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There was a swanky White House concert last night given by Paul McCartney and other entertainers, the occasion being the awarding of a Gershwin Prize for Popular Song to McCartney. With Barack Oabama presenting the award at night’s end, and with Michelle Obama and their kids sitting front-row center, and with everyone singing along to “Hey Jude” during the finale.

“McCartney brought down the house by belting out ‘Michelle,’ aiming his words straight at a first lady named Michelle,” says an AP report.

“He said he’d been ‘itching’ to perform it at the White House, and asked the president’s forgiveness in advance. The first lady was soon mouthing the words along with McCartney and the president was swaying in his seat.

After serenading the first lady with the lyrics ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ McCartney joked that he just might be the ‘first guy ever to be punched out by a president.’

“The whole night was built around Obama’s presentation to McCartney of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, awarded by the Library of Congress.

“McCartney said it was a moment like no other. “‘I don’t think there could be anything more special than to play here,’ the Englishman said. And then he volunteered to make it a regular gig. ‘Lunchtimes, we could come around,’ he offered. ‘We’re cheap.’

“McCartney, 67, left no question about how he felt about Obama, telling the president that in tough times, ‘You have billions of us who are rooting for you and we know you are going to come through.’

“Later, after the TV cameras had left, he expressed appreciation for the Library of Congress and added a zinger: ‘After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.'”

The Gershwin prize is named for the songwriting brothers George and Ira Gershwin, whose collections are housed at the library. Previous recipients of the Gershwin award are Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon.

The concert will air on PBS’s “In Performance at the White House” on July 28 at 8 pm.

There will be an encore presentation at 9:30 p.m.

I’ve no interest in whether Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are currently “on” as a couple, but I know they’re almost certainly doomed if Pattinson fails to find some degree of assurance or validation from outside the Twilight sphere. They both need to succeed in films without vampires or werewolves, but especially Pattinson given (a) his apparently limited acting range and (b) his shitty choices so far, which have created a vague “uh-oh” feeling.

Robert Pattinson on the set of the currently-lensing Water for Elephants.

Relationships between actors are never entirely defined by feelings and character and commitment. They’re about about the necessity of similar career grooves. If over the next two or three years Stewart’s career just piddles along like Pattinson’s, they may work out. But if she catches on with a great performance in something really successful or Oscar-worthy while he’s still treading water, they’ll be finished in a matter of months.

Pattinson’s stock clearly fell in the wake of his boring performance in Remember Me, a second-rate romance by way of some 9/11 exploitation. RP’s previous appearance as Salvador Dali (with that absurd uptwist moustache) in ’08’s Little Ashes didn’t do him any favors either.

Pattinson currently has three extra-curricular features in the pipeline, and if one of them doesn’t “take” on some level he’s done. I’m sorry to sound like a Darwinian hard-ass, but if you don’t think agents are thinking and saying the same things then you need to get out more.

One look at Pattinson’s appearance in his next film, a period romance called Bel Ami, and your heart goes “meh.” Co-directed by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod and based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, it’s described as “a chronicle of a young man’s rise to power in Paris through his manipulation of the city’s most influential and wealthy women.” In other words it’s a period Lothario story in the vein of Stephen Frears‘ Cherie.

Pattinson on the set of Bel Ami.

Next comes the currently-shooting Water for Elephants, which is being directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine) from a Richard LaGravanese screenplay. (Here are pics from the set.) It costars Reese Witherspoon, Christoph Waltz and Hal Holbrook. It’s about a young guy who gets a job as a circus vet. Maybe, but it seems minor.

Pattinson’s third and last shot is Madeline Stowe‘s Unbound Captives, a western that Stowe wrote and will direct. The synopsis says it’s about “a widowed woman [being] rescued by a frontiersman and the two searching for her kidnapped children,” etc. Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz costar. I’m guessing that Jackman will plays the fontiersman so I don’t know where this leaves Pattinson.

As reported by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Tom Cruise will reanimate producer Lev Grossman — his Tropic Thunder character — on this Sunday’s MTV Movie Awards (airing at 9 pm). Not just in this Risky Business riff but in two others about Twilight-ers.

I’ve always suspected that the name “Lev Grossman” was a riff on Sid Krassman, the coarse Hollywood producer depicted in Terry Southern‘s Blue Movie.

In a just-posted piece about the critical firestorm that last weekend greeted Sex and the City 2, N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis suggests that Hollywood.com critic Thomas Leupp owns the idea that SATC2 might inspire anti-American terrorist acts. “It could become an effective inspirational video for suicide bombers,” Leupp wrote, “provided they can endure the film’s two-and-a-half hour running time, of course.”

