Men Apart

Seeing Hellboy II the other night reminded me that the films of Guillermo del Toro are as good as it gets in the fantastical horror realm. They've got first-class effects, wit, invention, soul, visual economy, emotional gravitas. The monsters are beautifully particular, the performances have warmth and authority, and the camerawork and the cutting are grabby and fast but this side of hyper.

The problem is this, and it's not so much Guillermo's fault as the action-fantasy genre: I'm sick to death of watching stuff getting wrecked and smashed and shattered and blown into a million pieces. I hate the rigid big-studio FX formula that insists upon confrontation and chaos and ruination happening ever 20 or 30 minutes, like some stupid whammy chart. Windows exploded, buildings decimated, cars doing aerial triple-flips, fire hydrants spewing tons of city water, industrial clutter everywhere....what the fuck is this? It's the same shit in every movie, and it vacuums your soul.

What kind of cretin do you have to be to find this stuff interesting after it's been repeated 25 or 30 times? How many times can the dumbest moviegoer out there go "whoa!" after seeing a super-hero wallop a slime-covered monster and send it flying several hundred yards into a building or a wall of glass or a concrete bunker, or vice versa? How many times can the hero take a severe beating to the extent that it looks like he's finished? How many times can a slithering disgusting alien creature try to eat or invade or flatten the heroes? How many times can a moron with a extra-large tub of popcorn in his lap be impressed with loud aural thumpings on the soundtrack?

Guillermo does everything he can to add feeling and humor and humanity to Hellboy II, and he succeeds nicely from time to time, but he's working within a genre that insists upon showing the same shit over and over, no matter what and no end in sight.

I never thought I'd say this, but in this context I'm a Barry Manilow type of guy. I mean that I loved (okay, liked) the sequence in which Ron Perlman's Red and Doug Jones' Abe Sapien drunkenly sing along to Manilow's "Can't Smile Without You." And I'm a pretty big fan of Tecate beer. And I liked the bit with Perlman protecting the baby from the madness and other stuff along these lines.

I'd much rather see a televised dramedy series starring Red, Abe, Selma Blair's Liz Sherman, Jeffrey Tambor's Tom Manning and all the rest of the Del Toro freaks and eccentrics, and made into a kind of Everybody Loves Raymond type deal with monsters showing up maybe once every five or six episodes. If that. Because I really can't stand watching shit being blown up any more. How can people can sit through the same demolition derby in film after film, over and over, year after year? It's insane.

Guillermo knows that I'm much more of a Chronos/Devil's Backbone/Pan's Labyrinth/The Orphanage type of guy and that I just can't roll over for the big-studio stuff. It's always been a big problem for me.

One technical beef: when the giant land-squid monster picks up a Mercedes Benz and squeezes it to death, we should see gallons of gasoline gushing out. Are we supposed to think that the car had no gas in it? I didn't believe it. Maybe Guillermo can fix this effect for the DVD version.

I can't remember the last time I've taken such an instant dislike to an actor as I have to Josh Peck, star of The Wackness (Sony Classics, 7.4 in N.Y. and L.A.) It's lazy to do this, but I can't express it any better than I did last April: "Peck obviously does well at playing young urban white guys who talk in a street argot that is part imitation 'black' and part whatevuh," I wrote last April, "but in any case suggests a total inability to convey an air of refinement and higher education.

"Is there any circumstance in which any casting director, no matter how whacked, would use this guy to play a small-town cop in Oregon, an assistant to a U.S. Senator, a young suburban dad, a used-car salesmen from Cranford, New Jersey, or anything other than a what-up homie who sells tabs of ecstasy and dilaudid in Tompkins Square Park?

"In other words, Josh Peck is basically Leo Gorcey. Nothing wrong with that, exactly, except that he has one trick and one rap and thassall."

I can't embed this Channel 4 promotional ad for a series of Stanley Kubrick films they'll be showing, but it's ingenious -- a carefully choreographed, superbly designed and exquisitely cast tribute to The Shining. The sets, the haircuts, the mood of it...perfect! Except I can't find the actor playing Kubrick or Jack Nicholson. I guess I need to watch it a few more times. (If it's embedded somewhere, please send along the code.)

"Channel 4 has painstakingly recreated the set of Stanley Kubrick horror film The Shining," the story reads, "complete with look-a-likes of the crew and cast members including Shelley Duvall, for a TV ad to promote a More 4 season of the director's films.

"The 65-second promotional spot has been filmed as a one-take tracking shot through the recreation of The Shining.

"Viewers get Kubrick's point of view as he walks through the set, ending up in his director's chair as the crew prepare to shoot the famous scene of Danny Torrance, the son of Duvall and Jack Nicholson's characters, riding round and round the deserted corridors of the Overlook Hotel.

"The promo, filmed as a single tracking shot with a cast of 55 actors, was meticulously researched to 'remain as faithful as possible to the period in which it was shot and the culture of the British studio in the late 1970s".

I'm sorry, but Meryl Streep's use of the word "miasma" in the previous story reminded me of the character named "Miasmo" in Peter Yates' The Hot Rock ('71), and that led to finding this scene on You Tube. Hands down, it's the best acted and most convincing dumb hypnotism scene in the history of American cinema.

In an interview with The Guardian's Stuart Jeffries, Mamma Mia! star Meryl Streep has more or less said that the reason she's starring in this new movie musical is because of the roundabout influence of Osama bin Laden. Because of the 9/11 attacks, she means. More particularly because of the effect that a matinee performance of Mamma Mia! on the Broadway stage had upon a group of 10 year-olds, including her daughter Louisa, not long after the attacks.

Mama Mia! star Meryl Streep; Osama bin Laden.

I knew there was unusual left-field reason why Streep would star in a movie version of an ABBA stage musical! I knew it and now it makes sense.

It was seven years ago and Streep "was in a bit of a pickle," Jeffries writes. "She had to dream up an excursion for some friends of Louisa, the youngest of her four children by husband Don Gummer, the sculptor to whom she has been married for the past 30 years. Only one problem: it was October 2001 in Manhattan.

"'Everybody was really dimmed spiritually after 9/11,' Streep relates. 'I thought, 'What am I going to do with the kids?' So I took all these 10-year-olds to see a matinee of Mamma Mia!. They walked in and they sat there with their heads in their hands. Dimmed is the word. They were sad all the time, you know?

