sinatra (the first Billy Bigelow in the 20th Century Fox/Henry King film before he quit and Gordon MacRae was hired to replace him) signing Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Soliloquy." Sinatra was five times the singer that MacRae was -- here's proof.

Here's another article about the Jon Voight brouhaha, except this one -- written by Politico's Jeffrey Ressner -- has a Voight quote: "It's out of line to insinuate that we should blacklist people for speaking their minds. It's an important time for people on the conservative side to speak out, [but] it's a strange thing when people in this country can't express their opinions without being attacked."

I agree 100% that it's wrong to insinuate that anyone should blacklist anyone for speaking their minds. I didn't think I did that last week by confessing that if I was a producer making a film I might not hire Voight for it. I thought I was just speaking for myself by admitting to a momentary feeling of petty vengeance. Face it -- it feels good to stick to people you don't like or disagree with, but I wouldn't recommend or advocate hostile get-backs as a general policy.

I've said repeatedly that there's a big difference between (a) saying I "might" theoretically stick it to someone I disagree with by ignoring them or not giving them a job on a movie and (b) suggesting, much less advocating, that other liberal-minded industry types act on this feeling in reality. I've also stated a core belief that hiring actors should always be about what's best for the film. But none of this matters because the right-wing hammers are going to make as much hay as they can out of the portions of what you've said that serve their agenda, and never the all of it.

Voight also told Ressner that "I don'tt want to make a big deal out of this. I made some very strong points, and you do expect that people are going to respond to it in a variety of ways. And that's how it should be."

Yesterday Glenn Beck went off on yours truly a little bit on CNN last night,. The usual torrent of wingnut hate mail followed. News cycles on a particular story are pretty short these days -- 48 to 72 hours -- but this thing has been going since last Tuesday or Wednesday. And it's not over yet as I've agreed to come on CNN this afternoon and The O'Reilly Factor tomorrow sometime. O'Reilly will try and kick the stuffing out of me, but I'll get a readership bump out of it so why not?

"How important is it for candidates to tell the truth?," asks Elizabeth Kolbert in an 8.11 New Yorker essay. "Throughout his long career in politics, John McCain, who called his PAC Straight Talk America, has presented frankness as his fundamental virtue. [But] the past few weeks have seen a change in McCain. He has hired new advisers, and with them he seems to have worked out a new approach.

"He is no longer telling the sorts of hard truths that people would prefer not to confront, or even half-truths that they might find vaguely discomfiting. Instead, he's opted out of truth altogether.

"Recent history suggests that Presidential campaigns don’t reward integrity; the candidate who refuses to compromise his principles is unlikely to have a chance to act on them. Still, McCain's slide is saddening. That he has sunk to the level of 'Pump'" -- the ad that more or less blamed Barack Obama for rising gas prices -- "a full month before Labor Day really doesn’t leave him -- or the race -- far to go."

Added N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd said in yesterday's column that "McCain's mouth is moving but the words coming out belong to his new hard-boiled strategist, Steve Schmidt, a Rove protégé, nicknamed 'The Bullet' for his bald pate. Schmidt has turned Mr. Straight Talk into Mr. Desperate Straits. It’s not a good trade. "

Night of the Gun author and N.Y. Times guy David Carr paid a visit to MSNBC's "Morning Joe" this morning to talk about his account of his turbulent druggy past. Asked how his confession of substance abuse in the '80s squared with his present-tense employment with the straight-laced New York Times, Carr said his history was never "about journalistic malfeasance or professional degradation...I'm not one for missing deadlines or screwing up assignments." Here, again, is my 7.19 piece on Carr's book.

All is well in Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Weinstein Co., 8.15) when Penelope Cruz's neurotic firecracker is on-screen and having her way, and particularly when she's arguing with Javier Bardem's compulsive seducer-slash-painter. These two provide the erotic blood-flow in this Woody Allen film, and thank the Movie Gods for that. VCB is certainly worth seeing for Cruz and Bardem alone, but if the film had been entirely about them I would have been 100% delighted.

