One day after Bill Clinton‘s “Obama needs to kiss my ass before I’ll enthusiastically campaign for him” quote was picked up by news services, Clinton and Barack Obama talked on the phone and had a “terrific” conversation, according to this Nedra Pickler AP story filed an hour or so ago.
OBAMA: All right, Bill. How do we do this?
CLINTON: Well, are you ready to kiss my ass on Main Street?
OBAMA: Heh-heh…okay.
CLINTON: I mean, that would work.
OBAMA: I’ve got a campaign to win, Bill. I need your help. You don’t like me, I can take you or leave you personally and who gives a shit? What do you want?
CLINTON: I want my reputation back. I was Elvis, the first black president. And I want a speech from you that pays tribute to that and puts all that race-monger, race-card player stuff to bed. I want it dead and buried. Like it never happened.
OBAMA: People respect you, Bill. I respect you as far as it goes. No need to dwell on the past.
CLINTON: I want my name back.
OBAMA: You made your bed, Bill. You, not me. I don’t control the press any more than you do. Everyone says you hurt Hillary’s campaign as much as help it. Probably more hurt. You’ve made yourself look emotionally petulant and hair-trigger with this kiss-my-ass thing, which tarnishes your rep. Not presidential, not dignified.
CLINTON: But here we are and you want my help. That’s where we are right now.
OBAMA: I’m not going to get into the way you and Hillary played your cards with the rust-belt voters.
CLINTON: I want to move on the way you want to move on. I have a price, is all. Nothing is for free. Everybody wants what they want. You want what you want, but to get that you need to give me what I want. Or you may not get what you want.
OBAMA: I’ll speak about you with respect and admiration, but I’m not going to go back to the campaign and say what happened didn’t happen. Let’s stand on common ground and go from there. That I’ll do.
CLINTON: Then we need to try again. I want an apology or I stay home. I want to be who I was before you and Hillary got into it last fall. Particularly the guy I was before last January. Before we started campaigning in Iowa.
OBAMA: You’re deluded.
CLINTON: And you can kiss my ass.
OBAMA: Okay, let’s take a break. Try again next week.
CLINTON: Bye.
OBAMA: Adios.

Drew McWeeny‘s combo-review piece on The Dark Knight and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, posted this morning at 7:38 am, is too sprawling and wind-baggy. He’s a first-rate writer but it wore me down. That said, here’s the best graph in the whole piece — a tribute to Aaron Eckhart‘s Harvey Dent performance in the Chris Nolan film.
Eckhart “deserves some praise as well for the way he brings Dent to life, and for finding a way to play earnest without becoming overbearing,” Drew says. “Dent’s a more difficult role than the Joker in many ways because there aren’t as many big emotions you can play. He’s a decent, upstanding man who believes in doing things right, in prosecuting criminals instead of fighting them on a street level, and little by little, he’s actually making a difference.
Eckhart, in short, “gives the guy an inner life, just enough quirk to make him seem human, so that when the inevitable tragedy (which really is awful as laid out in the film) occurs, it’s not a simple on-off cartoonish lurch into violence for Dent. We feel it. We believe it. Dent’s physical trauma may be exaggerated, but the emotional side of it is pitch-perfect. And his work as Two-Face is just sad and angry. He’s nothing like the Joker. Hell, I’m not even sure I’d call him a villain.”

It is a profoundly good and nourishing thing to find love and peace with a partner, and so here’s to David Poland having apparently tied the knot in Bermuda over the weekend. Mazel Tov and best wishes! A good thing to do for a fellow in his mid 40s. And may his first child be a masculine child. Poland is good with kids; I’ve seen him in action.

When I was sick with possible blood poisoning a year and a half or two years ago Poland left a “get well” phone message, so it seemed okay and symmetrical to send him a “congratulations and good for you” e-mail a few months ago when I heard he was moving in a marital direction. Poland being Poland, he ignored it. Nice yellow tie, though.

An hour-long chat with Hellboy II director Guillermo del Toro at the Four Seasons early Sunday evening, from roughly 6 to 7 pm.