"'The first part was really wordy, and then 'Dancing Queen' started up. And for the rest of the show they were dancing on their chairs and they were so, so happy. We all went out of the theatre floating on the air. I thought, 'What a gift to New York right now!' She sent a thank you letter to the cast."

And that opened Streep's emotional receptivity door and down the road she was offered the part. In other words, Streep became a Mamma Mia! fan for the same reason that some journalists fell big-time in love with Amelie at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival -- i.e., because it was shown right after the attacks and put them in a much better mood. Another way to put it is that Streep joined the Mamma Mia! team for the same reason that Ron Silver became a Republican. Oh...my....God!

"Isn't this role beneath you?" Jeffries asks. "I'm not strategizing my career moves at all," Streep replies. "I haven't got a career that I'm building. When I swim my 55 laps, I try to remember the movies I've been in order, and I can't...the past is just a miasma. There's no career path.

"I just want to do things that are valuable to introduce into the culture,. This film [Mamma Mia!] is a valuable thing. I knew it when I saw it."

God grant me (a) the serenity to accept the bad movies I cannot stop from being made that I will probably wind up seeing anyway because I have to try and stay current because I write a daily column, (b) the courage to refuse to see the really bad films that come along that are truly bad for your soul, like Wanted, and (c) the wisdom to know the difference.

Some Came Running's Glenn Kenny feels that a certain James McAvoy line in Wanted -- "Six weeks ago, I was ordinary and pathetic, just like you" -- indicates that screenwriters have contempt for their audience. "What is this bullshit?," Kenny asks. ""Have screenwriters become so defensive /resentful on account of churning out quasi-nihilistic, faux-convoluted, graphic-novel-mytho-Babel tripe like this that they feel compelled to lash out at the audience that laps their nonsense up?" Uh, yeah...kinda.

A gaffe, as Michael Kinsley famously wrote, is when you blurt something out that everyone knows to be true (like Samantha Power calling Hillary Clinton a "monster") but which you're not allowed to publicly acknowledge. And in a way, Kenny seems to be saying, that Wanted line is a kind of screenwriter's gaffe -- a confession of loathing for the unwashed masses that kind of "slipped out" and wound up in the Wanted screenplay. (Which is attributed to Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan.)

The Hollywood elite, trust me, think very little of ticket-buyers in general. Once you've made it to a certain level in the film industry and have begun to run with the truly cool and connected and earn serious dough, you don't relate to average stiffs. Big Talent tends to look upon regular moviegoers as prisoners of a sort, living in a comfortable penal colony that allows them to indulge in all kinds of perks but keeps them prisoners all the same. (You know...like the way things are in The Matrix.) I'm sorry if this sounds cruel.

Talk to talent on E.T. or Extra about the fans and they'll go "we love 'em all!" -- but that's public relations. Remember John Lennon's lyric about how "you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see"? That was another "uh-oh...a celebrity just said what he should have kept quiet about." The real truth about things only comes out when someone is tired or arrogant or involved in primal-scream therapy and the obiter dicta -- the words in passing -- just tumble out.

I was doing an interview in 1982 with actor Paul Land, who played the "Tommy Dee" character in Taylor Hackford's The Idolmaker. Land, whose people skills weren't that great, was talking about his life before he became a successful actor, and he said at one point, "I was like you back then!" Me, he meant -- a low-rent schlub, struggling to survive. I understood what Land was basically saying and I didn't take offense, but the publicist in the room noticably stiffened and went "aaahh."

I now have good reason to doubt Glenn Erickson's review of the Blu-ray Dirty Harry disc that I linked to and commented about yesterday. Erickson was cool with Fox Home Video's controversial Patton Blu-ray disc, but has claimed that the Dirty Harry disc shows "heavy tweaking to minimize grain, sharpen contrast and brighten colors" and that "heavy processing has given most night shots an almost unnatural look."

The reason is that transfer guru and unrequited grain-worshipper Robert Harris doesn't agree, and neither, according to a well-placed source, does Clint Eastwood himself. Harris says that the Harry disc looks like beautifully restored film and not digital data (unlike, in his opinion, the case with the Patton disc). And an on-the-lot source has told me that Eastwood approved the Blu-ray transfer during a test screening late last year.

Eastwood "came in to watch the first ten minutes, said it was fine, and then got up, went to the back of the room, sat down and watched the whole thing," the source says. "The only grain reduction was done to even out the grain structure. We also toned down a blood scene so it wouldn't look so day-glo red."

The trailer for The Day the Earth Stood Still (20th Century Fox, 12.12) with Keanu Reeves (as Klaatu), Jennifer Connelly, Kathy Bates and John Cleese. Directed by Scott Derrickson, written by David Scarpa. I copied the code from some Russian site called Ru Tube. YouTube had it up for a bit before it was pulled. It probably won't last very long here also. It's also watchable on this fan site.

Scarpa's script may, I'm reading, be based more closely on Harry Bates' 1940 short story called "Farewell to the Master" than the classic 1951 Robert Wise film with Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Billy Gray and Sam Jaffe. Don't read the Wikipedia synopsis of the short story if you don't want to know.

During a q & a session following a Los Angeles Film Festival showing of Boogieman, the superb Lee Atwater doc, I asked a question about the differences in the political climate of 20 years ago (i.e., during the Bush-Dukakis presidential race) and today, and said that I don't think that racial attitudes are quite as fearful and retrograde as they seemed to be in '88. I was obviously referring to the Obama ascendancy, but some in the audience flat-out laughed at me for saying this.

The night before last I happened to watch 48 HRS. ('82), the seminal action buddy movie with Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy as a cop and a con kicking around San Francisco and looking to stop some bad guys. I was surprised how...yesteryear it felt.

And I'm telling the snooties who laughed at my political naivete a couple of weeks ago that the racial attitudes and undercurrents in this Walter Hill movie, which came out 26 years ago, have all pretty much disappeared in Blue America. They give you a taste of a racially-biased and separatist culture that no longer exists in this country, or is at least severely diminished, and would never be represented in an action film made today.

Nolte is a flat-out racist brute who calls Murphy "nigger" and "spear-chucker." They go into a redneck bar that's supposed to be some kind of haven for good ole boy white separatism (in San Francisco?), and when Murphy walks in the vibe in the room is like, "Holy shit, a black guy!" When Murphy order a drink the bartender goes, "How about a Black Russian?" Can anyone imagine material of this sort turning up in any movie made today? Even one set in Bumblefuck, Idaho?

