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Clint Eastwood has been composing and performing music — melodies simple and clean, always with a catchy hook — for the soundtracks of his films for a long time. But now he’s apparently composed and sung a song for Grand Torino. The computer I’m on right now was made by slave-wage Koreans in 1997 so I can’t listen and check, but there’s said to be an mp3 of Eastwood’s performance on this filmdrunk page.

“What are your thoughts on Twilight having a Titanic-type hold on the hearts and minds of the 2008 American teen girl?,” a Manhattan friend wrote this morning. “Look at its numbers — it made $6 million on Tuesday, obviously not falling off the cliff. I realize this is an extended holiday weekend and all that, but still the similarities are kind of striking — doomed romance (in that death has consumed the boy and may eventually consume the girl), relative unknowns in the leads, just enough action for the guys to remain happy. I can see substantial business (and repeat business) through Christmas. What could it earn by the end of the run?”

As shallow and Hollywood-centric as this may sound, I’m wondering (as others have since yesterday) if the Mumbai terrorist attacks will have any effect on Academy voter thinking regarding Best Picture contender Slumdog Millionaire, which is set in Mumbai and does an excellent (and at times almost too persistent) job of capturing the chaotic sociological and temperamental stew of Mumbai (particuarly the social caste system) over the last 20-plus years.

I suspect the attacks will have either no effect or perhaps (cynical as this sounds) help the film a little bit because the horrible news pushes all kinds of how, why and what-the-hell? questions into everyone’s head, and Slumdog Millionaire is now a kind of touchstone — a movie at the center of the hurricane, although not one that touches even slightly on the subject of Muslim militancy.

Slumdog is a Dickensian fable that portrays, yes, hard times and much cruelty but also projects an optimistic fantasy that couldn’t contrast more strongly with the mindset and tactics of the Muslim wackjobs who yesterday shot and bombed that town all to hell.

In the view of N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott, Sean Penn “outdoes himself” in Milk, “playing a character different from any he has portrayed before. [But] this is less a matter of sexuality — there is no longer much novelty in a straight actor’s ‘playing gay’ — than of temperament.

“Unlike, say, Jimmy Markum, Mr. Penn’s brooding ex-convict in Clint Eastwood‘s Mystic River, Harvey Milk is an extrovert and an ironist, a man whose expansive, sometimes sloppy self-presentation camouflages an incisive mind and a ferociously stubborn will.

“All of this Mr. Penn captures effortlessly through voice and gesture, but what is most arresting is the sense he conveys of Milk’s fundamental kindness, a personal virtue that also functions as a political principle.”

For the last 25 years Penn’s name has summoned different ideas about fundamental natures — fundamentally pugnacious Irish, fundamentally contentious, fundamentally smoking no matter what the hotel rules are, fundamentally inclined to spit phlegm on the camera lenses of paparazzi jackals. You have to admit — it’s quite an achievement for Penn, even given his immense talent, to sell “fundamentally kind.”

My mother lives in a sleepy compound called The Watermark, an old folks home located in the boonies of Southbury, Connecticut. It’s great to see her, of course, but I’m in wireless hell every time I visit. The AT&T aircard gets only one bar, and that gives me nothing. One bar only on the iPhone also — it’s awful. Even the wifi at the local hotel a mile away isn’t working. It’s like it’s 1994 up here. It’s Devil’s Island. One of the worst black holes I’ve encountered in this country.

“I saw Gran Torino last night,” says HE reader Andrew. “It’s clunky and heavy-handed at times, but very effective. Eastwood the actor has never been better in a moving and often hilarious performance. This kind of reminds me of the Million Dollar Baby syndrome. Like Flags of Our Fathers, the hyped Changeling underwhelmed me. But like Baby, the out-of-nowhere Gran Torino completely works.”

Gran Torino is having its first big L.A. press screening next Monday night (12.1). Those of us on the other coast, per custom, will have to wait.

In the view of Variety‘s John Anderson, Darnell Martin‘s Cadillac Records (TriStar, 12.5) “approaches the blues with the enthusiasm of an overcaffeinated brass band, [but] nonetheless makes some kind of music, mostly because she mines a righteous, mythic sensibility out of the story of Leonard Chess, Muddy Waters and the birth of the Chicago blues.

