Perhaps the most dangerous, Obama-threatening paragraph in recent weeks was posted yesterday by New Republic columnist Howard Wolfson (a.k.a., “The Flack”). “Perpetually fretting Democrats will not want to accept it,” it begins. “The campaigns themselves can’t afford to believe it. Many journalists know it but can’t say it. And there will certainly be some twists and turns along the way. But take it to a well capitalized bank: Bill Ayers isn’t going to save John McCain. The race is over.”
He may well be right, but there are at least five reasons why these words shouldn’t be spoken.
One, it ain’t over until it’s over. Two, there are millions of Obama-supporting but fundamentally lazy and distracted under-25 voters who will leap at any excuse not to vote, and reading that political insiders believe that “it’s over” is just the excuse they’d like to hear. Three, McCain going ugly between now and 11.3 could notch things down a point or two. Four, something bad could still happen (like a terrorist October surprise). Five, however far ahead in the polls Obama may be the night before election day, the Bradley Effect (i.e., racial-minded whites getting cold feet in the election booth) will probably drop that margin 3 to 4 points.
Here’s a sixth reason:

Mean Mag has a short video of Bill Hader being Bad Lieutenant (the old Abel Ferrara-Harvey Keitel version, not the new Herzog). No video screen because Mean’s embed code doesn’t adjust to column size — brilliant!

Arizona Daily Star critic Phil Villarreal reported this morning that An American Carol director David Zucker shot a cheapshot bit aimed at Sen. Ted Kennedy but apparently (and understandably) decided to cut it due to Kennedy’s recent struggles with brain cancer.
Zucker “had a Ted Kennedy look-alike offer a ride to someone at a convention,” Villareal reports. “When he opened the car door, water spilled out. It’s a reference to the 1969 incident in which Kennedy drove off a bridge with Mary Jo Kopechne as his passenger. Kennedy survived but Kopechne died.
Villareal says he “got this tidbit from former Tucsonan Jillian Murray, who has a role in the film. ‘It was a cool stunt,’ Murray told Villareal. ‘Fish were coming out.'”
Zucker’s scumbag sense of humor aside, the fish-coming-out-of-a-car is a bit from Paul Brickman‘s Risky Business. Remember? It was followed by the Porsche car-dealer guy coming up to Tom Cruise and his friends and asking, “Who’s the U-boat commander?”

It’s been a long wait, but Oliver Stone‘s W. (Lionsgate, 10.17) is finally done and being shown to print press (tonight and tomorrow morning) prior to tomorrow’s press junket. This is a very big deal in my world. I’m so keyed up, in fact, that all I’ve done this morning is surf and research and surf again and call around. Ten stories circling the airport and I haven’t brought a single one in for a landing. And it’s mainly due to the pre-screening heebie-jeebies.

Josh Brolin in Oliver Stone’s W./

I’m presuming — we’re all presuming — that W. is probably going to be received as a film about its performances first, and the content, theme and the shape of it second. Which is I was hearing two or three weeks ago. “Good film but uncanny Josh Brolin” is how Politico’s Jeffrey Ressner reported it. Which will be more or less fine with me. I’m expecting more though, being a fan of Stanley Weiser ‘s script and knowing what it more or less is.
Variety editor-columnist and Sunday Morning Shootout guy Peter Bart saw W. the weekend before last with the other TV interview press. Last Friday he called it “an engrossing film — part polemic, part parody — that reminds us that the man who made Platoon hasn’t lost his edge.”
Engrossing? That’s almost like calling it “interesting” or “impressive.”
The pic “explores the love-hate relationship between George Bush senior and junior. It culminates in a devastating (and imagined) scene in which Bush senior all but implodes in parental rage, declaring that, thanks to junior, no Bush will ever again be elected to public office.”

“The case against Junior in the film is pinned to Iraq — indeed it is W’s handling of the war that finally sends Senior over the top — but the president’s utter helplessness in the face of the present collapse serves as a vivid postscript. The Bush dynasty is all about money and power — economic upheaval is not an acceptable option.”
Stone’s portrait of the president “is that of a smug, self-righteous and uniquely stubborn Ivy Leaguer-turned-Texan who believes he has direct access to Godly wisdom,” Bart writes.

