George Butler’s Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (ThinkFilm, opening soon) “brings to the surface a Kerry I didn’t know existed: charismatic, idealistic, eloquent. {So] who turned this brave leader in to a Stepford candidate?” writes critic B. Ruby Rich. “Activist groups like MoveOn.org could do worse than buy airtime to show Kerry’s historic testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a passionate attack on failed foreign policies and warmongering. Yeah, just the kind of speech he ought to deliver now in 2004.”

There’s been a bit of a Huckabees dust-up in reaction to Sharon Waxman’s friendly-but-unflattering David O. Russell profile in last Sunday’s New York Times. The beef on the part of two Huckabees cast members I spoke to on Wednesday evening is essentially this: the dynamic between directors and actors during a shoot amounts to a special insiders-only thing with its own particular self-enclosed rules, and that it’s hard for a visiting journalist to understand this special camaraderie as fully and clearly as the filmmakers do. Hence Sharon’s overly matter-of-fact Huckabee’s set report (in the view of these actors) about Russell and his cast going through all kinds of emotional loop-dee-loops. Let’s just leave it at that.

The relentless energy coming off Michael Moore’s site (www.michaelmoore.com) is truly intoxicating right now, and is almost enough to dispel lamentable notions that Kerry has so hopelessly cocked things up that Bush has the election in the bag. Moore isn’t having any of this defeatist crap. His 9.20.04 message (“Put Away Your Hankies”) says, in part, “Enough doomsaying! Bush is a goner…IF we all just quit our whining and belly-aching and stop shaking like a bunch of nervous ninnies. Geez, this is embarrassing! The Republicans are laughing at us. Do you ever see them cry, ‘Oh, it’s all over! We’re finished! Bush can’t win! Waaaaaa!’ Hell no. It’s never over for them until the last ballot is shredded. They are never finished — they just keeping moving forward like sharks that never sleep, always pushing, pulling, kicking, blocking, lying. How do you think they’ve been able to [run the country] considering they represent only about 30% of the bvoting populace? It’s because they eat you and me and every other liberal for breakfast and then spend the rest of the day wreaking havoc on the planet.”