“The first and perhaps only great mayor was Greek — he was — Pericles of Athens and he lived some 2500 years ago and he said, ‘All things good on this earth flow to the city because of the city’s greatness.'” That means, in part, beautiful women. Not necessarily the best in terms of character or loyalty, but looks, brains and talent have always been drawn (and will always be drawn) to power and the hustle-bustle.

Electoral Vote projects Obama over McCain, 343 to 184 electoral votes (and 11 unaccounted for). Yahoo’s Dashboard foresees Obama taking 330 to MCain’s 175. And fivethirtyeight is estimating 384.3 to 189.7, Obama again favored. Without a new Great Depression Obama would have won by a smaller margin, but he would have taken it. 24 days to go and the question everyone’s asking is whether a game-changing shoe will drop and tighten things up. I’m 95% sure nothing jarring will happen during the final debate. If it’s anything it’ll be a big move in — or from — forces in the Middle East. Israel bombing Iran?

I love the loud red and blue colors on the current Lionsgate W. ad banners (they showed up yesterday, replacing the original somber design) and particularly the backwards digital clock. They’re vivid, exciting, audacious. You can’t say they don’t jack up your interest levels on W. I’m genuinely sorry for any crashed browsers out there. (There’ve been a couple of complaints.) Just to be limber and fluid I use four browsers — the latest Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, Safari for Windows and Flock (a newbie from the guys behind the old Netscape).

Beverly Hills Chihuahua — America’s favorite hide-away-from-economic-calamity movie — is #1 again this weekend, projected to take in $19,900,000 by Sunday evening. Quarantine, reportedly the top grosser on Friday, is projected to come in second with $14.3 million. And Ridley Scott‘s Body of Lies — a not great but reasonably decent thriller with the usual satellite-camera pizazz and a solid, appealing Leonardo DiCaprio performance — is apparently a third-place shortfaller with a projected weekend haul of only $12.5 million.

This despite earlier projections of $15 to $17 million, and despite a reported second-place showing yesterday. If the $12.5 million figure (Steve Mason is projecting a “likely” $15 million), the best Warner Bros. can hope for at the end of the theatrical road is a gross in the mid to high 30s. (And it could could come in lower.) Factor in the $80 million or more production costs plus marketing and even if you’re a WB stockholder there doesn’t seem to be any way out of calling Lies a major wipeout. Foreign and video revenues will brighten things to some extent, but it still looks like a fairly big bust to me.
The fourth-place Eagle Eye will do $10.8, with Nick and Nora‘s $6.4 million earning a fifth-place spot. The Express — a tank — with make $4.6 million, $1600 per theatre.

MCN’s Len Klady has called Mike Leigh‘s Happy-Go-Lucky (Miramax, 10.10) “a miracle.” I don’t know about that. No, I do know about that. I know how this very well-made movie made me feel. It made me feel like I was in a jail cell with Bobby Sands, but eating really good food.
HGL is a very “together” and confidently made film. It knows itself and what it’s up to. Leigh, after all, is one of the finest directors around; he has been for a couple of decades. And as I wrote last month, Sally Hawkins‘ performance as the cheerful and indefatigable Poppy is a full-on inhabiting, and she brings it all home in the last 15 to 20 minutes with quiet maturity and resigned grace.
But for some of you, the Poppy character will feel like an absolute horror. She certainly felt that way to me. I explained it all before. Here’s the 8.26 piece.

I understand and accept that Twilight is going to kill, but why…forget it. I give up. Forget I said anything. Nothing matters. You can’t fight City Hall. I’m quitting early today and driving down to see Body of Lies. Report at 11 pm.

Some Vanity Fair editors threw together a list of the 25 best documentaries of all time, and they don’t mention the Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk? Which is hands down one of the most emotionally affecting films ever made (i.e., including features). And they blow off Grizzly Man? And Sicko? And Que Viva Mexico? And…forget it. These guys weren’t that serious.

The November 4th writing is on the wall, many if not most never-say-die righties are admitting to the likelihood of Barack Obama’s election, and John McCain, who surely understands the math, has one decision to make: does he go down slimy or does he go down clean? Because if something terrible happens, God forbid, it’s not just McCain who will have blood on his hands — it’ll be the rightie-kook wing of the Republican party

He could decide to stop the inflammatory hate rhetoric and winking at (or certainly doing nothing to discourage) yahoos yelling “traitor!,” “terrorist!” or “kill him!” about Obama, and talk instead about vision-identity stuff — dreams and designs, can-do policies and things that have always mattered to him deep down. He could become, in other words, a Reaganesque right-wing soul man. He’d still lose, but he would at least have a semblance of honor to call his own, which he has all but forfeited since the Wall Street crisis began and he began his angry, erratic, low-road, stirring-up-the-wackjobs thing. (Not in the debates but on the trail.)
David Gergen, appearing on Anderson Cooper 360 last night [and excerpted in the video above], said that “one of the most striking things we’ve seen in the last few day, we have seen it at the Palin rallies and we saw it at the McCain rally today, and we saw it to a considerable degree during the rescue package legislation. There is a free-floating sort of whipping-around anger that could really lead to some violence. And I think we’re not far from that.”
Someone yelled “traitor!” again today during a McCain speech. Big John said nothing to calm down the vibe. He has fallen so far, so deep into the pit

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil has posted another Oscar prediction chart. The participants voted big for Frost Nixon. They include Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, the Daily Beast‘s Tom Tapp, Richard Rushfield of LATimes.com, The Envelope‘s Mark Olsen, Variety.com’s Jeff Sneider, T.L. Stanley of the Hollywood Reporter, In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Star magazine’s Marshall Fine.

