Last weekend 20th Century Fox flew several junket-whore types to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois to promote Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov‘s Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (opening 6.22). If you’ve seen the trailer (domestic or international) you know this film has as much reverence for Lincoln’s history as my two cats. For what it’s worth Burton’s black-and-white introduction, filmed in London, plays well.

N.Y. Times music critic Jon Pareles and Billboard‘s Danyel Smith spoke about Whitney Houston on Charlie Rose last night. The only stab at explaining what caused Houston’s tragic drug habit and death came at the 11-minute mark, when Smith said that Houston had all this responsibility to be great and maybe in the midst of this “she just wanted a cigarette, and maybe something else.” Okay, but what about other superstar entertainers who’ve dealt with this kind of pressure and who haven’t become cokeheads or died?

Smith also vaguely attributed some of Houston’s difficulties to her having grown up in Newark, New Jersey, which, she said, can be a “rough and tumble” environment. Except coming from a tough neighborhood tends to toughen you up and make you stronger, no? “That which doesn’t kill you”…right?

The only positive response I’ve ever had to the word “valentine” was when I saw Sydney Lumet‘s The Fugitive Kind and Marlon Brando‘s Valentine Xavier appeared in a snakeskin jacket. I feel zilch about this Hollywood montage making the rounds today. The finale of The Apartment is the only proclamation scene that has ever touched me because (a) it comes at the very end and (b) the object of Jack Lemmon‘s affection shrugs and says “fine, whatever…let’s get down to it.” Exactly.

I also love the champagne-cork gag. Perfect timing, perfect delivery. I laugh every time.

Deadline is reporting that Chris Pine‘s former agency, SDB Partners, has filed a lawsuit against the actor after he dumped them by email. SDB wants commissions on This Means War as well as Pine’s forthcoming work as Captain Kirk in Paramount’s Star Trek franchise.

It appears (emphasis on the “a” word) that Pine is dumping these guys because he’s panicking about the reception to War, the all-but-universally reviled McG action-romcom that sneaks tonight and opens on Friday. He reportedly canned them last November, at which point he’d surely realized what a piece of shite the McG was. In any event he needs to convey a message to the industry that he realizes he (i.e., SDB) screwed up and that he’s making changes, etc. “Okay, I signed off on the McG, fine, but they pushed me into it so it’s mainly their fault!”…or words to that effect.

Your typical American yahoo believes that under the skin many if not most Islamics are radical anti-Americans who have to be guarded against and certainly can’t be trusted. A more benevolent, open-hearted view is that we’re all God’s children and we have to accept our differences. Sean Stone, 27 year-old son of director Oliver Stone, belongs to the latter camp. He announced today from Iran, where he’s shooting a documentary, that he’s converted to Islam.

This is the kind of thing that bright willful types sometimes do in their 20s. Stone is trying to define himself. What matters in the end is blood, and Stone is half-Christian and half-Jewish so this is a phase — a “statement.” He’ll be sipping martinis with super-models in Paris next year or the year after. I met him once at a party in Manhattan. He believes in passion, wildness and the search for ecstasy by way of truth.

“The conversion to Islam is not abandoning Christianity or Judaism, which I was born with,” Stone said in a telephone call from the central Iranian city of Isfahan, where he underwent the ceremony. “It means I have accepted Mohammad and other prophets.” According to Iran’s Fars news agency, Stone had become a Shiite and had chosen to be known by the Muslim first name Ali.

I once made the mistake of leaning down and hugging a red Doberman Pinscher — a dog I knew really well and had played around with several times. The fucker bit me on the right cheek and ear. That never would have happened with a Golden Retriever. You can’t really trust Dobermans, Pit Bills or Mastiffs, certainly not when it comes to kissing or hugging.

Look at those cops after the Denver newswoman, KUSA’s Kyle Dyer, is bitten by Max the mastiff. They be cool, chillin’…no worries. And look at that weather guy after it happens.

Rick Santorum, who would probably get slaughtered in a race against President Obama, has essentially tied Mittens Romney in three nationwide polls among Republicans. Santorum has 30% to Romney’s 27% in a N.Y. Times/CBS News poll released today. A Pew Research poll has Santorum over Romney, 30% to 28%, and a Gallup poll has Romney at 32% vs. Santorum’s 30%.

Is there a scenario in which Santorum could realistically override Romney and wrestle away the Republican nomination? Highly doubtful. If anything Santorum, who knows the taste of butter on bread, will probably go the opportunistic-waffle route and become Romney’s vice-presidential candidate, which will probably strike a good portion of Santorum’s base — the Evangelicals, Tea Party nutters and gun-owning racist heehaw right — as a cop-out.

I say again what I’ve been saying all along: President Obama will squeak out a victory next November. There will be some (but not much) joy in Mudville among liberal moderates and progressives when this happens. The lefties felt euphoric in ’08 when Obama beat McCain, of course, but his victory over Romney will be met with great surges of…relief, I suppose. Better a mellow centrist who supports moderate measures in the pursuit of economic fairness and justice while winking at corporations than a shallow 1% guy — an empty haircut with the mindset of a corporate raider who made the family dog shit all over the station wagon.