Leupp may have been the first critic to express this, Dargis implies, or was the most articulate or noteworthy…whatever. But for one reason or another she chose his quote to represent this view, so draw your own conclusions.

My own, for what it’s worth, is that Dargis doesn’t respect HE like she could or should. Because I was first to plant a flag on the SATC-terrorism thing.

Way back on May 28, 2008, after seeing Sex and the City: The Movie at a commercial Paris cinema, I called it “another Taliban recruitment film.” In a followup piece I suggested that “young Arab men might be so repelled by its celebration of putrid 21st Century chick culture that joining the Taliban might seem freshly appealing.”

Now, you can surmise that I wasn’t quoted because my “Taliban recruitment film” remark wasn’t written in response to SATC2, the focus of Dargis’s article. But of course, the same content that everyone is responding to in the current film was also stinking up the place in ’08’s SATC: The Movie. The fact that the girls travel to Morocco-disguised-as-Abu Dhabi in the newbie is a mere geographical anecdote. The spiritual cancer at the heart of the SATC franchise was just as pernicious two years ago as it is today…c’mon. Both films were sired by the same seed.

All of which suggests that Leupp may be enjoying his moment in the N.Y. Times sun because I was too far ahead of the pack. Forget The Man Who Knew Too Much (also partly shot in Morocco) and consider The Man Who Spoke Too Soon.

Lionsgate has apparently delayed its Killers screenings for critics until opening day (i.e., 48 hours hence). They’re obviously looking to prevent negative reviews from denting the weekend gross, but I thought reviews don’t matter to undiscriminating Eloi.

The way Ashton Kutcher seems to be half-yawning is a mistake, I feel. He’s trying to suggest a certain nonchalance (“don’t worry, baby….getting shot at by rival spies is no biggie”) but it comes across as a kind of boredom. And Katherine Heigl ‘s haircut makes her look much older than she seemed to be in Knocked Up, like she’s 38 or 39 and lives in the suburbs.

The July issue of Vanity Fair contains one of those oh-to-have-lived-a-champagne-life-in-the-50s-or-60s articles about the coupling of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It’s an excerpt from Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger‘s Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century (Harper, 6.15).

The fact (i.e., outside the bubbly spell of this book and article) is that Taylor and Burton were considered to be celebrity boors and attention junkies after they meshed in Rome in 1962 and thereafter became known as Liz-and-Dick — the first Hollywood power-couple whose paparrazi photos gradually developed the power to make average people feel nauseous at the drop of a hat, certainly by the time they made The Sandpiper in ’65.

They had both enjoyed their proudest professional moments in the ’50s (although Burton managed to recapture some of his glory in two ’60s films, Becket and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold), and seemed to do little else except spend and party and squander once they hooked up.

Taylor had hit her physical, sexual and professional peak from the time of ’51’s Father of the Bride through Butterfield 8 in ’60, and Burton was in an enviable groove during the same approximate period, tackling a little Shakespeare on stage along with films like The Desert Rats, The Robe, Alexander the Great and Look Back in Anger. But they began to signify a kind of jet-set boredom and the notion of attention-for-attention’s-sake after they became a famous couple. They were the first to be seen in this light, I suppose, becoming in a sense the Bennifer (my favorite term was always “B. Lo”) of their time.

The two photos above — Taylor during the filming of Suddenly Last Summer in ’58, and recently with her current boyfriend, the allegedly gay Jason Winters — remind us that the elixir of youth is spent before we know it, and that it all downswirls into wheelchairs and tired bones and cluelessness. It’s a brutally cruel process.

Taylor in ’55, during the shooting of George Stevens’ Giant.

“Before Brangelina, TomKat and Speidi there was Liz and Dick — that is, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the super-couple who set the standard all others can only aspire to in terms of modern celebrity,” reads Rebecca Sacks‘ summary. “What other couple has been condemned both by the Vatican and on the floor of the House of Representatives? What other couple lived as decadently, as opulently, and as passionately? What other couple could conquer both Hollywood and Broadway the way these two did over a span of two decades?

“Kashner and Schoenberger trace the arc of this epic, turbulent love affair, which appropriately began on the set of Cleopatra — a story about another romance for the ages, and one of the most expensive films ever made — and ended spectacularly with jealousy, anger, and divorce, despite the fact that Taylor and Burton never really fell out of love.

