Ruffled feathers at Fox News over an unflattering photo of Sarah Palin on the cover of the current Newsweek. If they were so inclined, could the Newsweek guys have run a more flattering shot of the Republican vp candidate? Certainly. Did they go with this one because certain parties at Newsweek (along with every blue-minded voter in this country) find her despicable? Don’t know, can’t say.

John McCain is losing and knows it. He feels, in fact, that he’s trapped in a kind of jail cell — a cell of ugly rhetoric and impossible taskdom, given the his poll numbers since the economic meltdown — that he can’t escape from. How do I know this? Because earlier today in Pennsylvania McCain said, “Across this country this is the agenda I have set before, my fellow prisoners.” Maybe we’re all prisoners in a mortal existential sense, but McCain was clearly revealing the Freudian undertow.

The latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking report, taken from 10.5 to 10.7 (i.e., before last night’s debate) shows Barack Obama with a 52% to 41% lead over John McCain. Between McCain’s “that one” gaffe, his leaving the studio right after the event (while Barack and Michelle stayed and chatted), and the worldwide economic calamity vibe it really does feel as if the ship has sailed on the 11.4 outcome. The lead may expand a bit in the next poll, given the general consensus that Obama “won” or at least did better last night. The only thing to factor in on top of this is the Bradley effect.

Who’s keeping the definitive list of whacked movie print critics? The Salt Lake Tribune‘s Sean Means? He’s probably already added Arizona film critic Craig Outhier, but in case he hasn’t here’s the announcement. Arizona’s East Valley Tribune (which publishes affiliate local papers in Scottsdale and Tempe) will cut loose 46 editorial employees come January, Outhier included.

Whenever someone gets it like this I always think of Joe Pesci‘s death in Goodfellas. “Oh, no!”…thunk, body flop in the linoleum floor, blood spreading out and the old-guy shooter saying with finality, “That’s that.”

I love this. I certainly respect the speed factor — it was up two or three hours after the close of last night’s debate — but the art isn’t quite right, dammit. The capital “t” and “’08” don’t seem proportionately rock ‘n’ roll. Trying to figure why “amost”-level logos and style designs don’t work can drive you nuts. Someone should re-do it and get it right and then the buttons, bumper stickers and whatnot could begin to circulate. For fun, I mean. A keepsake.

Everyone remembers W. costars Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright being arrested last July at a bar in Shreveport, Louisiana, along with five other W. crew members who had worked on the just-wrapped Oliver Stone movie. Brolin was maced; Wright was tasered. [Note: Stone told me today the initial discord was due a racist attitude.] Some or all of the W. guys were taken down to the station and had to post bail.

W. star Josh Brolin (slight grin) — Tuesday, 10.8.08, 5:15 pm

There was said to be a cell-phone video of part of the incident, which I can confirm today to be absolutely the case.
I later wrote that Brolin should make a short film about this incident, but he said his hands were tied because he’d been told to shut up about it. Today, however, he opened up.
It was during an interview we did late this afternoon during the W. junket at the Four Seasons hotel. Before reading the transcript and listening to the recording, know that Brolin is looking at a court date in Shreveport in November or December to answer charges of interfering with an arrest. He and his lawyers, asserting there was no such interference, have been waiting for Shreveport authorities to drop the charge and make amends, but this has never happened.
Anyway, here — with minor edits — is a transcript. [The comments in brackets are my questions or clarifications.]
“What we were really waiting for was for them [the Shreveport authorities] to dismiss it. We were waiting for them to do the right thing. The mayor, prosecuting attorney, whomever. I don’t know everything that happened. I do know there was no fight. None. I do know that I was maced and that Jeffrey Wright was tasered. There was no defiance, no struggle. There was no fight. There was no resistance.
“I know my assistant got arrested or asking too many questions. Twelve questions. [So what the cops perceived as a lack of submission to their authority…?] I don’t know. I don’t see it. I look at the tape, which everyone will eventually see….I look at the tape and I go ‘where is the fight’? I don’t understand where the fight is. [Was it] me saying, ‘Hey, where are you taking [Jeffrey]?” because I want to get him out? After I asked for the third time.