As is, VCB is about a couple of American girls -- Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) -- getting romantically involved with Bardem (and to a lesser extent Cruz) during a summer in Barcelona, and the hard fact is that Johansson and Hall are nowhere near as interesting as their Spanish-born costars.

And yet Vicky Cristina Barcelona played better at Monday's night's premiere screening in Westwood than it did for me in Cannes, and I'm trying to figure out why.

One reason had to do with mere suggestion, I suppose. The crowd at Westwood's Village theatre laughed heartily at just about every joke and visual inference, and the press people in the Grand Palais last May were much more subdued. Another persuader was the fact that I read David Denby's review of Allen's film just before the Village screening, and an observation of his had a surprising effect.

One of my beefs against Vicky Cristina Barcelona when I reviewed it on 5.16.08 was the incessant narration. I described it as "persistent, obnoxious and thoroughly unwanted" and said that it made "this story of overlapping, off-and-on love affairs in present-day Barcelona so on-the-nose and over-explained that I was feeling actively hostile less than 15 minutes in."

Denby, however, wrote the following: "Allen uses a narrator (Christopher Evan Welch) to explain who the women are, and, at first, it seems as if the director is just filling in backstory and telling us things we might have noticed ourselves. But this narrator does for Allen what narrators once did for Francois Truffaut -- he allows him to skip merely functional exposition and jump from highlight to highlight."

Truffaut! A light went on. Or rather, I found myself gradually succumbing to a cousin of the movie lover's "Russian Tea Room syndrome." Legendary critic Andrew Sarris described this back in the '80s as a willingness to not only accept but applaud speed-bumpy things in a foreign-language film (precious-sounding dialogue, say, or a clumsily-composed narrative) that an American viewer might reject outright if included in an English-language film, and especially a Hollywood-produced one.

An hour or so after finishing the Denby review (which I read while sitting at Jerry's Deli), the lights came down at the Village and I began watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona with the idea that it was, in fact, a French-language Truffaut film, and it played like a whole different animal. Not painful, not prickly. Not first-rate but a mostly agreeable thing.

I still preferred Cruz and Bardem's scenes to everything else, but the narration didn't get on my nerves because it was now the narration in Truffaut's Two English Girls or The Woman Next Door,and that was okay.

It still felt as if Allen was faintly mocking his own writing style and penchant for having his characters forever going to musuems, chatting in cafes and talking about artistic longings...aaah, I'm blathering. My basic point is that it played better the second time so do what you will. Odds are you'll have a pretty good time with it.

Of course, if you're under-25 you won't go at all because GenY audiences, to go by the box-ofice track record of Allen films over the last eight or ten years, are averse to the Allen sensibility.

I want to repeat one complaint from last May, which is Allen's no-naked-breast- shot rule. "He's telling a story that's swimming in mad erotic currents," I wrote, "and yet he's clearly decided against boob exposure -- not even a casual random glimpse. It's obviously unnatural and un-European. Presumably this was about avoiding an R rating, but the oddly prudish vibe works against the story and the general mood, so why even pick up the brush if you're afraid to paint a nipple?"

WhateverPineapple Express winds up making between today and Sunday night, it's certain to benefit from good word because of that first 80%. (The finale doesn't mess it up exactly -- it just makes you wonder why they felt they needed to go that way.) Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason says it'll earn $35 million; I'm hearing more like $33 or $34 million.

Received today at 4:57 pm Pacific: "You think you have blacklisted John Voit but he is better off away from the coke sniffing, wife swapping and vile of hollywood and the likes of you. Be carefull what you do and say to hurt people that are not of the same mind set as you and the Demacrates the evil people that you are GOD will protect his own and he will take care of business in his own time and in his own way so from a proud conservative to a progressive socialist have a wonderfull day." [Spelling exactly as received.]

Politico's Jonathan Martin writes that Barack Obama today praised T. Boone Pickens, the right-wing Texas oilman who contributed millions in '04 to the effort to swift-boat John KerryJohn McCain." Here's Pickens' alternative energy plan.

