On Hulu, a three minute and nine second portion of the tidal wave sequence from Roland Emmerich‘s The Day After Tomorrow. In high-def yet. I’d forgotten how well-painted this sequence is. The reason I’d forgotten, of course, is that the movie generally blows and I’d thrown the baby out with the bath water. Hulu offers video embed codes of some of its clips, but not this one.

I was as much of a devout fan of Tim Russert as anyone, but I have to say this: I’m getting sick of the emotional butterscotch schmaltz that NBC reporters, commentators and show hosts are still pouring all over the man’s memory this morning. I wish more of it had been on the level of, say, what Chris Matthews said on the phone from Paris and…well, just less from everyone else.

The thing that tipped it was Matt Lauer‘s emotion-milking interview this morning with Tim’s son, tthe very bright and admirable Luke Russert, followed by Meredith Vieira and Kathy Lee Gifford talking about how “incredible” the younger Russert is…Jesus! Enough! I’m sorry but something just snapped when Vieira said that.
I realize it’ll keep going until the Wednesday morning funeral and the Kennedy Center tribute later that afternoon, but it’s getting a little bit grotesque. There’s something to be said for quiet sadness and holding it in a bit, or at least for showing a little old-fashioned restraint. (A quality, come to think, that Russert’s dad, “Big Russ,” was known and admired for.) Sorry to say, but Russert’s friends have taken things to a point where they’re almost starting to taint his memory.
As the Orlando Sentinel‘s Hal Boedeker wrote this morning, “The self indulgence” of the Russert tributes “was breathtaking. A friend told me Sunday: ‘I now know more about Tim Russert than I do many members of my family.'”
Postnote: What is with the MSNBC embed codes? You copy a code for a particular video, it goes up just fine and then an hour later another video is playing. What the…?

Strangely, oddly, curiously, I didn’t hate Get Smart. I wouldn’t have felt very good if I’d paid to see it, but it’s mildly amusing (emphasis on the “m” word) here and there. I was expecting it to be awful and it’s not. It is, however, a little dreary to sit through. Okay, more than a little. But despite the depressing atmosphere of surrender to corporate attitude and authorship in every corner of it, Steve Carell‘s Maxwell Smart is half-appealing. He half-creates his own guy and half-channels Don Adams.

I know what it’s like to feel horribly burned by a bad big-studio film, and Get Smart did not do this to me. I wasn’t in the least bit engaged or turned on and I didn’t laugh out loud once — but I didn’t despise it.

I vaguely hated myself for sitting there and watching it this afternoon, but I have to be honest and report that the audience laughed a lot and clapped at the end. Nobody near me as I was walking out was putting it down. They knew it was basically a nothing movie, but they didn’t seem to mind. Whatever…we’re on vacation! I’ll tap out a bit morethis evening, but I have to get to a Cinevegas movie that’s starting 35 minutes from now.

A better-than-decent Father’s Day speech by Barack Obama in Chicago today, one that particularly chastises black dads who are “missing from too many lives and too many homes…acting like boys instead of men…and the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”

A note from the great Werner Herzog: “As you probably know, I will begin principal photography of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans in three weeks time, with only a very short period of pre-production. But I am doing fine, and this does not make me nervous. By the way: it is not a remake (as reported almost everywhere) — it is a completely different story in the same sense as the last James Bond is not a remake of the previous one.
“On another note: just before the hurricane I was scouting locations in Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Vietnam for The Piano Tuner, and as soon as I arrived in Bangkok I found myself arrested and handcuffed to a chair because of unpaid bills and taxes by the producers of Rescue Dawn. It required much explaining to explain that I was not the producer.”
The Rescue Dawn producer that the Bangkok authorities were looking to get their hands on is almost certainly the notorious Steve Marlton. I’m told that his history, some aspects of which have run afoul of the law, is public record in Oregon.

