Credoaction, a liberal-activist website, is collecting petition signatures that might persuade Disney not to advertise on “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” a forthcoming eight-episode series on the Discovery Channel in which Palin, a slayer of Alaskan wildlife and an advocate of “drill, baby, drill,” will serve as a kind of tour guide.

“Disney is a long-time advertiser on The Learning Channel, and unless the company specifically demands that its ads not be shown during this Palin show, that ad revenue may be funding this monstrosity,” the website states.

An extremely late-arriving defense of Sex and the City 2 director Michael Patrick King appeared this morning on Big Hollywood. The author, John Nolte, skews Glenn Kenny, yours truly and other liberal-type critics for slamming the film’s cultural attitudes and inflammatory politics or, in Kenny’s case, for criticizing Nolte.

It’s fun to kick this stuff around, but you can’t wait this long after the release of a terrible film. SATC2 has been dead for what…at least a couple of weeks?

Indiewire‘s report about this morning’s sudden death of Peter Brunette is sad, obviously. I knew and liked Brunette. Condolences to his friends and family. Bob Dylan‘s line about “death’s honesty” doesn’t seem to apply here since removing a vibrant man from the planet at a relatively young age seems rude.

Brunette was covering the Taormina Film Festival when it happened. I visited Taormina just last month. Joe Leydon says that this is how he’d like to go, on the job and doing what he loves best. If your number is up and you’re going no matter what, Taormina is a peaceful spot for it. A much better place to die than, say, Newark, New Jersey.

Any movie villain can be diseased and malicious, but the legendary high-style baddies that live on for decades have all been no-laugh funny. They’re required to be deranged and demonic, of course, but they always deliver their lines with a certain flourish that says “if you don’t want to laugh or chuckle, fine…but I’m double-tracking all the same.”

Line deliveries by no-laugh-funny villains aren’t “dryly funny” or “offhandedly funny,” but contemplatively funny. They don’t mouth their lines with any humorous English, in other words, but their characters are amusingly skewed — darkly, weirdly so — when you recall them, and they always raise a smile at odd moments.

I’ve quietly laughed longer and harder at Jack Nicholson‘s Jack Torrance in The Shining over the years than at any Jim Carrey or Seth Rogen or Adam Sandler performance. Ditto Ben Kingsley‘s Don Logan in Sexy Beast, Robert Mitchum‘s preacher in Night of the Hunter, Al Pacino‘s Tony Montana in Scarface, William Hurt‘s wackazoid gangster in A History of Violence, Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers, etc.

Which reminds me that Universal Home Video still hasn’t announced a date for their inevitable Scarface Bluray. They’ve milked this 1983 Brian DePalma film with how many DVD versions? Time for the big step-up.

MB: “I told him it didn’t make any sense, clippin’ you that way. He fucked up.”

TM: “You fucked up too, Mel.”

MB: “Don’t go too far, Tony.”

A couple of Jonah Hex look-sees are happening today; reactions will post 48 hours hence. Except I’m not feeling a lotta Hex-ian vibration out there. Is it me or is the corn-oil just simmering in the saucepan? Walter Winchell sending out a general telegram to Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea — what’s the hoo-hah? Apart from the usual LexG/Thelonious Monk riffs about Megan Fox, I mean.

Lefties aren’t supposed to side with cops over apparent police brutality episodes, but this video-captured incident — a two-day-old encounter between a young Paul Blart-ish policeman and a couple of attitude girls in a predominantly black neighborhood of Seattle — was primarily the girls’ fault. The cop obviously messed up when he punched the girl in the pink T-shirt, but the women were belligerent and hysterical and physically confrontational.

It was just a stupid jay-walking admonishment to begin with, but the girls elevated it into a neighborhood melodrama by refusing to show respect to the cop and the authority that he represents. Under stable social conditions, all citizens are obliged to chill down and comply when an officer pulls or calls them over. No exceptions, no arguments — you calmly respond to what the officer has to say. N.W.A.’s “Fuck The Police” and other such sentiments don’t apply.

You certainly don’t wave the cop off and walk away, which is reportedly what the girl in the black T-shirt did. If there’s a complaint about a wrong call or illegality or unfairness or what-have-you, there are ways to address this. Tedious and time-consuming ways, yes, but they exist. Either way you don’t tell a cop to piss off, and you don’t physically resist.