Posted exclusively at www.funnyordie.com a little after 2 pm today.

This Canadian one-sheet for Religulous is much grabbier than the rather soft versions that have come out of Lionsgate (example #1 and example #2).

"I don't know what your thoughts on George Lucas are, but I talked to him yesterday and cornered him on why he hasn't made one of those art films he's always going on about," writes CHUD's Devin Faraci. " It seems like the guy has the resources and ability to make pretty much any movie that strikes his fancy. He sort of blew off the question, but I think the way he blew it off was interesting."

My thoughts on Lucas are basically that he's the devil, which is to say a very real metaphor for total corruption of the spirit. He began as Luke Skywalker, and has been described by biographer Dale Pollock as a kind of a brave and beautiful warrior when he was under the gun and struggling to make it in the '60s and into the early '70s. But once he got fat and successful he slowly began to morph into an amiable corporate-minded Darth Vader figure. Obviously not an original observation, but I've been saying this since the late '90s.

Friend-of-HE Alfred Ramirez recently compressed "The Killing Joke," the graphic novella that The Dark Knight was mostly/largely based upon, into an rar file which can be accessed here.

The late '70s hair and moustaches worn by the American actors in Enzo G. Castellari's The Inglorious Bastards sent a clear signal to those moviegoers who were actually willing to pay money to see this World War II exploitation flick. The message was that Bastards would be very much set in in the era of Jimmy Carter, disco, cocaine and flexible sexual attitudes. The hell with period -- we're here to rock out and kick ass.

I don't think Castellari really thought this aspect through, of course. I think his actors (Bo Svenson, Fred Williamson, etc.) simply didn't want to get World War II haircuts for six or eight weeks' worth of work and whatever he was paying them. It wasn't worth the hassle so they said "sorry, Enzo -- at these prices, we're not getting haircuts that will make us look uncool when we go looking for our next gig, or when we go out to clubs."

"For long stretches Bastards seems less a war movie than a teen idyll," writes N.Y. Times DVD columnist Dave Kehr, "and its most fantastical sequence arrives when the gang stumbles across a group of female SS officers skinny-dipping in a stream. The interlude looks like a lost sequence from a Russ Meyer peeping Tom nudie of the '60s, and Mr. Castellari seizes the opportunity for some classic exploitation imagery: busty blond frauleins blasting away with automatic weapons."

Inglorious second-raters (one with 1969 Woodstock Music Festival hair and moustache) eyeballing skinny-dipping SS girls.

All screen grabs stolen from DVD Beaver's Inglorious Bastards page.

A day of thought about this new W poster and I can't feel anything. It's okay but the content is zilch. "Get ready"...fine. Why did Lionsgate go with a poster that says almost nothing? Because they want to build up a sense of generic interest rather than convey an idea that they're releasing a Bush-basher?

You can't really trust trailers because of their tendency to flim-flam, but this one for Rachel Getting Married (Sony Pictures Classics, 10.3) persuaded me right away that the finished film may turn out to be Jonathan Demme's most entertaining and commercial entry since The Silence of the Lambs. As far as dysfunctional family comedies go, it looks very smart, engaging and high-grade.

When I said "commercial" I meant primarily the urban blue areas. Because (and I hate to even raise the subject but how do you dodge it?) I would imagine that the more dug-in bumpkins are going to be a little cool to the inter-racial marriage aspect. ("They" will be be going to Beverly Hills Chihuahua on 10.3) If you've ever been to enemy territory...wow, that just came out. My point is that we're really living in a different country than the one for which Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? was made 40 years ago. A dark guy marrying a fair-skinned lady was an "issue" back then, and in Demme's film it's nothing. It's a "yeah...so?" I love that.

Jenny Lumet's script is a family-wedding dramedy that primarily focuses on Anne Hathaway's seriously screwed-up Kym, but it's mainly a dysfunctional- family comedy about the issues of various folks gathering to celebrate a forthcoming wedding between Rachel (Rosemary DeWitt) and Sidney (New York musician Tunde Adebimpe), a sort-of Nigerian-looking guy who's very trim and attractive with a beautiful smile. But we know how some of the reds are going to take this. Well...don't we?