I’ll never stay in a Las Vegas suite of this size or splendor ever again. I was given this high-roller pad because the wifi in the other rooms wasn’t working and they wanted to be nice to guests of Cinevegas, and I just don’t get here that often or care that much. I hate to sound like a shmuck tourist from Emporia , Kansas, but this place is amazing. Two big high-def flat screens, a little bar with a free refrigerator, a whirlpool bath, a poker table, breathtaking views of the Paris and Bellagio, an iPod music player. Give me a break.

I’m on the 35th floor of the Planet Hollywood hotel & casino, and I have to be honest and say the wireless doesn’t work. (I’m using my AT& T Air Card.) I’m here to do three or four days’ worth of Cinevegas and I’ll soon be off to the races. A Get Smart screening will begin in an hour or so. The machine-gun poster [see below] is the first thing I saw after arriving at McCarran.

From room #3567 at Planet Hollywood — Sunday, 6.15.08, 11:25 am

“Get Smart the movie has precious little to do with Get Smart the iconic TV series from the 1960s, but then again the movie has precious little to do with screen comedy, either,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt.
“This is a slap-dash effort whose producers threw money and stunts onscreen instead of the satirical gags and one-liners that made the old spy spoof so memorable.
“It’s hard to see how this lame puppy will gain any boxoffice traction other than by waving the banner of star Steve Carell opening weekend. His younger fans, who wouldn’t know Get Smart from Spy, might laugh at the overblown action swirling around their poker-faced hero, but are likely to advise friends to wait for the DVD.” No — the LA to NYC viewing on a 767.

Everyone knew The Incredible Hulk would do well this weekend, and it has. Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is predicting a $55 million-plus weekend with yesterday’s earnings hitting around $21 million. M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Happening was expected to earn $25 million, give or take, but yesterday $12.8 million haul means it’ll do more like $33 million. Kung Fu Panda will come in third, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan will be fourth and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, fifth.

If you were Barack Obama, wouldn’t you make a point of visiting western Europe, Iraq and points in between now and the August Democratic convention? It would help enhance your foreign-policy credentials (image-wise, at least), and allow you to bask in your reported huge popularity over there, in Western Europe particularly but also in the Middle East. A 6.13 McLatchy report, in any event, says such a plan is probably in the works.

As N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich wrote a week or so ago, “When the world gets a firsthand look at the new America Mr. Obama offers as an alternative to Mr. McCain’s truculent stay-the-course, the public pandemonium may make J.F.K.’s ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ visit to the Berlin Wall look like a warm-up act.”

“There are certain days when you can feel the air sucking out of Washington’s giant hot-air balloon, and Friday was one of them,” writes the N.Y. Times Mark Leibovich in a 6.15 piece about the news of the passing of Tim Russert.
“News of the Meet the Press host’s death moved entirely too fast, in that unnerving way that these things do in the viral media world, but especially here — the cycle of rumor to ‘did you hear?’ to confirmation (‘it’s online’) to disbelief lasted a matter of minutes. Riders on the D.C. Metro stared into their BlackBerrys, and every politician with access to e-mail was issuing statements, from the president on down.”
It was a whopper for me personally, I can tell you. Heartbreak for his friends, family and colleagues; a loss for the world of political TV coverage; a chill up the spine of every heavy-ish person out there over the age of 40. I felt for the MSNBC team yesterday during their marathon coverage. They were simultaneously reporting and dealing with their own private grief. They couldn’t see any way around not covering it as an all-day, stop-the-presses, death-of-JFK event. They didn’t want to turn it off, and probably couldn’t have if they had a change of heart.
That said, there’s this little voice stating that I understand and respect the rules that govern the observance of the death of anyone famous, particularly one as beloved as Tim Russert, which is that you may not talk about the circumstances that may have caused his life to end and whether or not it could have been prevented or at least delayed.
Type in the words “cholesteral plaque enlarged heart” and tell me what it gradually tells you. I’ve done a little reading for 20 minutes or so, and — I’m saying this as plainly and respectfully as I can — it just doesn’t seem as if a tree just uprooted itself and fell on the guy.