“The Seattle Police Department announced at a press conference [yesterday] that it will conduct a review of yesterday’s taped incident on the 3100 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Way S, involving an officer who punched a teenage girl in the face after she shoved him,” a slog.com story says.

“Acting Deputy Chief Nick Metz said today while the department will be reviewing the tape, for departmental training purposes, it’s withholding judgment on the actions of the officer. ‘We have questions about his tactics, so he’s going to receive additional training,’ Metz said of the officer, ‘and we’ve forwarded the incident to the Office of Professional Accountability. That’s all we’re prepared to do at this point.”

Metz adds that the teenagers in the video also ‘bear a great deal of responsibility.’

“‘Even if you think that contact from a police officer is unlawful, it is your responsibility to cooperate with it,’ says Metz. ‘In the event that you do receive contact from an officer that you think is unlawful, there are mechanisms instated which you can go through.”

“Metz says he doesn’t know the officer’s intent–whether he planned on just issuing a warning or ticket the teens for jaywalking. ‘I do know that if the young woman would have stopped and talked to [the officer], we wouldn’t be talking now,” says Metz. Once the teen resisted, a crowd gathered and cell phones started recording the incident.

“Eventually, both teens were arrested — one for the misdemeanor offense of obstructing an officer and the other for third-degree assault on an officer, a felony.”

Barack Obama‘s oil-spill speech, which I just saw this morning, said all the right things, but it was essentially a situational assessment — an awful thing happened, we’re doing this and that, I won’t allow BP to wriggle out of paying for the damage, etc. — and a soft, general-terms sermon about how we all have to stop thinking selfishly short-term and seize the moment by seriously switching to clean-energy policies.

And that…you know, we’ll eventually get through this ecological epidemic if we all hold hands and say a prayer and set out on a new path as a single unified nation, which of course will never happen if the corporate-fellating whores in the Senate and House have anything to say about it.

It was one of those “we can be a better nation if we decide to grow up” speeches — no real fire, no teeth, no thematic lift and, most disappointingly, no tough-sheriff talk and no blunt course-correction specifics.

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill didn’t happen like a hurricane or an earthquake — it was caused by greed and a culture that has long been willing (until a couple of months ago) to allow corporate bad guys to do whatever they want as long as they’re “hiring” and don’t fatten their bank accounts too much in their relentless sociopathic attempts to reduce their operating costs regardless of the risks, and by the willingness of government regulators to become non-regulatory, laissez-faire ass-kissers.

It was basically a 1979 Jimmy Carter speech, and I don’t think I’m alone in saying that it brought me down.

The just-up trailer for Mark Romanek‘s Never Let Me Go (Fox Searchlight, 10.1), which falls under the headings of “drama” and “science fiction.” Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Charlotte Rampling and Sally Hawkins.

Tomorrow’s Star is reporting that Al and Tipper Gore‘s marriage broke up because Al has been doing the nasty with Inconvenient Truth producer Laurie David, the ex-wife of Larry David, for the last two years. Most guys would say this wasn’t too bad a deal for Fat Al, considering the hotness gap between Tipper and Laurie. The story also, if true, “humanizes” Al — he’s been seen all his life as a bit of a stiff. It’s also a Hollywood-seduces-Washington story if I ever saw one.

The story may be bogus — N.Y. Daily News reporter Helen Kennedy reports that “Gore’s friends called the story utter nonsense” and Laurie David’s rep is also denying — but at least it sounds like a recognizable human scenario, which is more than you could say for the initial reports that the Gores were splitting up because they’d simply “grown apart.”

If the Al-and-Laurie thing is accurate, I’d like a little credit for writing eight days ago that “older couples don’t break up unless one of the parties is seriously fed up and wants out…something has to be pretty damn intolerable to upset a comfortable 40 year-old apple cart. And most of the time — let’s face it — it’s about the husband wanting to pick up that spear and feel like a hunter again.”

The Enquirer‘s report on the matter allegedly “blame[s] Tipper’s unfounded suspicions of affairs,” according to Kennedy’s story. “Tipper’s jealousy was putting stress on their marriage” and “Al finally told her their relationship was over because he couldn’t stand her jealous rages anymore.”

That’s so Warren Beatty-in-Town and Country if the Star story is true. Guys who are guilty of catting around usually follow Lenny Bruce‘s advice — deny it, deny it, deny it. The devious ones always turn it around and try to blame the trouble on the jealous wife.

