Some are saying that Quartermaine's Terms was and still is the best play by Simon Gray, whose compulsive smoking and drinking finally killed him yesterday in London, at age 71. But I always had a thing for Otherwise Engaged, a very sharp and funny character study of a British publisher that I saw twice on the Manhattan stage in the mid '70s -- once with original star Alan Bates, and then with Dick Cavett, who wasn't half bad.

"From Robert Downey Jr.'s purposely racist embodiment of African-American anachronisms to Jack Black's scatological humor, everything in Tropic Thunder qualifies as satire, not spoof. It's an important distinction. Pauline Kael once noted that 'unlike satire, spoofing has no serious objectives; it doesn't attack anything that anyone could take seriously; it has no cleansing power.'

"Thus, the movie opens with inane fake trailers to introduce its fictional stars, surpassing the ones in Grindhouse for espousing actual ideas. Director-cowriter and star Ben Stiller offers a catharsis for everyone overburdened by bombastic storytelling, but even when the movie becomes playfully self-reflexive, it remains a keenly layered narrative.

"He returns to the movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie metafilter so many times that the gimmick forces you to pay close attention and believe in the events as they transpire, without sacrificing the absurd edge of the equation. Jumping back and forth between Grossman's office and the jungle, Tropic Thunder recalls the comical dread of Dr. Strangelove, where Stanley Kubrick cut between the war room and a nuke-wielding B-52. This one could have the subtitle How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blockbuster." -- from Eric Kohn's review on premiere.com, posted yesterday.

I had picked up on maybe four or five of these, but seeing them all together... whoa. Not that this will have the slightest effect on the thinking of the McCain crowd or even the fence-sitters, for that matter.

The other night Pineapple Express star-co-writer Seth Rogen told Jon Stewart that he's "26, but I look 50. I'll probably die in three years. I had back hair at nine. I had ear hair at 13." Another guy who doesn't look his age is Philip Seymour Hoffman, 41, who was looking more or less his age in Capote but looked about 59 (white hair, beard, the usual paunch) when he was in Cannes last May to promote Synecdoche, New York. There needs to be at least one other guy in his 20s or 30s or early 40s who looks a good 15 years older. Just one more.

HE reader Nick Zayas informs that Hulu just put up Joseph Sargent's The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. The whole thing, in other words, is now free and streamable in reasonably decent quality. With "limited commercial interruption," of course.

A grayed-up, middle-agey Denzel Washginton during shooting of Tony Scott's The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. (Photo stolen from JustJared.)

The new Tony Scott version with Denzel Washington (in the Walter Matthau role) and John Travolta ("as" Robert Shaw and another villain) won't be out until 7.31.09.

Fantasy Moguls' Steve Mason is reporting that Pineapple Express took in only $6.25 million on Thursday, which represented a 50% drop from its first-day tally of $12.1 million. David Gordon Green's stoner comedy "may" take in $27 million over the weekend and reach $45 million by Sunday night.

As it must to all men, death came earlier this evening to legendary manager, producer, book author and mover & shaker Bernie Brillstein. A good man with a rich sense of humor (particularly those darkly ironic aspects), Brillstein helped me out with stories when I was writing for Entertainment Weekly and the L.A. Times Syndicate in the '90s. Here's Nikki Finke's recollection piece.

The cleaning guys pulled this out of the back of the refrigerator today, unopened.

X costars Vincent Riverside (l.) and Eden Brolin (r.) flanking director-writer Josh Brolin at this evening's Fourth Annual HollyShorts Film Festival at the American Cinematheque's Egyptian theatre -- Thursday, 8.7.08, 8:05 pm. Here's my reaction to Brolin's short afte seeing it last February at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. Also shown was Martin Keegan's Verboten, a twisted relationship drama about a weirdo son with glazed eyes, a malevolent dad (played by Keegan) and the latter's attractive German-speaking girlfriend.

I feel moderately relieved that I wasn't too bad on The O'Reilly Factor earlier today, and at the same time somewhat depressed that I didn't really kick out the jams either. I did everything I was told to do -- write down what I wanted to say, decide which points were best to emphasize, and concentrate on being clear and concise. But halfway through the interview the clarity I had in my head started to feel mushy and imprecise. I was half making sense and half saying to myself, "What's happening? Why isn't this working out better?"

The Fox News interview set, located in the basement of the Fox buildigon Armacost, about 20 minutes before air-time.

Either I'm not just cut out to be a talking guest-head or I need to do more of these to sharpen my routine or O'Reilly intimidated me or something. My main intention was to be clear and reasonable in presenting my opinion, which is that it's absurd of the right-wing hammers to accuse me of being a supporter of hypothetical liberal blacklisting. I'm sick of talking and thinking about this deranged subject as it has no relation on any recognizable reality I'm familiar with.

Over half of the e-mails that came in were from enraged or illiterate right-wingers calling me a "whacko commie pig" and such. It's probably best to just concentrate on the positive reactions and take heart that I probably picked up some new readers.

"I saw you on the O''Reilly factor a second ago and I have to say that I respect you for coming on the program and saying what you believe to Mr. O'Reilly," wrote a guy named Steve Klinck. "I happen to be a conservative and disagree with your statements but, as Bill said, you''re a stand-up guy, and I respect you for that."

"I just watched your conversation with BR on The O''Reilly Factor," wrote Paul Lyle of Plainview, Texas, "and until that moment I'd never heard of you, but I want to say how delightful and gracious you were, very open and credible. You are a very prepossessing gentlemen. BR made nothing off your forthrighness about having some reservation about what you had written regarding Jon Voight. I thought that was high drama. Welcome to my world. I'll be watching and reading you."

"When I heard your quote I was angry at you," wrote Jim Lewallen," but you did a nice job with Bill. I am a conservative[but] you made sense. You have your opinions on the blog. No one has to read this and you weren't encouraging Hollywood to blacklist conservatives. You said it best when you said basically I'm just a guy with an opinion. Interesting interview."

I spoke earlier today with Magnolia Pictures president Eammon Bowles about Man on Wire, which has been doing good business since opening on 7.25 because it's been well reviewed, but mainly -- and it really is this simple -- because it delivers a genuine spiritual high. And when films that really and truly do this come along, people always pick up on this and go and tell their friends and then it builds and builds and builds.

This combination documentary, elegy and suspense film is opening around the country this weekend. It is absolutely essential to see it, and I don't mean on DVD

When Sean Connery saw Man on Wire at the Edinburgh Film Festival a little more than a month ago he called it “one of the best three films I have ever seen.” (He wouldn't say what the other two were.) At the Vicky Christina Barcelona party the other night people kept asking me what my favorite recent film is, and over and over I kept on saying Man on Wire. I hadn't said this to myself in so many words, but I didn't hesitate in saying it when asked.

Here's an mp3 of the last two or three minutes of my conversation with Bowles in which I articulate the "spiritual high" high, and here's an mp3 of our whole discussion.

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?