I had picked up on maybe four or five of these, but seeing them all together… whoa. Not that this will have the slightest effect on the thinking of the McCain crowd or even the fence-sitters, for that matter.

The other night Pineapple Express star-co-writer Seth Rogen told Jon Stewart that he’s “26, but I look 50. I’ll probably die in three years. I had back hair at nine. I had ear hair at 13.” Another guy who doesn’t look his age is Philip Seymour Hoffman, 41, who was looking more or less his age in Capote but looked about 59 (white hair, beard, the usual paunch) when he was in Cannes last May to promote Synecdoche, New York. There needs to be at least one other guy in his 20s or 30s or early 40s who looks a good 15 years older. Just one more.

HE reader Nick Zayas informs that Hulu just put up Joseph Sargent‘s The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. The whole thing, in other words, is now free and streamable in reasonably decent quality. With “limited commercial interruption,” of course.

A grayed-up, middle-agey Denzel Washginton during shooting of Tony Scott’s The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. (Photo stolen from JustJared.)

The new Tony Scott version with Denzel Washington (in the Walter Matthau role) and John Travolta (“as” Robert Shaw and another villain) won’t be out until 7.31.09.

Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is reporting that Pineapple Express took in only $6.25 million on Thursday, which represented a 50% drop from its first-day tally of $12.1 million. David Gordon Green‘s stoner comedy “may” take in $27 million over the weekend and reach $45 million by Sunday night.

As it must to all men, death came earlier this evening to legendary manager, producer, book author and mover & shaker Bernie Brillstein. A good man with a rich sense of humor (particularly those darkly ironic aspects), Brillstein helped me out with stories when I was writing for Entertainment Weekly and the L.A. Times Syndicate in the ’90s. Here‘s Nikki Finke‘s recollection piece.

I feel moderately relieved that I wasn’t too bad on The O’Reilly Factor earlier today, and at the same time somewhat depressed that I didn’t really kick out the jams either. I did everything I was told to do — write down what I wanted to say, decide which points were best to emphasize, and concentrate on being clear and concise. But halfway through the interview the clarity I had in my head started to feel mushy and imprecise. I was half making sense and half saying to myself, “What’s happening? Why isn’t this working out better?”

The Fox News interview set, located in the basement of the Fox buildigon Armacost, about 20 minutes before air-time.

Either I’m not just cut out to be a talking guest-head or I need to do more of these to sharpen my routine or O’Reilly intimidated me or something. My main intention was to be clear and reasonable in presenting my opinion, which is that it’s absurd of the right-wing hammers to accuse me of being a supporter of hypothetical liberal blacklisting. I’m sick of talking and thinking about this deranged subject as it has no relation on any recognizable reality I’m familiar with.
Over half of the e-mails that came in were from enraged or illiterate right-wingers calling me a “whacko commie pig” and such. It’s probably best to just concentrate on the positive reactions and take heart that I probably picked up some new readers.
“I saw you on the O”Reilly factor a second ago and I have to say that I respect you for coming on the program and saying what you believe to Mr. O’Reilly,” wrote a guy named Steve Klinck. “I happen to be a conservative and disagree with your statements but, as Bill said, you”re a stand-up guy, and I respect you for that.”
“I just watched your conversation with BR on The O”Reilly Factor,” wrote Paul Lyle of Plainview, Texas, “and until that moment I’d never heard of you, but I want to say how delightful and gracious you were, very open and credible. You are a very prepossessing gentlemen. BR made nothing off your forthrighness about having some reservation about what you had written regarding Jon Voight. I thought that was high drama. Welcome to my world. I’ll be watching and reading you.”
“When I heard your quote I was angry at you,” wrote Jim Lewallen,” but you did a nice job with Bill. I am a conservative[but] you made sense. You have your opinions on the blog. No one has to read this and you weren’t encouraging Hollywood to blacklist conservatives. You said it best when you said basically I’m just a guy with an opinion. Interesting interview.”

I spoke earlier today with Magnolia Pictures president Eammon Bowles about Man on Wire, which has been doing good business since opening on 7.25 because it’s been well reviewed, but mainly — and it really is this simple — because it delivers a genuine spiritual high. And when films that really and truly do this come along, people always pick up on this and go and tell their friends and then it builds and builds and builds.

