In honor of Jeff Prosserman‘s forthcoming Chasing Madoff (Cohen Media Group, 8.26), which I’ll finally be seeing on Wednesday, here’s a re-posting of a pretty good March 2009 piece about how Madoff might have lived his life and spent his time if he’d decided to lam it.

David Dobkin‘s The Change-Up (Universal, 8.5), an allegedly raunchy body-switch comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Jason Bateman, is having a big Westwood premiere tonight. The trailer has me scared because it has Bateman and Reynolds shouting “aaahhh!” when they realize they’re no longer themselves and have switched lives. It also implies that the film likes poo-poo and pee-pee humor, and that’s not good either. Plus I don’t like gags about guys getting all frazzled trying to take care of wailing babies. I’m just being honest.

It’s not funny when actors go “aaaahhh!”….ever. If you play a part in a big-studio comedy and you do an “aaahhh!, you’ve soiled your reputation for life. Would Jeremy Irons do an “aaahhh!”? Would Peter Finch, Cary Grant, Ronald Colman, Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, George Arliss, Spencer Tracy, Errol Flynn or Van Johnson do one? What kind of moron do you have to be to even snicker at an “aaahhh!” moment, much less laugh at one?

If I was a studio head I would say to every director making a big-budget comedy on my lot, “If you put an ‘aaahhh!’ bit into your film, I will not only fine you $50,000 but I will surreptitiously hire guys to break some of your bones — your choice.”

I’ll tell you what. If nobody goes “aaahhh!” in The Change-Up, I’ll go easy. Maybe the “aaahhh!” bits didn’t make the final cut, I mean, and they were just used for the trailer.

After The Wedding Crashers I thought Dobkin was some kind of genius. I thought he might be Judd Apatow 2. There were no “aaahhh!” bits in that film, for one thing. The writing was too good. Then he exec produced Mr. Woodcock and directed Fred Claus, the Vince Vaughn comedy. “Jesus, how could the guy who directed The Wedding Crashers direct Fred Claus?,” I asked myself. Now I’m thinking that Dobkin is just another highly proficient pro-for-hire like Shawn Levy, Dennis Dugan and Peter Segal.

On top of which The Change-Up was penned by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who did The Hangover and The Hangover, Part II. That also scares me. I’m also scared of the possible influences from producer Neal Moritz (Fast & Furious, Click)

Three months ago I wrote that “there’s a brief segment in Woody Allen‘s Husbands and Wives in which Allen’s character reads a short story about a champagne-sipping womanizer envying the married guy who lives down the hallway, and vice versa. The Change-Up is a feature-length riff on this idea, goaded by a supernatural premise.

“I used to ask myself if Ryan Reynolds will ever topline a really well-made commercial mainstream movie. Not a pretty good one like The Proposal or an interesting but unsatisfying indie-exercise pic like Buried, but a sharp, snappy, laugh-out-loud exception on the level of Dobkin’s The Wedding Crashers. Will it ever happen?”

Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde and Alan Arkin costar.

I sent an inquiry about the Academy’s current Best Picture voting rules to TheWrap‘s Steve Pond, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, EW‘s Dave Karger and Anthony Breznican, In Contention‘s Kris Tapley and Gold Derby‘s Tom O’Neil. The bottom line is that the Academy’s “surplus rule,” which only Pond and maybe 13 or 14 other people in the world fully comprehend in all its labrynthian detail, means that the 5% rule (or is it a 9% rule?) doesn’t apply all that strictly.

WARNING: The following is one of the most perplexing and brain-shredding articles I’ve written for Hollywood Elsewhere.

My previous understanding had been that under the new rules, no movie gets Best Picture-nominated unless 5% of the Academy membership mark it as their #1 preference. My new understanding is that this rule sorta kinda applies but not all the way around the block. Or it really does apply all the way around the block but there are gremlins and gang members hiding in bushes ready to hoodwink you. Plus you need to be a math nerd to figure out all the Pythagorian side-winding exceptions, and life is short so let’s all have a double Jack Daniels.