I'm also struck by the fact that Debra Winger, who was born in 1955, is suddenly looking and playing 50ish in her role as Abby, the mother of Kym and Rachel. I don't know if it's makeup or what but she's got what looks like gray-streaked hair. You could almost use the word "matronly" to describe her. It's been 25 years since Terms of Endearment and 26 years since An Officer and a Gentleman...Jesus. The clock just won't stop.

Defamer reported some kind of Century City bomb threat a little while ago. Evacuations of the MGM tower commenced about a half-hour ago, the report says. The only responsible thing is to evacuate, obviously, despite the usual suspicions that bomb threats are usually bogus. Only losers with small appendages announce an intention to cause harm. Truly malevolent people don't warn. Serious evil either happens or it doesn't.

"As a director I love all the visual and technical stuff and it's really fun to do but the hard lesson that you learn when you screen the movie is when it's a comedy, people want to laugh. They don't care about the explosions up or how much money you spent...if they're not laughing, the movie's not working. Everything has to play into the tone of the comedy." -- Tropic Thunder director-star-cowriter Ben Stiller during last weekend's press junket.

Ben Stiller

And yet the fact that Stiller made Tropic Thunder feel believable and well-jiggered in a first-class way let me relax on a certain level. If the action choreography, special effects and cinematic values hadn't been delivered on such a high level, I might not have been in a receptive laugh-y mood. I can't laugh at movies that feel in the least bit sloppy or imprecise or roughly slapped together. Comedy is a brutally difficult thing to get right.

I've cut out the opening distributor-logo intro and confined this mp3 to music from a prologue portion-plus-main title of a certain action-adventure film. If you haven't gotten it by the 30-second mark, you need to pack it in. This is the easiest music clip I've posted since I started this game last week.

Immediately following this evening's premiere screening of Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona; In Contention's Kris Tapley (blue shirt) exiting theatre; dark-suited security guy is about to tell me to step onto the curb.

One reason for the box-office death of Swing Vote last weekend was that under-35s constituted only 35% of the audience, according to Variety. I'd be willing to bet that the percentage of under-25s who went to Swing Vote was more like 15% or lower. The political content of the Costner film was made clear by trailers and TV ads, so it can be assumed this element dampened enthusiasm.

Which leads again to concerns about how politically-averse the middle American under-25s will be this November? Some of us suspect the election is going to be a squeaker with Obama winning by two or three points, maybe less. The margin of victory will of course depend on the turnout by African Americans, Hispanics, the liberal 18 to 24s, college-educated professionals, previously-Clinton-supporting women, etc. It's all about turnout, turnout, turnout.

I just wish there was a reason to feel better about the under-25 commitment levels, despite the '04 data that everyone's seen. What is the actual percentage of voting-eligible younger citizens who are expected to vote three months from now? 30-something per cent? You can't trust these guys.

Yesterday the AP's Jake Coyle wrote a piece that noted complaints about Christian Bale's raspy-growl voice when he's in the Bat costume.

If a ghost had come up to me at my high-school graduation ceremony and urged me to consider a more positive attitude, I might have been less of a sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll type of guy in my early to mid 20s. But it all turned out okay in the end, thanks to the internet turnover in the mid '90s.

Two and a half hours ago Indiana-based activist and writer Bill Browning posted a short Huffington Post article containing four reasons why he believes Barack Obama will announce Evan Bayh as his vice-presidential pick on Wednesday morning, plus one other.

One, BHO will want to announce before the start of the Beijing Olympics. Two, Obama and Bayh are coming to Indiana on Tuesday afternoon, and the press has been told they'll stay in the region until Wednesday afternoon or evening. Three, click on ObamaBayh08.com and it takes you to a Democratic Party site. And four, Browning "just got an invite from the Obama campaign to attend an appearance on Wednesday "that isn't on Obama's official calendar. Why not? The campaign said, 'I can't tell you what the event is about, but we want to make sure you have a ticket so you can cover it for the Bilerico Project. We want Bilerico Project to be there for this one.'"