This combination documentary, elegy and suspense film is opening around the country this weekend. It is absolutely essential to see it, and I don’t mean on DVD
When Sean Connery saw Man on Wire at the Edinburgh Film Festival a little more than a month ago he called it √¢‚Ǩ≈ìone of the best three films I have ever seen.√¢‚Ǩ¬ù (He wouldn’t say what the other two were.) At the Vicky Christina Barcelona party the other night people kept asking me what my favorite recent film is, and over and over I kept on saying Man on Wire. I hadn’t said this to myself in so many words, but I didn’t hesitate in saying it when asked.
Here’s an mp3 of the last two or three minutes of my conversation with Bowles in which I articulate the “spiritual high” high, and here’s an mp3 of our whole discussion.

Entertainment Weekly‘s Ben Svetkey: “If you could be any superhero, which superhero would you be?”
Barack Obama: “I was always into the Spider-Man/Batman model. The guys who have too many powers, like Superman, that always made me think they weren’t really earning their superhero status. It’s a little too easy. Whereas Spider-Man and Batman, they have some inner turmoil. They get knocked around a little bit.”
Svetkey: “For instance, who’s your favorite movie or TV president?”
Obama: You know who was a great movie president? Jeff Bridges in The Contender. That was a great movie president. He was charming and essentially an honorable person, but there was a rogue about him. The way he would order sandwiches — he was good at that.
Svetkey: Is that one of the things you’re looking forward to? Confounding the White House kitchen staff with obscure sandwich requests?
Obama: “Absolutely. I want to test them. I want to see if I can get any sandwich I want.” — from an interview posted on August 6th.

In a story that appeared yesterday (8.6) in La Stampa, Maria Elena Finessi reported that the late Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who passed last July at age 94, was so bummed by “his gradual loss of sight” that he starved himself to death, but in an elegant mystical way that was a kind of “masterpiece” of finality.

Enrico Fico, Michelangelo Antonioni

Finessi got the story from Enrico Fico, the widow of the legendary helmer (L’Avventura, Blow Up, L’Eclisse). Antonioni would not have taken his life by shooting or poison “because I still represented his link with the world,” Fico told Finessi. “But certainly he asked for help. To die was his only wish. To go away, in order not to fall into darkness and live as a blind man”.
Fico, who married Antonioni in the mid ’80s, said that with “incredible willpower” he had “simply stopped eating.” He had eaten little or nothing from September 2006, [a little less than] a year before he died, she told La Stampa. “He came to the table with me, to keep me company, but only ate a few spoonfuls”. He had proved that “one’s body continues to live even if you go month after month without eating”.
She said that like the mystics who had similarly starved themselves, Antonioni had acquired “extraordinary mental lucidity” towards the end. He had put up with his decline and illness “gloriously,” but “not to be able to see was for him truly unacceptable”. He had wanted to die “to free himself not so much from pain as from the body which was the origin of his suffering.” She said his death “was a masterpiece as much as his cinematic works. He went in absolute peace, embracing the absolute, as if he were a mystic. He wanted to de-materialize.”

Slim Pickens’ spirited farewell near the end of Dr. Strangelove.

For years my ideal self-obliteration fantasy (if I was facing imminent death anyway and wanted to end it on my own terms) was to go out like William Holden‘s Pike Bishop in The Wild Bunch. But getting shot several times (and in the back!) would hurt. It therefore might be better and kind of cooler, I used to tell myself, to go out like Slim Pickens at the end of Dr. Strangelove — vaporized in a millisecond in a hot flash of light, and so quickly that my body wouldn’t have time to send the pain messages to my brain.
But I don’t feel that way anymore. I believe in raging against the dying of the light and holding on to the very last. I want to go like William F. Buckley, slumped over at my computer, a sentence half-typed. Or I want to collapse on a busy street as I’m thinking about (or trying to get the attention of) a beautiful woman, like Omar Sharif in Dr. Zhivago.

British comedian and radio talk show guy Joe Cornish has recorded a Quantum of Solace spoof song that isn’t half bad, especially since he sounds a whole lot like David Bowie. But the best lyrics have been tapped out by Cornish’s radio partner Adam Buxton: (a) “I want a quantum of solace, but just a quantum / I know they do big bags of solace, but I don’t want ’em” and (b) “I met a lovely lady, but found out she was a rotter, so we exchanged some saucy quips, I snogged her, then I shot her”.