I really hate writing these stories but it boils down to the fact that with the Academy membership totalling a bit more than 6000, a film needs 455 first-choice, top-of-the-list votes to be a rock-solid, no-questions-asked Best Picture nominee. But a somewhat less popular film can also get nominated if it’s the recipient of surplus votes. And surplus votes — stay with me — come into play any time a film gets 20 percent more than it needs to qualify, or 20% more than 455 or an extra 91 votes. Or something like that.

So if War Horse gets 20% more than it needs to qualify, which is to say 455 votes plus 91 votes equalling 546 votes, then some other film will be the beneficiary.

I don’t want to get into this any further, okay? I really hate this stuff. I can feel my brain chipping away in small styrofoam chunks. I’m not in high school any more and I don’t have to learn this stuff or risk getting a failing grade so, you know, eff it. Okay, I’ll give it another try.

Pond explained it thusly in a recent Wrap piece: “You need 455 votes to be nominated but you get twice that many, 910, each of your votes will count 50 percent for you and 50 percent for the voter’s next choice. If you get a third more votes than you need, that third will go to your second choice.”

I can’t stand thinking about this stuff!

What if 33% of the Academy puts War Horse at the top of the list, and 29% go for Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close in the #1 slot, and 11% go for The Descendants and 11% go for Moneyball and/or The Ides of March?,” I wrote the Oscar gang. “That would be 96% of the Academy’s membership putting four films in the top slot and only 4% left over. So that means four Best Picture nominations…right?

No, not right. With a guaranteed five-nomination rule and if the voting works out along the lines as I’ve just speculated, the fifth or sixth or seventh-strongest Best Picture nominee could land a Best Picture nomination by getting only a measly 4% or 3% or 2% of the Academy members to put it at the top of their list. The surplus rule kicks and they slide right in there despite having tallied very little rock-sold support in the initial balloting.

Confused yet? Here’s Pond’s explanation, sent to me today:

“Sorry, but this is going to involve lots of math. Here goes:

“When the ballots are counted for the first time, the accountants will assume that 10 slots are up for grabs. This creates a magic number that will guarantee a nomination. This magic number (you really don’t want me to explain how they get it) is about 9% of the vote.” Wells intervention: 9%? What happened to 5%?

“If you get 20% more than this — which works out to about 11% — you trigger the surplus rule. I’ll use your numbers to illustrate:

“In your example, War Horse gets 33% of the vote. But it only needs 11% to guarantee a nomination. In effect, it only needs one-third of its votes. So every ballot that lists War Horse #1 now counts 1/3 of a vote for War Horse (all it needs to get nominated), and 2/3 for whatever film is listed second.

“If Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close gets 29% of the vote, it only needs 38% of each of those votes to be nominated. So its votes count 38% for Extremely Loud, and 62% for whatever’s listed second.

“The Descendants gets 23%, so it only needs 48% of each vote. The other 52% goes to each Descendants voter’s second choice.

“And Moneyball and The Ides of March got what they needed, so their ballots aren’t redistributed.

“One wrinkle: What if the accountants go to a Descendants ballot to allocate 52% of its vote to the second choice, but that second choice is War Horse, which already has more votes than it needs? In that case, the 52% goes to the voter’s third choice, or to the highest-ranked choice that hasn’t already secured a nomination.

“At the end of the first round of your hypothetical count, there will be indeed be four Best Picture nominees. But there will also still be a whole bunch of ballots still in play — all those War Horse ballots, for instance, will still be alive, counting for two-thirds of a vote. And all those 2/3 votes, plus the 62% Extremely Loud votes, plus the 52% Descendants votes, should be enough to bump something else over the 5% threshold after those surplus ballots have been redistributed.”

Wells intervention: Jesus!

“There’s also one more round of redistribution that happens, where any movie that got less than 1% of the vote is eliminated and its vote is transferred to the voter’s #2 choice (or, again, the highest-ranked choice that’s still in the running.)

“It’s complicated, and they never really talk about it because it just confuses people. But in practice it will almost always result in between five and 10 nominees.”

