It’s heaven to hear a guy like Al Gore just spit out what he damn well knows about climate change and the scientist whores who’ve been paid to say differently, and say it like a longshoreman. Listening to this is like standing under a waterfall in the Amazon rainforest and just getting soaked with clarity. If only President Obama had the cojones to be 1/3 or 1/4 as blunt and candid as Gore is here…the clouds would part.

In an exceptionally emotional but on-target outburst, MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan said yesterday that he’d like President Obama “to go to the people of the United States of America and say, ‘People of the United States of America, your Congress is bought, your Congress is incapable of making legislation on healthcare, banking, trade, or taxes because if they do it, they will lose their political funding and they won’t do it.

“‘But I’m the President of the United States, and I won’t have a country that is run by a bought Congress. So I’m not going to work with a bought Congress and try to be Mr. Big Guy…I’m going to abandon the bought Congress like Teddy Roosevelt did , and I’m going to go to the people of the United States get rid of the bought Congress.'”

“Until a President says that’s the problem and says he’s going to fix it, there is no policy that I can possibly see no matter how brilliant your idea may be or your idea or my idea or her idea or your idea at home, is that idea will not happen as long as there’s a capacity to basically fire a politician who disagrees with me by taking funding away from him. Is that a fair assessment?

In an email last night to The Huffington Post, Ratigan called the rant “his truest and most piercing and emotional expression of fact since he’s been in broadcasting. He also said he hoped the president was up to the task of addressing the real economic issues.

“In a nutshell, Hope without Courage is Lost,” Ratigan reportedly wrote in an email last night. “And I don’t mean the destructive cowboy bravado of the Republican Party either! I mean true courage to observe truth and work through it together.”

In essence, he’s saying President Obama lacks the courage to just man up and tell it and stand on the truth of it and come what may. Which is true. He doesn’t have that in him. He has to be mild-mannered, bipartisan-common-ground Barry. And that’s our nightmare right now.

Early yesterday morning The Miami Herald‘s Rene Rodriguez wrote that Rod Lurie‘s Straw Dogs (Screens Gems, 916) is “exceptionally well-acted and shot” and is “easily Lurie’s best work as a director.” But he said some other things besides.

After seeing the film, he said, “I was immediately struck by two things: (1) The film is practically identical to Sam Peckinpah‘s original, yet feels completely different; and 2) the violence isn’t nearly as shocking in 2011 as it was in 1971, but it doesn’t feel as cathartic or rousing as I expected. Instead, the mayhem felt vaguely depressing — a graphic, bloody depiction of the loss of humanity.

“Pauline Kael famously referred to Peckinpah’s movie as a ‘fascist film,’ but I doubt she would say the same about Lurie’s version, which boasts a much less graphic rape sequence and still-gory but swift violence that Lurie’s camera doesn’t linger on. I’ve been asking around lately and haven’t found a single person outside of movie critics and film buffs who has seen [the 1971] Straw Dogs. Peckinpah, I think, did a little too good a job at making sure his film was an unpleasant experience.

“I’ll be writing more about Lurie’s remake closer to its theatrical release. But I’m extremely curious to see how modern audiences react to the movie, which is exceptionally well-acted and shot, but still uses violence as a way to bait the viewer’s bloodlust and thirst for revenge, then leaves you with an ashen, queasy aftertaste.

“Peckinpah’s picture was a product of the Vietnam era; Lurie’s comes after a protracted war in Iraq. Both films were made during a time of tumult and tell a near-identical story, yet they send you home in radically different moods. Sometimes, remakes make sense.”

N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis has trashed The Help, calling it a “big ole slab of honey-glazed hokum.” And she’s pretty much dismissed every performance in the fiim except for Viola Davis‘s, which means, I suspect, that unless the entire world disagrees Davis has the heat and Octavia Spencer is out and that’s it.

(l. to r.) Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis in The Help.