By neglecting to mention (a) my knock-knock, plain-as-day comments about the wisdom of hiring the right actor for your movie regardless of his/her political affiliation, a view that all first-rate filmmakers have long adhered to, and (b) my having thoroughly considered claims of liberal Hollywood prejudice against Hollywood conservatives in a fair-minded article for Los Angeles magazine that ran in late '94, Washington Times columnist Andrew Breitbart has shown himself to be an obedient conservative loyalist by sticking to the regimented attack line. But it's nice of AB to call HE "influential."

Washington-based columnist Robert Novak has described his health situation following the diagnosis of a brain tumor as "dire." He's immediately retiring in order to submit to treatment. Novak is now the second legendary Washington player who's been around for decades looking at a very tough deal, the other being Sen. Ted Kennedy. One gathers there's some kind of linkage between Novak's diminished condition and his claiming not to have seen or noticed a pedestrian that he hit with his car a couple of weeks ago.

You have to hand it to TMZ.com -- they're always the guys to go to when somebody runs their car off the edge of a road and flips it "several times," like Morgan Freeman did last night around 11:30 pm near Ruleville, Misssippi . TMZ may be the spawn of satan, but when stuff like this happens, they're right there (sometimes within minutes), they're on it and they keep digging, etc.

Freeman and passenger Demaris Meyer, both of whom were seat-belted, were banged up. One source told TMZ that Freeman has "broken several ribs and injured his knee." But he was reportedly alert and talking to the cops at the scene. Either Freeman and Demaris had both fallen asleep at the same time, or some sort of activity distracted Freeman from focusing on the road...right?

"The most striking thing about the new Batman movie...is its emphasis on sado-masochism as the animating element in American culture these days," writes James Howard Kunstler in his "Clusterfuck Nation" column. "It must appeal to the many angry people in our land who want to hurt others, even while they themselves feel deserving of the grossest punishments. In other words, the picture reflects the extreme depravity of the current American sensibility. Seeing it all laid out there must be very validating to the emotionally confused audience, and hence pleasurable, in all its painfulness.

There is finally "the derivation of all this sadomasochistic nihilism out of a comic book," he concludes. "How appropriate, since we have become a cartoon of a society living on a cartoon of a North American landscape, that the deepest source of our mythos comes from cartoons. We're so far gone that real human emotion is beyond us. We're too far gone -- and even without shame -- to care how this odious movie portrays us to the rest of the world. It is already making a fortune out there."

In explaining his decision to leave the L.A. Times, William Lobdell concisely lays out the basic reasons why so many newspapers are going south. But he gets in a good one with a recent quote from a friend: "Bro, face it -- you guys are the 8-track cassette of news."

"The business model for newspapers is broken," Lobdell writes, "and no one has figured out how to fix it, probably because it can't be fixed. The smaller the newspaper, the longer its life span in print (four exceptions: the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, Washington Post and USA Today). Technology has run laps around the print media -- giving readers instant news, open-source journalism, no barriers to become publishers, and an infinite news hole.

"The idea that your daily news is collected, written, edited, paginated, printed on dead trees, put in a series of trucks and cars and delivered on your driveway -- at least 12 hours stale -- is anachronistic in 2008." Yup, that point has certainly been made.

Then it gets interesting starting with #11, and pretty much stays that way through #42.

It was early and I hadn't had yet the coffee, but my first reaction to the Pitt-Jolie twins photo, which People and Hello! reportedly paid $14 million for, was that Brad is starting to acquire a little bit of that puffy-faced, man-did-I-tie-one-on- last-night, Nick Nolte thing. In profile, at least. The second was that Vivienne Marcheline, whom I presume is on the left, is now the third family member to have those lips that launched a thousand ships (along with mom and Shiloh). The $14 million will be donated to charities.