A director-writer whom I’ve known for 16 or 17 years began telling me in the early aughts that the quality of the producers and studio-based film executives he was dealing with in terms of intellectual heft and seasoning and life experience had plummeted sharply. The guys getting behind this or that project didn’t know anything except how to be blustery and obsequious and predatory, he used to say, and “they’re getting worse by the minute. They’re fools…I used to think the ’90s generation was bad but these guys are ridiculous.”

Which is why I found this 6.15 Claude Brodesser “Vulture” piece about the alleged return of (i.e., purported interest in) original ideas so hilarious.

“Conventional wisdom in Hollywood of late has said that you should stick to familiar brands when making movies. It could be a sequel or an adaptation of an old TV show, board game, toy, or crumpled candy wrapper, just as long as people already know it. So how’s that working out?

“In a summer season where only three out of the fourteen major releases so far have come from a new idea, attendance is down 13.3 percent from last season. Even with The Karate Kid‘s surprise bounty, box-office revenue is down 7.5 percent, according to the National Association of Theater Owners…and that is skewed more by 3-D gouging than anything else: Since the summer of 2009, ticket prices have actually gone up 8 percent.

“That’s why studio execs at Warner Bros., Paramount/DreamWorks, and Universal are now madly pinging agents and managers with an uncharacteristic, desperate, and welcome request: Send us your fresh material!

“‘We’re on a lot of calls with people at the highest level [of production], and they’re just nervous,” one agent tells Vulture. ‘They’ve been telling us, ‘We have our movies for next year, but attendance is down, so, guys, you know what? Get us the original material. We need some original shit, because now our bosses are on us.'”

“It’s no wonder panic is in the air, considering how moviegoers are rebelling.

“‘[Moviegoers] are feeling marketed to as opposed to catered to,” says JC Spink, a partner in the management and production company Benderspink and one of the executive producers of last summer’s surprise original hit, The Hangover. “I think we’ve all gone a little bit overboard as an industry. There hasn’t been room for original material for a little while now. It’s a shame, because I don’t think it’s what anyone [who works in the business] came out here for.”

I wrote my director-writer friend about this whole thing, and he said the following in his reply: “I do remember that in the year 2000 I said something to you about this issue, to the effect that Hollywood decision makers are ‘getting dumber and shallower by the minute.’ Well, Jeff, approximately 5,256,000 minutes have transpired since June, 2000. Does that give you an idea as to the state of things?”

I too believe that Barack Obama’s oil-spill speech this evening at 8 pm is as important to his Presidency as his Reverent Wright speech in Philadelphia was to his campaign. The country has experienced something akin to a 9/11 reaction to the spill, and tonight may be Obama’s last chance to stand up and be FDR or LBJ and look the corporates in the eye and say “enough of this…BP isn’t handling it to our satisfaction and we’re taking the reins.”

My sense all along is that Obama hasn’t wanted the apparatus of government to seem overly assertive by wresting the controls from British Petroleum for fear of the right-wing crazies calling him a big-government socialist. It’s not quite that cut-and-dried, perhaps. I understand that there’s no magic-bullet solution to a hugely complex technical problem.

But I know that Obama has this annoying tendency to be thoughtful, conciliatory and mild-mannered, and that he’s got something in him that hates going eyeball-to-eyeball with adversaries. And that “mild-mannered” doesn’t get it this time because there’s been an appalling lack of coordination all along in this effort.

Obama really does need to “send in the troops,” so to speak, in order to coordinate the effort to somehow plug BP’s underwater gusher and tell those “drill baby drill” nutters that corporate power in this country has become arrogant, poisonous and psychopathic, and that enough is enough.

“The Deepwater Horizon tragedy will rival or eclipse health insurance reform as one of the life-altering events of the Obama era,” Peter Daou, a HuffPost op-ed contributor, recently wrote. “This, the greatest man-made environmental disaster in our history, is the mother of wake-up calls.”

I’ve been so exhausted a couple of times that I’ve been barely able to stand, but even in my most sleep-deprived state I could have held it together, I think, in a room full of people and press while listening to Sen. John McCain speak in front of TV cameras. I would have somehow gotten through that and then collapsed in a nearby hallway or the bathroom.