48 HRS. is about Nolte and Murphy seeing beyond their personal petty crap and coming to like and respect each other for who they are inside, but the fact that Hill and his writers toss in the racial jibes tell you something about the culture back then.

Attitudes were still fairly ugly in some quarters. The hosing of the civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, had happened only 17 years before, or what 1991 is to us today. Ours was a reasonably progressive society in elite media circles (Bryant Gumbel began his Today stint in January 1982, and Bernard Shaw had begun as a CNN anchor two years earlier) but Nelson Mandela wouldn't be released from Robben Island prison until 1990.

I was around and I don't remember anything in the early '80s like the comme ci comme ca homogenous whatever vibe that you feel today. In the blue cities and upscale suburbs, I mean. Maybe my memory is faulty, but I don't think so. The flannel-shirt dumb-asses are obviously still out there in force (they obviously kept Hillary's campaign going in the final stretches of the Democratic primary race), but things have definitely evolved and progressed since the early Reagan era.

"For those who are quick to call Hancock 'a mess' or the third act 'a huge left turn' or Variety's hypetastic Last Action Hero-like or whatever euphemism they are using this time, I offer this very serious suggestion -- see the movie again. If they still don't see how well the tapestry is woven, I will leave them to their myopia." -- Opening graph of David Poland's spoiler review of Hancock, which went up (I think) the night before last. See it again? I have a different suggestion. Erase this movie from your mind by any means necessary.

"The new Blu-ray of Dirty Harry prompts mention of the heated web debate about whether or not studios are over-enhancing older films for hi-def," writes film.com's Glenn Erickson. "Irate bulletin board posters have singled out Patton, as Fox's Blu-ray has been enhanced to minimize natural grain, presumably because Blu-ray proponents think that the format means 'no grain.' Patton was so bright and clear in its 70mm theatrical presentation that ordinary viewers are unlikely to complain. This reviewer wasn't offended either.

"Dirty Harry on Blu-ray is more complicated. The Blu-ray disc shows heavy tweaking to minimize grain, sharpen contrast and brighten colors. Sunny exteriors haven't changed much but heavy processing has given most night shots an almost unnatural look -- detail and bright color in what were once dimly lit areas, with everything else falling into inky blackness."

Hold on...Erickson is complaining about a so-so-looking film looking better than it did upon original release? Whatever for? I don't see the beef as long as it looks like "film" and bears a strong resemblance to the intended color and lighting scheme. Is Erickson saying it looks unnatural? Like data rather than celluloid? Look at that Clint Eastwood still up above, which was taken from the Blu-ray by the DVD Beaver guys. He looks terrific. And what's wrong with that?

"To this reviewer, Patton looks more or less like its theatrical presentation, while Dirty Harry is substantially altered," Ericksonj continues. "The 1971 release, after all, was never a visual beauty. The quest for 'docu realism' seems to have meant indifferent exposure and an over-reliance on zoom shots. Many dialogue scenes have a very shallow focus, and a number of shots are just plain out of focus. On original release prints, 'pushed' nighttime scenes offered milky blacks, golf ball-sized grain and weak hues."

Too many actresses are treated like race horses. They're allowed to race for a certain period, and then they "age out" and are put out to pasture. Is this what's happened to Rene Russo? She was looking good during the Clinton years, gliding along there in the early to late '90s (In the Line of Fire, Get Shorty, Tin Cup, The Thomas Crown Affair). And then...?

The last beam-ups were costarring roles in two movies released three years ago -- Two for the Money with Al Pacino and Yours, Mine and Ours with Dennis Quaid -- and then she went poof. And now off the radar for three years and counting. Not fair, not right -- women of Russo's age (born in '54) are in their prime and very watchable.

Hey, what about Madeleine Stowe? I saw her at the Aero Theatre a few months ago with her husband and child, but she's been MIA for a good while also. Several years. I heard she wrote a good script a few years ago (a western?) that people liked and wanted to make, but they said no when she said "I have to star in it." She wouldn't budge, the interest faded and it went away. That's the story I was told.

John McCain "was down at the end of the table and we were talking to the head of the [Nicaraguan] guerilla group here at this end of the table and I don't know what attracted my attention," Republican Sen. Thad Cochran recounted earlier this year, according to the Sun Herald's Michael Newsom. "But I saw some kind of quick movement...and I looked down there and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever.

"I don't know what he was telling him but I thought, good grief, everybody around here has got guns and we were there on a diplomatic mission. I don't know what had happened to provoke John but he obviously got mad at the guy and he just reached over there and snatched him."

The Western Writers of America have come out with a list of the 100 top westerns of all time. Variety's Anne Thompson, in an uncharacteristic burst of passion, has written that "they should be ashamed of themselves for these woeful rankings." I don't have the same likes and dislikes but I certainly don't feel...you know, disdain.

The WWA's Top Ten: Shane, High Noon, The Searchers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Dances with Wolves, The Wild Bunch, Red River, Tombstone, The Magnificent Seven and Open Range.

HE's Top Twelve: Shane, Unforgiven, Red River, The Wild Bunch, High Noon, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Open Range, The Ox-Bow Incident, Hud, Lonely Are The Brave, Tombstone and The Professionals.

I have a slight soft spot for Ride the High Country and Johnny Concho, the Frank Sinatra western. I've never really liked Johnny Guitar. I respect but have never really gotten off on those Anthony Mann/Jimmy Stewart westerns. Sergio Leone's westerns have too many portentous close-ups. I don't like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as much as I should because of the TV sound stage vibe, the hamminess of the acting, the fact that John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart are at least 15 years too old for their parts, etc. But I love the music and the opening credits.

I should have thought longer and harder before writing that Akiva Goldsman most likely wasn't to blame for Hancock's horrendous third act. HE reader "Richardson" did a good job earlier today of persuading me to reconsider. As he put it, "I can't see how you can blame Will Smith for major script problems when Goldsman is the credited re-writer who defanged the script. Same as [he did on] I Am Legend. You can blame Smith for approving Goldsman as the writer, though, since he surely did that."

Only in the film industry have I seen people laugh so uproariously and so obsequiously as Akiva Goldsman seems to be doing here. When you get to this town you soon learn that the vast majority of funny things that movie stars say and do are often hugely funny, causing those in their presence to shriek and bust a gut.

