This morning Sasha Stone, Phil Contrino and I looked at the tight weekend box-office competition, Lou Lumenick‘s N.Y. Post story about that Lincoln sneak, the ins and outs of Flight and so on. Here’s a stand-alone mp3 link.

For a little background here are (a) Movieline‘s Jen Yamato on Saturday night’s Fantastic Fest Faraci-Swanberg debate and boxing match, and (b) Glenn Kenny‘s Some Came Running commentary on same.

Watch this clip and imagine the real-life 21st Century parallel. There are more than one or two to be gleaned.

Who cares if End of Watch and House at the End of the Street tied for first place at $13 million each and Clint Eastwood‘s Trouble With the Curve tallied $12.7 million? It could have Clint tied for first with End of Watch and End of the Street in second place or vice versa with a little three-card-monte switcharound. It doesn’t matter. It’s a minus-ten topic of discussion.

It was clear from the Trouble With The Curve trailers that with a few variations Clint is playing the same snarly old guy that he played in Million Dollar Baby and Gran Torino. Trouble didn’t get the reviews it wanted, okay, but if pays off at the end. So why didn’t the Gran Torino crowd show up in greater numbers? Or will they show up in two or three weeks’ time? Did Clint’s “empty chair” routine at the Republican National Convention have anything to do with anything?

The closer I put my ear to the tracks, the more convinced I am that Robert Zemeckis‘s Flight (Paramount, 11.2) is going to be the shit when it opens less than six weeks hence, and more precisely after it closes the New York Film Festival on Sunday, 10.14. The trailer tells you it’ll be a smart, above-average situational drama about a commercial pilot with an alcoholic history who saves a planeload of passengers from death despite being half in the bag. Or perhaps on some level because of this condition.

I don’t know the Flight particulars and I haven’t read John Gatins‘ screenplay. But I’m getting the feeling from the trailer and from what I’m hearing that Denzel’s condition when he saves his plane from crashing is what saves the day. If he’d been 100% sober he might not have rolled the plane over and landed it upside down. But even if this isn’t what the film says, I’m thinking that this principle applies to some extent to car driving.

If you’re driving your Lexus drunk your reaction time is slower than if you’re cold sober, and if you’re really stinko you’re definitely a menace to all humanity. But drunk or semi-drunk driving isn’t all bad, and sometimes it works. Or at least it did for me.

I know, I know — did I just say that? In today’s world DUI is a felony punishable by huge fines and jail time in some cases, and rightly so. But in the ’70s tens of thousands of people drove from place to place every night with a buzz-on and in some cases plain shitfaced, and some awful things resulted, I’m sure. But quite often, probably the vast majority of times, drunks just drove home and parked their cars and watched a little TV and went to sleep and all was well.

May God forgive me but in my early drinking days when I lived in Wilton and Westport, Connecticut, I drove late at night with several beers and/or Jack Daniels on the rocks in my system, and I just cruised on through, and I mean weekend after weekend after weekend after weekend. No accidents, no fender benders, nothing. Others plowed their cars into ponds and trees and guard-rails, but not me. There were times, in fact, when I drove down those winding country roads at high speeds and I would focus like a motherfucker, and I was convinced at times that I was driving like Paul Newman at Lime Rock.

I started to tell myself, in fact, that I drove better when half-bombed because I was less intimidated by the possibility of something going wrong. I drove without fear, without hesitation. I took those hairpin turns like a champ.

In short, if you’re as good a driver as I was and you’re not flat-out wasted, driving with booze in your system isn’t such a bad thing. Or at least it doesn’t need to be. Would I drive drunk now? No. I stopped drinking last March and I’m not an asshole. I’m just saying that I got away with it for years, and…well, I’ve said it.