Why is the new Will Ferrell-John C. Reilly comedy called Step Brothers? I've known that stepbrothers is a single unhyphenated word since I took part in sixth-grade spelling bees. Is your mother's mother your "grand mother" or "grandmother"? I hate how marketing guys always do it their own way, get it wrong, thumb their nose at civilization.

Step Brothers, in any event, is not funny. I sat there like an Easter Island statue. No chuckles; not even a smile. I need to say right now that anyone who goes this weekend and laughs uproariously is showing their colors. I'm not saying it'll mark you as a mongrel for finding it amusing but if you laugh heartily and repeatedly it will say something about your level of refinement and your vistas. The movie is a wallow -- a crew of actors sloshing around in a mocha-colored whipped-mud pit and going "who-hooaaa!...being covered in slop is friggin' hilarious, so the more the funnier....yahhhh!"

I'll admit that I found the premise -- a couple of 40 year-olds (Ferrell, Reilly) still living with their respective single parents and being forced to share a domain when their parents decide to get married -- amusing on the surface. But I realized early on that immaturity in and of itself isn't funny. It never is or has been. Think back -- when has a contemporary acting like an immature twit at any age ever been amusing? In your own life, I mean.

I'll admit that some of what Ferrell and O'Reilly get into is mildly diverting if you're a good-natured person who likes to be charitable (people were laughing at the screening I attended), but that's neither here nor there.

The premise connects because the age of supposed maturity (attaining mellow emotionality, knowing how to tie your shoelaces, getting down to a career, etc.) has been taking longer and longer with each generation, and we all know this and probably want to laugh at it to alleviate our concerns.

Guys who came out of World War I felt compelled to get down to marriage and raising kids in their early 20s. Then again the F. Scott Fitzgerald/Ernest Hemingway "lost generation" of the 1920s was the first to put stuff off as they wallowed in personal issues. The Depression toughened the nation up and kept almost everyone (except for the Beats of the late 1940s and '50s) on the straight and narrow until the mid '60s when all cultural hell broke loose. It was nonetheless considered a mark of at least some shame in the '70s for anyone to have delayed on Big Life Moves until their late 20s or early 30s.

The state of social devolution has continued unabated since the '70s, to the point that it's now considered totally normal for immature guys to kick around well into their 30s and sometimes into their early 40s. Ten or twenty years from now it'll be considered almost normal for guys to start thinking about coming to grips with maturity when they hit 45 or 50.

The world is culturally devolving, disassembling and swirling down the toilet bowl. That's why Step Brothers is a downer -- it's essentially a meditation about the end of the world. I'm kind of kidding, yes, but not altogether. Because the world is ending, in a sense. Mamma Mia! was another indicator.

The one-sheet for The Day The Earth Stood Still (20th Century Fox, 12.12) implies a massive scale to the visiting alien space craft -- a bigger-than-big whoaness. This obviously summons memories (although I really mean "nightmares") of Independence Day, which is not a good thing for reasons I shouldn't need to list here. And if (I say "if") this indicates where the filmmakers are coming from -- scary-gargantuan! eerie-cool! -- it indicates to me a lack of original vision.

Because they mainly seem to be competing with past alien-visitation films (Close Encounters, etc.) that have used a massive sound-and light show approach to the big landings. In so doing the DTESS guys are obviously trafficking in the usual-usual, which is to try and crank up a not-very-hip crowd that mainly wants to be awed so they can sit in the fourth row with their massive buckets of popcorn soaked in amhydrous butterfat and go "kewwwl!"

What if an alien space ship arrived around noon on a sunny day in an open public place? What if it just showed up and plunked itself down on a big green lawn under a cloudless blue sky without any light-beams puncturing through fog and smoke with the usual wind machines blowing every earthling's hair? Not cool enough, right? Maybe, okay, but wouldn't a different sort of landing be more welcome? Something quieter, odder? What if Klaatu's landing isn't witnessed at all?

It was reported today by the N.Y. Times Michael Cieply that the Comic-Con crowd gave the DTESS product reel a spirited response "despite a certain amount of web-driven skepticism that has been swirling around the new movie’s eco-friendly themes.

"One person who posted earlier this month on imdb.com had demanded to know why 'would aliens care about the earth’s environment unless they intended to use it themselves?'

"Released in the fall of 1951, the original Day the Earth Stood Still was directed by Robert Wise and based on a story by Harry Bates. It cast Michael Rennie as an alien, Klaatu, who had been sent with his robot sidekick Gort to hand earthlings an ultimatum: Live peacefully, or die.

"This time around Keanu Reeves, who plays the Rennie role, is apparently detailed to save the universe from earth’s terminal messiness -- think of an alien Al Gore, with serious muscle."

Tech Crunch's Michael Arrington is reporting that "AOL is making across the board budget cuts on its blogging properties, we're hearing from multiple sources. The cuts range up to 25% of each properties total budget, which falls mostly on personnel costs -- bloggers are simply being told to take a couple of weeks off for now, and there may or may not be work for them later in August." This situation is apparently affecting our good friends at Cinematical to some extent. Editor/critic Kim Voynar says "we're still operating, we're undergoing an editorial readjustment, things will be back to normal in a week."

Thanks very much to amctv.com's Christine Fall for tributing Hollywood Elsewhere as site of the week in a piece that went up earlier this afternoon. All flattery is welcome. Every little bit helps. Even when there's no link to the term "site of the week" on the front page. If you go to the main site you have to click on the words "Future of Classic," which means nothing recgonizable to me.

Grand New Party co-author and presumed Republican party stalwart Reihan Salam did a talking-head stint today on MSNBC's Road to the White House, hosted by David Gregory. Salam is obviously whip-smart, but he has a disapproving scowl that kicks in when he hears something he doesn't agree with. I'm sorry but he reminded me right away of James Arness in Christian Nyby's The Thing (From Another World) with a little touch of Rex Ingram, the genie from The Thief of Baghdad. A bit like an alien studying humans for signs of weakness.

Responding to the diminishment of Phys Ed programs in public shools due to budget cuts, fitness guy Richard Simmons urged Congress earlier today to "keep and expand physical education" in American public schools. He emphasized data from the CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) showing obesity levels among kids these days, which everyone knows is rampant.

