Here’s that CNN article I was interviewed for the other day about Gabourey Sidibe‘s acting-career prospects. It’s nicely written. The author is Breeanna Hare.

I’m sitting next to a couple of twenty-somethings at a Starbucks on Eighth and 50-something, and I’ve been listening to them talk for last 40 or 45 minutes, and it never ceases to amaze how these guys, whom I almost regard as a separate species, all submit to the exact same mall-speak fascism in which there are no declarative sentences but constant questioning tones, as if the speaker is basically saying “is it okay if I say this? Because I don’t want to seem overly assertive…so is it, like, okay?”

And so instead of saying “I walked into that asshole’s office and told him if I didn’t get a raise I’d quit”, the GenYs say “so I, like, walked into his office? And said, uhhm, if I don’t, like, get a raise I’ll have to, you know, quit?” It’s pathetic. They’re all a bunch of Zeligs. If I was Absolute Dictator I would round them all up and put them in evening speech classes, and the first lesson would be that you really don’t need to feel uncertain or hesitant or in any way submissive when speaking a declarative sentence. Tens of millions of under-30s constantly speak with this questioning tone, as if they were all cloned by the same Mengele. It’s freaky.

And yet my two boys (21 and 20) don’t talk this way, and neither does Zoe Kazan. Wait, does Kristin Stewart speak like this? No, it couldn’t be.

It’s a little late in the cycle, but here‘s a chat with Hurt Locker double-Oscar winner Paul Ottosson, who won for sound editing and mixing last Sunday night. Brought to you and yours by the MakingOf.com guys. (The embed code is only two and half lines, but other embeds are longer than Russian novels. I hate — “I’m using the word ‘hate’ here” — voluminous coding.)

Roger Ebert has four-starred Paul Greengrass‘s Green Zone — fine. But the film will not come under fire “from those who are still defending the fabricated intelligence we used as an excuse to invade Iraq” as much as those who feel that it brings nothing really new to the table (factually, politically, stylistically), and that it would have felt at least semi-relevant if it had come out, say, two or three years ago. Or four, even.

A Green Zone friend-of-the-family asked this morning if I enjoyed it, and I said “yeah, but it’s no United 93. It’s basically the Bourne Zone, and therefore feels like a bit of the old same-old same-old. Paul should have named actual names, I feel — no stand-ins. And the shaky-cam thing is starting to bother me a bit.”

On top of which the definite interest levels are only fair — 40 and 42 for under-25 and over-25 males, and 21 and 33 for under-25 and over-25 females. The “first choice open & release” figure is only 9.

In a N.Y. Press profile of Zoe Kazan (The Exploding Girl, Behanding in Spokane), Eric Kohn suggests she has “the petite appeal of a Zooey Deschanel 2.0, her expressive blue eyes seemingly bursting out her diminutive noggin in an almost-hyperbolic image of pixie cuteness.” Among the bullet points: (a) she’s a die-hard New Yorker who’s against moving to Los Angeles (“There’s no dearth of work here”), (b) she wants “range” (i.e., character roles) and not a Katharine Hepburn-like career, (c) she’s thinking of bailing on Facebook because of the innumerable-lewd-ayhole factor, and (d) as New York magazine has called her Behanding character “a principled idiot,” a Kazan confidante describes the character as a “stupider” version of Kazan herself.

Two online movie-clips sites are suddenly angling for big attention at South by Southwest. Movie Clips.com, the Rich Raddon-Zach James site which appeared last December, has unveiled a new player. And this afternoon I’m dropping by the offices of AnyClip.com, which is will be promoting its presence in various ways at SXSW and launching on 3.15.

I don’t know anything. I’m just getting my feet wet. But the key to easy clip access is having a vast library (obviously) and providing embed codes — simple. Movie Clips.com has more money, obviously, but other differences require study.

“Barack Obama‘s whole career has been based on the idea of transcending partisanship.” the Daily Beast‘s Paul Beinart wrote earlier today. “But lately, by confronting Republicans rather than courting them, Obama has Democrats fired up.

“Amidst the speculation over whether David Axelrod hates Rahm Emanuel or Rahm Emanuel hates David Axelrod or Lawrence Summers hates them both, the punditocracy has glossed over something significant: Team Obama has had one hell of a month. In late January, health care reform was widely considered dead. Now it’s considered a better than even bet. It could all still end in tears, of course. But for the moment, Barack Obama has his mojo back.

“And he has it back for one basic reason: He’s given up the dream that he could transcend the partisan divide.”

Please, please make this true! By this I mean make this a repeatedly observable and provable reality. There’s only way to deal with the rabid right. Attack them, eviscerate them, and basically make their lives a living hell. And when they finally start to buckle and whine and ask you to please stop, then you really turn on the pain like Genghis Khan. That’s the only thing they understand. It’s the only way to treat them.

I was down with the first, and seriously despised the second. New Moon cut such a critical stink that it seems incomprehensible that anyone outside of the Twi-hards could be in any state of high expectation for Eclipse. Nonetheless…

Thanks to Mike Vollman and the MGM/UA team for not inviting me to last night’s 7pm showing of Hot Tub Time Machine (3.26) on 86th Street (forget the theatre, between 2nd and 3rd). It may be the only March film I’m half- jacked about, and I’ve only been posting the trailers for…what, five or six months now?

Not to sound tape-loopy, but “the reasons for the voltage are Kristen Stewart‘s scrappy performance as Joan Jett, the Runaways co-founder who went on to become a solo rock legend in the ’80s, and Michael Shannon‘s as L.A. rock impresario Kim Fowley. As long as the film is focused on [these two] and the generally pungent ’70s atmosphere, it radiates badass attitude and seems authentically plugged in to the spirit of ’70s rebel rock.”

Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir has written a sage and historically comprehensive overview of the occasional conflicts that have arisen between impudent critics and tough-minded publicists, and particularly about the recent Greenberg vs. Armond White brouhaha, which ended yesterday when everyone learned that White would be seeing Greenberg this Friday.

“Although the charges and counter-charges in this case are pretty salacious, the furor is only partly about White and Baumbach. It’s also about the uneasy symbiosis between film critics and the movie business, two organisms that feed off each other in an awkward dance of privilege, access and manipulation. L’affaire Greenberg is also heartening to many film journalists, in a peculiar way. It suggests, in the face of all available economic evidence, that what we do still matters.”

Thursday morning update: Village Voice critic Jim Hoberman provided photo-copy proof Wednesday afternoon that White did in fact suggest that his issues with Baumbach might been solved by “retroactive abortion.” As Hoberman writes, “[This] notorious statement was…the punch line of White’s review of Baumbach’s second feature, Mr. Jealousy, which suggested that the filmmaker’s mother should have gotten an abortion. Because this was published in the pre-internet days of 1998, some have dismissed it as an urban myth.

“Uh-uh. White wrote it and, thanks to the New York Public Library — where the above clipping was found earlier today — it will live online forever.

“White himself has suggested that the abortion quote was apocryphal. After Dart told Page Six this morning that the critic was uninvited ‘because he had made nasty comments about Noah, including calling him a [bleep]hole and saying his mom should have had an abortion,’ White denied what he termed ‘responsibility.'”