“And they didn’t want…maybe they looked at me and said ‘you know, he’s a big boy, he’s got a bald head…heh-heh-heh! We don’t want to deal with him, [and] we don’t want him possibly getting out of hand maybe.’
“[But] none of us were drunk, we had just finished shooting three or four hours before. We were out…in the beginning, it was like [smacks hand] okay! It was time! We did it! We were so proud, what an accomplishment!…and then this fucking happens. To me it was ridiculous. I have never seen…I have never ever, ever, ever, ever seen an escalation of paranoia and abuse like that…ever. And I know a lot of cops. Everybody knows I have a checkered past and I’ve been in situations that are kind of tough. I’ve never ever been treated like that by cops. Ever.
“[A cop will normally side with the local guy, the guy he knows.] Yeah, but I don’t think that was it. I don’t know the specifics between Jeffrey [Wright] and the bartender, but he was asked to leave, and I know that was why the cops came, to say okay, it’s time to escort you out. Not because [Jeffrey] was yelling or screaming. He was just saying look, I’m here with my friends, I’m celebrating the end of our movie, and then they escorted him out, [and] we wanted to know why, and they didn’t want to tell us. They immediately resorted to violence. Which is what the police are there to try and stop and prevent. That didn’t happen. They were the violent ones.
“It was us going….you can see it on the tape…us going ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.’ There was no fight-back at all. My lawyers are befuddled right now. They do not understand and they have never experienced anything like this. The dealings with the Shreveport legal system.
“[So when’s the tape going to come out?] I don’t know, I don’t know. Probably pretty soon. Or maybe after we go to court. November, December. Something like that. [Why are you going to court?] Because charges were pressed against me. Oh, yeah. Interfering with an arrest. I got the least, I got the least. My assistant got interfering with an arrest because of the questions asked, and then she got resisting arrest because she stepped forward as they were trying to push her face into the ground.

Brolin (no grin) — Tuesday, 10.8.08, 5:16 pm

“I mean, really severe, man. Truly, truly. Not to be too maudlin or morbid. But I’ve been around the police my whole life. I have so many policeman friends and police woman friends, and I’ve never never, ever, ever seen anything like it. All the time I was in jail I could think, the whole time…okay, they’ve arrested us knowing that their economy, part of their economy is based on the film industry. Okay, that’s one…knowing this is wrong. Secondly, they know we have some leverage. With the press, with this…they know we have some rebuttal, something, some reaction. They know that.
“Then I thought every person that goes through here…they have nothing, they have nothing, they’re forgotten. So I wonder how many people have been abused by this system? So then I started researching . They had a kid who died from a taser, 21 year old kid. Almost 300 people have died in the last five years. From tasers? It’s unbelievable, man, and the fact that they resorted to that when there was no violence?
“So, I’m telling you…I’ve never told any of this to anybody, but I’m giving this to you ’cause I just talked to the lawyer yesterday. And I said you know what, it’s too long now, I’m done, I’m done being nice. What’s the worst, they’re gonna put me in jail a couple of months because I spoke out about [their] abuse?”

Page Six has reported that Clint Eastwood “made clear” his feeling that Sarah Palin won the vice-presidential debate in a public interview he did last Saturday with writer Lillian Ross.
“‘One of the candidates the other night seemed more prone to telling the truth than the other,” Eastwood said. This was followed by Ross saying, ‘I liked her, too!’ Eastwood went on to talk about how well ‘she‘ did, although he stopped short of a ringing endorsement.
“The Post‘s Kyle Smith asked Eastwood, who describes himself as a libertarian, what qualities he believed would be ideal in a presidential candidate. Eastwood quoted James Cagney as saying, ‘Plant your feet and tell the truth.'”

With this Scott Feinberg/”Feinberg Files” piece about the odds of Angelina Jolie nabbing a Best Actress nomination for her Changeling performance, it is, I think, fair to say that the enthusiasm levels are neither low nor high. In part because Changeling has been taking hits. I’m sorry, but that’s how things seem to be tumbling as we speak. And Jolie — I think this is fair to say also — has Tom O’Neil to thank for this. Because he started the dialogue about whether the Academy has been unfair or stingy with her. He was looking to help, but look what happened.

According to Tom Tapp on the newly launched Daily Beast, Steven Spielberg has said he’d like to start this Lincoln project in “early 2009, because it’s Lincoln’s 200th anniversary.” And this is supposed to make sense to someone? Spielberg has been shilly-shallying on this thing for years but now he wants to “start” working on it — filming, I presume this means — because of a birthday in 1809? Which means the movie will come out in 2010 or ’11, or a year or two after Abe’s 200th anniversary. I have an equally brilliant idea. Why doesn’t Spielberg delay shooting until 2013 or early ’14 and then open it in 2015, or the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination?