As you might expect, Dave Izkoff‘s 2.12 N.Y. Times story about Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman‘s Lovelace, the currently rolling biopic about exploited ’70s porn star Linda Lovelace, was a marvel of artful dodging. Suffice that Itzkoff avoided mentioning that Lovelace’s fame wasn’t so much from starring in the famous 1972 porn film Deep Throat (’72) as playing a woman who swallows male appendages whole. Sorry.

All Itzkoff manages to say is that Lovelace “played a woman who learns that her clitoris is in her throat.”

He also says “there is comedy…in the film’s fastidious re-creations” of Lovelace’s python-like feat. He quotes actor Adam Brody, who plays Deep Throat co-star Harry Reems, saying that “those sex scenes with Ms. Seyfried were ‘by far the lightest, silliest stuff in the movie.'”

The other Linda Lovelace movie, Matthew Wilder‘s Inferno: A Linda Lovelace Story, won’t begin shooting until March, meaning that in all likelihood it’ll be eating Lovelace‘s dust. That in itself suggests that Wilder won’t be shooting his sex scenes in a light or silly vein, if only to avoid aping Epstein and Friedman. Lovelace producer Heidi Jo Markel, a former producer of Inferno, tells Itzkoff that Wilder’s script is “good” but “dark and oppressive.”

Inferno will costar Malin Akerman as Lovelace and Matt Dillon as her creepy and manipulative boyfriend, Matt Traynor. Peter Sarsgaard is playing Traynor in Lovelace and James Franco is playing Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner.

Itzkoff gets a tad more explicit at the end of the piece when he dryly describes the beginning of a scene in which Seyfriend/Lovelace orally pleasures Franco/Hefner in the balcony of Glendale’s Alex Theatre. Sorry again, but that is the gist of Itzkoff’s last paragraph. A N.Y. Times first?

Who, honestly, is going to have the stones to watch two Linda Lovelace dramas? One will be grueling enough, I suspect.

Andrew Sullivan‘s 2.11 riff about how Ja Rule goes well with slow-mo Wes Anderson shots reminds how much I love Anderson’s original scoring of this scene with Nico‘s “These Days”. I’ll always adore how she couldn’t sing but sang with such honesty, and could hit every note. Perfect.

Daniel Nettheim‘s The Hunter (Magnolia, 4.6) opened in Australia last October to a mostly positive critical response. The ads indicate that Willem Dafoe‘s character is out to shoot a Tasmanian tiger (thought to be extinct when the last of the species died in 1936) but that’s not the deal. This is tonight’s diversion pour moi. Written by Julia Leigh, Alice Addison and Wain Fimeri.

My idea of a cool Abraham Lincoln vampire movie would be one that resembles Phillip Borsos‘ The Grey Fox — a movie that looks, feels and behaves like it’s actually happening in the 19th Century — but with 19th Century vampires (i.e., ones that are trying to blend into society by concealing their nature whenever possible) running around. You need to respect the milieu and time period, and then weave in your bullshit. You’re a filmmaker with a time machine, and you’ve just landed in 1864 Washington…got it?

This trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (20th Century Fox, 6.22) tells us that director-producer Timur Bekmambetov isn’t much for authenticity. It tells us, as anyone who’s seen Wanted would know, that he’s an unbridled, wild-eyed, froth-at-the-mouth wildebeest who doesn’t give a shit about anything except roping in the idiots who pay to see cool CG monster shit.

I have this sense of having seen too many romcoms about under-40 couples (partly GenX but most GenY) taking the longest time to either find their ideal romantic partner or, having found him/her, taking eons to pull the trigger about moving in together or getting married or having kids.

I’m telling myself that these films — the latest being The Five Year Engagement (Universal, 4.27) — are metaphors for a general sense of under-40 futility out there — cynical attitudes and expectations, shitty jobs, crappy paychecks and “the Boomers have screwed us so what’s the point of shouldering too much responsibility?…we can’t afford that much and who knows when the next recession will come?”

You can’t turn off the hunger or instinct for love, sex and procreation, of course, and clearly there are thousands of rich or flush GenXers like Judd Apatow who’ve gotten married and have had kids, etc., but middle and lower-middle under-40s seem to be seriously ambivalent about taking the next step toward anything. They’d rather shoot the shit and hang out at cafes and text and go to Cancun and piddle around. Generation Flounder, Generation Procrastinate, Generation Wank. If this isn’t true why do I have a sense of so many movies and TV shows about romances that are endlessly delayed for this and that reason? Later.

On top of which I can’t buy into any film in which Jason Segel, the Manatee of GenY comic actors, is the engaged bachelor or groom or guy in a serious relationship. I look at him and I think indulgence and corpulence. Ice cream, Hostess Cupcakes, cheesecake, cheeseburgers, bananas, peanut butter, pasta, etc. I can’t “be” him and he can’t “be” me as I watch one of his films. He gives me the creeps.