Last week I decided against linking to Jeffrey Ressner's 7.23 Politico story about David Zucker's An American Carol because the basic plot -- a documentarian named Michael Malone [read: Moore] finally sees the conservative light in the way Ebenezer Scrooge got beyond being a selfish miser -- sounded sickening to me. Three or four graphs into Ressner's story and I was muttering, "I don't know want to know about this...I've read enough."

Jon Voight as George Washington and Kelsey Grammer as Gen. George S. Patton in An American Carol

But people here and there started...Read More

It seems obvious why Vanity Fair asked the esteemed Patricia Bosworth to write "a five-decade trajectory" piece about Paul Newman for the current issue. They obviously know the poor guy is on the ropes so they've decided to tribute him now instead of wait for the sad farewell and then give the go-ahead for a good-old-Paul piece.

I wonder why VF editor Graydon Carter didn't contact Oregonian critic Shawn Levy to write the article, given Levy's extensive research on a forthcoming Newman biography over the last couple of years. I'm told Levy has dug up...Read More

If you don't instantly recognize this main-title music, you don't yet know your stuff. No offense.

Eight days ago Simon Pegg, Jessica Hynes and Edgar Wright visited Laser Blazer, easily one of the two or three best DVD stores in Los Angeles (and certainly the cleanest and friendliest), to sign copies of the 3-disc Spaced: The Complete Series box set. The DVD package came out 7.22. Okay, so I'm slow. A day doesn't pass when I haven't missed something.

Glenn Kenny's 7.30 riff about the Voight/HE/right-wing spitball kerfuffle on Some Came Running is very droll and enjoyable. I laughed out loud twice. (That's saying something.) Thanks.

Why doesn't Wild Bunch make this trailer available with English subtitles? Why isn't there a bi-lingual Guerilla trailer? What's the deal with Gregg Goldstein's mention in the Hollywood Reporter about "four indie offers being on the table" and still no distrib deal? The possibility that Steven Soderbergh's epic (which has had 14 minutes trimmed since Cannes) may not even play commercially until '09 is ridiculous. What kind of a plastic, quarter-inch-deep moviegoing culture are we to have convinced distributors that buying Che rights is a sucide move?

"A few weeks ago I was in Las Vegas playing blackjack," director Rod Lurie has written on the Huffington Post. "Two white-guy soldiers who were a couple of days away from being re-deployed to Iraq sat at the table with me. After a few minutes of conversation I asked them who they were voting for. They both said they were voting for Obama.

"When I asked them why, they very simply and honestly told me they want to vote for the guy that will get them out of Iraq. I think this year we will...Read More

Tom O'Neil's 7.30 slapdown of Frozen River star Melissa Leo (for pulling rank after arguing with director Courtney Hunt) has resulted in three friendly rebukes -- one from myself, another from Thelma Adams and a third from Awards Daily's Sasha Stone. Undaunted, O'Neil shoots right back, sticks to his guns, gives no quarter.

Yesterday 23/6 posted an alleged photo of Jon Voight's "marked-up" copy of his Washington Times wing-nut opinion piece. Moderately funny stuff if you're not one of, you know..."them."

A terrible-quality bootleg video of the Wolfman trailer that was shown at Comic-Con. Some guy in the audience apparently shot it with a cell-phone camera. That aside, the vibe feels right and the content seems promising.

Benicido del Toro

The latest p.c. ding against Disney's The Princess and the Frog, which won't hit screens until '09, is that it has a "toothless firefly" character who, according to Defamer's description, "seems to have fluttered in accidentally from the set of Song of the South 2: Cajun Vacation."

Here are two earlier You Tube videos -- clip #1 and clip #2 -- that explain other problems related to racial cliches and/or pigeonholing. Between this and the revolting Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Disney is seeming more and more bunkered down and 20th Century clueless about everything.

It's not just the right-wing spear carriers who are slamming me, incorrectly, for allegedly advocating a Sen. Joseph McCarthy-esque response to Jon Voight's 7.28 Washington Times op-ed piece trashing Barack Obama. A liberal friend has taken me to task for this also. Obviously the McCarthy thing has gotten some traction, so let's review the basics and examine what I actually said and meant.

The paragraph that led to the freak-out read as follows: "[Voight is] obviously entitled to say and write whatever he wants. But it's only natural that industry-based Obama supporters will henceforth...Read More

I've "known" (i.e., been phone-chatting with) director Rob Cohen since the early '90s, and have always found him bright, affable, witty, open. He's a Harvard University grad and a very good gabber. I remember what a terrific job he did seven years ago on The Fast and The Furious, and how he recaptured that old Sam Arkoff-ian, American International Pictures B-movie vibe, and particularly how he fought to end it on a note of justice rather than legality.

But everything Coen has done since has been (and it pains me to say this) either cheesy or...Read More

N.Y. Daily News columnists Rush & Molloy went with a story today about a $250 million lawsuit against Scientology bigwigs (including Tom Cruise), filed by ex-church member Peter Letterese over harassment tactics used against him when he resigned. The catchy aspect is that Letterese is using the RICO statute as a weapon. As R & M explain, he's "calling the church a 'crime syndicate' and wants it broken up under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization law, just as the feds have broken up Mafia families."

Uploaded 14 days ago on Flickr, forwarded last night by Oregonian critic Shawn Levy. "This is an actual photo -- not Photoshopped -- of a second-run Portland movie theater, the Cinemagic, changing its marquee over from Hancock to TDK. As the fellow who sent it to me said, 'Sometimes it's better to work right to left.'"

The Journal Sentinel's Duane Dudek reported yesterday that Woody Allen's next film, the Larry David-Evan Rachel Wood relationship thing, will be called Whatever Works. Allen called it a "a blackish comedy." I think it's fair to say that the title doesn't imply this in the slightest. Generically speaking, of course.

In a piece that's largely about Dorothy Fadiman's Stealing America: Vote By Vote (opening Friday at NYC's Quad Cinemas and spreading out in August), Politico's Jeffrey Ressner quotes Ion Sancho, a Florida-based election supervisor who was involved in the Florida recount situation during the 2000 presidential race, as saying that Pennsylvania and Indiana are expected to be "problem areas" (i.e., states with potential incidents of vote fraud) in the coming November election.

"Pennsylvania and Indiana are jurisdictions with partisan election administrations, and that's one of the things that the film tries to illustrate," Sancho tells Ressner. There is a particular...Read More

After seeing and loving Tropic Thunder I figured Pineapple Express (which opens one week before Thunder, on 8.6) couldn't be quite as funny, despite the many months of advance praise. I trusted the buzz about James Franco being a revelation, but that "meh" Variety review by Justin Chang lowered the expectation factor a notch or two. I finally saw it last Monday night at the Grove, in any event, and about 20 or 30 minutes in I said to myself, "Wow, this is a wee bit funnier than Ben Stiller's movie."