Reading this took me back to last week's screening of Blake Edwards' Experiment in Terror (1962) at the Aero theatre, and in particular a scene at a public swimming pool. It's basically about the then-very-young Stephanie Powers, portraying the younger sister of stalker-victim Lee Remick, and some nice-looking dude chit-chatting. Almost all the people seen swimming and walking around in bathing suits are high-school age or slightly older or younger.

Something about this scene seemed "different" but I couldn't figure what it was. Then it hit me -- all the kids in this scene, which was shot some 48 or 49 years ago, were thin, muscular, in good shape. No Jabbas or beefy bods or guys with bigger boobs than some of the girls, which is absolutely what you'll see today if you go to a public pool or beach. American attitudes about diet and keeping in shape were healthier back then. Kids walked and played more, sat around a lot less, and ate less in the way of chili dogs, ice cream and heaping bowls of Velveeta cheese nachos.

Stepbrothers will be the weekend's big wide-release opener, possibly snagging $30 million or so -- tracking at 89 general awareness, 40 definite interest and 19 first choice. X-Files: I Want to Believe is running at 81, 25 and 9...bomb.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (August 1) is running at 90, 39 and 9 -- showing promise, possibly decent opening. Kevin Costner's Swing Shift...I'm sorry, Swing State...I meant to say Swing Vote (also 8.1) is running at 58, 20 and 1 -- big trouble.

Pineapple Express (8.6) is running at 47, 37 and 5. (The 8.6 opening is about getting some traction before the Beijing Olympics begin on August 8th.) Sisterhood fo the Traveling Pants 2 (also 8.6) is at 78, 22 and 4.

Tropic Thunder (8.13) is at 59, 33 and 2 -- an okay number for now, opening in the middle of the Olympics.

In discussing last night's release of the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, which reported concerns and doubts among Barack Obama's qualifications and leadership chops, one MSNBC guest commenter said that "most Americans are just starting to get to know" Obama and that Obama "really hasn't made the sale yet." When the subject turned to a possible bump from the Middle Eastern/ European tour, another said "most Americans don't even know [Obama] is over there now."

Are Americans living in concrete bunkers located 150 feet underground? I'm constantly shaking my head about the fact that news commentators never acknowledge -- aren't permitted to acknowledge -- how deliberately clueless "most" Americans seem to be about political matters. The primary campaign has been going for nearly a year and your typical low-information dolt is still saying "I don't know who Barack Obama is."

Said it before, said it again -- get rid of the deadweight/dumbass element by making prospective voters take a simple 25-question quiz (in the vein of a driver's license test) before being allowed to vote. Nothing too difficult or strenuous. Just basic stuff about world events and the price of rice. If they flunk it, they'd be given a chance to take the test again within, let's say, 7 days. If they flunk that, no vote until the next election cycle.

A democracy can't function effectively within a society grappling with significant levels of voter ignorance. Voters have to be educated and aware and interested in the process, or the system won't work.

If I had the power, I would disenfranchise the deadweight classes so fast their heads would spin. At the same time those two American Teen guys would be out of the picture and relegated to the sidelines until they decide to make an effort.

The somewhat pretentious-sounding Vietnam movie being made in Tropic Thunder -- the one starring the characters played by Ben Stiller, Robert Downey, Jr., Jack Black, et. al. -- is called Rain of Madness, which has an obvious Joseph Conrad-ian ring. Here's a promotional website that includes a trailer and (I think, have been told, haven't found) a kind of mockumentary about the making of it.

"Hehllo, I'm Chris Nolan and eyehm the directauhr of The Dauhrk Knight..."

Apologies to readers for the periodic slow loadings experienced earlier this afternoon. I've taken measures that will alleviate the problem. The first is the loading of extra RAM tomorrow morning around 8:20 am tomorrow morning, which will result in a shutdown for about 10 minutes. The second will take effect about four or five days from now.

I wouldn't have noticed this You Tube clip if In Contention's Kris Tapley hadn't put it up earlier this morning first.

Swing Vote (Disney, 8.1) is, I've been told, "mushy" in a typically Hollywood way. Its main character is a selfish and decidedly jowly bad dad (Kevin Costner) with a sluggish red-state attitude about voting, and the film, I'm hearing, essentially embraces the old cynical saw about politicians being chameleons out for themselves, blah, blah. And that it basically treads water without swimming in this or that direction.

But there doesn't seem to be much to support the flimsy idea that it has an anti-liberal slant because of the right-leaning views of certain cast members. Costner played golf with the elder George Bush back in the early '90s, but his political contribution record shows he's mostly supported liberals. Costars Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper have contributed to right-wing candidates, yes, but they're just actors doing a job. have been mostly to liberals. (I haven't been able to determine the political contribution records of director Joshua Michael Stern or co-screenwriter Jason Richman.)

In a piece about Swing Vote that ran a couple of months ago, Politico's Jeff Ressner wrote that it's "likely to draw ire from members of the two major political parties" with "the script [playing] off of stereotypes that annoy and inflame the party faithful on both sides."

The film "depicts Republican strategists as nasty connivers without souls, willing to change their views on gay marriage and the environment just to get elected," Ressner noted. "Democratic campaigners are shown to be similarly hypocritical, spinelessly flip-flopping their long-held positions on abortion and immigration to win the election.

“Swing Vote revolves around a low-life trailer park drunk (Costner) who, by virtue of his young daughter's idealism, becomes responsible for deciding the fate of a closely tied presidential election. Both the incumbent Republican commander-in-chief (Grammer) and the milquetoast liberal Democrat challenger (Hopper) descend on his small town and vie for his vote by shamelessly courting him, even going so far as to change their strongly-held beliefs to align themselves with what they mistakenly believe are his views."

In other words, as a conservative-minded blogger commented to Ressner a few weeks back, "It's about a red-sate dad with a blue-state daughter."

Swing Vote, Swing Shift, Swing State, Swingtime, Sling Blade.

What's the difference between "walking back" on a quote and "backpedaling"? Is there one? I have this notion that the latter sounds a bit more urgent or frantic. But maybe not.

