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“It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards — Purple Heart, Bronze Star — showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old.

“And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life. Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way.” — Colin Powell speaking on Meet The Press this morning, posted by Swampland‘s Karen Tumulty. Photo by Platon.

Posted a couple of days ago by Awards Daily contributor Ryan Adams. I could scratch off one or two more but what’s the rush? It’s not even November.

W. is clearly a project that the restless, edgy Josh Brolin dived into wholeheartedly. Is he comfortable with the thought that his performance may make people like Dubya more? “I dunno if they’ll like him more, but I think they’ll struggle with the humanity of him as opposed to just pointing the finger. He is more likeable. That’s my point of view. But I think it allows your opinion of him to… (pause) I can see Republicans seeing this movie and saying, that’s why he’s so great. And I can see Democrats seeing this movie and saying, that’s why he’s a sociopath.” — from a Sunday, 10.19 interview with the Independent‘s Craig McLean.

“The average studio feature now costs $71 million to produce and $36 million to market, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, a 35 percent increase from the average at the start of the decade. In the world of independent films, costs are up even more — 83 percent during the same period.” — from Brooks Barnes‘ 10.18 N.Y. Times article about the degree of color-blindness in Hollywood decision-making about which films to green-light. It’s called “Race and the Safe Hollywood Bet.”

Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke reported exit polling earlier today about W., and the bottom line is that “27% felt the movie was better than expected, 38% felt it was not as good as expected (this was consistent across all groups, especially liberals), and 35% felt it was as good as expected.” Basically a 62-38 split favoring positive.

I alluded to this before but it can’t hurt to reiterate. Just to be fair, as The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil was on Friday and as Variety‘s Pamela McLintock was last Tuesday about Showeast reactions, Frost/Nixon reactions have been more mixed than outright negative (although two or three London Film Festival reviews obviously were).

“The real reason for The Soloist getting bumped into March ’09? Every single test, every single cut, the scores kept going down. It’s a non-audience picture and just a tank.” — a good and trusted fellow who tends to pass along good stuff.
And yet I wonder. How problematic could Joe Wright‘s film be if it’s scheduled to open the AFI Fest a few days from now?

“I directly know three people who have seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, one in a rough state in the editing room, and they were all weeping in the end. Is it 2 hours and 45 minutes? Yes, but that’s what it is. Except nobody wants to be a front-runner, so Paramount is going to keep it under wraps [until mid to late November].” — passed along by one of those “guy” sources that have mildly irritated Patrick Goldstein for being off-the-record and not described but quoted all the same.

The major London papers have reviewed Quantum of Solace, the new 007 film, and the reactions are pretty good. Not ecstatic, but primarly enthusiastic and supportive.

One slight dissenter is the Telegraph‘s Mark Monahan who says the new film “lacks Casino Royale‘s narrative drive, and is less than the sum of its parts.” He adds, however, that “those parts are often terrific. See it for them, and see it for Daniel Craig‘s fully-formed Bond: angry, icily unsentimental, and fleetingly borderline psychotic at the close.”
Times Online critic James Christopher writes that “director Marc Forster has absorbed the lucrative lessons discovered in Martin Campbell‘s Casino Royale. He has also managed to pace his sequel much better.
“Royale felt slightly wheel-clamped by one too many longeurs. If anything, the crunching chase sequences in Quantum of Solace are even more magnificently dangerous. And the daredevil leaps and tumbles through glass roofs are just as sensational as the splintering high-speed pyrotechnics.
“But it’s the amount of heartache and punishment that Craig’s new Bond absorbs that makes him look so right for our times. Bond is no longer a work in progress. He is now the cruel, finished article.”
LIkewise, the Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw is somewhere between okay and pleased with the film — he submits to the rock ‘n’ roll — but is primarily a fan of Craig’s performance.

Gen. Colin Powell‘s endorsement of Barack Obama this morning — “a seal of approval [by] the most important military figure of the age,” a Meet the Press commentator stated — will almost certainly increase Obama’s poll ratings with conservative over-55s and fortify the general movement in Obama’s direction.

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborugh said this morning that the race is going to tighten up by the end. “We’re not a 60-40 nation,” he said. “We’re a 51-49 nation.”

The term “kitchen sink cinema” refers to grittily realistic black-and-white British films made in the late ’50s to early ’60s about working-class characters afflicted by despair, banality and a sense of entrapment. I don’t know how many of them were made exactly, but my favorites are John Schlesinger‘s A Kind of Loving, Tony Richardson‘s Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, The Entertainer and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Karl Reisz‘s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Lindsay Anderson‘s This Sporting Life. What is that, seven?

I’ve always thought the term “kitchen sink” had something to do with one of these films having depicted a scene in which one of the protagonists (Alan Bates in A Kind of Loving or Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning) coming home drunk late Saturday night and literally throwing up in the kitchen sink. It may have come from a line Pauline Kael wrote about the genre, but I know I’ve had this image in my head for years. But it just hit me with a start that I can’t remember which actor in which film did the actual vomiting…if in fact it happened in one of these films.

Or is the term “kitchen sink” is in fact “derived from an expressionist painting by John Bratby which contained an image of a kitchen sink”?, as it says on the kitchen-sink Wikipedia page? “The critic David Sylvester wrote an article in 1954 about trends in recent English art, calling his article ‘The Kitchen Sink’ in reference to Bratby’s picture. Sylvester argued that there was a new interest among young painters in domestic scenes, with stress on the banality of life.”