With a total of 2,885,555 ballots having been recorded in the initial Minnesota U.S. Senate race, fivethirtyeight.com‘s Nate Silver has posted a mathematical analysis-projection report that “works out to a projected gain of 242 votes for Al Franken statewide over Norm Coleman. Since Coleman led by 215 votes in the initial count, this suggests that Franken will win by 27 votes once the recount process is complete (including specifically the adjudication of all challenged ballots).

“The error bars on this regression analysis are fairly high,” Silver cautions, “and so even if you buy my analysis, you should not regard Franken as more than a very slight favorite. Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe that the high rate of ballot challenges is in fact hurting Franken disproportionately, and that once such challenges are resolved, Franken stands to gain ground, perhaps enough to let him overtake Coleman.”

In a box-office story about the Twilight avalanche, N.Y. Times reporter Brooks Barnes notes that “experts” are saying the film “could struggle with what movie executives call playability, or the ability to maintain box-office heat after the core fan base has moved on.”

Summit distribution chief Richard Fay is then quoted saying that “he hope[s] strong word-of-mouth among mothers will keep ticket sales solid.”

Mothers? Guys of all ages can go to this thing and learn (i.e., remind themselves) how to act with their girlfriends and wives in a way that will most likely lead to some action. This is not a painful-to-sit-through, young-girls-only movie. It goes down fairly easily, plus it’s a major phenomenon that anyone who fancies himself to be any kind of cultural pulse-taker is absolutely required to see.

“This movie isn’t Four Christmases,” Today‘s Gene Shalit just said on the air. “It’s against Christmases.” Oddly, I can’t shake the urge to slip into this thing anyway. I know it will bring much suffering, but I’m a fool for the wicked Vince Vaughn tongue-lashings I’m hearing in the trailer.

Inspired by the depiction of the fight against Prop. 6 (i.e., the Briggs Amendment) in Milk, Marshall Fine recounts a 1977 conflict with the forces of southern conservatism when he was a young-buck entertainment reporter (i.e., liberal, Jewish, nervy) for Jackson, Mississippi’s Clarion-Ledger and panned a performance by Anita Bryant at a local state fair. Part One of the story was posted yesterday; the second installment will conclude sometime later today.

Last night Variety‘s David S. Cohen and Anne Thompson posted a story about the digital projection snafu that ruined last Thursday evening’s Benjamin Button screening at L.A.’s DGA theatre. Three days after the incident feels like a long reporting, writing and editing period to me; they couldn’t have posted something by Friday afternoon? Hubba hubba.

And why didn’t they identify the manufacturer of the digital projection system that failed, “which Par rented for the occasion”? It seems as if editorial political pressure might have been brought to bear upon Cohen and Thompson with the rationale that it wasn’t the hardware but some error by the DNA projectionist. This scenario is indicated by a one-word graph stating that such incidents “raise questions about screening room hardware and projection-room expertise in operating new d-cinema projectors.”

I want names and specific explanations, dammit. Bad guys were at fault and I want the guilty punished. If I was David Fincher I would have had a frank conversation with the manufacturer of the digital projector and with the DGA’s projection staff manager, and I would have gone all Rahm Emanuel once the responsible parties were identified.

I’m down for a Reader screening tomorrow at 2 pm, and then a 7 pm Benjamin Button unveiling at MOMA’s Titus with a David Fincher q & a to follow. Whatever and however I and my New York colleagues wind up responding the next morning, the L.A. crowd has gotten the first looksee and posted the first reviews, and that’s that.

Here‘s Variety‘s Anne Thompson….

“When The Curious Case of Benjamin Button reaches its climax, it is extraordinarily moving,” she begins, “although some find the movie cold and dispassionate. It may pack a more powerful punch the older you are and the more people you have lost. In that case it will score with the Academy, who will also recognize the skillful filmmaking on display.

“The movie marks a seismic shift in terms of what is possible in moviemaking. What Fincher and his team have done is no small technological feat. Button starts off as a CG-aged baby, moves through CG-altered older Pitt faces superimposed on small bodies, and then proceeds to the ‘real’ Pitt wearing makeup and then getting younger and younger.

“Thus the film’s central performance is in great part a visual effect. (Cate Blanchett is also made younger digitally, but aged with makeup.) That accounts in part for the movie’s high cost (well above $150 million) but is also its primary limitation.

