wired

Swing Vote is about a New Mexico layabout with a drinking problem (Kevin Costner) who is heavily courted by a couple of major presidential candidates (Kelsey Grammer, Dennis Hopper ) who need his vote to tip the election in their favor. Whacked, improbable…but that’s it. Anyway, it was pointed out yesterday that this premise is fairly similar to that of Garson Kanin‘s The Great Man Votes (1939).

It’s about a boozy widower (John Barrymore) who, it is discovered, is the only registered voter in a key precinct, which leads to politicians from both parties bearing inducements.
There’s no question the two films are using the same basic bones. A friend says the Costner film is considerably different beyond the premise, but so what? I’ve never even seen the Barrymore film. It’s not exactly a must-see. Right now it’s only available on VHS.

The gist of this Eric P. Lucas article in the L.A. Times (8.1) is that Heath Ledger shouldn’t be nominated for Best Supporting Actor nominated because he died a foolish death. He didn’t die trying to save someone from drowning, he wasn’t killed by an IED in Baghdad and a tree didn’t fall on him. He carelessly pulled the plug on himself, and this sad fact, Lucas is saying, shouldn’t be romanticized or glossed over with an Oscar nomination. It would set a bad cultural precedent or send a bad message to youths. Something along these lines.

Another main-title clip — name the film

“The Trolls Among Us,” an 8.3 N.Y. Times Magazine piece by Mattathias Schwartz, is a mildy confusing, difficult-to-read article about a “growing internet subculture with a fluid morality and a disdain for pretty much everyone else online.” Is it fair to call any HE regulars “trolls”? Who are the nihilists? I don’t have a list exactly, but there certainly seems to be an occasional nihilist virus in some of the jottings on this site.

Stephen Frears and Peter Morgan‘s The Deal, which came out on DVD last Tuesday, is about the complex political relationship between Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) and Gordon Brown (David Morrissey), and a reported deal between the two regarding the 1994 election of a new Labor Party leader. I’ve been keen to see it since the early days of The Queen, which is Part 2 of Frears-Morgan Blair trilogy. Frears once told me that The Deal is way too secular to be appreciated by an American audience. Is it?

Although what this guy really means is, “Why don’t you stand up and fire back hard at the racially-driven attacks?”

Commenting on Jon Voight‘s 7.28 anti-Obama article in the Washington Times, Variety editor/blogger Peter Bart wrote yesterday that while he may “appreciate Voight’s fervor,” he worries “about his intellectual equipment.”
Then comes the anecdote, dating back some 38 years: “I remember that moment in the early ’70s when Paramount offered Voight the lead role in Love Story, opposite Ali McGraw. Voight had just achieved stardom thanks to Midnight Cowboy and suddenly had his choice of roles.
“As a young production executive at the studio, I was trying to push Love Story forward and joined colleagues in trying to interest Voight in the part. However the more we prodded, the more reluctant he became.
“He finally blurted: ‘The character in this movie is a Harvard student. He’s bright. He reads books. I could never be believable as that smart young guy.”
“Reading Voight’s op-ed piece these many years later, I realize how right he was.”

Yesterday it took the HE readership 90 minutes to identify the main-title music from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I thought someone would nail it right away, but nope. Here’s today’s main-title clip. (Yes, this is going to be a little game for a while until the tank runs dry.) If someone doesn’t identify this within 30 minutes or less, HE readers are going to have to take a long hard look into the bathroom mirror and ask him or herself, “How much of a hard-core film buff am I?” Because the clip is not obscure. At all.

Last year The Express (Universal, 10.3), an inspirational sport drama about Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy, was being shot on the Syracuse University campus. I know this because Jett, a Syracuse sophomore last year, told me about it. Now the trailer is up. Here’s the Ernie Davis Wikipedia site, if you want to know the whole story.

McCain’s Moses/”The One” ad — hilarious — basically says don’t vote for hope or change or any notion of things being better. Stick with the tried and true and glum way of government. Mind-blowing. Well…revolting, really. But I’ll bet it’s playing with a certain sector of the public.

The ad uses that shaved-down Obama quote thjat popped last weekend, to wit: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.” The actual Obama quote reads, “It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign — that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol.” Naturally, the lying McCain ad guys are using the abridged version.

A CNN report appeared last night on Anderson ‘s news show that seemed a reasonably fair portrait of hunkered-down rural-American attitudes when it comes to beliefs about Barack Obama having been raised a Muslim and/or being a Muslim. Among 50ish and 60ish types, I mean to say. There’s no permalink or embedded code — go to http://www.cnn.com/video/ and then find the report titled “Rumors Stick on Obama’s Faith.”

Reporter Gary Tuchman went to Copperhill, Tennessee, and asked around. He found only one guy who believed Obama is a Christian; everyone else he spoke to believed Obama can’t be rusted and that his interests will be divided between America’s and his Muslim brothers “if he gets in.” Ignorance is not a virus — it’s a choice. You could even call it a kind of faith. Here’s an mp3 of the report.
One beef with Tuchman: when he hears the locals spout their little fairy tales about Obama’s Muslim allegiance, he responds with “but he says that’s not true…he says he’s a Christian.” And the locals go, “Yeah, well…politicians will say anything to get elected.” Obama isn’t saying he’s a Christian — he is one, over and out. Tuchman’s retort is from the same gene pool as Hillary Clinton‘s “he’s not a Muslim as far as I know” line.
When 60 Minutes‘ Steve Kroft heard a group of southern Ohio dumbasses repeat the same beliefs, he said, “It’s not true” — no ifs, and, buts or “he says.”

Tuchman quotes a Newsweek poll, 25% of Americans believe that Obama was born a Muslim, and 12% believe he’s currently a devout Muslim.

Last week I decided against linking to Jeffrey Ressner‘s 7.23 Politico story about David Zucker‘s An American Carol because the basic plot — a documentarian named Michael Malone [read: Moore] finally sees the conservative light in the way Ebenezer Scrooge got beyond being a selfish miser — sounded sickening to me. Three or four graphs into Ressner’s story and I was muttering, “I don’t know want to know about this…I’ve read enough.”

Jon Voight as George Washington and Kelsey Grammer as Gen. George S. Patton in An American Carol

But people here and there started writing about Zucker’s film anyway, the latest being CHUD’s Devin Faraci. He was so struck by one of Ressner’s graphs that he ran it twice. “In a climactic scene, Malone finds political clarity at the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center,” it reads, “while the admonishing ghost of George Washington (played by Jon Voight) hovers nearby.”
This evening a reliable source passed along this verbatim quote from a friend who’s seen An American Carol: “This thing goes beyond heavy handed. It reminds one of the sensation of watching Burn, Holllywood Burn. It tries to be outrageous but just comes off as a paean from a Republican who wants to continue getting tax breaks. I rank it right out there with Skidoo and Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness as far as the WTF nature of it all. The laugh quotient is right up there with The Love Guru and confirms that David Zucker was always the Fredo of the ZAZ comedy mafia.”
Vivendi Entertainment will release An American Carol on 10.3. Keep in mind that the major distributors all saw it and passed, even the Weinsteins.

David Zucker