"The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take Mamma Mia! to be a useful contribution to that debate," writes New Yorker critic Anthony Lane in a 7.28 posting.

"I thought that Pierce Brosnan had been dragged to the edge of endurance by North Korean sadists in his final Bond film, Die Another Day, but that was a quick tickle with a feather duster compared with the agony of singing Abba’s 'S.O.S.' to Meryl Streep through a kitchen window."

Young Turks' Cenk Uygur on Crawford is/was a prop, Bush doesn't have the first clue, "Wall Street got drunk, needs to sober up," etc. The best part is a lecture to shitkicker voters, at the very end: Wealthy Republicans "are screwing you and having a great time doing it."

Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder (Dreamamount, 8.13) , which I saw three months ago, is an escaped-from-Bedlam, bong-hit, National Lampoon-level (the '70s magazine, not the movies) Hollywood satire of (a) itself and (b) various Vietnam War movies we've all savored, particularly Platoon and Apocalypse Now. Except it's not as low as it sounds. The tone is informed by the filmmaker characters, all of whom are clever jerks of one kind of another. Nobody's a complete idiot.

The laughs stem from a rollicking, toking-up-with-the-guys attitude that gets sillier, wilder and more surreal by the page. And it's a people's comedy in that uncouth types will love it but so will those with a little education and refinement as long as they've gotten high at some point in the past, or have it in them to get the drug-humor thing.

That sounds like a ceiling, doesn't it? Conventional wisdom says that satire only travels so far, and drug-humor movies never get past $60 or $70 million. Well, Tropic Thunder has something else in the engine, a kind of manic propulsion element that really hellzapops.

On top of which acid-tinged humor is a tonally appropriate way to go for a movie about making a movie about the U.S. of A's first and only psychedelic war. It's basically about a self-absorbed asshole movie star (Stiller) who's career is downspiralling, and who has taken a role in a Vietnam movie that's being shot in...I forget precisely but somewhere in Southeast Asia. And of course, all hell breaks loose at the end of the first act.

Speedman's costars are Jack Black's "Portnoy" and Robert Downey, Jr.'s "Kirk Lazarus," among others. The director is played by crazy Steve Coogan. The technical advisor is a flipped-out Vietnam vet played by Nick Nolte. Matthew McConaughey (great casting!) plays Speedman's slithering, soul-less agent, and Tom Cruise -- best thing he's done in years -- plays a potty-mouthed pit-bull mogul who runs the studio that's funding the film.

The story is about what happens when the cast goes out in to the wilds of the jungle in order to feel the fear and acquire the thousand-yard stare, and real life intrudes in the form of a Golden Triangle drug-dealing gang.

Two hours after I saw Tropic Thunder last April, breathless and still charged, I called it "the most psychedelically deranged Vietnam-War-movie comedy of all time." That still sounds like an okay way to put it. I remember saying to myself as I sat in the Sherry Lansing theatre, "I feel like I'm on something....what would this movie be like if I was?" But every inspired comedy feels like you or the actors have dropped at least a half-tab of something. That's what Some Like It Hot feels like, for sure. Ditto A Night at the Opera, The Big Lebowski, Superbad, etc.

I wish I did still turn on (I haven't smoked anything since the mid '70s) because I'd love to get wasted before re-seeing Downey's performance as a talented but pretentious actor playing a "black guy," complete with an Isaac Hayes street accent and a special pigmentation makeover.

Stiller, who's directed and co-written the script (with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen), has been trying to make this film for years. Here's a salute to not just Stiller but all tenacious filmmakers -- great ideas are nothing if you don't have the balls to keep pushing. This film is Stiller's best work since the hey-hey days of The Ben Stiller Show, and his best idea since the Al Pacino-auditions-for-Beethoven bit.

It also feels to me like an Oscar-level thing for Downey. I know -- who gives a hoot about Oscar nominations when a film is this funny? But Downey is amazing in this. This plus Iron Man -- what a year for the guy. The Best Supporting Actor race is already down to Downey vs. Ledger.

One of the most successful performances by Stiller's Speedman was a retarded Jack character, and one of Tropic Thunder's trippiest moments is when Stiller re-performs Jack in front of the heroin-dealing gang. I love that Speedman never "wakes up" -- start to finish, he's in a movie of one kind or another.

At least Cruise has one thing he can point to this year with pride and joy, even with Valkyrie's myriad issues. (I wonder, by the way, how The Hardy Men -- a Stiller-Cruise comedy -- is progressing?)

Is there a difference between humor that you know is funny as hell but you do';t laugh at, and the kind that you do? I suppose, but for me, Tropic Thunder was a half-and-halfer in this regard. And that's totally fine.

Martin Scorsese's Shine a Light opened only three and a half months ago. I'd convinced my significant other to come see the IMAX version with me, and she had half-convinced her daughter to come with us. But it didn't happen and the film left the IMAX theatres and now the opportunity is gone for the rest of our lives on this planet. Next Tuesday's arrival of the Shine a Light Blu-ray disc reminded me of that.

"Everything Is Cinema is important because it is an honest, intelligent and often eloquent treatment of a major motion picture artist [i.e., Jean-Luc Godard]. Sometimes reading it is a bit like riding a train that is chugging dutifully up a hill; at other times it's a roller coaster of exciting ideas. Either way, like a Godard film, the journey turns out to be worth it." -- from Jeanine Basinger's 7.23 N.Y. Times review. Wait...the book came out two months ago (on 5.13)?

Vandamm: Let me go, Professor, and I'll tell you a secret you'll really want to know.
Professor: Talk first, Vandamm, and we'll see.
Vandamm: (whispering) Leonard gave better head than Miss Kendall.
Professor: Oh, that I already knew. Take him away, boys! And don't spare the rubber hoses!

(copied from 7.7.08 IMDB posting by Bilwick1.)

The best documentary of the year so far, hands down. One of the best of the century, no lie. Plays like a suspense thriller and a poem at the same time.