In an 8.3 N.Y. Times piece about Judd Apatow and David Gordon Green's Pineapple Express (Sony, 8.6), writer Mark Harris notes that "pot comedies seem to be flourishing lately, so much so that the genre is subdividing. Those who will always view the Cheech and Chong ouevre (particularly 1978's Up in Smoke) as archetypal can find their natural heirs in the high-and-higher flavor of the two Harold and Kumar comedies (with a third in the works)."

Harris mentions two or three others, but ignores Curtis Hanson's Wonder Boys, which I've long considered one of the most aromatic "light stone" pot movies ever made.

Getting ripped has been a standard youth rite since the late '60s. Every generation of high-school or college-age students has been toking up since, at least on an every-now-and-then basis before growing out of it or deliberately putting it aside because, as anyone who's ever turned on knows, pot "gets in the way" of having a semi-disciplined, semi-organized, semi-productive life. Still, the only people who have never turned on are the 65-and-older geezer generations, or the ones who grew up in the early 1960s, '50s, '40s and '30s. And even a percentage of them have probably sampled here and there.

The population of the US of A is therefore 85% "experienced" these days, and there is nothing all that wild or provocative or envelope-pushy about pot comedies as a result. They're funny (i.e., Pineapple Express) but in a "sure, okay, whatever" sort of way. They've acquired the taint of normality.

The more those oil guys suffer, the more likely the top-dog reactionaries are to eventually give up on denial and realize that global warming isn't kidding around. It's literally like Yul Brynner's Ramses refusal to set free the Jews and suffering one plague after another. "And yet Pharoah's heart was not moved."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn had 89 tough, proud years on this planet, and surely knew before his death earlier today that his legacy as one of the great all-time ballsy writers of the 20th Century was unassailable. The 1973 publication of The Gulag Archipelago, a scalding account of Soviet prison camps, led to the Soviet Union giving him the boot the following year. This eventually led to a decampment in Vermont and an 18-year period as a Russian expat. His BBC obit notes that "while living [in Vermont] as a recluse, he railed against what he saw as the moral corruption of the west"...hah! A malcontent and a truth-teller wherever he hung his hat.

David Gergen, a respected right-of-center establishment and political consultant, has said in so many words that in emphasizing the "other"-ness of Obama, the McCain campaign is making a "very intentional effort to paint him" in racially-coded terms. "The McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it," be began, "but it's a subtext of the campaign...everybody knows it. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you when you see the big Charlton Heston ad, 'the one'...that is code for 'he's uppity, he oughta stay in the place.'

"You know...everybody gets that who's from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, 'I'm against quotas'...we get what that's about. We understand where that's coming from. That gets across."

Cue the Hollywood Elsewhere naysaying righties to find some way to spin this in another direction. C'mon, guys -- ball's in your court. We know you can do it. Guys?

Tropic Thunder costar Jack Black talking about the film and other matters at the Four Seasons hotel early this afternoon. (Taken with iPhone.)

Tropic Thunder director-star-co-writer Ben Stiller; shot with better focus

Costars Steve Coogan, Nick Nolte.

It's fairly well known that in Tropic Thunder (Dreamamount, 8.13), Robert Downey, Jr. plays an extremely pretentious, Oscar-winning actor named Kirk Lazarus who decides to not just "play" a black guy but almost literally become one by changing his skin color and other physical attributes. One result has been is that some of the African-American "slow kids" have taken offense at his performance. Here's an mp3 of Downey explaining the thinking behind the role, the genesis of it, and so on at today's Tropic Thunder press junket.

Four Seasons hotel, 2nd floor, 11:20 am

A journalist at the round table actually asked Downey "how is this performance different from 19th Century blackface?" Downey said, "Well, first it's entertainment set up by people who are high minded enough so the film won't be racist or offensive. Second, the whole film is based on the idea that what [our characters] do on some level is offensive and who we are on some level is despicable and pathetic. Which is the truth and not the truth. But the part of it that's the truth is entertaining. How far-reaching can someone's narcissism go?"