We talked a little bit about the film, but mainly we discussed The Hobbit (the first part will be more Guillermo, the second more Tolkien/Jackson), the creation of “Bleak House” (his creative hideaway studio he built about five blocks away from the regular family home), his amazing 12 year-old daughter, relations with his father, the conservative tendencies and judgments of video-game producers, his admiration for the “Shadow of the Collossus” video game (engaging storyline, super-intelligent game play), the current doings of Cha Cha Cha, a discussion of “Hitchcock/Truffaut,” etc.
He’s one of the gentlest, kindest and most brilliant guys I’ve ever known. If you don’t know him, listen to the whole hour and it’ll serve as a kind of introduction. I shot a whole video of our chat but it was visually dull and not worth transferring to mp4 so I dumped it.

Last night Collider‘s Steve Weintraub was fuming that Variety‘s Diane Garrett and her editors didn’t credit him for breaking a story “last week” that Legendary Pictures is developing some kind of sequel/prequel to 300 that Frank Miller is writing, Zack Snyder will direct and Warner Bros. will distribute.
Garrett posted Sunday night that “another 300 has been rumored from the start, but last week Snyder and the original producing team stoked a frenzy online when they talked about it at the Saturn Awards.” The online frenzy, says Weintraub, stemmed entirely from his reporting that came from the 300 producers as well as Snyder.

The Quantum of Solace teaser. Reactions?

The Hollywood Reporter‘s Ray Bennett has raved about Mamma Mia! from London, where it’ll open next Friday (7.4). How does a dedicated sourpuss and Europop/ABBA hater cast doubts and aspersions without having seen the film? Obviously he can’t and shouldn’t. The watchword should always be “try to be fair.” The sourpuss can, however, sniff the air for girly-girl fumes, for hints of vapidity or plasticity or anything that feels like excessive fizz.
The word “fun,” for example, has been known to strike fear in the hearts of ardent film lovers. “Fun,” as we all know, is a code word that usually means the kind of shallow exuberance best appreciated by women and gay guys. Bennett’s statement therefore that “no matter how many blockbusters there are, Universal Pictures’ screen version of the global hit stage musical is the most fun to be had at the movies this or any other recent summer” is perhaps cause for concern. Perhaps, I say. Or perhaps not.
“Teenage boys may be glued to the latest action adventure, but the rest of the family will be having a rollicking good time and dancing in the aisles to Swedish pop group ABBA’s irresistible songs,” Bennett says. Does “the rest of the family” include dad and Uncle Frank and his son Carl as well as grandpappy Amos with the limp and the overalls? I don’t think so. And I say this as a straight guy who’s occasionally succumbed to shallow pop tunes with cleverly delivered hooks, like Paul McCartney‘s “No More Lonely Nights.”
“It’s a delightful piece of filmmaking with a marvelous cast topped by Meryl Streep in one of her smartest and most entertaining performances ever,” Bennett writes. I don’t mean to sound like a pisshead, but isn’t the use of “delightful,” “marvelous” and “entertaining” in the same sentence reason to wonder about the reviewer’s critical scrutiny levels and his general susceptibility to the gush impulse?

It was reported earlier today that Bill Clinton has told confidantes that in order to get his full support in the presidential campaign Barack Obama will have to apologize, beg and grovel like nobody’s business. Clinton was quoted as saying, in fact, that Obama will have to “kiss my ass” in order to make things right.

Bill Clinton, George McGovern

Clinton apparently resents having been tarnished by the Obama campaign for having played the race card, which of course Clinton absolutely did when he compared Obama’s win in the South Carolina primary to Jesse Jackson’s two previous wins there in the ’80s. Coupled with Hillary’s statement that Obama is not a Muslim “as far as I know” and her “psst…Obama is black!” implications in speeches to and comments about “white” Appalachian-belt voters, it’s almost surreal that her husband is angry about all this, but the truly arrogant have never recognized boundaries.
The last time “kiss my ass” was attributed to an ex- or would-be White House resident in a presidential campaign was, according to this Time report and this Wikipedia page, on the final day of the 1972 campaign when Democratic candidate George McGovern euphemistically told a pro-Nixon heckler in Battle Creek, Michigan, to plant his puckered lips on McGovern’s rump. The astonished heckler, a chubby kid with glasses, reportedly told a reporter that McGovern had “said a profanity!”
Time columnist Joe Klein has told the Telegraph that he’s been told the ex-president is “very, very bitter” about the campaign. “It’s time for him to get over it or go off and do his charitable work,” Klein is quoted as saying. “[Clinton] knows the rules of the road. What’s going on now is kind of strange. I think his behavior is really, really shocking.”

