I’m listening to MSNBC out of the corner of my ear, and I just heard a political analyst refer to “low-information voters” and then define them as “people who…uhm, just aren’t paying attention? But you know? It’s often these people who tip an election.” Precisely — that’s how we got Dubya in ’00 and ’04. “Low information voters” is the p.c. TV term. “Gap-toothed tattooed dumbasses” is the term that pops out after a couple of beers. If I was on TV and the subject came up? I would call them “rurally challenged.”

My Virgin America plane arrived in Los Angeles at 8:20 pm Saturday. I crashed around 1 am, up at 5:30 am. Up until 3:30 pm when I took a nap, intending to rise again at 5:30 pm. I slept through two alarms and woke up groggy at 11:30 pm — now I’m flat cold alert. A normal sleep rhythm will kick in eventually. A nap here and there, catch as catch can, roll with it. It takes about a day per time zone.

Now begins the catch-up. Over the next week or two I need to try and see People Like Us, Seeking A Friend For The End of the World, To Rome With Love,The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Brave (which I’m not looking forward to), Men in Black 3 (wait for DVD?), Piranha 3D, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Bel Ami, Paul Williams Still Alive, Lola Versus, Dark Horse, El Gringo, My Way, Life Happens, The Lady, etc., etc. Plus Kirby Dick‘s just-opened The Invisible War, Oliver Stone‘s Savages on Thursday, etc.

I can buy “Tom Kpy3” in any number of roles — a sports agent cut loose, a profane studio chief, a MIssion: Impossible guy scaling a glass skyscraper in Dubai — but I don’t know about his playing a six-foot-five urban badass in Jack Reacher. This, at least, is how author Lee Childs has described Reacher in his best-selling series. The source novel, “One Shot,” is the ninth.

Yes, Cruise will “pull it off” with his usual command and hard-edge physicality, but he’s also on the short side. Everybody knows that. A bit of a speed bump.

I know this much — One Shot, the original title, sounds cooler than Jack Reacher. It makes me think of “reach-around.” And it sounds like an overly self-conscious effort to create a macho brand — they might as well have called it Jack Belt-Buckle or Jack Motorcycle Boot or Jack Hardcock. (Then again you don’t want anything too sexual sounding — Cruise doesn’t do that.)

Paramount will release the actioner, shot in Pittsburgh and directed and cowritten by Chris McQuarrie, on 12.21.12.

This is hilarious. And brilliant. Once the blowback against a film reaches this kind of meta-whatever, it’s finished. It took a little while to emerge but this, I predict, will be the ultimate Prometheus verdict. Ridley Scott is putting on the fishing hat and Raybans as we speak and heading out to the desert on the eastbound 10.

Magic Mike was looking at a weekend tally in the mid ’40s. But the Saturday income dropped 45% from Friday’s, and now the projection is for $38 million or thereabouts. Apparently Joe & Jane Popcorn, looking for an amusing male-stripper high, didn’t like the serious character stuff or…what, the orange sepia photography?

Universal’s Ted dropped 15% from Friday to Saturday but will still take in $52 million. So what happened apart from the usual U.S. boxoffice scenario of a not-as-good film (i.e., Ted) making more money than the clearly superior competition (i.e., Mike)?

There’s always been a huge aesthetic gap between Serious Film Catholics and casual ticket buyers. The former tend to view Average Joes as not just Adam Sandler-embracing “easy lays” whose tastes are stubbornly unsophisticated, but in some ways “stupid and ineducable,” to quote from “The Film Snob’s Dictionary.” A $5 million indie flick making $38 million over a single weekend is obviously a hugely successful thing, but negative buzz from the above-described sector prevented Mike from hitting the mid 40s. Philistines.

When I was coming out of Ted late Friday night at the Chelsea Clearview I heard three guys talking about Mike, which had also just ended. One guy was complaining that Mike “has no plot.” He apparently meant it had none of the contrivances and complications that constitute a “plot” according to 21st Century standards, but what happens in Mike is all driven by character. Mike has an arc, of course, and the four significant characters start at point A and end up and point J or K. What the hell was that Chelsea Clearview guy looking for? A third-act twist?

You could throw that “no plot” complaint at a lot of films, including Last Tango in Paris and Lawrence of Arabia and three or four hundred others.

“Is there a secret language school where they teach under-35 women to converse in mallspeak with the exact same reedy, mincing, me-me tones?” — tweeted from JFK before my Virgin America LA flight took off.

“I disliked Prometheus intensely,” writes “Subashini” in a 6.23 post on the Blog of Disquiet. “I do think that having acrimonious feelings towards the film is the actual point — the film seems to be a stand-in for a certain segment of humanity and its imperialist, ruinous ambitions, though like most films coming out of Hollywood this seems to coexist with its appreciation of capital, technology, and involuntary/reproductive labour.