I guess my judgment was clouded by the fact that I'm an admirer of Goldsman's scripts of A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man, but I sorta kinda woke up when I re-read Richardson's post late this afternoon and also after a veteran Los Angeles critic reminded me in an e-mail, "When in doubt, blame Akiva Goldsman!"

This same guy sent along me a copy of Vy Vincent Ngo's Tonight He Comes -- the original script that eventually morphed into Hancock. "I haven't had time to read this completely yet," he said, "but from what I can tell it looks interesting and might serve as some sort of object lesson about what happens to scripts when they get tailored for a big-star tentpole. It's worth checking out if you have a little time. I don't know who sent this to me, but it's obvious he doesn't care who sees it at this point."

The problem is that Ngo's 126-page script isn't dated, and it's missing page 125. In any case, if anyone wants to read it I'll send it along.

Here's the letter that accompanied the script: "It's always frustrating to read movie reviews in which the writing is slammed. Screenwriters are easy targets, but they're often innocent bystanders in the development process. If you want to know what Hancock looked like before all the cooks in the kitchen got their grubby paws on it, here's an earlier draft that shows the writer's true vision.

"If you take the time to read it you'll discover that it was once a very promising story before the bigwigs crapped it up. You can't blame the writer for that."

Anyway, here it is. It would be better, of course, if I could find a version that contains page 125. If anyone has a PDF with all the pages, please send along.

Off to that screening (which I'm late for) -- back around 3 pm. In the meantime, please review this astounding summary of right-wing talkshow and blogger reactions to WALL*E. Consider this Glenn Beck quote in particular: "I can't wait to teach my kids how we've destroyed the Earth. I can't wait. You know if your kid has ever come home and said, 'Dad, how come we use so much styrofoam,' oh, this is the movie for you."

The denial levels in this guy are menacing. There are guys like Beck out there right now -- millions of them -- waving away the reality and chuckling to themselves and passing their bullshit along to their kids and keeping the ignorance levels high. This is the way the world is going to end.

A reader remarked in response to yesterday's Hitchcock/Truffaut item that Alfred Hitchcock looked like one of those recumbent tubbos from WALL*E, and I had to respond immediately to that. I'm re-posting here to give it the proper attention because it's a fairly major point:

"No -- he was Alfred Hitchcock, and therefore brought things to the table that were so creatively ripe, rich, eternal, fascinating and delectable that his physical proportions are anecdotal, at best. Same deal with Orson Welles (starting in the mid 1950s), Guillermo del Toro, Diego Rivera, Charles Laughton, etc. Their inside action so completely overwhelms the outside appearance that the matter of corpulence barely comes to mind.

"Now, it may well be that this or that morbidly obese Jabba waddling around the local galleria is a secret Orson Welles or Guillermo del Toro and that their inner light is simply not apparent to the passerby (i.e., I was a secret guy myself for years before coming into my own), but possessing an awareness of this or that lardbucket's wondrous creativity, imagination and richness of spirit is not my responsibility. I need some sort of readily apparent indications of this.

"Besides, we can all tell things by just looking at someone. We can see past a person's massive body-fat situation to look at how they're dressed, what they seem to be income or lifestyle-wise, what they're up to activity-wise, how fat their kids are and how their eyes look -- how sparkling or interested they seem to be in the life around them, or how deadened by junk food and a WALL*E teletubby lifestyle, which creates eyes that are next door to a shark's.

"On top of which Mr. Hitchcock was a super-Jabba only from the early to mid 1930s to the early '40s. He embarked on a diet during the making of Lifeboat with the aid of a product called Reduco (you can see the before and after shots of Hitchcock on a newspaper that William Bendix is reading during the film), and henceforth was never that massive -- just pleasingly plump or perhaps modestly fat. He suddenly became heavier, yes, towards the end of his life when he wasn't working and was eating far too many rich desserts or high-calorie gourmet dishes, but....I digress. (I'm kidding about Reduco, of course -- that was a made-up product Hitchcock threw in for the sake of visual economy.)"

HE reader Mark Edward Heuck has passed along the art below with the following message: "Alcoholic drifter with superhuman powers and antisocial feelings -- check. Saves good-looking stranger who dedicates themselves to superhero's career rehabilitation -- check. Starring Academy-Award nominated actor in the lead - check. Showstopping musical numbers written by Rocky Horror Picture Show creators -- uhhh, hold on." Has anyone ever seen this Alan Arkin film? I don't even remember it.

Don't let anyone tell you that the tide is turning on Hancock, and that David Denby's rave in the New Yorker was some kind of indication that the initial bad buzz is not to be trusted and that it's just a matter of the cool people sending out the cool word.

Forget all that. Hancock is a cloddy but decent-enough thing at first but then -- wait for it -- it shoots itself right in the face with a .44 Magnum. It does this at the two-thirds mark with (a) an astoundingly ridiculous plot turn, (b) a totally absurd abandonment of logical behavior concerning a certain character, (c) an introduction of a tediously loathsome fat-faced villain who does nothing but bring everyone down and spoil the vibe, and (d) a ludicrous (and suddenly introduced) back-story dependency that is ridiculous in its complexity and certainly makes no rudimentary sense.

How does a movie directed by Peter Berg (never a Stanley Kubrick-type guy but a fairly able guy and a shrewd operator) and produced by three very savvy hombres -- Akiva Goldsman, James Lassiter and Michael Mann -- along with star Will Smith turn out this badly? How could they have gone with such a drop-dead awful third act?

The villain has to be Smith; he must have pushed it through. Goldsman knows what makes a good story -- he's no dummy. And Mann clearly knows his way around a solid three-act structure and what good stories have to do. Did these guys actually produce this film or just sit back and glad-hand Smith and pocket the paycheck? What the hell happened?

Hancock, which I paid to see at the Arclight last night (after catching Hellboy II at the Chinese), is a crudely destructive but tolerably entertaining cartoon for the first act. A runamack alcoholic superhero creating titanic havoc and earning everyone's enmity -- fine. The second act, which is about Hancock's prison time, quiet meditation, rehab and p.r. restoration, is less engaging but not too bad. But the third act, trust me, sends the Hancock train completely off the rails and crashing into the stockyards. It is not just bad -- it is confounding, mind-boggling, nuts.

I could feel the energy hissing out of the audience last night once the third-act meltdown settled in. Some laughed it off; some were scratching their heads as they smiled at their dates; some were walking out with very pissed-off expressions. I have to get dressed and make a private screening of a friend's movie in less than an hour, but this movie is one of the weirdest big-budgeters I've ever seen because it's acts as it wants to destroy itself. It has no interest in doing that dance of skill and spirit and occasional movie magic that lifts you out of the third-act quagmire and sends you out satisfied.