“[The authors] scored a major coup in persuading Taylor to allow them to publish scores of never-before-seen letters that Burton wrote to her, and passages from many of the letters are included in the excerpt. In addition to demonstrating that Burton was a gifted, lyrical, playful writer who could effortlessly summon the beauty of the Shakespearean language he so loved, the correspondence reveals poignant and intimate truths about the power of the bond that Taylor and Burton shared — sexual, creative, and spiritual.”

I knew less than ten minutes into last night’s screening of Get Him To The Greek (Universal, 6.4) that it was funnier, smarter and far less irritating than Forgetting Sarah Marshall , director Nicholas Stoller‘s previous film (which was ruined by the galumphy Jason Segel, or more precisely by his pathetic first-act nude scene). So I guess I’ll have to re-think Stoller, whom I’d previously dismissed on the basis of Segel’s performance and casting, even.

Maybe I’ve been kicked and beaten down by too many moronic comedies, but I knew from the start that this was at least a couple of cuts above. It’s crude and outrageous at times, and it’s also a fairly dry, moderately deadpan, naturalistically-performed satire of music industry mores.

It’s also a 21st Century remake of My Favorite Year, with Russell Brand as a debauched-rock-star version of Peter OToole, and Jonah Hill as Mark Linn-Baker‘s Benjy Stone character.

And it has two…make that three chuckle-worthy performances from Hill, Brand and P. Poppa-Diddy-Pop Sean Combs. I never really “laughed,” but I’m not much of a hah-hah responder when I see comedies. I’m more of a heh-heh type, or a type that guffaws or half-grins and says to himself “that’s funny” without making a big show of it.

I was again reminded of what a moderately cool, moderately funny movie this was when I awoke from an hour-long snooze and caught the last 30 minutes’ worth. Okay, I realize that sounds highly suspect but please let me explain.

My slipping under the waves had nothing to do with Greek’s quality; it was due to lingering jet-lag. I succumbed under great duress and protest, in fact, knowing that I’d be missing something that was obviously working pretty well. I was placated, I supposed, by the realization that I don’t need to see an entire film to know if it’s good or bad or in-between. I can tell with ten minutes, and sometimes within five. Same thing with a script — good or bad, you know the deal by the time you’ve hit page ten.

I intend to somehow catch it again before Friday’s debut, or just pay to see it this weekend. Update: Seeing it again Thursday night at the AMC 34th Street.

Go ahead and attack me for writing a favorable review of a film that I missed 60% of, but who’s calling this a review? It’s simply an honest account of what happened, and what my gut and my head (however befogged by slumber) told me as I tried to avoid the lures of Mr. Sandman.

Okay, so I lost the battle, but one of the reasons I gave in is that I’ve learned that it’s better not to fight the urge. Give in, surrender and when you return to consciousness 10 or 12 or 15 minutes later you’ll understand and appreciate the film you were trying to watch all the more. Last night’s problem was going under for a whole damn hour, which I’ve never done before.

Get Him To The Greek is being described as a semi-sequel to Forgetting Sarah Marshall because Brand is playing the same preening jerkoff he was in that Hawaiian-based film — a giant-boned, spindly-limbed British rocker named Alduous Snow.

Everyone knows the basic Greek drill, I presume, about Hill’s character, who works for Combs’ record company, suggesting in an office meeting that Snow, a self-destructive, once-hugely-popular performer, should be booked into doing a concert at L.A.’s Greek theatre as a celebration of a legendary Snow/Greek concert that happened in 2000. Hill is assigned to go to England and “mindfuck” Snow into some kind of malleable state so that he shows up for the concert in a sober (or at least perform-worthy) state of mind, and if you’ve seen My Favorite Year (directed by Richard Benjamin, released in ’82) you know the rest

I probably just should sit through this thing again — no snoozing! — and then write Part 2.

I can at least reiterate something I’ve said before, which is that Hill’s size has become a real problem — fat guys are funny but morbid obesity is an ailment that will stop your life cold. Hill is so ballooned-out that I had real trouble believing that he’d have any kind of girlfriend, much less one as fetching as Elizabeth Moss.

Mainstream media and online jackals reacted adversely yesterday to Kristen Stewart‘s comment, included in an interview with British Elle‘s Claire Matthiae, that being hunted down, surrounded and flash-bulbed by paparazzi is a little like being raped.

Kristen Strewart in a British Elle snap used to accompany the interview.

In the print version of his story, N.Y. Daily News writer Anthony Benigno quoted an online ranter who called Stewart’s remarks “ignorant and insensitive,” and added that she should “apologize to rape victims.”