Same thing from New York‘s David Edelstein and Movieline’s Stephanie Zacharek: Davis is a solid standout in an overly gauzy, so-so film.

Which is too bad because I feel Spencer’s performance is also quite special. She’s broad at times but she touches bottom. If you ask me it’s her and Davis, her and Davis, her and Davis. Wait…Zacharek to the rescue. “The whole idea of The Help is that a maid isn’t just a maid, and Davis and her co-star, Octavia Spencer, breathe life into that idea,” she says. “As the quietly crusading Minny, Spencer has some of the movie’s best comic moments, though she never lets us lose sight of the justifiable anger and frustration that have come to rule her life.”

Davis “keeps her cool even as she warms your heart and does her job, often beautifully,” Dargis writes. “She doesn’t just turn Aibileen, something of a blur in the novel, into a fully dimensional character, she also helps lift up several weaker performances and invests this cautious, at times bizarrely buoyant, movie with the gravity it frequently seems to want to shrug off.”

Edelstein is saying that The Help “belongs to Viola Davis..it’s a tough, beautifully judged performance — it gives this too-soft movie a spine.”

For what it’s worth, The Help isn’t doing too badly — 74% — at Rotten Tomatoes so far.

Some of us can tell right away when we’ve seen an Oscar-calbre performance. Others can spot this and which category the actor/actress can reasonably be expected to compete in…just like that. If you had to think last year about whether Another Year‘s Lesley Manville should have run as Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress, you were already behind the eight-ball. It was dead obvious she had to run in as supporting, even with literalists like Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas more or less saying that Manville is a lead, the film is mainly about her, her character has the strongest and saddest arc, etc.

Earlier today Cinema Blend‘s Katey Rich tweeted that The Help‘s Viola Davis is a Best Actress contender, despite it being thuddingly obvious that the only category Davis can possibly hope to compete in is Best Supporting Actress. (And who decided by the way that Davis is the big Help contender and not Octavia Spencer?) It doesn’t matter if Davis’s character carries the weight and dignity of the film on her shoulders… which she does. She can’t hope to win against Streep/Close. On top of which Davis is “due” so the obvious move is to go for Best Supporting. Case closed, end of story.

Don’t Lesley Manville her! Don’t Ed Douglas her! Give Davis a fighting chance!

I don’t care if this interview between Bill Moyers and Oliver Stone is 20 months old. It’s the most nourishing and sobering thing that’s seeped into my head all day. It’s basically Stone talking about his time as an infantryman in Vietnam, and how that experience has informed his views of the current debacle in Afghanistan, and convinced him that Obama has made a terrible mistake by trying to go for some kind of win over there, which of course is futile.

Forget segment #1 — start with segment #2 and then watch segment #3, segment #4 and segment #5.

I don’t know what I ought to know about music, so I’m guess I’ll be listening to this weekly podcast so I’ll have a clue the next time I’m shuffling around Hollywood Ameoba (Sunset and Cahuenga). Co-hosted by the currently untethered Jett Wells and Syracuse U. pally Nathan Matisse, now working in some fringe capacity at Wired. Did Keanu Reeves invent the term “whoa”? No, but he owns it. You can’t say it without thinking of him in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

My whole life has been about avoiding and hating films like this, and doing everything I can to persuade others to follow suit. I’d also like to devote my next life to same, even if I come back as a horse or a rabbit or a drop of water in a fountain.

I’m sure John Wood was extremely grateful when he landed the part of has-been playwright Sidney Bruhl in the stage version of Ira Levin‘s Deathtrap, which opened in February 1978. For the dryly debonair and deliciously decrepit manner Wood lent to the role was so popular with everyone that he became a major character actor in Hollywood films through the ’80s and ’90s. The irony is that he never found a part in any Hollywood film that was as much fun to play (or watch) as Sidney Bruhl. Not one. Not even close.

Wood at Dr. Stephen Falken in WarGames.

