There’s a view that advance-praising a film or setting up high expectations before it gets seen at a film festival, as I may have done in the case of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown in last Saturday’s Peter Howell/Toronto Star forecast piece, is not necessarily desirable because it sets the movie up for a fall. By this criteria or scenario or what-have-you, someone else coming along and going “nyah, nyah…Garden State was better,” as Variety‘s Leslie Felperin has done in her review out of the Venice Film Festival, balances the high-expectation effect, which I guess is a good or at least a mitigating thing, from Crowe’s point of view…right?

“One of the creepier vanities of most political leaders is the private yearning to be tested on a historical scale,” writes David Remnick in this week’s New Yorker, in a piece about Bush’s response to the New Orleans-Katrina disaster. “Bill Clinton used to confide that, no matter what else he did as President, without a major war to fight he could never join the ranks of Lincoln and F.D.R. During the Presidential debates in 2000, George W. Bush informed his opponent, Al Gore, that natural catastrophes are ‘a time to test your mettle.’ Bush had seen his father falter after a hurricane in South Florida. But now he has done far worse. Over five days last week, from the onset of the hurricane on the Gulf Coast on Monday morning to his belated visit to the region on Friday, Bush’s mettle was tested — and he failed in almost every respect.”

I don’t care if Sean Penn’s boat sprang a leak. I respect the way he got out there and gave it up and reached out to people in New Orleans who needed help. What is there not to admire and salute about this? Just wait for some rightie dickhead columnist to try and make fun of this in some way…just wait.