EW‘s Karger responded as follows: “As I understand it, your math is correct, Jeff. But as I also understand it, it’s highly unlikely that your hypothetical scenario would occur. Tom Sherak said in his announcement that in the past decade, if the new guidelines had existed, there would have been between five and nine nominees each year. The Academy is so diverse age-wise and taste-wise that I don’t think you’re ever going to see acclamation around just four films.”

The last word goes to In Contention‘s Tapley: “The new rules have me dizzy and entirely apathetic toward the intricacies of the process. In short, well played, Academy.”

Deadline‘s Nikki Finke is reporting that last weekend’s box-ofice actuals have Cowboys & Aliens just barely nipping ahead of The Smurfs for the #1 position. Jon Favreau‘s somewhat disappointing, sensory-assault CG-aliens western made $36,431,290 compared to $35,611,637 for Sony’s odious animated family comedy.

A margin of just over $800,000 ain’t hay, but it’s not much overall.

I’m not sure that this technical victory matters all that much in the greater scheme because the shorthand Twitter legend — i.e., Cowboys & Aliens having been lasso’ed or hog-tied or stunned or otherwise humbled by this awful little family film — has already sunk in.

I tweeted this yesterday, but I’ve decided that the worst-rhyming rock-tune lyric is the following: “Hey, there, Mr. Brontosaurus / don’t you have a lesson for us?” It’s funny how you just snap into these realizations while driving on a freeway.

“I saw Stupid, Crazy, Love over the weekend,” critic Lewis Beale wrote this morning in an email. “Now I understand what you were so worked up about. That scene at the middle school graduation is so terrible, so unreal, so cringe-worthy, it practically destroyed what was otherwise a nice, entertaining rom-com.

“I always wonder about scenes like that. Don’t the filmmakers understand how ridiculous they are? Are these endings imposed by the studio? Glenn Ficarra and John Requa have done good work in the past. What were they thinking?”

Wells to Beale: Agreed, but you’re being too kind by calling Stupid, Crazy, Love “a nice entertaining romcom” up until the graduation finale.

Repeating my 7.25 remarks: “One of the most revoltingly phony, profoundly sickening ‘romantic comedies’ I’ve ever seen. Nothing about it feels the least bit true or reflective of modern life as most of us (with the exception of certain filmmakers) know it. Wafer-thin characters, ludicrous sitcom plotting, outrageous fakery of all kinds, absurd over-emoting, ghastly dialogue, etc. It was so bad that I cried.”

Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino says the $19.3 million that Stupid, Crazy, Love earned last weekend is “very healthy…it’ll probably end up in the $65 to $70 million range…it’s aimed at adults who are constantlyfeeling fatigued by kid movies, and this audience has lowered expectations in the summer…it got a B-plus from CinemaScore.”

Meaning that some CinemaScore respondents were less than delighted, i.e. “It’s a mildly shitty romantic comedy but at least it isn’t about CG aliens!”

Let no one doubt that Hollywood Elsewhere is an influential, shaker-upper column. Not just in terms of influencing the conversation about Oscar nominees and the Best Picture race. But also in terms of getting people fired. Or one guy, at least. Which doesn’t feel very good if the facts are what they seem. Call me chagrined and somewhat appalled.

I learned a few hours ago that Ivan Infante, a screenwriter and maker of short films who’s been the most friendly and recognizable face at West L.A.’s Laser Blazer for nine years, was canned last Wednesday by owner Ron Dassa, and that one factor in his termination was a piece I ran on 7.20 — 11 days ago — about the sagging fortunes of Laser Blazer. It was called “Saddest Video Store.”

Like all retail video stores Laser Blazer has been going downhill for the last couple of years, so Dassa would have had to cut bait sooner or later. The business has been running at a loss, so Infante, who’s been the store’s product buyer for several years, figured the blade would drop by September or October. It happened sooner, he strongly suspects, for reasons of spite and revenge over the 7.20 article.

Infante says Dassa told him it was also because the article made him suddenly realize that the business was doomed, despite Dassa having assessed Laser Blazer’s financial situation on a regular basis all along. That’s bullshit, of course.

