Actor Ron Silver, whose immense talent and fine, irony-tinged performances (Reversal of Fortune, The West Wing, the original B’way production of Speed The Plow) were diminished and compromised in the public mind when he became a “9/11 Republican” and gave his earnest support to one of the most destructive and dysfunctional Presidents in U.S. history, died Sunday morning from esophegal cancer.

The 62 year-old actor had been fighting the disease for two years. Too soon, tragic news, sorry to hear it, condolences to his family and friends. I loved Silver’s acting and would like to forgive him for giving a speech in support of Bush-Cheney during the 2004 Republican National Convention — but that’s not going to happen. Silver shamed himself with his Bush allegiance, and history will not judge him kindly. But I greatly admired Silver before he became a right-wing Frankenstein hard-ass. Let’s try and remember him in a pre-9/11 light.

The prevailing character trait in Christine Jeffs‘ Sunshine Cleaning is a curious obsession on the part of Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) that she needs to look out for her wayward younger sister Norah (Emily Blunt). If you can relate to this on some level, the film might work for you. But it never did for me. It felt fake, or certainly strained.

I’ll always be ready to help my younger brother if he’s in a corner, but never to the point of a week-in, week-out constancy that would interfere with my own progress. I have my own struggles to overcome and demons to wrestle with; we all have to fend for ourselves. Life is hard enough when you’re strong and focused and organized and handling just the day-to-day (which for me includes the creative). Maybe women feel differently.

“Let me simply say, I feel like the old Alan Sillitoe short story ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’…and that’s what this is, by the way — a long-distance run.” — Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, speaking on 1.8.09.

Available on Amazon UK on 3.24.

The ruins of Detroit on Time‘s site and also the French reliques site: An HE reader called “x” asks, “Why not have Hollywood film all of its post-apocalyptic movies there? It would make money for Detroit, and it’s got to be even cheaper than filming in Canada. You don’t even have to build the sets before you burn them.”

Nobody has a softer spot for traditional Irish music than myself, so I think I know where I’ll be on Tuesday evening. Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Day parade has always been a must-to-avoid because of the thousands of drunken pigs who flock to Fifth Avenue; ditto most of the city’s Irish bars. But the Half King (where I had lunch last week) might be a different vibe. It’s an old-fashioned place with plain wooden tables and pub food. My sense is that it doesn’t cater to the ESPN crowd.

When I was married I visited Ireland in the fall of 1988. Myself, my now ex-wife Maggie and Jett, who was then four months old. We stayed at the 200 year-old home/farm of Chris Ryan in the town of Knocklong in County Limerick. Ryan runs a fabled riding-to-hounds business out of his home. Several horses and something like 40 black-and-tans live in the rear stables and kennels. There’s a limited edition book about the operation written by Michael MacEwan called “The Ryan Family and the Scarteen Hounds.”

With St. Patrick’s Day two days away, it seems like the right time to explain a phobia that I’ve been grappling with for years. I hate the name Danny. It’s a cruel and idiotic prejudice, obviously, but there it is. I just hate the damn sound of it. Anyone or anything called Danny is therefore diminished if not discredited. Sorry.

Dan and Daniel are cool, but Danny is a cheap 1950s Irish punk street name. I’ve always disliked the Irish ballad “Danny Boy” because of the odious aroma in the title. If Daniel Stern, Dan Futterman or Dan Aykroyd had begun their careers as Dannys they wouldn’t have done as well, I’m convinced, and might have even failed to break through. I further believe that Danny Moder, Julia Roberts‘ dp husband, will always have career troubles unless he changes course and goes strictly by Daniel or Dan. If I read a script with a character named Danny, I’ll stop reading and put it away. And I’ve always disliked the 1958 Elvis Presley flick King Creole because it’s based upon Harold Robbins‘ “A Stone for Danny Fisher.”

I’m not the only one on this boat. Ask Danny Huston, who has no doubt suffered in one way or another because of it.

Those connected with or working for Julia Roberts and her about-to-open film, Duplicity, have to be grinding their teeth about a nip-nip snark piece by Newsweek‘s Ramin Setoodeh that asks, “Is Roberts over?” They have to be especially chagrined about such a piece appearing a day before the big New York premiere of Tony Gilroy‘s deceptive brain-tickler and six days before it opens nationwide.

The answer, as I’ve written, is yes, time moves on but no, Roberts isn’t “over.” She is, however, in her Bette Davis/All About Eve phase now, which probably means she’s no longer a stratospheric box-office draw. She puts fewer butts in seats, but that’s still a valuable asset if you grade this attraction on the curve of her marquee power-that-was. She’s still “Julia Roberts” but in a more mature (tougher, steelier, suffer-no-fools) guise. Which basically means she’s become someone else. Which is cool.

Roberts is returning to the screen “after essentially taking five years off to raise her three children,” the Newsweek piece begins. The problem is that things have changed in the interim. One, the romantic comedy genre, in which Roberts has enjoyed her biggest successes, is “practically on life support.” Two, movie stars “have become a dying breed.” And three, Roberts hasn’t opened a successful film in eight years — i.e., since ’01’s America’s Sweethearts.

On top of which Roberts is “Hollywood ancient” — i.e., 41 years old — and, in Newsweek‘s view, a ’90s relic. (That was then, this is now.) Plus “it’s almost impossible for a woman to drag her date to a chick flick,” the article claims. Is this because Sex and the City, Mamma Mia and He’s Just Not That Into You were so awful that males have come to believe that the bottom has fallen out of chick-flick badness?

Plus her strict sense of privacy seems out of synch, the piece notes, “in this age of TMZ, celebrity blogs and phone cameras in every restaurant. It’s amazing how much we don’t know about her. Does anyone remember what her husband, Danny Moder, looks like? Even her children are virtually anonymous, which is quite a feat in our Shiloh– and Suri-crazed world. This is all great for Julia, but it may not be great for her career now that saturation media exposure has become the one-a-day vitamins of any healthy Hollywood career.”

Your husband’s face has to be commonly recognized and photos of your kids have to be in Vanity Fair and People in order to fortify your movie-star credentials? I feel nauseous.

But the observation about movie stars being a dying breed is more accurate than not. And it’s satisfying to once more hear that guys are totally refusing to be dragged to chick flicks.

It’s commonly known that Clint Eastwood‘s The Human Factor, which Warner Bros. (a.k.a., the “Death Star”) will release next December, is based upon John Carlin‘s “Playing The Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation.” Yesterday’s news is that the first half-decent set photos turned up on TheBadand the Ugly. All shot from a distance, no close-ups, fuzzy.

Matt Damon, Clint Eastwood on the South African set of The Human Factor (Warner Bros., 12.09). This and other pics were posted yesterday afternoon by TheBadand the Ugly. I have the script on PDF, but the usual laziness and fatigue has kept me from reading it.

Morgan Freeman reportedly bought the rights to Carlin’s book, and is now producing and playing Mandela in the film. It tells the story of how the 1995 World Cup Rugby Final — a contest between the heavily-favored New Zealand team and the South African Springboks — helped to heal the post-Apartheid racial divide.

Matt Damon, whose hair has obviously been blonded and is now trim and buffed up (i.e., a sharp contrast from the chunky cholesterol bod he grew for Steven Soderbergh‘s The Informant, which may turn up at the Cannes Film Festival two months hence), is playing South African rugby team captain Francois Pienaar.