Hancock dives into a third-act sinkhole and goes, "Whuhhh...we're diving into a pit of insanity now and we're not leaving! Get used to the stink pit! You thought this movie had a reasonable attitude and would avoid this kind of thing....surprise, assholes! We were a 'pit' movie all along and you just didn't realize it until the third act, so fake-out and fuck you! Because we're getting paid anyway.

"You don't want to know the realm we live in. You'll never get there anyway. We are the gods and you are the peons. We lose our bearings because we feel like going there because we're arrogant, which means pulling the rug out in the third act and you, the audience, pay to see it regardless. A pretty good deal from our end!"

As someone noted yesterday, Tony Ortega's "Trash Talking with Harvey Weinstein" piece, which was posted yesterday on the Village Voice site, recalls the sifting-through-garbage tactics of famed Dylanologist A.J. Weberman. Ortega happened upon a large bin of Harvey's trash in some Tribeca back alley that had all kinds of good stuff, and so he made a piece out of it and even got Harvey to get on the phone.

Harvey Weinstein; Nicole Kidman

The most heartening or encouraging thing for me were the various unsigned Nicole Kidman contracts regarding The Reader, which is currently filming without her. As Ortega notes, "She dropped out when she got pregnant for the first time with her new husband, Keith Urban, and was replaced by Kate Winslet. The documents contain details that are probably pretty standard for highly-paid stars like Kidman: the size of her name in advertising, a guarantee of first-class travel, a right not to have her hair 'permanently' colored, restrictions against nudity not already spelled out in the screenplay, the right to keep one of each item of her wardrobe," etc.

The agreeable surprise is that Kidman agreed to make the flm for a lousy $100 grand, plus another $450,000 if the movie breaks even. (Given the lore about Harvey's bookkeeping practices, the $450 thousand sounds like a dream.) As Ortega points out, "That's a pittance for a star in her bracket, but not unusual when an actor really wants to take part in an 'art' movie."

Kidman's price surely has been dropping since the double box-office calamities of The Invasion and The Golden Compass (which followed a commercially lackluster run of films starting with Cold Mountain and the refrain I've heard said over and over, to wit: "She doesn't sell tickets") but $100,000 seems really low for a star of her magnitude. Cheers nonethless for her willingness to take less for the right role. I don't know how many others have this attitude, but everyone should embrace the concept of risk in this business, at least occasionally. It would be a far healthier business if they did.

It's not nostalgia, and it's not a refrain of the "old films are better than the new" crap that the sentimentalists run up the pole from time to time. The fact is that this King Kong vs. T-Rex fight sequence (found about halfway through this clip) is better choreographed, more thrilling and generally more kick-ass than any mano e mano, big monster vs. big monster sequence made since the 1950s -- including, I would add, the battle between the Ed Norton and Tim Roth bulkazoids in The Incredible Hulk.

As part of a discussion of John Horn's recent L.A. Times piece about a visit to the set of Oliver Stone's W, Patrick Goldstein posted a page from Stanley Weiser's script. Noting Horn's observation that the film "is heavily focused on the current president's relationship with his father," i.e., ex-President George H.W. Bush, Goldstein chose a scene in which Bush, Jr. tries to comfort Poppy on the night of his electoral loss to Bill Clinton in 1992.

So what the hell -- here's my favorite scene. (I can play this game too...no?) It's basically George Bush, Jr. vs. his mother, Barbara Bush -- Page 92, Page 93 and Page 94.

The gist of Eric Lundegaard's 7.1 Slate piece (""Why We Need Movie Reviewers") is that critics are more in synch with moviegoer tastes than you might think. The key is to look at how critical favorites have done on a per-screen basis. If you look at things this way, the fog lifts and the blinders come off!

Going by Rotten Tomato ratings, Lundegaard notes that "while there were fewer 'fresh' films (i.e., pics that critics liked) that showed on fewer screens and took in less overall box office, they tended to make almost $1,000 more per screen than 'rotten' movies (i.e., pics critics didn't like). So, on a per-screen-basis, more people are following critics into theaters than not."

The Hollywood Reporter's Thomas K. Arnold has rewritten a Paramount Home Video press release about the forthcoming Godfather trilogy Blu-ray four-disc package that's coming out on 9.23, and again -- as noted in my riff on Peter Bart's 6.23 Variety blog piece about the package -- no mention of the fact that the restoration guru Robert Harris (Vertigo, Spartacus, etc.) supervised the frame-by-frame digital restoration of all three films. The last time I looked the Harris brand meant blue chip, top-of-the-line, etc. The PHV press release mentions Harris and his credits right up front (i.e., in the second paragraph).

In this stammering Tony Kaye video about his regard for the films of Stanley Kubrick, he talks (at the very end) about an encounter with a friendly payroll consultant. As a way of stirring empathy between kindred souls, the guy told Kaye "he played the ape in 2001...the one who picked up the bone and threw it into the air." As Kaye puts it, "The friendliest person I ever met when I was going bust was the ape in 2001."

I knew in a flash upon watching this morning that Kaye had spoken to Dan Richter, whom I interviewed 15 years ago for an L.A. Times Calendar piece. Here are three scans of the original -- #1, #2 and #3.

My second favorite Kaye line in this video is his repeating what New Line Cinema's Bob Shaye said in an argument over American History X, to wit: "'Look..who do you think you are, Stanley Kubrick or something? You don't have a track record, you haven't done anything, you can't tell me what you want." In response to this, Kaye says, " I was stood up, very reactive, and stormed out and proceeded on a direct road to hell. "

Taken on the balcony of suite #1418 at the Four Seasons Hotel prior to my Guillermo del Toro sit-down two days ago -- Sunday, 6.29.08, 5:40 pm

Three reactions to Eddie Murphy telling Extra's Tanika Ray that he's considering retirement from film acting with comments like (a) "I have close to fifty movies and it's like, why am I in the movies?," (b) "I'll go back to the stage and do standup" and (c) that he "doesn't want to be a part of" Brett Ratner's Beverly Hills Cop 4 because "the movie [isn't] ready to be done."

Eddie Murphy; Frank Sinatra.