“Thus while I admire the film’s amazing accomplishment — it’s hard to imagine that anyone but the digitally sophisticated Fincher, who has become adept at “painting” his digital canvases, could have pulled this off–the movie is not entirely satisfying. But given what it is, it’s hard to imagine it being done done any better. The actors are superb, especially Pitt and Blanchett, who should earn Oscar noms.

“What’s missing has partly to do with the limitations of the technology. Button reminds me of Peter Sellers as Chauncey Gardner in Being There. He’s oddly passive and restrained, zen-like as he floats through all the decades, watching, listening, learning. He narrates the tale via his diary, along with his dying love Blanchett. We see him engaging with people, but he never says much. We see him from the outside; we never get under his skin, and we never learn the fruits of his wisdom. He stays much the same.

“Still, the movie is sadly beautiful, of a piece, as impeccably wrought as its ornate clock that runs counterclockwise. Do Paramount and Warner Bros. have a prayer of making their money back? This movie needs all the help it can get, from anyone who loves movies and wants the studios to take more risky bets like this one.”

This didn’t air last night on SNL….beeep. The image of a naked, bitch-slapped Joe Leiberman….beeep….walking his McCain-loving ass back to Connecticut from Washington, D.C., is worth it in itself.

The latest estimate is that Twilight will end up with $70 or $71 million by tonight. It made about $20.7 million yesterday plus $35,948,000 combining Thursday midnight and Friday. It’ll bring in another $45 million or so during the five-day Thanksgiving holiday (especially with fewer people travelling this year due to economic worries). It will probably end up with $150 to $160 million at the end of the day.

Quantum of Solace will make $27,193,000 by tonight, which is a 60%drop from last weekend’s opener. That’s not a good hold. It should have been down about 40% to 45 % tops, meaning that people who saw it last weekend didn’t like it all that much.

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is six feet tall? She’s shorter than me by only half an inch without shoes? TV and movies always conceal and never reveal body size. I remember meeting James Mason in ’83 or thereabouts and feeling startled by the fact that he was a fairly sizable guy, very nearly my height, which strongly contradicted my movie impression that he was maybe 5′ 8″ or 5′ 9″, at best. I have 100 stories like this.

James Mason

“I would be happy to watch James Marsh‘s documentary Man on Wire on a continuous loop, preferably shown on the wall beside my desk, volume off, while I try to write,” says author Ann Patchett in a N.Y. Times “Screens That Matter” piece compiled by Emily Gould.

“Aside from being deft on a high wire, Philippe Petit was smart enough to have made plenty of footage of his gorgeous and glorious youth, rolling around in tall grass in the French countryside with his friends, walking the wire with his girl on his back. But the film’s true moment of glory was also Petit’s: the 45 minutes he spent traversing the space in the air back and forth and back and forth between the two World Trade Center buildings. He bows, salutes, kneels and then, as if the glory of the world has finally overwhelmed him, he simply lies down in the clouds.

“His art was exhilaration, fearlessness, a wild grab at life. The wire he and his friends strung at night between the two towers formed the intersection of recklessness and precision. And those buildings, those silent supporting actors, you can’t help marveling at how young they are.

“In August 1974, when Petit took his morning stroll, they were still raw on their upper floors, not completely finished. I would wish for those buildings that they could someday be remembered for how they began — with the felonious act of a young man who was madly in love with them, their height, their audacity, their doubled beauty — instead of how they ended. Man on Wire gives those towers back to us, at least for a little while. It also reminds us of all that art is capable of when what is risked is everything.”

Five days ago Mitt Romney wrote a N.Y. Times Op-Ed that made great sense, saying in essence that the Big 3 Detroit car manufacturers have to do a major overhaul (including the removal of General Motors’ Richard Wagoner, Chrysler’s Robert Nardelli and Ford’s Alan Mulally) before the government can begin to think about helping out.

I was amazed to find myself in total agreement with Romney of all people, who had done nothing but anger and irritate me all through the primary campaign season. He basically said the auto industry needs to hire some Steve Jobs-type guys to streamline and revamp, and that means the Big 3 dickwads need to go.

And once it became known that Wagoner, Nardelli and Mulally had flown to Washington, D.C., in three separate corporate jets, I channelled Frank Pentangeli in that Lake Tahoe scene in The Godfather, Part II. “I want those Rosotto brothers dead,” he told Al Pacino‘s Michael Corleone. “No,” snapped Pacino. “Morte,” Pantengeli said again.