Before accepting the Lazarus role, Downey sifted it all through. "You check your gut and ask, you know, do I feel like the universe is going to support this?" Going into a standup riff, he said that "for a moment I was thinking 'fuck Ben Stiller...[here is coming to me saying] I want to do a great big movie with you, but I want you to have the highest risk factor and I want to maybe put you up for ridicule and have people, like, hate you for something you should have known was fucking wrong to do.

"We were in rehearsal and I said, if Kirk Lazarus has himself unde the imropession that he's black but he's coming up against an emotional interface with a black man....what's entertaining about this? Just about nothing. So I said, the only thing he knows about black culture as an Australian...is what everybody who doesn't know anything about black culture but has put themselves under the impression that they know, is that he knows some stuff from some shows...from the '70s." He meant The Jeffersons, characters in Across 110th Street, Isaac Hayes.

Downey also indicated his political leanings. To men, anyway. "I'm not a political person by design, but where we're at as a country, which is often where things are on a global scale...we're on a precipice where there can be a lot of healing and advancement or things can...out of fear or design or negligence, things can kind of go in a lousy way or stay stuck...and that's kind of on the menu for the next few months."

Again -- here's my recording of Downey's chit-chat

What's profoundly depressing about the current chapter in the presidential election race is that the smart, informed, semi-educated segment has pretty much made up its mind about Obama vs. McCain, and from here to November the race is necessarily about appealing to the asleep-at-the-wheel types -- under- educated podunks, racists, citizens of Bumblefuck, slow on the pickup.

And these people -- say it, admit it -- have a way of bringing everyone down that is truly relentless and numbing. They're basically the slow, scowling pudgy guy in the back of the class who rarely does his homework, is always scratching himself and smells like he's just scarfed down some fast-food chicken.

In her 8.3 N.Y. Times column, Maureen Dowd has portrayed this sinister situation by the lights of Jane Austen:

"In this political version of Pride and Prejudice, the prejudice is racial, with only 31 percent of white voters telling The New York Times in a survey that they had a favorable opinion of Obama, compared with 83 percent of blacks.

"And the prejudice is visceral: many Americans, especially blue collar, still feel uneasy about the Senate's exotic shooting star, and he is surrounded by a miasma of ill-founded and mistaken premises.

"So the novelistic tension of the 2008 race is this: Can Obama overcome his pride and Hyde Park hauteur and win America over?

"Can America overcome its prejudice to elect the first black president? And can it move past its biases to figure out if Obama's supposed conceit is really just the protective shield and defense mechanism of someone who grew up half white and half black, a perpetual outsider whose father deserted him and whose mother, while loving, sometimes did so as well?

"Can Miss Bennet teach Mr. Darcy to let down his guard, be more sportive, and laugh at himself?"

Roger Ebert was mixed on the original The Mummy ('99), which I hated with with every last fibre of my being. Ebert was "not pleased with The Mummy Returns ('01). And yet he recently called the latest version, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, "the best in the series." At the end of his review, he writes, "Now why did I like this movie? It was just plain dumb fun, is why. It is absurd and preposterous, and proud of it."

I really and truly consider all three Mummy movies (the first two directed by Stephen Sommers, who produced the current installment) a blight upon our souls. It is industrial-strength pollution in the American cultural river. Giving a pass to these movies is like blowing a kiss to the devil himself.

Yesterday morning's calculation was that The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor would nudge out The Dark Knight by $2 million or so -- a slight but decisive margin. That equation has now gone south. The Bat is king again.

Fantasy Moguls Steve Mason has reversed his cards and is now saying The Dark Knight will finish the weekend with $44.8 million (a mere 40% drop) vs. $42.5 million for the Mummy. What happened, it would appear, is that the negative Mummy word started to spread on Friday night and that's what took it down.

The unfunny Step Brothers has come in third with $15.5 million for a cume of $62.16 million. Mamma Mia is up to $88 million with a with $13.1 million haul and a fourth-place showing. Swing Vote has died with a $7 million haul, which, barring a groundswell miracle, means won't even make $20 million by the end of the domestic run.