Am I wrong in thinking that images of semi-dressed couples in something resembling a sexual embrace have disappeared from movie advertising? When’s the last time a movie poster showed a moderately hot couple lying horizontal and kissing each other with one of them bare-chested? It’s odd to think that 1962 movie posters allowed for juicier images that the ones we have today, but it may be true.

I’ve always been more of a “do your best and the hell with rankings” type of guy. Which is why I’ve always hated the “we’re-number-one!” ESPN jock mentality. And why I hated the mentality of those who didn’t like Peter Berg‘s Friday Night Lights because it didn’t end with a Big Win.

Mike “Mad Dog” Bell, Chris Bell and Mark “Smelly” Bell, in Magnlia’s Bigger, Stronger, Faster

Whenever I’m near a sports bar and I hear 40 or 50 beerguts howling like baboons because a touchdown’s been made or a homer’s been hit, I always shake my head and frown a little bit and mutter “assholes.” And I like a good football or baseball game as much as anyone. I just hate sports goons.

I consider it vital to work, perform and create as fully and passionately as I can, but I don’t feel I have to prove that I’m the Absolute Lord and King-Shit ruler and master of all my competitors. I am what I am on a daily aspirational basis and that’s good enough for me.

Anyway, the desperate need to be the biggest, the strongest and the fastest in our culture is what Chris Bell‘s Bigger, Stronger, Faster is basically about, although the nominal topic is the abuse of anabolic steroids, and more particularly what this abuse represents in terms of the national character.

I spoke with Bell, a very bright, open and fair-minded guy, a couple of weeks ago about his film, which is very much in the running for a Best Feature Documentary nomination from the Academy.

Anabolic steroids are basically synthetic versions of hormones that the body produces naturally, but they’re primarily known for enhancing sports performance and enabling athletes to attain physiques that seem absurdly pumped-up to people who live outside the body-building realm.

The film’s main narrative is a portrait of Bell and his two brothers, Mike and Chris, who grew up idolizing muscular superstar types like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone — doomed from the start. They all got into steroids in the mid to late ’90s.

As critic Maitland McDonagh has written, “Mike left college to become a professional wrestler while Mark became a competitive weight lifter. Bell’s quest to find out why he always saw steroids and other drugs as cheating while others — including both his brothers — don’t takes him down many roads.

“Not only does he delve into the rules governing professional athletes and the ways they circumvent them, but he explores the health supplement industry, the changing physiques of comic-book superheroes and GI Joe action figures, ‘roid rage, military use of amphetamenes, ‘gene doping’ (the genetic mutation that allows Belgian Blue cattle to grow ‘double muscle’ has implications that go beyond the stockyard), reliance on beta blockers to banish stage fright and the off-label use of ADD drugs like adderall to improve concentration, widespread retouching in physique magazines and the adult-film industry’s reliance on liquid Viagra.

“And he keeps circling back to his brothers: Mike’s wrestling career fizzled, he became addicted to recreational drugs, attempted suicide and is trying to get a new WWE contract while performing at tiny local venues. Mark opened a gym, got married, had a child, and promised his wife he’s stop using steroids. He hasn’t.

“Bell’s conclusion that the use of steroids is rooted in a poisonous American belief that bigger is inherently better and second best is just first among losers is compelling. And he doesn’t let himself off the hook: He doesn’t use performance enhancing drugs, but when Mark scores a coveted victory – one he would never have won without doping – Bell and his parents (including his mom, who wept when she learned two of her sons were on the juice) are on the sidelines cheering him on.”

The best line from Bell’s film is “there is no safe drug….what there is, is a benefit-to-risk ratio.” Which you could obviously say about alcohol, heroin, nicotine, ritalin, cough syrup, whatever.

There’s a piece in the N.Y. Times Sunday Magazine by Daniel B. Smith titled “What Is Art For?” If you ask me art’s only function is to be. But if you’re asking what purpose it serves, I’ve always believed the Tom Wolfe proclamation that its primary raison d’etre is to allow the art world’s benefactors — the stinking rich — to present themselves as hipper, wiser and more soulful than those who don’t support it, and thereby place themselves a notch higher on the social totem pole.

Some of the terminology and references from Wolfe’s The Painted Word (’75) are obviously dated, but the basic through-line is still dead-on.

Neil Young has written the most visionary, sharply focused and concisely written manifesto about how to save the Big Three car companies that I’ve seen anywhere.

“Hillary Clinton is probably ready to ankle out of the Senate,” N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes in her 11.16 column, titled “Team of Frenemies.” “The point of the Senate was to be a staging area for her presidential race, and that’s done.

“She’s not a player there. Her bid to get the health care issue away from Ted Kennedy was stymied recently when Kennedy refused her request to create a special subcommittee that she would head.

“And why should the woman who made 18 million cracks go back to being junior to Chuck Schumer, if she could be toasted from Dublin to Dubai?

“On the down side, Hillary would be taking over a big and demoralized government bureaucracy, after proving with her campaign that she does not know how to run a big and demoralized group of people.

“On the up side, she would never have to exaggerate her foreign policy résumé again; this time, she really would be brokering peace and flying into places where they’d try to fire at her.

“And if she worked hard enough — and she would — she could restore clarity to Foggy Bottom, the striped-pants center of diplomacy so maligned and misused by W. and Dick Cheney on their Sherman’s march to war in Iraq and in their overwrought bid to become the only hyperpower.

“If Barry chooses Hillary as secretary of state, a woman who clearly intimidated him and taught him to be a better pol in the primaries, it doesn’t signal the return of the Clinton era. It says the opposite: If you have a president who’s willing to open up his universe to other smart, strong people, if you have a big dog who shares his food dish, the Bill Clinton era is truly over.

“Appointing a Clinton in the cabinet would be so un-Clintonian.”

Asked by the N.Y. Times‘ Deborah Solomon about Barack Obama‘s choice of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff, Karl Rove replies as follows: “I raised a question as to whether this would be the best use of Emanuel’s talents. If you’re trying to work through a big legislative priority, it is sort of hard if you have a guy who has a reputation as a tough, hard, take-no-prisoners, head-in-your-face, scream-and-shout, send-them-a-dead-fish partisan.”

Slumdog Millionaire‘s Danny Boyle narrating a N.Y. Times still-montage piece about the shooting of his film last year in India.

Taped to ticket window in lower Manhattan’s Angelika Film Center — Saturday, 11.15, 7:15 pm.

Australia’s website has been revamped and re-launched. It may be the most fluidly visual and eye-candy-ish movie site I’ve ever laid eyes on. Some 200 pics from the film, 20-plus short clips, interactive, whistles and bells.