A Robocop-era outtake of Gene Siskel and Rogert Ebert, to wit: "He asked the McDonald's girls if he could have apple pie with his order before they asked him! Wants some salad with your apple pie? They worked through the whole fucking menu! He ordered every fucking thing they have!" (YouTube clip stolen/copied from Patrick Goldstein's bloggy-blog...I think. I still can't tell the difference between the blog and the weekly dead-tree "Big Picture" column because those lazy-ass Times designer guys can't be bothered to create a real stylistic distinction.)

An unnamed major film critic recently asked a journalist friend about "that Kevin Costner baseball movie." Baseball movie? "Yeah," the critic said. "It's Costner doing the usual jowly working-class schlub thing...what, it's not a baseball movie?" No, he was told. My friend then said to the critic, "You know, if someone like you -- a film critic who ostensibly keeps up -- isn't getting what this movie is about, the marketing for Swing State is doing something wrong." I'm sorry -- Swing Vote!

Hours-old comment by Time's Joe Klein that McCain's remark yesterday about Obama being willing to lose a war in order to win a campaign is the "most scurrilous" he's ever heard in all his years of covering campaigns.

After months of shadowing, it would appear that those tenacious big-game hunters from Lantana, Florida, finally cornered their prized North Carolinian leopard in the Beverly Hills hotel this morning and threw a net over him. Or so it would seem. This is the scenario that some (like Slate's Mickey Kaus, having heard the stories) predicted would happen sooner or later. The running-up-and-down-the-stairs and into-the-cellar part sounds so humiliating. We live in a diseased and predatory culture.

It turns out that Dark Knight star Christian Bale has been charged by London police only with "verbal assault" in last Sunday night's incident between himself, his mother Jenny and his sister Sharon. In London verbal assault can be classified as a Class 4 or 5, with Class 4 being aggravated with "an intent to cause alarm."

In other words, Bale was popped for the domestic American custom known as "arguing," possibly with a loud and/or threatening tone of voice. By this curious standard Jeremy Piven's "Ari" character would be doing 10 years without parole, easy, if he lived in London.

I for one would love to read James Vanderbilt's forthcoming screen adaptation of "Truth And Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power," the 2005 book by former CBS News producer Mary Mapes about the big 60 Minutes II brouhaha that hurt CBS news anchor Dan Rather when he and Mapes produced a story four years ago about President George W. Bush's...er, activities in the Texas Air National Guard. It eventually led to Mapes getting bounced from the network and Rather taking an early retirement.

"This was a corporate, political, and public relations operation," Mapes has been quoted saying by the N.Y. Observer, "designed to take the heat off and allow Viacom to walk away unscathed, unencumbered by lingering anger from the White House or the various Republican-dominated committees that the corporation lobbied constantly."

The price of drinks over the last ten or so years has risen to obscene levels at almost all nightspots. At many places you can easily drop $40 or $50 bucks on three or four glasses of wine, with tip and all. Even beer is ridiculous. Forget mixed drinks. So imagine my shock when I happened to wander into Barney's Beanery last night and ordered a Miller Chill and the bartender held two fingers up. "Two dollars?," I said. "Two," she said. Astonishing.

Peter Coyote has written a statement to all name actors regarding the possible SAG strike. Its has been posted on Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily. The gist is an appeal to the multimillionaire set to join in solidarity with the working stiffs.

"Once an actor reaches the six or ten million dollar mark for several months work, they are financially secure for life unless they are morons or have extremely bad habits," he writes. "By the time they're earning 15 to 20 million, some measurable percentage of those earnings is meaningless. A major star on a film we were doing together once told me, “Hey there's no difference between 17 and 18 million to me! My agent tells me so-and-so gets it and so should I.”

"That 'no difference money' is the difference between earning a living or not for most of the rest of us. A modest return to insure the health of the entire community (the principle behind income taxes) hardly seems excessive. While this would not solve all the problems of our community, it would certainly remove much of the desperation and rancor from negotiations and make earning a living once again possible for far more of the membership. It cannot be legislated by law, only by custom, but as a custom it would lend a definite grace to our industry, and perhaps set a model that might inspire others. (Why do the words 'corporate executives' leap to mind?)

"You cannot grow roses without mulch. While stars represent the beautiful blooms of the industry, the soil of the industry, the medium of growth supplied by all those who surround you, is being starved for nourishment. Eventually, this lack of payback to the medium supporting all the growth will kill, if not the plant itself, at least its quality and vitality. Our industry is not secure while the majority of its players are not. To change the situation requires consciousness, solidarity, and power. We have the consciousness and solidarity. We appeal to you for help with the power."

Politico's Jeff Ressner is reporting about a right-wing Obama hit doc called "Hype: The Obama Effect." Made by conservative "provocateur and well-known Clinton antagonist" David Bossie, pic will be presented in Denver on the Sunday before the Democratic National Convention, and then come out on DVD on 9.1.

I really do think there's something genetically different about hardcore right-wingers -- something that unleashes the belligerent, territorial, selfishly guarded aspects of our nature. Like they have a genetic inheritance that hasn't been passed along to others. Remember Lukas Haas's conservative-minded character in Woody Allen's Everybody Says I Love You ('96)? Whose political attitudes are traced at the end of the film to a small tumor in his brain that caused him to think and feel this way?

I was watching right-wing talk show guy Glenn Beck guest-host the Larry King Show last night. My God! The man is so relentlessly contentious (and in some cases willfully ignorant) about Obama-related issues and histories that he's like some kind of animal.

Hardball's Chris Matthews speaking last night on Jay Leno about his "thrill up my leg" comment about Obama....well said, from the heart, draws applause.

There are at least three circumstantial points to consider regarding Christian Bale's mystifying arrest in London today over allegedly assaulting his mother and sister. I mean, on top of the basic head-scratching reaction that is probably manifesting worldwide right now.

The three things are (1) the incident happened at the Dorchester Hotel last Sunday night, or the night before The Dark Knight's Euro premiere, (2) the two women made the allegation at a local police station "in Southern England" (where...Brighton? Dover?) and that the information was then passed on to London's Metropolitan Police in London, and (3) London's Sun tabloid has allegedly reported that the cops "didn't question the actor Monday because they didn't want to interfere with the premiere of the movie."