One, Murphy may be feeling deflated about the tracking on Meet Dave (7.11), which has been fairly abysmal for the last couple of weeks. The first-choice numbers have recently improved (they're up to 2 or 3) but the signs are unmistakable that the bloom is off the rose and that people have finally understood that the odds of a Murphy comedy being gross or sloppy or not funny enough are pretty good so why bother in the first place? Murphy has since quashed the retirement talk, but that's only because he's moody fuck who feels what he feels when he's feeling it. The bottom line is that he's in a lousy place.

Two, he's talking about a "Frank Sinatra retirement" which really means an extended "fuck all this" adventure that's about shedding the old skin and finding new sources of vitality or what-have-you. A soul-seeking, soul-recharging exercise that every high-stress creative person goes through once or twice, usually in their 40s or 50s. In short, a bout of the middle-aged-crazies.

Three, it's obviously a healthy thing or Murphy to be thinking about getting out of the rut and get back to his stand-up roots. I used to love the guy in the old days (late '70s to '83). I saw him perform live twice back then -- once at a comedy club in Manhattan, once at the Universal amphitheatre. But the hip industry people haven't been with him for 20 years. His loss of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Dreamgirls confirmed that, and then people really didn't like his graceless ass when he bolted out of the Kodak theatre 90 seconds after Alan Arkin, the winner, took the stage.

All I know is, the guy used to be really funny, and that he needs to get back to that place again if he wants to matter again. Or feel anything again. Right now he's a dead man.

A 30-minute iPhone 3G video tour starring that same dweeby-looking Apple guy in his 40s with the conservative haircut and the glasses -- the same guy who's been hosting the how-to video on the Apple site since the iPhone first appeared last summer. Except it's not a quick tutorial for experienced users showing what's new and different. It's a basic tutorial about everything. Oh.

There are two PUMA PACs -- one run by founder and Massachusetts mom Darragh Murphy that stands for People United Means Action, and one run by Will Bowers that stands for Party Unity My Ass. But they're both are about rallying Hillary Clinton supporters believe she lost due to media sexism and who won't support Barack Obama (who, PUMAS believe, were the principal agents of said sexism) are perhaps inclined to vote for John McCain.

Here's a New England Cable News report on Darragh that ran yesterday, and here's a report by Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte contending that "PUMAS are Swiftboats" and particularly that Darragh was a McCain contributor in 2000 (based on a donation record found on Open Secrets.com) and that there's reason, therefore, to wonder about her true motives. Apart from being dead set against Obama, that is.

"I would like to argue that this PAC was not formed to support Clinton," Marcotte writes, "but to support the media narrative about hysterical feminists, and to help the McCain campaign with (a) creating the illusion that McCain is moderate enough to attract the votes of feminist Clinton supporters and (b) reinforcing the narrative about how feminists are just hysterical bitches with no common sense who subsist on outrage, can’t act in their own self-interest because of their feminine-addled brains, and can safely be ignored."

An HE reader named Lucas sent me an embedded code for that Travelocity ad I spoke of the other day. The actor is Stephen Full -- here's his reel. The actress is Diane Ruby Lane.

The currents flowing between Will Smith and Charlize Theron in Hancock "are reminiscent of the heat generated by Gable and Harlow, say, or Bogart and Bacall. It turns out that there's a bond between these two (which I won't reveal), and the rest of the movie, which includes some superb comic invention as well as scarily turbulent scenes, grows out of it. Hancock suggests new visual directions and emotional tonalities for pop. It's by far the most enjoyable big movie of the summer." -- from David Denby's New Yorker review, dated 7.7.08.

I've been sitting on this recording of Rob Reiner talking last Thursday to Pete Hammond during the L.A. Film Festival. It's well worth it for the story he tells toward the end about Albert Brooks doing a mime bit on Johnny Carson's Tonight show back in the late '70s or early '80s, and a lesson Reiner learned about how funny is funny even if the audience doesn't laugh. Because they will eventually.

Rob Reiner , Pete Hammond

IGN's Todd Gilchrist is doing the usual somersaults over The Dark Knight -- "an intense, disturbing masterpiece."

From a new Vanity Fair spread about Hollywood's New Wave. I know two of these guys -- Amanda Seyfried, 22, co-star (along with Meryl Streep) of Mamma Mia!, and Kristen Stewart of Into the Wild, Adventureland and What Just Happened?. But I'm just not that into Emma Roberts (Wild Child) or Blake Lively (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants). Okay, I haven't heard of them.

Seyfried, Roberts, Lively, Sterwart.

"If Michael Moore, Oliver Stone or, God forbid, some effete French director had crafted a feature film that was a thinly disguised political broadside portraying Americans as recumbent tubbos who moved around on sliding barcaloungers with built-in video screens and soft drinks always at the ready, don't you think there'd be some sort of notice taken?"

So asks Hitsville's Bill Wyman, the former arts editor for NPR and Salon. His point is that Pixar has done exactly this with WALL*E and that reviewers have barely acknowledged it. Many who have admitted that WALL*E has this social criticism aspect have done so in a vague pussyfoot fashion. The only ones who have stood up Gary Cooper-style and called a spade a spade, says Wyman, are N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott and myself and...I think that's it. (In Wyman's piece, I mean. Variety's Todd McCarthy and Cinematicals's James Rocchi also took note.)

"What was rarely analyzed in the reviews is that the earth is deserted because a Wal-Mart-like company called Buy n' Large has filled it up with trash, and the departed humans, expanded to Big Gulp size, are contentedly gorging themselves amid the comforts of a flying Club Med, where they slide around on those carts, on which they watch TV continuously without even having to sit up completely," Wyman writes. "While some of the better reviewers mention the beglotted humanoid forms, I found it odd that most mainstream reviewers didn't bother to point out what the film was saying.

"I'm no film theorist, but I think what director Andrew Stanton is trying to tell us is that we humans eat so much and limit our movements to such a degree that we will soon become immobile whales unable to focus past the video screens permanently affixed in front of our field of vision.

"And not subtextually, either; as my friend Michael Sragow says about such obvious material in films, 'It's not subtext -- it's text text.'

One day after Bill Clinton's "Obama needs to kiss my ass before I'll enthusiastically campaign for him" quote was picked up by news services, Clinton and Barack Obama talked on the phone and had a "terrific" conversation, according to this Nedra Pickler AP story filed an hour or so ago.

OBAMA: All right, Bill. How do we do this?

CLINTON: Well, are you ready to kiss my ass on Main Street?