“I was able to catch an early screening of Milk in Portland this weekend, and can confirm that it’s stellar,” a critic friend wrote last night. “It’s impassioned and immediate, with beautiful use of light. It looks as if Gus Van Sant shot every major scene around 4:30 pm — not the ‘golden hour’ but that especially crisp hour right before.
“I’m not much of a Sean Penn fan — I generally find his showiness distracting — but he disappears into Harvey Milk. I think he’s a lock for a Best Actor nomination. James Franco is also exceptionally subtle, though I suspect his low-key work will be ignored in favor of Josh Brolin‘s performance as Dan White, who gets a couple of emotive clips in, and Emile Hirsch, who plays completely against expectations as a street hustler who Milk convinces to politically organize his fellow tricks.
“The most interesting thing to me about the movie — and the reason why I thought I’d write you about it — is that I don’t think it would have been possible without Brokeback Mountain‘s mainstream success. This is a picture focusing on an activist gay man with a flamboyant streak and several lovers (mostly offscreen) and despite the poignant ending, it focuses less on gay suffering and more on the thrill of finding personal identity and a political voice. It isn’t afraid to come busting joyfully out of the closet, and I’m not sure it could have gotten the traction it will get, if not for Brokeback.”
It doesn’t include the Dan White trail and the twinkie defense, the subsequent aquittal and the White Night Riots at City Hall that followed, he says. “It ends at the candlelight vigil,” he explains. The other stuff is covered in a “where are they now?” text.

Say what you will about the matter-of-fact unfolding of Oliver Stone‘s W., about the inescapable intrigue coupled with a relatively rote approach, about the mild-mannered, low-style precision that if anything bends over backwards to be fair to our 43rd U.S. President, and about Josh Brolin‘s performance as George W. Bush being dead perfect but — and this, I believe, is a crucial distinction — appropriately hollow. Which means that on some level the performance, like the film itself, leaves you feeling a wee bit flat and wanting more. But wait.

This is part of a deceptive strategy, it turns out. You’re supposed to say “this is great but why isn’t it better?” Because it’s about a fairly shallow man, for one thing, and the facts are the facts. On top of which cagey Oliver is holding his cards to his chest and making you wait for the turnaround of the last ten or twelve minutes, which pays off (or at least paid off for me) in a way that — seriously, no jive — is something close to astonishing.
So bring out all the thoughtful complaints if you want (as Variety‘s Todd McCarthy and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Kirk Honeycutt have done this morning), but you have to give it this one thing, and for me it’s something that, in my eyes at least, makes W. one of the most startling and surprising films of the year.
The damn movie leaves you feeling sorry for this fucker at the finale, and that ain’t hay.
Compassion for a fiendish klutz? For one of the worst guys on the planet right now? For the chief enabler and architect of this country’s massive financial ruin? For the man who tarnished and shamed his country and took it on a moral and ethical downslide that will take years if not decades to turn around, if it’s not too late? Yes.
Which, being a Bush hater second to none, I didn’t think was possible. But that’s what it does, and you have to give Stone credit for an amazing sleight of hand. I came out saying to myself, as Bush himself says to himself at the finale, “What just happened?” By the last shot you are sold because the anger is gone and you’re left with this stunned and oddly tragic figure saying to himself, “This is how my life turned out?”

Stanley Weiser‘s screenplay is what it is — a no-frills portrait of a sad, limited and stubborn man who was never able to climb out of what he was given and born into from the moment he took his first breath. How, Weiser must have said to himself at the beginning, do you touch people’s souls with such a character? Richard III, he’s not. But he is George the 2nd, and that’s enough. Because all along it’s been about his relationship to his father, George H.W. Bush. What a mess. What a calamity.
“I’m not sure that we’ll succeed,” Stone recently told a British journalist. “But this movie is not for the 12 per cent who still approve of him – it’s for the other 88 per cent.” (I thought Bush’s approval rating was something like 26 per cent…no?) “On the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything in the movie that the other 88 per cent would have any reason to detest. It is a human portrait of a man, not meant to insult people who believe in what Bush believes in.”
This, Stone told the Brit, is why he made W. – “to understand, to walk in the man’s shoes. ‘It’s my job…if I’m dramatizing his life…to step above my hate,’ he says.'”
This is all I have time to write because I have to see W. again at 9 am and then go to the press junket and talk to Stone, Brolin and Weiser. I’ll write more about it later today and tomorrow.
Added note: W. was shot under the gun, 46 days of principal photography, only 300,000 feet of film exposed (as opposed to the normal million) and only a bit more than two months of post-production. I’m saying this because Stone — you do have to be fair about this — might have had time to burnish and refine and add some English here and there, and W. might have been a bit more than it is right now. I’m not making excuses. I’m just saying that the plain-deal flatness, given the circumstances, was inevitable, and yet, as I’ve said, it serves a purpose in that it reflects the depth of Dubya’s soul. And then along comes the ending and you go, “Oh, I see…now I get it. Wow.”