“In his 1991 book The Reasoning Voter, political scientist Samuel Popkin argued that most people make their choice on the basis of ‘low-information signaling’ — that is, stupid things like whether you know how to roll a bowling ball or wear an American-flag pin.” Or whether or not a political candidate seems like the kind of guy you can relax and have a beer with. I’ve read that Josef Stalin had a common-man touch. He could relate to Ukranian wheat-growers and their concerns. Not that this mattered in the Russia of the 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s.
“In the era of Republican dominance, the low-information signals were really low — how Michael Dukakis looked in a tanker’s helmet, whether John Kerry‘s favorite sports were too precious (like wind-surfing), whether Al Gore‘s debate sighs over his opponent’s simple obfuscations were patronizing. Bill Clinton was the lone Democratic master of low-information signaling — a love of McDonald’s and other assorted big-gulp appetites gave him credibility that even trumped his evasion of military service.” – from a depressing Joe Klein Time piece, dated 4.24, called “The Incredible Shrinking Democrats.”

N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply has written a light-hearted, semi-whimsical piece about the persistence of big-business villains in modern movies — whatever. The odd thing is that Speed Racer producer Joel Silver declined to be interviewed for it. One images the reasoning: “Please…no light-hearted N.Y. Times articles about corporate villainy…leave us alone….the article might be slanted against the film!” The Wachowski brothers, true to form, also declined to be interviewed.

As noted three days ago, tracking is indicating that uncertain box-office prospects are facing the Wachowski brothers’ Speed Racer (Warner Bros., 5.9) due to interest levels for the kid-friendly film being strongest among the over-25 set. Out of this has come a notion that What Happens in Vegas, the Ashton Kutcher-Cameron Diaz comedy that opens the same day, could elbow Speed Racer aside and become the weekend’s #1 film.

Diaz, Kutcher in What Happens in Vegas

The reasoning partly comes from reports — one of them first-hand and reliable — that the Kutcher-Diaz is quite funny and entertaining, and partly because Vegas-backdrop movies seem to be working with younger audiences these days, judging by the success fo Robert Luketic‘s 21. And because I’ve been told that two high-profile critics are down on Speed Racer, one calling it “terrible” and another using the term “godawful.” Perhaps we shouldn’t draw any conclusions, this being a young person’s movie and these two guys being on the far side of 50.
If — I say “if” — What Happens in Vegas beats Speed Racer over the May 9th weekend, it’ll be a major humiliation for Warner Bros. marketing. But who knows? Let’s wait and see what happens. You can’t tell about younger kids from tracking surveys. It’s quite possible that Speed Racer interest levels among teenagers, tweeners and toddlers will uptick significantly a week to ten days before it opens. (People tend to be flatliners on upcoming movies until opening week.)
“What you’ve written is more or less correct,” a seasoned numbers-watcher wrote after this piece went up. “The only chance for Speed Racer is if it catches on with the family audience, and as of now, there’s nothing to indicate that that’s going to take place.”
Fox had a couple of junket screenings this weekend for What Happens in Vegas, but I haven’t heard anything from any press colleagues who attended.

Nobody can trust IMDB posters, but if you want to believe that non-vested people wrote the Vegas responses that are currently up, the film sounds more than half decent. An older exhibitor-related friend did tells me he’s heard it’s pretty good.
“The theater was almost full and the laughs were almost as much as on Superbad,” one IMDB poster said. “The room went nuts several times. The scene were Cameron and Ashton meet for the first time is brilliant comedy. Only about 15% of it take place in Las Vegas…it doesn’t show Vegas in a very good light.”
Another wrote several hours ago that he “just finished watching it tonight at the Century City shopping mall [and] in my opinion [it’s] one of the funniest movies this year with one of Ashton Kutcher’s’s better performances. He and Cameron Diaz were perfect together in this movie, [which is] funny from start to finish.” You can tell from the syntax and phraseology that the writers aren’t that judgmental or terribly deep thinkers, suggesting the posts could be plants, but if they’re not…
The other thing, mentioned by as friend, is that What Happens in Vegas will be the fourth romantic comedy in a row aimed at 20- and 30-something couples and older women, following Made of Honor, Baby Mama and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Will there be that much of an appetite for this kiind of thing, he’s asking, by the time Vegas rolls along?