But there does come a time in every dying business when an owner realizes he needs to reduce overhead. Dassa claims he had to cut Infante because he couldn’t afford to pay his salary. Okay, I believe that part. But not 100%.

I think the severing was probably 60% or 70% about revenge for the article, and 30% or 40% about facing economic reality. Okay, 55% to 45%.

Laser Blazer owner Ron Dassa

The first email blast I got was that Infante had been whacked because of the piece. But what was in the article that was so damaging to Laser Blazer’s income or rep? “Business is down,” I wrote. Hello? Video retail is down everywhere. “The mood is down,” I wrote. As it naturally would be inside any store that feels like a storage closet due to a lack of air-conditioning. “Excess inventory is being sent back to distributors”…is that what ticked Dassa off? “And the air conditioning is on the fritz, and in fact hasn’t been repaired for several weeks,” I wrote. That was a simple climatorial fact. You can’t run a business in the summer without a.c.

So Dassa was angry at Infante for sharing honest and/or obvious information about the store’s diminishing business, and particularly for sharing the fact that Dassa had refused to fix the air-conditioning system since it stopped working last February, and he wanted to take revenge because Infante, he felt, was using HE to agitate Dassa to get the a.c. fixed. Or something like that. It sounds semi-plausible to me.

I just don’t see whacking a good employee after he’s been with you for nine years without showing a little kindness. Dassa offered no goodbye severance check, no farewell party, no thanks or hugs….just a chilly, straight-from-the-shoulder “you tried to pressure or embarass me about the air-conditioning so you’re gone…sorry.” I don’t blame Dassa or any businessman for cutting costs when he’s forced to, but I wouldn’t cut a guy loose who’d been with me for nine years without giving him a little renumeration and maybe a farewell dinner or something. End it with a little class and grace.

If anyone in any aspect of video business is reading this, understand that Infante knows film backwards and forwards and that he’s very good with people and that he’s loyal and trustworthy and considerate and well-liked, etc.

Here’s the piece that caused the ruckus.

Barack Obama has bent over backwards to Republican swine over the debt reduction fight, and right now he looks weak as hell to me. He’s the “adult in the room,” yes, but how I wish he had the courage to be more than just reasonable and mild-mannered. I think of Obama these days and right away I get irritated. He’s a moderate conservative, and I thought I was voting for a guy who would try to be much, much more.

It would be so great if a serious liberal could challenge Obama in the primaries and give him trouble and speak the truth and let some light into the room.

I’m saying this with a presumption that Obama will be re-elected in 2012. As he should be, given the alternatives. He’s a sane, perceptive and highly intelligent U.S. President. Most voters of any education or reasonably adult perceptions will almost certainly choose to keep him for a second term rather than vote in the glib and shape-shifting Mitt Romney or, God forbid, Michelle Bachmann or some other lying, slithering, corporate-kowtowing Republican serpent.

But Obama’s refusal to act like a man — to talk straight and stand his ground like a strong, scrappy liberal and call those deranged, Tea Party-fellating radicals by their right name and most of all to use the bully pulpit of his office to explain what’s really going on and what the right’s agenda is truly about — is infuriating. In his 7.31 piece called “The President Surrenders,” N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman noted that Republicans “will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats…and that the reported terms of the deal…amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president.”

If I could clap my hands three times and have a genuinely tough liberal hombre in the Oval Office, somebody who thinks like Bill Maher and talks almost as plainly and who would all but spit in the Republicans’ eye, I would clap my hands three times.

Obama has made the term “adult in the room” seem synonymous with “the capitulator,” “the man with no balls,” “the guy who doesn’t know how to play poker like a man” and so on.

LexG drove out to the deepest West Valley the other day to confront Lars Von Trier‘s Melancholia ((Magnolia, 11.11) during its ultra-low-profile, Academy-qualifying L.A. engagement. I sat on his review for two or three days but here it finally is. He somehow manages to actually write about the film without going into his “woe is me, I needs me some white wimmin’ and if I don’t get what I need I’m gonna kill myself” routine. Very commendable.

Alexander Skarsgard, Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia.