“Jeffrey Wright‘s Waters is unforgettable, Eamonn Walker gives an unnerving performance as rival bluesman Howlin’ Wolf, and Beyonce Knowles‘ Etta James should put bottoms in seats.

“The second feature this year to focus on the same musicians, Cadillac Records takes a far broader approach than Jerry Zaks‘ Who Do You Love, which concentrated more on the conflicted character of Chess than on the artists he hired, promoted, profited from and, some say, exploited.

“In Cadillac Records, Adrien Brody cuts an appropriately oily figure as the man who founded Chess Records in 1956, while Wright delivers a performance of eloquent, simmering dignity as Waters — the first Chess star, one of the great vocalists in American music and the dramatic engine of Martin’s film.

“As a racial parable that couldn’t be timelier. Chess Records was a mixed marriage — the owner was a Polish immigrant, his artists were African-American, and much of the America they inhabited was hostile to any such arrangement. This all comes to a head after Chess signs Chuck Berry (a dryly funny Mos Def), whose hybridized pop sound had some promoters thinking he was a white country singer.

“Berry is the guy who puts Chess over the top; as someone says, they’re not sure what he’s playing, but it’s not the blues. But it sells, and it bridges the racial divide: In a scene duplicated in Who Do You Love, the velvet ropes separating whites and blacks at a Berry concert are toppled by the audience.

“That Martin later has Knowles reprise the entire racial psychology of America through James and her seemingly insoluble identity problems, by contrast, is overkill; Knowles gives a soulful portrayal, but her part of the movie seems to exist in another dimension entirely.

“The music — most of it performed by the actors themselves — has a real richness to it, if not quite the muscle of the Chess records themselves. Recording sessions are shot like live concerts; the club gigs feel sweaty and smoky. And Def’s Berry performances succeed in capturing what it felt like when the blues had a baby and they named it rock ‘n’ roll.”

This time with a bit of narration. Narration? That’s like a Harvey thing.

Of the 12 sci-fi classics reportedly being prepared for remaking, the one I’m most interested in seeing — Westworld — is apparently the least likely to happen.

L.A. Times guy Geoff Bouncher wrote yesterday that original director-writer Michael Crichton “had worked recently on a script for a remake (and, at one point, Quentin Tarantino was approached to direct) but the author’s death in November may mark the end of the reboot effort.” Why? We all fall sooner or later, but art (or hugely enjoyable cheap-thrills entertainment) is eternal.

My second wanna-see is Darren Aronofsky‘s Robocop re-do. Breck Eisner’s The Creature From The Black Lagoon might work if it’s cheesy enough. (That means a guy in a rubber creature suit — no CG enhancements!) The new When World Collide will be ruined, I predict, by the hand of the demonic Stephen Sommers , who’s set to direct. Guillermo del Toro ‘s Frankenstein may work, but how many times can we sit for this Mary Shelley story? The rest hold no interest.

Shame enough that MCN’s Gurus of Gold haven’t supported Steven Soderbergh‘s Che as one of their Best Picture favorites, but it is absolutely infamous that not one of them voted for it, even as a ninth or tenth-place choice. History will not judge them charitably, much less kindly.

The reportedly awful Defiance gets a #7 ranking from Sean Smith and #9 rankings from Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson, and Che, which is so much more than that Ed Zwick film that comparisons are a waste of breath and brain cells, is blanked by these three? This is unconscionable. I know what I know.

N.Y. Post critic Lou Lumenick, incidentally, has given a #9 ranking to Valkyrie. A faith vote based on admiration for director Brian Singer, or has he seen it?

Brad Pitt‘s Benjamin Button performance is passivity incarnate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. He simply chooses (or was told) to become the watcher — a nice fellow who delights in absorption of all things, a sponge man. But his best performance of the year, hands down, was in Burn After Reading. He wasn’t Hamlet in that Coen Bros. film, but Pitt’s every line and gesture was a kick. His gym instructor was stupidly, radiantly alive, and brimming with presence.