OBAMA: Heh-heh...okay.

CLINTON: I mean, that would work.

OBAMA: I've got a campaign to win, Bill. I need your help. You don't like me, I can take you or leave you personally and who gives a shit? What do you want?

CLINTON: I want my reputation back. I was Elvis, the first black president. And I want a speech from you that pays tribute to that and puts all that race-monger, race-card player stuff to bed. I want it dead and buried. Like it never happened.

OBAMA: People respect you, Bill. I respect you as far as it goes. No need to dwell on the past.

CLINTON: I want my name back.

OBAMA: You made your bed, Bill. You, not me. I don't control the press any more than you do. Everyone says you hurt Hillary's campaign as much as help it. Probably more hurt. You've made yourself look emotionally petulant and hair-trigger with this kiss-my-ass thing, which tarnishes your rep. Not presidential, not dignified.

CLINTON: But here we are and you want my help. That's where we are right now.

OBAMA: I'm not going to get into the way you and Hillary played your cards with the rust-belt voters.

CLINTON: I want to move on the way you want to move on. I have a price, is all. Nothing is for free. Everybody wants what they want. You want what you want, but to get that you need to give me what I want. Or you may not get what you want.

OBAMA: I'll speak about you with respect and admiration, but I'm not going to go back to the campaign and say what happened didn't happen. Let's stand on common ground and go from there. That I'll do.

CLINTON: Then we need to try again. I want an apology or I stay home. I want to be who I was before you and Hillary got into it last fall. Particularly the guy I was before last January. Before we started campaigning in Iowa.

OBAMA: You're deluded.

CLINTON: And you can kiss my ass.

OBAMA: Okay, let's take a break. Try again next week.

CLINTON: Bye.

OBAMA: Adios.

Drew McWeeny's combo-review piece on The Dark Knight and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, posted this morning at 7:38 am, is too sprawling and wind-baggy. He's a first-rate writer but it wore me down. That said, here's the best graph in the whole piece -- a tribute to Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent performance in the Chris Nolan film.

Eckhart "deserves some praise as well for the way he brings Dent to life, and for finding a way to play earnest without becoming overbearing," Drew says. "Dent's a more difficult role than the Joker in many ways because there aren't as many big emotions you can play. He's a decent, upstanding man who believes in doing things right, in prosecuting criminals instead of fighting them on a street level, and little by little, he's actually making a difference.

Eckhart, in short, "gives the guy an inner life, just enough quirk to make him seem human, so that when the inevitable tragedy (which really is awful as laid out in the film) occurs, it's not a simple on-off cartoonish lurch into violence for Dent. We feel it. We believe it. Dent's physical trauma may be exaggerated, but the emotional side of it is pitch-perfect. And his work as Two-Face is just sad and angry. He's nothing like the Joker. Hell, I'm not even sure I'd call him a villain."

It is a profoundly good and nourishing thing to find love and peace with a partner, and so here's to David Poland having apparently tied the knot in Bermuda over the weekend. Mazel Tov and best wishes! A good thing to do for a fellow in his mid 40s. And may his first child be a masculine child. Poland is good with kids; I've seen him in action.

When I was sick with possible blood poisoning a year and a half or two years ago Poland left a "get well" phone message, so it seemed okay and symmetrical to send him a "congratulations and good for you" e-mail a few months ago when I heard he was moving in a marital direction. Poland being Poland, he ignored it. Nice yellow tie, though.

An hour-long chat with Hellboy II director Guillermo del Toro at the Four Seasons early Sunday evening, from roughly 6 to 7 pm.

We talked a little bit about the film, but mainly we discussed The Hobbit (the first part will be more Guillermo, the second more Tolkien/Jackson), the creation of "Bleak House" (his creative hideaway studio he built about five blocks away from the regular family home), his amazing 12 year-old daughter, relations with his father, the conservative tendencies and judgments of video-game producers, his admiration for the "Shadow of the Collossus" video game (engaging storyline, super-intelligent game play), the current doings of Cha Cha Cha, a discussion of "Hitchcock/Truffaut," etc.

He's one of the gentlest, kindest and most brilliant guys I've ever known. If you don't know him, listen to the whole hour and it'll serve as a kind of introduction. I shot a whole video of our chat but it was visually dull and not worth transferring to mp4 so I dumped it.

Last night Collider's Steve Weintraub was fuming that Variety's Diane Garrett and her editors didn't credit him for breaking a story "last week" that Legendary Pictures is developing some kind of sequel/prequel to 300 that Frank Miller is writing, Zack Snyder will direct and Warner Bros. will distribute.

Garrett posted Sunday night that "another 300 has been rumored from the start, but last week Snyder and the original producing team stoked a frenzy online when they talked about it at the Saturn Awards." The online frenzy, says Weintraub, stemmed entirely from his reporting that came from the 300 producers as well as Snyder.

The Quantum of Solace teaser. Reactions?

The Hollywood Reporter's Ray Bennett has raved about Mamma Mia! from London, where it'll open next Friday (7.4). How does a dedicated sourpuss and Europop/ABBA hater cast doubts and aspersions without having seen the film? Obviously he can't and shouldn't. The watchword should always be "try to be fair." The sourpuss can, however, sniff the air for girly-girl fumes, for hints of vapidity or plasticity or anything that feels like excessive fizz.

The word "fun," for example, has been known to strike fear in the hearts of ardent film lovers. "Fun," as we all know, is a code word that usually means the kind of shallow exuberance best appreciated by women and gay guys. Bennett's statement therefore that "no matter how many blockbusters there are, Universal Pictures' screen version of the global hit stage musical is the most fun to be had at the movies this or any other recent summer" is perhaps cause for concern. Perhaps, I say. Or perhaps not.

"Teenage boys may be glued to the latest action adventure, but the rest of the family will be having a rollicking good time and dancing in the aisles to Swedish pop group ABBA's irresistible songs," Bennett says. Does "the rest of the family" include dad and Uncle Frank and his son Carl as well as grandpappy Amos with the limp and the overalls? I don't think so. And I say this as a straight guy who's occasionally succumbed to shallow pop tunes with cleverly delivered hooks, like Paul McCartney's "No More Lonely Nights."

"It's a delightful piece of filmmaking with a marvelous cast topped by Meryl Streep in one of her smartest and most entertaining performances ever," Bennett writes. I don't mean to sound like a pisshead, but isn't the use of "delightful," "marvelous" and "entertaining" in the same sentence reason to wonder about the reviewer's critical scrutiny levels and his general susceptibility to the gush impulse?

