A Vanity Fair excerpt from “The Real Romney“, a forthcoming book by Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, contains an intriguing story about likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. It happened during a family road trip 28 and 1/2 years ago, when Romney was 36.

“The destination of this journey, in the summer of 1983, was [Romney’s] parents’ cottage, on the Canadian shores of Lake Huron. The white Chevy station wagon with the wood paneling was overstuffed with suitcases, supplies, and sons when Mitt climbed behind the wheel to begin the 12-hour family trek from Boston to Ontario.

“As with most ventures in his life, he had left little to chance, mapping out the route and planning each stop. Before beginning the drive, Mitt put Seamus, the family’s hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon’s roof rack. He had improvised a windshield for the carrier to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.

“Then Mitt put his sons on notice: there would be pre-determined stops for gas, and that was it. Tagg was commandeering the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, when he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ‘Dad!’ he yelled. ‘Gross!’ A brown liquid was dripping down the rear window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

“As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Mitt coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the road with the dog still on the roof.

“It was a preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management. But the story would trail him years later on the national political stage, where the name Seamus would become shorthand for Romney’s coldly clinical approach to problem solving.”

Anyone who would put a dog inside a carrier strapped to the roof of a car moving 70 mph for hours and hours is one cold fuck of a human being. I would never do that to a dog, even to some stray I’d just found on the side of a road. Seamus is a social-political metaphor, all right. I trust I don’t have to explain it.

Most of us understand what the terms “suspended animation” and “suspended sentence” mean, but a Presidential candidate announcing that he/she is “suspending” their campaign implies they’re putting it on hold as opposed to shutting it down. They’re not turning off the DVD player and heading out for a bike ride — they’re hitting freeze-frame and keeping the TV on in case an unforeseen opportunity presents itself down the road.

Which in the case of Michelle Bachmann‘s over-and-done-with campaign is a chickenshit dodge.

If you’re having relationship problems, your girlfriend might say “so you wanna break up or what?” And you might say “well, not exactly…what I had in mind is that we should suspend our relationship as opposed to throwing it into the wastebasket. Let’s freeze it in the space-time continuum in case we want to return to it next month or next year…okay?” To which she would say, “You know, this is one of the reasons why we don’t get along. You are so SO full of shit sometimes.”

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino and I pondered the imponderables this afternoon. Actually, we didn’t. We talked about box-office tallies for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and especially The Artist, and then (after Sasha insisted) the Producer’s Guild nominations, and thent I went into one of my laments about the direction of action films. Here’s a stand-alone mp3.

This reminds me of the opening scene in Planes, Trains and Automobiles with the client (William Windom) staring at ad concepts while Steve Martin and Lyman Ward wait wordlessly for some hint. Margin Call director-writer J.C. Chandor is accepting the Best First Film award from the NYFCC on Monday, and on Tuesday will pick up the NBR’s award for Best Debut Director. Margin Call has also been named of the NBR’s top 10 Independent Films.

Bluray jacket art is routinely viewable weeks and sometimes even months ahead of street dates. For whatever reason these MGM Home Video titles, streeting on 1.24 and released through 20th Century Fox, haven’t been viewable on Amazon and other major Bluray sites. A Fox Home Video publicist provided them today.

Right now obviously isn’t Matt Damon‘s time with a realization of the insignificance of We Bought A Zoo ricocheting everywhere, and Daniel Craig isn’t exactly the revving engine behind the success of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo — Rooney Mara and David Fincher are. The Descendants‘ George Clooney, one of the two most likely Best Actor winners (along with Moneyball‘s Brad Pitt), is the only guy on top as we speak.

Whether or not Chris Nolan has decided to remix Tom Hardy‘s Dark Knight Rises dialogue, was anyone honestly able to understand what Bane was saying in the DKR IMAX prologue?

All right, Twitter followers…if anyone can come up with a question about 2 Fast 2 Furious, Catch That Kid, 3:10 to Yuma, Wanted, The Double and the forthcoming Overdrive, I’m yours for the next…it took three minutes to compose this…57 minutes!

The nominees for the 2011 Darryl F. Zanuck Producer of the Year Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures were announced two hours ago: The Artist — Producer: Thomas Langmann; Bridesmaids – Producers: Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel, Clayton Townsend; The Descendants — Producers: Jim Burke, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor; The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — Producers: Cean Chaffin, Scott Rudin; The Help — Producers: Michael Barnathan, Chris Columbus, Brunson Green; Hugo — Producers: Graham King, Martin Scorsese; The Ides of March — Producers: George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Brian Oliver; Midnight in Paris — Producers: Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum; Moneyball –Producers: Michael De Luca, Rachael Horovitz, Brad Pitt; War Horse — Producers: Kathleen Kennedy, Steven Spielberg.

The winner will be announced at the PGA awards gala at the Beverly Hilton on 1.21. I would jhave posted this earlier but I was asleep earlier this morning, having awoken at 4:15 am and written for two or three hours.