Posted on Slate. Produced, narrated and edited by Andrew Bouve; written by Torie Bosch. A tale without a finish.

In a 10.3 N.Y. Times piece wondering about the commercial potential of Ridley Scott‘s Body of Lies (Warner Bros., 10.10), John Anderson writes, “To paraphrase the old Vietnam-era bumper sticker: What if they gave a war movie and nobody came?” I sense interest in Scott’s war thriller, but not excitement. The real voltage will happen, I predict, with the arrival of Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker. Which Summit Entertainment is afraid to release this year. (Or was the last time I looked.)

A 10.5 AP report states that Sarah Palin‘s claim that Barack Obama is “palling around with terrorists” is “unsubstantiated” and carries “a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.” That ain’t the half of it. If McCain wants to play the guilt-by-association game…

I happened to turn on Susanne Bier‘s Things We Lost in the Fire on HBO a little while ago, and it got me once again. I’m now more certain than ever that the critics and audiences who turned away from this faintly flawed but deeply moving film really missed the boat. Maybe this’ll hit some of them down the road and they’ll ask themselves, “What was I thinking?”

I really like this section from my 10.5.07 review:
“There can be no beating around the bush about Benicio Del Toro‘s performance as Jerry the junkie, a once-successful lawyer who’s slid down into the pit. Over the course of this two-hour film he climbs out of his drug hole, brightens up, chills out and settles in, relapses, almost dies, and then gradually climbs out of it again.
“I’m starting to see this actor (whom his friends and Esquire magazine profilers call ‘Benny’) as almost God-like in the Brando sense of that term. He’s holding bigger mountains in the palm of his hand, right now, than De Niro held in the ’70s and ’80s. He’s one of the top four or five superman actors we have out there. There isn’t a frame of his performance that doesn’t hit some kind of behavioral bulls-eye.
“I’ll tell you this — when journalists who’ve seen Things We Lost in the Fire go ‘I don’t know…meh’ and then say in the same breath that some other so-so film is ‘pretty good’ there’s some kind of virus out there that I don’t want to give a name to.”

The Globe cafe and bookstore in Prague (south of Narodni, on Pstrossova 6) will be showing the second Obama-McCain debate on Wednesday morning, 10.8, at 3 am, with a re-broadcast at 11 am later that morning.

Nikki Finke reported about two hours ago that original DreamWorks partner David Geffen is moving on after 14 years. She got this from an early look at a press release “to be issued about the formal separation of DreamWorks and Paramount,” blah blah. It also says that “a decision on who will be the new distributor for DreamWorks 2.0 will be made at the beginning of the week by Steven Spielberg. No suspense about this as everybody’s figuring Universal.
Why don’t I care more about this? Because I’ve always chosen to regard the comings and goings of powerful rich guys as a corporate parlor drama that doesn’t really affect my realm. Many journalists feel differently. They get wet over this stuff. You have to be up on who’s running what, of course, but that’s as far as it goes with me.

Sometimes car accidents can be…well, not too bad. Sometimes they can be shrugged off with no cops, no insurance, no injuries, no nothin’. I learned this around 5:30 in the morning on the Hutchinson River Parkway when I was 18 or 19, and I’ve never forgotten the lesson. Not everything that goes badly needs to be catastrophic.
Three of us had done an all-nighter in Manhattan, wandering around the streets on mescaline, the usual West Village-East Village walk-around, not much cash, soaking up the energy. We drove back to Connecticut around 5 am, the light starting to break. And somewhere around Rye, or right before the Connecticut border, we came around a curve and there was this beige Volkswagen Beetle lying on its side, the owner standing nearby, looking more or less unruffled and going “hmmm.”
We immediately pulled over, put on the flashers, got out and ran over and helped the guy right it. One, two, three…done. Quick thanks, hand shake, the bug (which had no serious marks or dents) started right up and he took off. Then we did the same. It was semi-dangerous standing around near a curve, of course. The whole deal took maybe 90 seconds…okay, two minutes. My friends and I hardly spoke of it later, that morning or during the weeks and months that followed.