I'm basically observing that there didn't appear to be a huge sense of urgency or ticking-clock concern about this matter on anyone's part. An alleged assault on Sunday followed by an arrest two days later because the police didn't want to muck up the premiere? Mom and sis left London to some town in the south and then they reported the incident? Why not go to the local London police? And who assaults their own mother and sister, for God's sake? Sounds more like a scuffle about something that escalated. A very, very weird story.

HE reader Evan Boucher has "more evidence that The Dark Knight may continue to do phenomenal box office this weekend," he wrote this morning. "Your feeling of being exhausted at the end of it is understandable. It is a relentless assault on your senses at least in a physical standpoint. However, multiple people that I have spoken to have indicated that they loved the movie ('awesome!') but that in order to fully understand everything they'll need to see it again -- and soon.

"That's a very unusual phenomenon. Let's be honest and state that if you had to take a leak during this movie, you could go online in 3 minutes after the movie and find out what you may have missed through a streaming bootleg. If you didn't understand why someone did something that they did (understandable given the complexity and the constant exploration of character motivations) you could find out by googling a plot synopsis. But those options won't be good enough in this instance.

"I want to see The Dark Knight again in the theater, preferably in IMAX. And I'm almost betting that it will be better the second time, because I won't be so worried that I will miss something. It was sooo good I don't want to wait for the DVD (a Blu-ray release in early December, coupled with a price drop on Blu-ray players, will push the entire platform over the edge....just a prediction). It looked so good that online or bootleg copies couldn't possibly replicate it.

"I want to see the truck flip over in IMAX, I want to see the pencil thing in IMAX, I want to see Ledger walk away from that hospital again in IMAX. I have a thousand productive things in my life I could be doing, but I am just trying to figure out a way to squeeze in three hours to see it again as soon as possible."

"I am exaggerating probably, but I can't remember the last movie I paid to see twice. I'm betting I'm not alone in that regard. If thats the case, between word of mouth from people who don't trust critics and repeat action we could be seeing something exceptional as far as second-weekend TDK business is concerned."

This Spencer Ackerman piece in yesterday's Washington Independent is definitely worth reading because it asks a fascinating question -- is Batman's become-my-enemy response to the Joker's aggressive anarchy in The Dark Knight analagous to Vice-President Dick Cheney's approach to dealing with Islamic terrorism? In other words, is Chris Nolan's film some kind of stealth right-wing statement?

"The thought of Vice President Dick Cheney in a form-fitting bat costume might be too much for most people to bear. But the concepts of security and danger presented in Christopher Nolan's new Batman epic, The Dark Knight, align so perfectly with those of the Office of the Vice President that David Addington, Cheney's chief of staff and former legal counsel, might be an uncredited script doctor.

"Insofar as it's possible to view an action movie that had the biggest three-day-opening in cinematic history as a comment on the current national-security debate, The Dark Knight weighs in strongly on the side of the Bush administration. Confronting the Joker, a nihilistic enemy whose motives are both unexplained and beside the point, the Batman faces his biggest dilemma yet: whether to abuse his power in order to save Gotham City.

"Again and again in the movie, the Batman's moral hand-wringing results in the deaths of innocents. Only by becoming like the monster he must vanquish can Batman secure a victory that even he understands is Pyrrhic."

I'm going to briefly pretend I'm a low-information boob and just say that this photo of Barack Obama and Gen. David Petreus, which accompanies a 7.22 N.Y. Times story by Richard A. Oppel, Jr. and Jeff Zeleny about Obama's visit to Iraq, is very visually appealing. Vittorio Storaro-level lighting. Cool-ass Top Gun shades, headphones, mouth mikes. No white flare-out from the window -- you can see the topography and the colors very clearly.

Yesterday the New York Observer's John Koblin cited evidence that 2008 may be the worst year in modern newspaper history. Okay, he asked if this was the case. But who's disputing? "On Wednesday morning at 11 a.m., Arthur Sulzberger and Janet Robinson will be managing a conference call that, from the looks of it, won't be much fun," he writes. "They'll be reporting The New York Times Company's second-quarter earnings."

"If you're really cynical you might even say that X Files: I Want to Believe illustrates why the show was cancelled in the first place: because it ran out of fresh ideas." -- from an anonymously-written review (not even a nom de plume?) the Sci-fi Movie Page. The review seems authentic, plus an industry professional whom I know and trust passed it along.

Obsessed With Film's Ray DeRousse argues strenuously against a "mumbling backlash" that has attacked Heath Ledger's Joker performance, or at least the Oscar talk that has greeted it. These contrarians are saying, he says, that Oscar talk wouldn't he happening if Ledger were alive. Anonymous chatrooms where? On how many sites?

I sat down today with the American Teen quintet -- Hannah Bailey, Colin Clemens, Megan Krizmanich, Mitch Reinholt, Jake Tusing -- at Jerry's Deli (i.e., the one on Beverly near San Vicente). I couldn't separately mike them plus myself so I just relied on the Olympus digicorder to do its best. As I feared, there was too much clatter and ambient noise inside Jerry's so the whole thing came to naught. On top of which we didn't get that far in the chat due to the lunch ending sooner than expected. A nice bunch, though. Bright, polite, candid, friendly.

The conversation took a turn at the very end, however, that I'd like to briefly discuss in a calm manner. It was just me, Colin and Jake (everyone else was outside) when I asked, "So where is everyone politically? Is anyone...you know, a Ron Paul fan? Or Nader? Anything out of the ordinary? Or are you all for Obama or...?"

Nobody, they both said. Nada, zip, no interest. Jake said he hasn't paid any attention at all to the candidates or the election. I asked if he might want to think it over sometime between now and election day in November so he could vote for somebody -- Obama, the Libertarian guy, McCain, whomever. "No," he said. Doesn't pay attention, doesn't want to know, TV off.

Colin said the same thing. I didn't record him or take notes, but he basically said that "politics and politicians are a game...it never changes...it's not something I care about...maybe when I get older but...I don't know, but not now."

