The Reel Geezers hit it out of the park again with this review of Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

I’m in hell…we’re all in hell tonight with the Hildebeast having won Pennsylvania by a solid 10%. I know Obama’s seeming flirtation with Adlai Stevenson-ism is frightening to many of us (it certainly has been to me), but the two bedrock reasons for the persistence of the Clinton campaign are, face it or not, (a) gender loyalty among the less-well-off, somewhat less-educated women who can’t let go of the momentousness of a woman making a super-serious run for the presidency, and (b) primal tribal resistance among the working grunts — under the skin, only slightly acknowledged ** — to the idea of an African-American president. Very few will cop to it, but it’s been there all along. Don’t lie. Don’t deny.
“Why can’t Obama put Clinton away?,” MSNBC’s First Read asked this morning “The AP’s Ron Fournier takes a stab at answering this, and he points to five reasons (race, working-class voters, friends in trouble, inexperience, and mettle). But to us, women seem to be the bigger reason. They continue to rally to her side; nothing has shaken their confidence in her. If Clinton continues to beat Obama by 30-plus points among white women, how can he knock her out?”
On top of which that Clinton won’t stop with the viciousness, and the bubbas seem to keep going for it.
“The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it,” says a N.Y. Times editorial called “The Low Road to Victory.”
“Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.”
** Fournier’s piece noted that “an AP-Yahoo News poll found that about 8 percent of whites would be uncomfortable voting for a black president. The actual percentage is probably higher because voters are shy about admitting a racial prejudice to pollsters.”

Variety‘s Todd McCarthy reported at 9:30 pm this evening that Clint Eastwood‘s Changeling (Universal, 11.8), a 1920s mystery drama with Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Amy Ryan and Colm Feore, will compete at next month’s Cannes Film Festival.

With the official Cannes announcement due tomorrow morning, McCarthy also revealed three other surprises:
(a) Woody Allen‘s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which stars Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem, “will appear in Cannes after all, with Allen attending the fest over the initial weekend.”
(b) There may be a sliver of sunshine peeking through the clouds regarding the reported not-quite-ready situation concerning Steven Soderbergh‘s two Che Guevara films, The Argentine and Guerilla. “No one is saying the situation has definitely changed, but the competition schedule is being left flexible enough to accommodate Soderbergh in case he decides the films are in shape to present to the public — a result for which Cannes programmers have evidently been given some reason to hope,” McCarthy wrote.
(c) Barry Levinson‘s widely reviled What Just Happened? may not close the festival, despite an earlier report that it would.

Due respect, but Michael Cieply‘s 4.23 N.Y. Times story about Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner‘s Valkyrie — twice-delayed and presumed to be troubled — adds next to nothing to the story.

All it does is (a) offer a cursory sum-up of the situation that followed the announcement of the second push-back on 4.8.08 (Cieply believes that negative web reaction was the most noteworthy aspect) and (b) allows Wagner to sound tough and resolute with statements like “we will not be daunted,” “anybody trying to dismiss us or write us off doesn’t understand the business,” “nothing is going to stop us” and “we are determined to make this work.”
I obviously know what this sounds like, but I feel that the piece I threw together on August 9th provided a more interesting photograph of things as they seemed to stand 14 days ago than Cieply’s piece does now at looking back and reviewing the hoo-hah.

I was disappointed after missing a screening of OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, a French- produced James Bond/Austin Powers spy satire, at the Seattle Film Festival in June 2006. It had opened to great reviews and strong business in France two months earlier, and it seemed like all the rage. (As far as a French- made film can be said to be the rage of anything.) A year and a half later it played at the St. Louis International Film Festival.

And now it’s here…almost. But too late! A little more than two weeks hence (i.e., on May 9th), it will finally open commercially in this country. I’m sitting here and I’m going, “They expect me to feel enthusiasm about an ’06 movie?” It should have at least opened last summer. The current has wound down. Flatline.

Is there any guy in the civilized world who wouldn’t feel at least a slight twinge of concern if a woman he’s just met has confessed she doesn’t use deodorant?

5:52 pm Update: First it was “too close to call,” then “too early to call” and now Pensylvania has been called a Clinton win with — right now — a 10% margin, 55% to 45% in her favor. If the margin of victory doesn’t go down to 5% or 6% or 7%, it’ll be a bit of an Obama bummer. Were those exit polls indicating a 4% margin between Clinton and Obama — 52 to 48 — anywhere near accurate?

Answer the following after watching this trailer for The Wackness (Sony Classics, 7.3). Josh Peck obviously does well at playing young urban white guys who talk in a street argot that is part imitation “black” and part whatevuh but in any case suggests a total inability to convey an air of refinement and higher education. But answer me this…

If I were totally alone in my galumph-aversion to Forgetting Sarah Marshall‘s Jason Segel, would Universal have taken his face off the film’s posters? Segel told David Letterman last Friday night that “they tested posters with my face on them and there was an unfavorable reaction to my face. I’m not quite good-looking enough to be the good-looking guy, but I’m not bad-looking enough to be the hilarious guy.” Obviously there’s a silent majority out there that feels the same pain.

Any film about sexual obsession and kinky-deranged inclinations has to have attractive actors — no ifs, ands or buts. That means you keep things within….how to say it?…somewhat conventionally appealing limits, which means steering clear of dweeby-looking actors with boney bods, pale freckly skin and red hair with that “just arrived from the Planet Uranus” look in their eyes. In this respect, Julianne Moore as the notorious Barbara Daly Baekland works just fine, but Eddie Redmayne as her totally weird son Antony does not.

Here’s the trailer.
The IMDB keywords for Tom Kalin’s film (IFC First Take, 5.30) are “masturbation,” “hand job, ” “incest,” “mother-son incest” and “woman on top.” The Wikipedia entry on the late Ms. Baekland says it all. To be honest and comprehensive about it, I should also mention that any film costarring Stephen Dillane presents a problem for me. (For me, the only digestible Dillane performance — recently, I mean — has been his Thomas Jefferson in HBO’s John Adams miniseries.)

The Pennsylvania polls close at 8 pm. All right-thinking people are hoping that the Hildebeast margin of victory will be kept to within 5% to 7%. A winning margin below 5% will be cause for champagne in the streets.

I suggested yesterday that Envelope columnist Elizabeth Snead should have attempted an explanation why the Sex and the City is blowing off a big-ass debut screening at the Cannes Film Festival in favor of one in London, especially since Sarah Jessica Parker said Cannes was a possibility in a Snead article that ran on 3.14.
Today Snead ran a portion of an interview with an anonymous Warner Bros. insider, who offered at least a partial answer to the London-not-Cannes question. “A WB insider who refused to go on record told me, ‘One word: recession,'” Snead wrote,. “[The source added] that movie studios were feeling the pinch of a devalued U.S. dollar and that a Cannes fete done right would be far more costly than a red carpet event in London.”
I don’t believe this is the entire reason for one shaved millisecond. There’s no doubting the fact that Cannes is going to be horrifically expensive for everyone this year, but London is no cheap deal either. Everything hurts when you’re in London. I was there last March and I know. It’s just as bad as France. So if you ask me the “London is cheaper” explanation is at least partly bullshit.