My Tuesday chat with W. director Oliver Stone at the Four Seasons. And here‘s the press conference with Stone, Josh Brolin, Scott Glenn, Richard Dreyfuss, Rob Corddry, Thandie Newton, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell. There’s a bizarre moment at the beginning of the press conference recording when an electronic fire alarm goes off.

W. director Oliver Stone at the Four Seasons — Tuesday, 10.7.08, 6:15 pm

I just wrote L.A. Weekly critic Scott Foundas about an interesting terminology matter that’s cropped up over the past week or so. It’s basically about the 21st Century definition of porn, or rather the expanded cultural “street” definition that doesn’t apply to sex. I love chasing new terms and understandings, but I’m not quite 100% on all the wrinkles here so I’m asking for counsel.
“I was amused by and posted a comment from a reader who said that Revolutionary Road “looks to be the Citizen Kane of Gen X marital-strife porn.” It may be that a certain party on the DreamWorks marketing team has taken this as a slam against the Sam Mendes film, which it isn’t. What ‘porn’ means in this context is (and tell me if I’m wrong) an obsessive waist-deep immersion in any intense or demanding or melodramatic activity, be it war or Wall Street or baseball or politics or anything.
“In your L.A. Weekly review of Body of Lies,” I continued, “you used the term ‘terror porn,’ which came from a colleague who had amusingly used this term to describe the entire wave of recent Middle East Hollywood espionage movies — Syriana, The Kingdom, Rendition, Body of Lies. Does this mean your friend regards these films as somehow lewd or marked by questionable taste? Not unless you’re Ed McMahon. He’s saying they’re extremely immersive, whole-hog experiences. I mean…right?
“Does ‘porn’ in this context allude to something obsessive or repetitive? I’m not sure if it does. What do you think? I’ve only been using this term recently. I do know that the older crowd flinches when they hear it, presuming that it means something icky or distasteful. A journalist friend has this same reaction yesterday, but he’s now coming to terms with the new definition.
Foundas replies: “Basically, I think ‘porn’ when it is used in the context of ‘terror porn’ (per the colleague I cited in my Body of Lies review) or “disability porn” (as I referred to Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) or even ‘torture porn’ (which is probably where all these other ‘porn’ derivations started) has less to do with obsession and repetition than with a certain superficiality or tastelessness — in other words, the idea that the thing being classified as ‘porn’ is somehow being used shamelessly to manipulate or titillate the audience, without any serious comment being made on the subject at hand.
“So the person who says that Revolutionary Road looks like ‘the Citizen Kane of Gen X marital-strife porn’ probably means to imply that somehow the iconography of middle-class domestic unrest is being used for its iconographic value and little deeper meaning. Of course, it’s partly an inane comment, in that Revolutionary Road takes place in the 1950s, so it has nothing whatsoever to do with Gen X, but I digress.”
[Wells comment: I took the GenX thing to mean an allusion to Kate and Leo’s own generational alignment, although the reader may have cooked it up in ignorance of the ’50s backdrop in Revolutionary Road.]
“To offer another example, I myself tried to address some of what you seem to be getting at here in my LA Weekly review of Grace is Gone last December, where I wrote:
“[Strouse has] devised Grace Is Gone to work on our sentiments the way a porn movie works on our libidos — only Strouse postpones the money shot with 80-odd minutes of emotional foreplay en route to the inevitable, orgiastic climax where Stanley finally spills the beans and the girls spill forth the entire contents of their tear ducts. It’s a horribly contrived bit of catharsis, and, as if to underline the crassness of his instincts, Strouse drowns out the dialogue of that crucial scene with music — a reminder that, in all pornography, talk is expendable.”
Wells response: If Foundas’ definition of porn (“shameless manipulation or titillatation of the audience, without any serious comment being made on the subject at hand”) is more commonly understood than my own (“an obsessive waist-deep immersion in any intense or demanding or melodramatic activity”) then it was wrong — incorrect — to run that “Citizen Kane of GenX marital-strife porn” line because no one’s seen Mendes’ film and has any clue if it’s shamelessly manipulative or not. I rather doubt that it is, knowing Mendes’work as I do. So it’s probably best to drop it and put the whole porn issue to bed.