“That in itself doesn’t make it inherently unlikeable, not at all. But as Susan Sontag wrote in ‘The Imagination of Disaster,’ ‘Science fiction films invite a dispassionate, aesthetic view of destruction and violence — a technological view,” and perhaps it’s the nihilist technological determinism of Prometheus that is inherently unsettling. Perhaps it’s this utter lack of meaning in the movie that is its meaning, and consequently the source of my loathing. Maybe a part of me just wants machines and people to get along? I’m not sure.”

I know this for sure: I will never, ever watch this movie again. They can send me a free Bluray and I’ll give it to someone who might appreciate it.

As I wrote on 6.1.12: “Prometheus is impressively composed and colder than a witch’s boob in Siberia — a forbidding gray film about howling winds and chilly people. It’s visually striking, spiritually frigid, emotionally unengaging, at times intriguing but never fascinating. It’s technically impressive, of course — what else would you expect from an expensive Scott sci-fier? And the scary stuff takes hold in the final third. But it delivers an unsatisfying story that leaves you…uhm, cold.”

Also: “What kind of space-voyage movie has on-board officers walking around in flip-flops and sandals? All space travellers in all the space-travel movies going back to George Melies‘ A Trip to the Moon have worn boots or lace-ups or anti-gravitational grip shoes or whatever. Sandals! My heart sank when Michael Fassbender made his entrance with his milky Irish man-toes…don’t get me started.”

I apologize for omitting Ben Lewin‘s The Sessions (i.e., formerly Six Sessions, and before that The Surrogate) in my initial posting of my best-of-2012 piece, which I called “Half-Time.” I’ve since corrected the error. Fox Searchlight will release this highly praised acquisition (for which they paid $6 million) on 10.26.12.

“I saw Ben Lewin‘s The Surrogate this morning,” I wrote on 1.24.12, “and yes, it’s a touching, thoughtful and comforting film about touching, needing, being open and the finding of fulfillment. It’s an emotional, erotic variation on the themes in My Left Foot, The Sea Inside and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly with a little sprinkling of Who’s Life Is It Anyway?.

“And John Hawkes, as a quadriplegic invalid who hires a sex therapist to cure his virginity, will almost certainly get some awa

Tom Berenger has been jogging around the track for 35-plus years. He broke into features in the mid ’70s and had a great 16-year run — Looking for Mr. Goodbar (’77), In Praise of Older Women (’78), The Dogs of War (’81), The Big Chill (’84), Platoon (’86), Someone to Watch Over Me (’87), Major League (’89), Born on the Fourth of July (’89), The Field (’90), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (’91), Sliver (’93) and Gettysburg (’93). And then he seemed to slip into B-level genre stuff, but he came back two years ago with a significant role in Chris Nolan‘s Inception.

The man is a veteran who’s paid his dues several times over and is now into his seventh decade of life on the planet…and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences has only just granted him membership? I understand that you have to apply and that you need a sponsor or two. Maybe Berenger never applied, but why wouldn’t he have? He knows this town and that membership couldn’t hurt and could possibly help his career, so what kind of moron do you have to be to say “naaahh, I don’t want to join”? So if he did apply before, why would Academy gate-keepers turn him down? It just seems weird. The overwhelming majority of those recently granted membership are people who broke through within the last ten years or less.

Wait…is it because he’s politically conservative or something? I don’t know anything but that kind of thing can be a stopper.

The odd thing about Berenger is that he’s allegedly declared that his favorite feature of those he’s starred in was Gettysburg, in which he played Gen. James Longstreet. That movie has stayed in my mind for one reason only — bad beards. I would say that the beards in that film were ludicrous — they looked woven out of yak hair.

Magic Mike did around $18 million on Friday, and is forecasting $47 million by Sunday night — much higher than expected. And Seth McFarlane‘s Ted, the Mark Wahlberg teddy-bear movie which I saw tonight and was more or less okay with, is expected to do a little over $50 million by Sunday night. All the hot-dog-eating, ESPN-watching guys who wouldn’t be caught dead seeing Mike went to Ted — it’s that simple.

Mike got a B from CinemaScore respondents — i.e., it didn’t get an A because some felt that it would’ve been a little better if it had less character stuff and was glossier-looking (“What was up with the orange-y color?”) and cheaper and sillier with dumb jokes.

For whatever reason the following exchange, which happened at a party in London’s Soho district sometime in early December 1980, has never left my memory. It was a really great gathering, thrown (or so I recall) by Time Out magazine. It was crowded and everyone was half bombed and the music had a great tribal drum thing going on. This is how it went:

Me: Who are we listening to?

Guy #1: What?

Me: (shouting in his ear) Who’s playing?

Guy #1: You know who it is.

Me: I do? It’s not coming to me.

Guy #2: You know who it is…say it!

Guy #1: You know who it is!

Me: Bow Wow Wow?

Guy #2: That’s right.

Three or four days earlier I had been woken up at a place I was staying in Stockwell with the news that John Lennon was dead. I was over there to do a GQ profile interview with Peter O’Toole. O’Toole wasn’t very receptive at first, but it eventually happened and the piece turned out fine.