In the wake of my similarly-worded 4.23 item, the Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Zeitchik wrote on 4.25 that expectations persist that Fernando Meirelles‘ Blindness will be shown under some aegis at the Cannes Film Festival, possibly as the opening-night attraction.
“The opening- and closing-night films haven’t been officially announced,” he reports, “and several sources said that Meirelles’ profile and the film’s scope (as well as such stars as Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo) make it a prime opening-night candidate. Even if it doesn’t end up in that showcase slot, it could go in one of several competition slots that might yet be announced. Said one executive: ‘I’d be very surprised if it didn’t end up there.'”
“I gather it will be shown at Cannes under some aegis,” I wrote on 4.23. “I haven’t been told this in so many words, but a person in the Blindness camp has written that [the rcently annoucned] official Cannes list, as we all know, omitted ‘a few key announcements that are yet to be made.’ The implication seems clear.”

“Iron Man is a mixed bag. Slick, snappy, wonderfully witty, and at times more of an irony-man than just plain Iron Man. (‘It’s actually titanium-alloy man,’ says Robert Downey‘s blase Tony Stark). Yet at times it’s also a routine action movie with no real inventiveness, plot-wise,” says Israeli blogger Yair Raveh‘s in his review on Cinemascope. Uh-oh…the first sign of Iron Man political backlash!

“Politically it tries to be liberal-minded at first,” Raveh says, “putting the blame for wars on profiteering by arms manufacturers — but in fact this is a conservative old-fashioned picture, about a nation looking for a dude to fight its wars for it, abroad and at home, and do it with as little accountability as possible.”

This Bill Maher “New Rules” clip is only nine days old — is that so bad? Yes, yes…I should have posted it earlier. But the riff about class and elitism that Maher delivered at midpointabout the Barack Obama/Reagan Democrats “bittergate” scandal is, for my money, gospel. Best line: “You know who is bitter in America? I am. Because shit-kickers voted twice for a retarded guy they wanted to have a beer with, and everybody else had to suffer the consequences!”

I can’t believe I’m planning to pay money out of my own wallet — the fruit of extremely hard and grueling day-to-day effort — to see Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay (New Line, 4.25) sometime later today. I know what I’m in for. It’s going to make me want to to kill myself Khmer Rouge-style with a blue plastic bag. But I missed the damn press screening and I need the ammunition that will derive from being able to know and say “yes, I’ve seen it.”

Especially knowing what I do about Kal Penn, which is that he’s an animal. I know of no other youngish actor who conveys chronic brain-cell blockage and open-mouthed slovenliness like Penn does time and again. I’m not saying he’s literally an unbridled idiot off-screen, but he’s relentless at trying to convince audiences that his characters are low-born and dumb as fenceposts, and after a while the effort carries over.
I didn’t realize Penn had the bona fide ape gene until I caught Mira Nair‘s The Namesake (’06), in which Penn played the son. I thought I might be treated to some other aspect of his personality, that working with Nair would allow him to shake off the low-rent moves and attitudes that he’s used in Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle and all the other 20-something TV shows and crap-level movies he’s been in.
But within minutes of his first appearance in The Namesake, Penn went into this standard routine, which boils down to that clueless-asshole expression plus that open-mouthed thing he does in nearly every scene. What a creep, I told myself then and there. He can’t class himself up for even a single role. Penn plays it fairly straight and restrained throughout most of The Namesake, but I didn’t believe for a second that he wasn’t a major dumbass beneath the skin.
The only time I half-believed a Penn character might actually have something going on upstairs was during his brief performance in Mike Binder‘s Man About Town.
Penn’s decision to teach two current undergrad courses at the University of Pennsylvania — “Images of Asian Americans in the Media” and “Contemporary American Teen Films” — in no way belies or undercuts what I’ve said here. He doesn’t just “play” morons convincingly — he convinces you that it goes deeper than that.
“The Asian American Studies Program is delighted that Kalpen Modi, a.k.a. Kal Penn, chose our program to host his teaching engagement at Penn,” Grace Kao, director of the Asian American Studies Program at Penn, said last year. “Mr. Modi is one of the leading Asian American actors of his generation and is particularly aware of how his racial and ethnic identification has affected his professional experiences.” And that’s supposed to mean what exactly?