It was reported earlier today that Bill Clinton has told confidantes that in order to get his full support in the presidential campaign Barack Obama will have to apologize, beg and grovel like nobody's business. Clinton was quoted as saying, in fact, that Obama will have to "kiss my ass" in order to make things right.

Bill Clinton, George McGovern

Clinton apparently resents having been tarnished by the Obama campaign for having played the race card, which of course Clinton absolutely did when he compared Obama's win in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson's two previous wins there in the '80s. Coupled with Hillary's statement that Obama is not a Muslim "as far as I know" and her "psst...Obama is black!" implications in speeches to and comments about "white" Appalachian-belt voters, it's almost surreal that her husband is angry about all this, but the truly arrogant have never recognized boundaries.

The last time "kiss my ass" was attributed to an ex- or would-be White House resident in a presidential campaign was, according to this Time report and this Wikipedia page, on the final day of the 1972 campaign when Democratic candidate George McGovern euphemistically told a pro-Nixon heckler in Battle Creek, Michigan, to plant his puckered lips on McGovern's rump. The astonished heckler, a chubby kid with glasses, reportedly told a reporter that McGovern had "said a profanity!"

Time columnist Joe Klein has told the Telegraph that he's been told the ex-president is "very, very bitter" about the campaign. "It's time for him to get over it or go off and do his charitable work," Klein is quoted as saying. "[Clinton] knows the rules of the road. What's going on now is kind of strange. I think his behavior is really, really shocking."

What...another Dark Knight reviewer doing cartwheels over Heath Ledger's Joker? Is this getting tedious or just repetitive? We get it already. Brilliant demonic channeling. The guy's going to win a posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Warner Bros. will almost certainly run a full-on Oscar campaign on his behalf. Now can we talk about something else, please? I feel like I'm getting beaten over the head here.

Ledger "presents himself as The Joker in a role that defines a career," writes Rope of Silicon's Brad Brevet. "It is unimaginable it would come to the point that a film based on a comic-book character could actually have such an impact on one person. On a generation. Ledger's decent into what is, and has become, The Joker makes Jack Nicholson's interpretation look like nothing more than a simple clown.

"'Wait'll they get a load of me,' Jack said 19 years ago. Wait until you get a load of Heath!

"The Dark Knight presents a character so destructive and without a care for those landing in his path of decimation that you are left to your own devices. Love him. Hate him. Hate to love him or love to hate him, director Christopher Nolan has guided an actor into a dark realm not often realized. The Joker finds his place alongside villains that go by the name of Hannibal, Scarface and John Doe himself. A nameless, unrecognizable entity you won't be willing to or able to admit is Ledger until the credits roll."

"Curmudgeonly, cantankerous, cigar-chomping Hellboy is a cross between a '40s noir detective and a burning fireplace," writes Variety's John Anderson, "but he's also cool enough to make Hellboy II: The Golden Army the hipster's hit of the summer. It's certainly a more deliberately (and successfully) funny movie, thanks largely to Ron Perlman, who returns with the rest of the cast, and without whom an onscreen Hellboy would have been almost unthinkable.

"Yes, Catholic imagery has always run rampant through helmer Guillermo del Toro's movies, including Pan's Labyrinth, which he made in between the two Hellboy entries, but he's really an evangelist of fanboy excess: Given the right push by Universal, he'll be making fantasy-horror acolytes out of the heretofore unconverted."

"In a previous life, del Toro might have been a maker of clocks -- clocks inhabited by gargoyles instead of cuckoos, and which exploded on the hour. But there's a precision to the visual ornateness of Hellboy II that exceeds even that of its predecessor."

Eight or nine days ago the New York Observer's Sarah Vilkomerson wrote one of the funniest observation-and-reporting articles I've read in ages called "You've Got Mail (You Never Open)." And I only happened upon it last night over dinner. Funny because it's true, because it's my life -- because the urban under-45 onliners, one gathers, have become a nation of mail denialists.

"I don't have a fundamental fear or anxiety that makes me avoid the mail," Mark McMaster, a 29-year-old senior account manager at Google, tells Vilkomerson. "It just seems relatively uninteresting, and probably most importantly, doesn't arrive when it's relevant. I don't want a bill to tell me it's time now to pay by showing up at my door. I just got home from work, asshole!

"At Google, we wax philosophical about `the cloud,' a metaphor for all the data that's kept in a server farm that could be in Oklahoma or Beijing but you can instantly access from any computer or phone or BlackBerry that's connected to the internet. I put as much of my life in the cloud as possible."

As Vilkomerson summarizes, "The internet, with its neat-o technology, has made it so that, for the most part, not opening your mail doesn't really matter."

Update: It's one thing for people to not use mail that much or as much -- that's been a growing reality for eight or ten years or whatever. Or for the usefulness of the U.S. postal service to matter less and less in terms of personal letters, bills, credit card come-ons and junk mail. But a growing subculture of web-savvy urban dwellers falling into the habit of not even opening their mail -- that's significant. And so far, no one reading this site seems to be appreciating this sea-change, or even chuckling about it. Flatliners. Asleep at the wheel.

A convincing report of stepped-up secret covert actions against Iran by the Bushies, as written by New Yorker's Seymour Hersh in a piece called "Preparing the Battlefield." The neocons have only a few months left to try and hurt I'm-a-dinner-jacket. It's a kind of prelude or warm-up, some believe, to the big Israeli bombing of Iran that will happen (if it happens) sometime after the Democratic and Republican conventions. One imagines that $4.40 a gallon will seem like a fond memory if and when such hostilities commence.

The obvious movie analogy to the "my middle name is Hussein!" movement (good citizens symbolically showing support for Barack Obama and flipping off the righties who've tried to use the exotic Middle-Eastern sound of this name to stir fear among rural dumb-asses) is, of course, the "I'm Spartacus" scene in Spartacus (1960). Moving then, moving today.

To emphasize the analogy I tried to find a good-quality letterboxed clip of this third-act moment in Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick's film. Then I was distracted by this beautiful Pepsi ad that ran on the Oscar show four or five years ago and forgot all about the Obama aspect. I love the moment when the Roman centurion offering to return the lunch-bag Pepsi shrugs and says "I'm Spartacus," and then pops open the can and downs it.