Not now? These guys are about to start their junior year in college. They're adults with a responsibility to think and do beyond themselves. The world is going to hell in a global-warming handbasket, we're at a fork in the road, the stakes couldn't be higher, the world needs to change like it never has before, and the youth vote has been estimated to be bigger this year than ever before. But I sucked it in and just said to them, "Well, other people your age feel differently." They said yeah, we get that.

That happened six or seven hours ago, and I've been thinking about it since and I have to say that I don't get where they're coming from or, frankly, respect them at all for choosing to be uninformed and inactive with a major election going on and the future of the planet at stake. They're nice guys with good hearts and nice smiles, but this attitude and posture doesn't cut it.

I told a journalist friend about what they'd said and he replied, "Well, they're from Indiana." What's that supposed to mean? "Kids from that part of the country are...they have their own world. They take their cues from their parents, and obviously their parents are apolitical. That's the Midwest for you. The politically active kids are all from the cities and the city suburbs. It's who they are. I would just let it go."

Let it go? Well, okay, sure...it's not that big a deal. But on the other hand, know-nothingism and selfishness and tunnel-vision are a social cancer, I told him. I thought kids were supposed to be coming out of their shells this year and getting into Obama or Ron Paul or whomever, I said, and these guys shocked me.

I asked the friend what he would do if, hypothetically, he was interviewing these guys and they said they were white supremacists. "I would run with that because it's a good story," he answered. But apathy, which delivers more harmful consequences to society than white supremacy because it's more widespread and allows political evil to run rampant, is not?

For me, Nanette Burstein's American Teen is too much of a hybrid to be called a "documentary." It's remarkably tight and clean and well-shaped. Almost too much so, it seems at times. Some of the dramatic "scenes" unfold so concisely and with such emotional clarity that it almost feels scripted. As if every so often Burstein had told the kids, "Cut! That was good...but once more with feeling." That never happened, everyone says. Teen was just heavily covered and edited. 1,200 hours of footage were cut into a 100-minute film. But still...

Teen is about five teenage seniors from Warsaw, Indiana -- a basketball jock (Colin Clemens), a rich blond bitch (Megan Krizmanich), a plucky-sensitive X-factor musician girl (Hannah Bailey), a geek-nerd with serious acne who wears a 1965 Beatle haircut (Jake Tusing) and a hunky, nice-guy jock with a sensitive side (Mitch Reinholt). It follows them through their final school year -- relationships, crises, family dramas, college plans. And it also takes us on a rewind tour of our own.

Sounds cliche-ish, right? Except American Teen breaks through all that by immersing us in all the essentials -- conflicts, hidden goblins, insecurities -- churning inside. And so you gradually forget about the slickness and start paying attention to the deep-down stuff.

I was kicked out of an American Teen screening during Sundance last January when I couldn't find a seat. But I had seen the first ten minutes' worth and didn't like it much. Too glitzy, too familiar, same old stuff. So I didn't feel too badly about having to leave. The trick is to get past those first ten minutes, because the movie does get better and deeper and more layered after that.

All high schools are composed of brutal societies with rigid caste systems. The result is that things are almost always awkward, difficult or at least unpleasant for anyone who marches to a slightly different drum. Only the jocks, the student-council dweebs and the pretty blondes seem to find any satisfaction or serenity. I was 85% miserable in my high school. I love it that many of the "stars" of my class are now kind of average, pudgy, diminished from what they seemed to be in their youth, pot-bellied, not up to very much. Hah!

Colin is the nice lanky basketball star with a John Kerry jawline who needs a scholarship to get into college. Hannah is an arty, free-spirited musician who wants to go to film school in one of the big cities. Megan is the dishy blonde with the haughty attitude who's called "the biggest bitch" in school by Hannah. Jake is an acne-plagued geek who has no girlfirend, doesn't run with a crowd and seems to have esteem issues. Mitch is a jocky fair-haired hunk with a sensitive side and a nice sense of humor.

They all go through tough times. Colin feels he has to be a superstar on the court in order to land that scholarship, which leads to the wrong on-court attitude and lots of inward perspiration. Dealing with a terrible family trauma and under much paternal pressure to get accepted by Notre Dame, Megan is shown to have inner anger issues, which are manifested early on in a stupid vandalism crime. Worried that she might inherit her mother's manic-depressive chemistry, Hannah loses it after a longtime boyfriend dumps her, and then she gets dumped again after hooking up with nice-guy Mitch. And poor self-denying Jake gets dumped by his first girlfriend, although his luck turns down the road.

It's all good dramatic stuff and definitely absorbing, although, as mentioned, there's something about American Teen that just feels too polished. Despite assurances to the contrary, a suspicion lurks that portions of it may have been vaguely rigged on some level. Variety's Dennis Harvey mentioned a moment when "the camera catches two future sweethearts making eyes at each other in a crowded room, before they've even met." And why isn't anyone getting high? Everybody turns on in high school, right?

I liked, however, the animated sequences that dramatize the kids' innermost fears and desires. This is a pretty good way of conveying how high-school kids really feel about their personal dramas. The sense of drama is very acute at that age. Teen is definitely worth catching this weekend. It's worth catching, period. It's a full-meal movie.

The student crowd I saw it with at USC last week were chuckling and "ah-hah"-ing from time to time. A couple of girls sitting near me gasped in shock when Hannah's mother, who comes off as easily the least nurturing parent in the film, says to her "you're not special" and does everything she can to talk her out of going to San Francisco in order to follow her dream. Hannah knows who she is and hates the idea of living a life of caution and limits in Indiana, and yet her mom can only talk about the risks and the pitfalls of the big scary world out there. All parents of creative people say this to their kids. Be practical, play it safe, have a back-up plan in case you fail. My parents said this to me. This is why I related to Hannah the most.

Coming Attractions founder Patrick Sauriol read this morning's piece about the general popularity, essentialness and vitality of the old CA site, and has written to announce Coming Attractions 2.0 will be up and running less than 30 days from now. Excellent. The old CA '90s current lives again! And more ad dollar competition to boot!

"I just read your piece on the site today," Sauriol began. "Thanks for the love. I can also give you some good news that you can break on your site if you want: Coming Attractions is coming back next month.