“Functioning as almost a companion piece to his more outrageous Antichrist, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is an emotionally audacious movie of two halves. The first depicts the encroaching mental breakdown of depressed bride Justine (Kirsten Dunst) on a notably unhappy wedding day as a distant planet called Melancholia approaches Earth. The second half skips ahead as the Melancholia continues its ominous approach we witness the doomed last days of now-thoroughly-shut-down Justine along with her more functional but also emotionally ragged sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Claire’s husband (Kiefer Sutherland) and young son (Cameron Spurr)

“Dunst and Gainsbourg deliver distinct, shattering characterizations, and that give-and-take contrast extends to the subtly audacious narrative as well. The two-part structure allows Von Trier to revisit and mirror certain motifs, images, and themes from the internalized Justine section (depicting mental anguish) again in the more sci-fi-ish, suspenseful and visual Claire segment, where the end of the world has become an externalized physical threat.

“It’s an auteurist triumph, bringing full circle the more pulpish elements of Von Trier’s earlier work with the emotional rawness of Breaking the Waves with just a little of the formal experimentation of his dogme years, but now with the impeccable visual panache of Antichrist.

“Dunst is the real deal here, functioning as LVT’s muse in a story that’s in a way almost first and foremost about the director’s own notorious mindset and provocations; Dunst has gone to the dark side before, most impressively in John Stockwell‘s crazy/beautiful, but this is a whole ‘nother level — an indelible portrait of complete dejection that’s easily the intensity-equal of Natalie Portman in Black Swan.

“Dunst is so good, in fact, it’s almost getting lost in the shuffle how raw Charlotte Gainsbourg is — the two performances, again, complement each other perfectly.

“Supporting cast is a veritable if unsurprising roll call of Von Trier-worthy maniacs, from Udo Kier to Charlotte Rampling to Jesper Christensen to John Hurt to the father-and-son Skarsgaards (Stellan and Alexander), but definitely worth noting is how easily Sutherland, perhaps taking a cue from his awesome old man’s roving-artist ’70s work, makes the transition to European Art Cinema in a decidedly un-Jack Bauer role.

“I’m not entirely sure where Brady Corbet managed to earn his ‘work with insane provocative overseas auteurs club’ card after Funny Games and this, but he pops up here doing his Rich Man‘s Kyle Gallner routine in the first half, wherein the cynical familial, corporate, and romantic relationships represent either a reason for, or a wonderfully indulgent justification of, Justine/Von Trier’s nihilistic despair.

“Others have cited a certain shared series of cinematic and thematic interest that recur between Melancholia, Another Earth and Tree of Life, but for my money this is the strongest of the bunch, the one that best melds the otherworldly implications of a giant perilous universe with the interpersonal breakdowns of its characters. But when they write the definitive film-summation book on 2011, lumping these three (and probable others to come) together might not be a bad place to start, this year almost starting to look like a more cosmic extension of last year’s dark ruminations on mortality (Enter the Void, Inception, Black Swan, Hereafter, etc etc.)

“In a nutshell: highly recommended.”

About 13 months ago I posted an observation about a tendency of younger women to project thin little pipsqueak voices and use mallspeak accents and phrasings in order to sound average and blend into the crowd. I flashed back to this a few nights ago as I listened to Cowboys & Aliens star Olivia Wilde talk to Jimmy Kimmel. She’s beautiful but her voice has no particular flavor and distinction.

Wilde is supposed to be a star in the making but she sounds like a checkout girl. Her voice is almost stunning in its flatness, and it makes her sound glib and unexceptional. She opens her mouth and…that’s it? A woman with a face as exquisite as Wilde’s ought to have some kind of soulful, cultured, knowing, inner-oomph voice to go with it…but no.

I had the same reaction to Blake Lively‘s voice when she visited Late Night with David Letterman to plug The Town. This? She sounds like a sixteen year-old from a suburb of Akron or Denver or Orlando, or…I don’t know, somebody who works for a downtown Manhattan accounting firm. She doesn’t sound like a tenacious lady who’s been around and taken legendary iPhone pics of herself in the bathroom and portrayed a frayed floozy in The Town and who will soon be swirling around Europe with Leonardo DiCaprio.