What…another Dark Knight reviewer doing cartwheels over Heath Ledger‘s Joker? Is this getting tedious or just repetitive? We get it already. Brilliant demonic channeling. The guy’s going to win a posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. Warner Bros. will almost certainly run a full-on Oscar campaign on his behalf. Now can we talk about something else, please? I feel like I’m getting beaten over the head here.

Ledger “presents himself as The Joker in a role that defines a career,” writes Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet. “It is unimaginable it would come to the point that a film based on a comic-book character could actually have such an impact on one person. On a generation. Ledger’s decent into what is, and has become, The Joker makes Jack Nicholson’s interpretation look like nothing more than a simple clown.
“‘Wait’ll they get a load of me,’ Jack said 19 years ago. Wait until you get a load of Heath!
“The Dark Knight presents a character so destructive and without a care for those landing in his path of decimation that you are left to your own devices. Love him. Hate him. Hate to love him or love to hate him, director Christopher Nolan has guided an actor into a dark realm not often realized. The Joker finds his place alongside villains that go by the name of Hannibal, Scarface and John Doe himself. A nameless, unrecognizable entity you won’t be willing to or able to admit is Ledger until the credits roll.”

“Curmudgeonly, cantankerous, cigar-chomping Hellboy is a cross between a ’40s noir detective and a burning fireplace,” writes Variety‘s John Anderson, “but he’s also cool enough to make Hellboy II: The Golden Army the hipster’s hit of the summer. It’s certainly a more deliberately (and successfully) funny movie, thanks largely to Ron Perlman, who returns with the rest of the cast, and without whom an onscreen Hellboy would have been almost unthinkable.

“Yes, Catholic imagery has always run rampant through helmer Guillermo del Toro‘s movies, including Pan’s Labyrinth, which he made in between the two Hellboy entries, but he’s really an evangelist of fanboy excess: Given the right push by Universal, he’ll be making fantasy-horror acolytes out of the heretofore unconverted.”
“In a previous life, del Toro might have been a maker of clocks — clocks inhabited by gargoyles instead of cuckoos, and which exploded on the hour. But there’s a precision to the visual ornateness of Hellboy II that exceeds even that of its predecessor.”

Eight or nine days ago the New York Observer‘s Sarah Vilkomerson wrote one of the funniest observation-and-reporting articles I’ve read in ages called “You’ve Got Mail (You Never Open).” And I only happened upon it last night over dinner. Funny because it’s true, because it’s my life — because the urban under-45 onliners, one gathers, have become a nation of mail denialists.

“I don’t have a fundamental fear or anxiety that makes me avoid the mail,” Mark McMaster, a 29-year-old senior account manager at Google, tells Vilkomerson. “It just seems relatively uninteresting, and probably most importantly, doesn’t arrive when it’s relevant. I don’t want a bill to tell me it’s time now to pay by showing up at my door. I just got home from work, asshole!
“At Google, we wax philosophical about `the cloud,’ a metaphor for all the data that’s kept in a server farm that could be in Oklahoma or Beijing but you can instantly access from any computer or phone or BlackBerry that’s connected to the internet. I put as much of my life in the cloud as possible.”
As Vilkomerson summarizes, “The internet, with its neat-o technology, has made it so that, for the most part, not opening your mail doesn’t really matter.”
Update: It’s one thing for people to not use mail that much or as much — that’s been a growing reality for eight or ten years or whatever. Or for the usefulness of the U.S. postal service to matter less and less in terms of personal letters, bills, credit card come-ons and junk mail. But a growing subculture of web-savvy urban dwellers falling into the habit of not even opening their mail — that’s significant. And so far, no one reading this site seems to be appreciating this sea-change, or even chuckling about it. Flatliners. Asleep at the wheel.

A convincing report of stepped-up secret covert actions against Iran by the Bushies, as written by New Yorker‘s Seymour Hersh in a piece called “Preparing the Battlefield.” The neocons have only a few months left to try and hurt I’m-a-dinner-jacket. It’s a kind of prelude or warm-up, some believe, to the big Israeli bombing of Iran that will happen (if it happens) sometime after the Democratic and Republican conventions. One imagines that $4.40 a gallon will seem like a fond memory if and when such hostilities commence.