"In 2006 I decided that I wanted to relaunch Coming Attractions. It's been a nightmare trying to find the right development team that can execute what I want with CA 2.0, taking the better part of two years to get to where I'm at: less than 30 days away from launching the new Coming Attractions, so your article asking about whatever happened to CA comes at almost the right time.

"I'm purposely downplayed the noise and tried to keep it low that CA 2.0 is in development, mainly because it's been hell trying to get it built but also I'm a strong believer in 'show, don't tell.' I've tried to keep in mind all the cool things about CA 1.0 that people tell me they liked and make sure that it remains in CA 2.0. That said, there is going to be a ton of things that the new CA will bring.

"Rest assured that there will still be movie database pages but now there will also be picture galleries, budget and box-office info, the ability to leave comments and two absolutely amazing apps that I am really excited about that will be able to tell the reader how hot or cold the hype for a movie is throughout the film's entire production history. For example, you can see the ups and downs of the production cycle of James Cameron's Avatar in a single image that can also be manipulated by the user. You can see how casting news, the release of a trailer or any other buzzworthy event impacts the film's hype throughout any stage of the movie.

"The way that I explained this to the development team is this: suppose CA 1.0 was the old Battlestar Galactica and CA 2.0 will be the new Galactica -- take the cool ideas that worked for the old series and then use them to make an even better version of the original idea. That's what I'm hoping readers will see in CA 2.0.

"To answer your other questions...

"Back in 2003 Cinescape offered me the chance to report movie news through their site (and at the time their magazine). Part of the deal was that I would be exclusive with them for the duration of my contract (2 years) but that CA would redirect to their site.

"Financially speaking it was a better deal for me because my overhead was still way too high (internet costs had just started to roll back due to the fallout from the dot-bomb days of '00). Instead of having to use 2/3rds of the revenue made from advertising on CA to cover bills I could actually pay myself and make a living as a writer. With a baby on the way I took the job offer. The Cinescape contract was written so that all the content I produced, I still owned. I never sold any part of Coming Attractions. I still own all of the thousands of pages, which is important for what I'll be doing this year.

"FYI, I never got a big selling out check. Cinescape paid me a decent monthly amount so I could write online full time but it was never a buy out situation.

"In late 2005 Cinescape started to go under. Just before the company dissolved UGO.com approached me about coming to work for them full time. I started in the fall of 2005 with UGO. One of the things that I did there was create their movies blog which broke a number of world exclusives including the review of the Justice League movie script and spoilers about the new STAR TREK movie.

"In spring 2008 UGO decided not to renew my contract and I was let go. At around the same time a local Vancouver internet start-up called MovieSet.com approached me about blogging for their site. Eventually they asked me to come onboard full time when their funding came through. That's my 9-to-5 job right now. I took the job because I liked the vision for the company (they want to deliver an authentic movie experience for fans and also offer a complete online solution for movie crews to help with their production and they like my writing, so how could I say no?). There's a lot more I can tell you about MovieSet. It's got a helluva ambitious idea behind it (think IMDb meets Facebook), but I can always get into that at a later time if you want to know more.

"In-between all of this work stuff there was also a lot of personal heartache and it impacted my creative side. In the space of three years I lost both of my parents to illness and my wife and I also suffered through the loss of a baby. I'm close to family so each of these events hit me like nuclear bombs -- events like these put into perspective writing about the latest cool movie trailer or so-and-so being cast in X-Men 4. 2008 has been a lot better for me, both in speaking of my career and personal life.

"Anyway, I hope that gives you a better idea of where I am and what's going on. If you want to follow up on any of these things ask away, and feel free to publish what I've said on your site. And when I launch CA 2.0 I planned on dropping you an email anyway, to ask that you change the link you've got on your site.

"Thanks again for saying the nice stuff about CA and me."

The Drudge Report revealed this morning that less than a week after running Barack Obama's "My Plan for Iraq" piece on the N.Y. Times Op-Ed page, the Times editorial board rejected a counterpoint Iraq War article written by John McCain. "The paper's decision to refuse McCain's direct rebuttal to Obama's [piece] has ignited explosive charges of media bias in top Republican circles," Drudge writes.

Obviously using material forwarded by either McCain campaign strategists or friends of same, Drudge quotes Times Op-Ed editor David Shirley as having said in an e-mail last Friday that "it would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece, [although] I'm not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written.'"

Drudge's piece includes the original McCain article. One portion of the article indicates, however, that the Times did McCain a roundabout favor by not running it.

"In 2007 [Obama] wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost," McCain wrote. "If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance. To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future."

Hello? Despite his attempt to walk back his recent Der Spiegel statement, Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable. So McCain should be glad the piece didn't run. On top of the Times guys having given him a liberal-media-bias issue to run with for a few days, which will help his cause.

Every so often non-obsessive film mavens who don't monitor the news on a day-to-day basis must wonder whatever happened to Patrick Sauriol and Corona's Coming Attractions ('95 to '03), the best news and gossip-tracking site in movies that ever lived. Seasons change, details fade, things slip away, and suddenly you're going, "Wait...what happened there again?"

We know what happened, of course. Sauriol bailed on CA in '03 to become a Cinescape reporter/editor and then he went on to write stuff for Vanity Fair and "other publications." He was described in this undated Movieset Corporate profile as "happily married [with] two wonderful children, three cats, one dog and way too many DVDs."

I wrote Sauriol this morning for some information. I think he lives in Vancouver. No reply at press time.

Five years and four months ago Online Journalism Review's Marc Glaser posted a piece about Sauriol having taken a buyout deal with Cinescape magazine, which effectively ended the glory days of Coming Attractions, which Sauriol founded in 1995.

"No, we haven't been bought out and absolutely nothing's changing about the way Coming Attractions reports about the movies," Sauriol says in the piece. "That could be technically true," replied Glaser, "but one important change for readers is that they now have to slog through Cinescape's graphic-heavy site to find Sauriol's movie news, which are mixed in with book and videogame news. Worse still is the loss of the weblog format, forcing readers to load a separate page for each item."

I'm just saying I seriously miss Coming Attractions, and that it's a damn shame it went away.