Who has a voice that matters? One with a little sass and intrigue and conviction, that cracks at times or has a breathy quality? Emma Stone, for sure. Elle Fanning has a voice with faint undercurrents of hurt and need. Amy Adams has a voice in The Fighter that suffers no fools. Katie Holmes‘ voice has a genuine something-or-other…a “been-around and known some disappointment” quality. Kristen Stewart sounds like she’s actually lived a life and has some convictions about this and that. Cameron Diaz sounds like a girly-girl, but her voice has a playful spirited quality and she knows how to sound hurt and nihilistic. Debra Winger has a real voice. Sassy Fran Drescher obviously had a voice in the ’90s. Michele Rodriguez has a voice right now.

Here’s that June 2010 piece I mentioned, called “Chirpy Minnie Mouse.”

“It hit me a day or two ago that an awful lot of women these days — actresses and broadcasters to some extent, but mainly average, non-famous women in the under-30 range (including movie publicists) — speak with thin little pipsqueak voices. Couple this with a general tendency to use mallspeak accents and phrasings (which 85% to 90% of under-30 women have done in order to sound like everyone else) and it almost seems as if inane peep-peep voices have become a kind of generational signature.

“Go to any bar and restaurant and walk around and listen to women’s voices…’peepity-peep-peep’ and ‘squeakity-squeak-squeak,’ over and over and over.

“For whatever reason these women have decided that sultry, smoky, husky voices — the kind that Lauren Bacall and Glenda Jackson and Anne Bancroft and Patricia Neal used to play like soulful wind instruments — aren’t as appealing or have perhaps been categorized as unattractive, and that they need to project more of an amiable ‘oop-poop-pee-doop’ Betty Boop thing.

“I’m obviously not reporting scientific data, but it does seem as if an awful lot of Minnie Mouse voices are being feigned or emphasized these days, and that the rich, intriguing tonalities found in the wonderfully adult voices of Meryl Streep or Ann Sheridan in the 1940s, or Jessica Lange or Katherine Hepburn or Greer Garson or Faye Dunaway or Jodie Foster aren’t heard as much.

“You can’t be one of those super-cool women who wear short skirts and long jackets and speak with a peep-peep voice. You have to sound like Anouk Aimee or Simone Signoret or Joan Crawford or Jane Russell….that line of country.

“I really do think it’s affected to some extent. Chosen. Performed. Almost anyone can go deeper or higher if they want.

“There’s that old story about director Howard Hawks telling a young Lauren Bacall (i.e., before he cast her in To Have and Have Not) that it’s sexier to speak in a lower register, and that she should give it a shot. Bacall took Hawks’ advice and trained herself to speak with a deeper voice. It was that simple.

“So if Bacall can do this, anyone can in either direction. And I think — suspect — that a lot of younger women have persuaded themselves, perhaps not consciously, that squeaky-peepy works best in today’s environment. Mistake.”

The bloggerati have been salivating all day over the apparently distinct possibility that the under-performing, flopping-around-like-a-flounder-on-the-sand Cowboys & Aliens will come in second for the weekend behind the horribly vile, reprehensible, apocalypse-summoning Smurfs. I’ve been too settled and soothed in Santa Barbara to care, but I know that David Poland‘s Cowboys & Aliens pan is good stuff.

Sunday morning update: Variety‘s Andrew Stewart is reporting that reps for Smurfs and Cowboys & Aliens are both estimating $36.2 million for the weekend, “leaving no room for a clear winner until [actuals] are released on Monday.”

Earlier: “According to Universal’s North American box office stats, Cowboys & Aliens opened only #2 Friday with $12.994 million, beaten by the $13.29 million debut of Sony Pictures’ The Smurfs,” Nikki Finke reported about five hours ago. “But Universal is still claiming its Western/scifi mashup should come in #1 for the weekend at $36.78 million, behind the little blue guys toon’s $36.02 million. Or is that only wishful thinking at this point?

“Smurfs is really overperforming while Cowboys & Aliens is way behind expectations to the point of tanking.”