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick recently caught a Tribeca Film Festival screening of Brian Hecker‘s Bart Got a Room, and was pleasantly surprised. “I didn’t have enormous expectations,” he writes, “for this autobiographical story about a teenager trying to find a prom date in a south Florida town with the help of his newly-divorced parents, played by William H. Macy (in a Jewfro!) and Cheryl Hines.

Macy, Kaplan in Bart Got a Room

“But it’s hilarious, quick-paced (80 minutes!) with lots of smarts and heart and a terrific lead performance by newcomer Steven Kaplan and, unusually for a teen comedy, a big-band score. Some smart distributor should snap this up quick.”

Too many photos from M. Night Smyamalan‘s The Happening (20th Century Fox, 6.13) show the principals — Mark Wahlberg, Zoey Deschanel, John Leguizamo — either (a) staring with stern but alarmed expressions at a TV screen, (b) staring with stern but alarmed expressions at some piece of physical evidence that indicates something strange is going on, or (c) staring into space with stern but fatigued (or numbed out) expressions. The Fox publicity team needs to hand out stills that are more varied, less predictable. I’m starting get bored. (Latest photos are posted at JoBlo.com)

Adding to my dissenting view of Guillermo del Toro‘s official contracted commitment to spend four years making two Hobbitt movies for New Line/ Warner Bros. and the oppressive poobah Peter Jackson, Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir yesterday riffed and elaborated about the regret many are feeling about a great filmmaker preparing to lie down with dogs.

O’Hehir’s best score is quoting Del Toro from a 2006 Cannes interview he did with the guy, to wit: “I was never into heroic fantasy. At all. I don’t like little guys and dragons, hairy feet, hobbits — I’ve never been into that at all. I don’t like sword and sorcery. I hate all that stuff.” I knew it…knew it! A brother under the skin. Guillermo, homie…I’m with you all the way.
Second best O’Hehir graph: “And where did the brilliant idea to make a ‘Hobbit’ sequel — a movie that will presumably cover the 60-year gap between the stories told in ‘The Hobbit’ and in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ — actually come from? If you read all the back-and-forth stories closely, it becomes clear that New Line executive Mark Ordesky at some point told Peter Jackson that the studio had acquired rights to make both ‘The Hobbit’ and a sequel, presumably based on Tolkien’s fragmentary back-story information about what happens in his fictional universe between the two novels.
“A less kind way of saying this is that any ‘Hobbit’ sequel won’t really be a Tolkien adaptation; Jackson and Walsh and Boyens and del Toro and Ordesky and, I don’t know, some guy in the Warner Bros. lunch room will be making the shit up.”

Former Rolling…sorry…Hitsville‘s Bill Wyman, a former NPR and Salon arts editor, has posted a strong argument against Errol Morris‘s payment of interviewees for Standard Operating Procedure (Sony Classics, 4.25), largely in response to this morning’s N.Y. Times story.
My view of this, posted last Tuesday, is that “notebook reporters can’t pay for information — that’s completely out and always has been — but documentaries are a different matter, I feel. As long as what the subject says to the documentarian can be verified to be a portion of absolute truth and nothing but, I don’t see the problem.”

When I first spotted Jon Favreau in his semi-hilarious breakout role in Doug Liman‘s Swingers (’96), it was obvious he’d be looking at weight issues later in life. Sure enough he gradually went there as the years went along, finally achieving Orson Welles-ian proportions two years ago when he appeared as Vince Vaughn‘s best friend in The Breakup. But recent photos from Iron Man, which Favreau directed and costars in, as well as interview footage show that he’s obviously gotten religion.

(l.) Favreau as currently constituted; (r.) as he looked during filming of The Breakup in mid to late ’05