This whole jag started when I was sifting through web articles this morning about the good old days of Comic-Con. This led me to a piece I wrote eight years ago for my Reel.com column about attending a Comic-Con panel called "Caught in the Net: Movie Webmasters on Hollywood, the Internet, and the Future of Their Bastard Child."

The panel, moderated by IGN Moves' Den Shewman, featured "TNT Rough Cut's Dave Poland, Film Threat's Chris Gore, writer/director Kevin Smith, Coming Attractions' Patrick Sauriol, CHUD's Nick Nunziata, Ain't It Cool News' Harry Knowles, and X-Men producer Tom DeSanto," as I put it back then.

I'm running this because I'd like some reactions. Read this over and ask yourselves what's changed over the last eight years (except for people having different gigs and jobs)? How is the movie-internet world of '08 significantly different from the one we had in '00?

"I wasn't disappointed" in the panel, I wrote back then. "They gave Harry some hell. His sins, they said, included the appearance of acting arrogantly and ethically irresponsible in certain ways. They rapped him for appearing to be too chummy with moneyed, honeyed Hollywood. They were especially angry about Harry having posted posting their e-mail addresses at one point during the Jimmy Smits/Star Wars Episode 2 brouhaha a few weeks back.

"Harry apologized for the posting ('It was a mistake'), but otherwise stood his ground and even jabbed back here and there. And Smith got off some good, funny lines.

"But the discussion was a little too political and mild-mannered for my taste. No one raised their voice or lost their temper or squirted anyone with a seltzer bottle. And there didn't seem to be any particular focus or shape to the scrapping. It was this topic, then another topic, and then something else, then back to the first topic, and then Smith would make a crack and everyone would laugh.

"I'm looking over my notes and I still can't find a shape to it, but if there was a theme, it was probably, 'With great power, comes great responsibility.'

"Gore got off a good one at the beginning by pointedly describing Film Threat as a site that "confirms facts," an allusion to a recent piece by Ron Wells that calls Knowles' ethics into question. Knowles shot right back with, 'Did you confirm the story, Chris? I don't remember getting a phone call.' Poland jumped in, then Gore again, and then Harry, and things started to build.

"I had written about this fracas and wanted to see where the discussion might go, but some in the audience yelled, 'Move on! Move on!' So the Wells' Film Threat article was dropped.

"The movie experience, said DeSanto, 'has been forever changed by the internet, for better or worse.'

"Poland told Knowles that he has 'real concerns' about how malleable Knowles may be when it comes to studio gift-giving and massaging. Referring to a recent trip Knowles took to Prague to visit the set of Sony's A Knight's Tale, Poland said to Knowles, 'I can tell you, whether you realize it or not, that Sony thinks they own your ass now and have you pretty much in their pocket.'

"At one point, I asked the panelists how they were interpreting the abrupt fall-off of business for X-Men, but that topic, too, was waved aside because the audience was becoming bored.

"Midway through the discussion, Sauriol raised an ethical issue by saying, 'We need to check each other and to affirm basic journalistic standards. There's this concern about being renegades or untrustworthy -- reflecting only a fraction of what's been written -- that mainstream media people have about us. Without a set of unified rules, the studios are never going to respect us.'

"Instances of studios getting angry at certain Internet journalists for what they've regarded as intemperate reporting or reviewing were brought up. 20th Century Fox was angered awhile back at Knowles for running X-Men photos that temporarily queered a deal with Entertainment Weekly to run an X-Men photo on a cover. De Santo confirmed that they almost lost the EW cover because of this.

"Poland said he was concerned about stepping over lines that might aggravate relations with the studios. Knowles mentioned at one point that he'd been banned from getting access or inside information to Fox's Titan A.E., to which Smith said, '"That's a fucking blessing.'"

Okay, here comes the emotional part...

"Then Smith admonished Poland for what he apparently felt was an undue concern about not wanting to piss off the powers-that-be and keep things on par regarding access to early screenings.

"While Poland tried to explain what the political realities of dealing with the studios involved, Smith shot back with, 'Fuck the studios! Who gives a shit about seeing [a film] early? Pay your seven bucks, see it on your own, write what you want, and fuck 'em! Don't worry about those cats! The weapon of the internet is that everyone has a fucking voice."

"Poland countered that there was no one on the panel who wasn't 'doing business' with the studios. 'If renegades are really renegades, fine,' he said. 'It's when supposed independents start playing both sides that we've got problems.'

"At one point, Knowles said part of his role in talking early about the flaws of a film like Batman and Robin was that he thought he might save someone the $7 they'd pay to see it.

"'You can't save anyone $7 by saying Batman and Robin is bad,' Smith responded. 'Because they just say 'Oh, yeah? How bad?' and they pay to see it anyway.'

Citing a decision by Disney/ABC to take At The Movies with Ebert & Roeper in a "new direction," Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert announced this morning that he's bailing on the show altogether. This followed Richard Roeper's annnouncement yesterday that he's also leaving because he and Disney/ABC couldn't come to terms.

Reaction #1: who cares about Roeper in any light, medium or manifestation? His voice, I mean. The man could be kidnapped by aliens and taken to the planet Trafalmadore and the movie world as I know it would barely notice. Reaction #2: Ebert's vitality and tenacity in the face of adversity is an inspiration to all of us, but surely it's allowable to note that his vocal limitations are the key factor in his relationship with the show, and now whatever "new direction" it's going in.

I wasn't vigilant enough to catch last night's update from Variety's Pamela McLintock (posted at 10:34 pm) that The Dark Knight actually grossed $158.3 million, or three million more than Sunday’s estimate of $155.3 million. (And seven million more than my walked-away-from, studio estimate figure of $151 million.) She reports that the final figure was "released Monday morning" -- what, East Coast time?

Using the blink-and-you'd-miss-it 7.11 opening of Death Defying Acts as a bellwether and ricocheting off those recent Bob-and Harvey-are-on-the-ropes articles in Business Week and the Hollywood Reporter, the Sunday Telegraph's Tom Teodorczuk posted his own assessment yesterday about how the boys seems to be "up against it." One non-attributable industry guy is heard from, and Teodorczuk speaks to yours truly also (on the record, of course). But mainly it's a numbers-and-business-moves analysis piece.