I know. I caught Deathtrap toward the end of Wood’s run (I think) in the late summer or early fall of ’78. By that time he’d given so many performances he was going a little batty. He was seized with concentration but also looked half-stoned. “I’m jumping off a proverbial cliff with this part and I don’t care because it’s so much fun….yaaahhh!,” he seemed to be saying. I remember noticing that he was half-muttering his costars’ lines — you could almost see his lips move. He was hamming it up for dear life. And when he said “nothing recedes like success” early in the play, he was brilliant. The audience loved him, applauded him. He was so confident, so alive, so cup-runneth-over.

And then the movies let him down. In the ’80s, I mean. A couple of minor flashes of flavor but that’s all. Somebody Killed Her Husband…forget it. Dr. Stephen Falken in WarGames…gimme a break with that running-around-in-the-cave scene at the end. The thin-lipped Deacon of Diction in Richard Donner‘s Ladyhawke…blah. All right, he was not only pretty good but fit the tuxedo in Woody Allen‘s The Purple Rose of Cairo. But then it was back to hell in Jumpin’ Jack Flash and then a mini-part in Mike Nichols‘ Heartburn. And then a supporting role in Lady Jane…okay, not bad.

The the ’90s kicked in and Wood started to get a little bit luckier. Archduke Karry in Orlando. A pretty good part in The Madness of King George. And then parts in Uncovered, Sabrina, Richard III, Jane Eyre and so on. And then he got older and started to slow down in the aughts He died in his sleep on 8.6.11.

Wood had been a Shakesperean stage actor for a little less than 30 years before doing Deathtrap, and I’m presuming he was quite content with his work and life during the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s before Levin’s play came along. I’m sure his accountant was very happy with Wood’s post-Deathtrap income, and I’m sure Wood was pleased as well. If only he could have landed one killer movie role, just one.

(l. to.r.) Wood, Marian Seldes and Victor Garber during the ’78 stage production of Deathtrap.

The one thing I didn’t like very much about Rise of the Planet of the Apes is Ceasar’s unnaturally deep, vaguely creepy voice. This was a concession, I felt, to a basic Hollywood notion that formidable warrior figures have to sound snarly and tough and commanding in some primal way. But if you’ve seen footage of a talking ape (as I have) you know they don’t have deep, dark voices but ones that are on the soft, high-pitched side. They sound like very old white men. So while the line “Ceasar is home” worked, the delivery didn’t.

Reports about Anne Hathaway‘s stunt double having driven her Catwoman chopper right into an IMAX camera yesterday (i.e., Monday) on the set of The Dark Knight Rises don’t say if the camera was totalled or partly damaged or what. The TMZ Video shows the bike hitting the camera at a relatively slow speed, and that some of the damage (whatever it amounts to) will be from the IMAX camera having been dropped by the cameraman.

What does an IMAX camera cost? $350,000? A half million? Even if was completely destroyed (which I doubt), keep two things in mind: (1) There’s a mention on The Dark Knight‘s iMDB page that “while filming [a] chase scene with the Joker and the SWAT vans, one of only four IMAX cameras in the world at that time was destroyed.” And (2) this pales compared to the 1958 incident on the set of Ben-Hur when a $100,000 65mm camera was totally destroyed during the filming of the chariot race. The Dollartimes inflation converter says a 1958 dollar would be worth $7.72 in 2011, so the smashed Ben-Hur camera cost filmmakers the equivalent of $772,000.

The same basic despair expressed by my recent “Hillary Should Have Won” riff was concurrently written and reported about by The Daily Beast‘s Leslie Bennetts. “During the last few days, the whispers have swelled to an angry chorus of frustration about [President] Obama’s perceived weaknesses,” she wrote. “Many Democrats are furious and heartbroken at how ineffectual he seemed in dealing with Republican opponents over the debt ceiling, and liberals are particularly incensed by what they see as his capitulation to conservatives on fundamental liberal principles.”