Why should Stewart apologize? Paparazzi are hit-and-run rapists of a sort, and being obliged to surrender little slivers of your soul as your picture is taken hundreds or thousands of times by a pack of shouting wolves is a kind of personal mauling that isn’t far from my understanding of “rape” — to be invaded and occupied and suffer a kind of brutal violation or wounding or theft, be it physical or emotional.

The people dissing Stewart are insisting, idiotically, that “rape” be defined as only a sexual violation. I’ll bet twenty bucks that most of these complainers aren’t very well educated.

I felt raped once when I came home to a Paris apartment I’d been staying in and realized it had been broken into and everything taken, including a new can of American-brand shaving cream that heated up when it came out of the can. I really loved that stuff, and those frog mo’fos stole it! I was enraged, and realized in an instant that this is probably a taste of what being physically raped feels like. Sexual violation is obviously many times more bruising and traumatic, but I know what I felt when I saw that apartment door ajar and my bathroom cabinet ransacked.

“The photos are so…I feel like I’m looking at someone being raped,” Stewart tells Matthiae. “A lot of the time I can’t handle it. What you don’t see are the cameras shoved in my face and the bizarre intrusive questions being asked, or the people falling over themselves, screaming and taunting to get a reaction. All you see is an actor or a celebrity lit up by a flash..it’s fucked. I never expected that this would be my life.’

In order to stave off suspicions that the Hollywood Reporter is being made over into a kind of fluffy-whorey celebrity rag, newly installed editorial director Janice Min has hired veteran industry reporter Kim Masters as an editor-at-large — i.e., a term that basically means writing stuff from home. Masters, formerly of Premiere, Esquire, The Washington Post and Vanity Fair, is sharp and well-connected, but does anyone see this as a lasting fit?

I mean, honestly, c’mon…Janice Min and Kim Masters? I understand about Min needing Masters to symbolically affirm the legitimacy of her editorial intentions, and about Masters being amenable to a six-figure salary and all, but they seem like a real oil-and-water team. It’s a little bit like costarring Mae West and Rosalind Russell as sisters. What do I know? Well, I know Kim, and I’ve sure as hell heard stories about Min.

Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson mentioned earlier today that (a) Min will “transition the THR print edition to a weekly by summer’s end [while] moving the daily online” and (b) that “her stated goal is to broaden THR’s coverage with consumer-friendly content” — a euphemism for fluffy-whorey? — “while still hanging onto the mandate to cover the entertainment business for the trade.”

Previously available as a pricey limited edition hardcover, Paul Duncan and Steve Shapiro’s The Godfather Family Album debuts today at a much more affordable price — $44 bills and change.

I know what I’m supposed to say about the just-released Spartacus Bluray, which I finally bought and saw last night in my modest Brooklyn apartment. I know what the general consensus is, and I’m all for being a joiner. I’m supposed to agree with the condemnation of this disc that Robert Harris, the restoration maestro who brought the original Spartacus back to life in 1991, posted two or three weeks ago. Just get in line and say it, affirm it — Spartacus is an affront!

More particularly I’m supposed to say yes, the Spartacus Bluray looks like a son of Patton — a plastic piece of digitally-wiped shit. Electronically sharpened, haloed, and scrubbed free of all the high-frequency detail in Russell Metty‘s Super Technirama 70 lensings.

There’s no question that the Spartacus Bluray has been scrubbed down. Last night I put my face about 15 inches away from my 42″ plasma and studied Jean Simmons‘ face during one of the first-act closeups, and it’s like she’s wearing too much base — not the flesh-covered stuff you buy in pharmacies, but the digital kind that washes away organic sincerity.

So yes — Harris is right. The Spartacus Bluray is, technically speaking, a cheap handjob, an abomination, high-end vandalism. It should be recalled and Universal tekkies should engineer a “new image harvest,” and do it right this time.

There’s just one problem. If you step back from the screen — sit three or four feet away, I mean — the Spartacus Bluray looks way better than the Criterion DVD or the laser disc or any other version that I’ve ever seen. For the first time since seeing Harris’s restored print on a big screen, I felt dazzled by some of the images. I was saying to my son Dylan, “I’m not supposed to like this but whoa…look at that!”

Harris will probably get angry when he reads some of these words, but this Spartacus delivers some of the sharpest, most gleaming and best-looking pop-out images I’ve ever seen of Stanley Kubrick‘s 1960 film outside of a theatre. As long as you keep your distance from the plasma screen, I mean. And especially if you squint a bit.