Vanity Fair.com‘s Laura Jane Estes has written a summary of David Brinkley‘s VF article (appearing in the July issue) about Sean Penn‘s Haitian humanitarian camp-down. “If it looks as though Sean Penn is just another Hollywood star courting headlines with a camera-ready cause, look again,” Estes begins.

“With a midlife milestone looming (Penn turns 50 in August), his marriage to Robin Wright Penn seemingly finished (‘She is a ghost to me now,’ he observes), and a teenage son, Hopper, having recovered from a life-threatening skateboard accident, the Oscar-winning actor decided to redirect his focus and his priorities.

“Instead of shooting another film or hawking his latest (Fair Game, in which he portrays Ambassador Joseph Wilson, playing opposite Naomi Watts as ‘outed’ C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame), Penn ended up committing himself to the people of Petionville, a once-affluent Haitian suburb where he now runs a camp for 50,000 displaced earthquake survivors.

“As Vanity Fair‘s July issue reveals in detail for the first time, a week after the quake hit last January — killing an estimated quarter of a million people — Penn, a longtime political activist, joined forces with L.A.-based, Sarajevo-born philanthropist Diana Jenkins (creating the humanitarian organization J/P HRO), lined up crisis veteran Alison Thompson to assist in recruiting an A-team of relief volunteers, and flew from his home in Malibu to a ravaged hillside in Port-au-Prince — with a dozen doctors in tow.

“Ever since, Penn, wearing camouflage khakis and carrying a Glock handgun, has been living in a tent not much larger than an army-surplus locker. And this spring the actor and his organization–who toil alongside Haitian colleagues, fellow aid workers, and army rangers — were designated by their fellow NGOs and U.N. officials as the ‘camp manager’ of the Petionville facility.

“Author Douglas Brinkley, the historian, V.F. contributing editor, and a decade-long acquaintance of Penn’s (the pair volunteered in New Orleans in 2005 shortly after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina), traces the humanitarian and personal motivations of the typically press-averse Penn, examining his desire to become an activist in the Phil Ochs mold.”

The first five minutes of Get Him To The Greek, which I’m going to see tonight in a state of absolute wide-awake alertness. Posted by Funny or Die and linked to last night by Brad Brevet‘s Rope of Silicon.

The idea, I think, behind Billy Eichner‘s aggressive microphone routine and trying to bully people into committing to see Sex and the City 2 (“I saw it and I liked it!”) is to engage in a kind of theatre that pushes it. He’s obviously “playing” a hostile-belligerent gay fan of the series, but I’m not sure to what end. The “fuck you” is surprising but not exactly “funny.” It’s weird. It may be a case of Eichner simply being an asshole.

Apologies to anyone who posted a comment last night or this morning and didn’t see it appear. This was due to my having turned up the discriminator on the all-but-worthless Movable Type spam controls. Instead of blocking spammers, it wound up attacking legit commenters. My bad. Every day I spend at least 30 to 40 minutes (maybe closer to an hour) banning this and that spammer and deleting their posts. Still trying to figure out the right plug-in to use.

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 “ooh-ooh” 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.

There was a swanky White House concert last night given by Paul McCartney and other entertainers, the occasion being the awarding of a Gershwin Prize for Popular Song to McCartney. With Barack Oabama presenting the award at night’s end, and with Michelle Obama and their kids sitting front-row center, and with everyone singing along to “Hey Jude” during the finale.

“McCartney brought down the house by belting out ‘Michelle,’ aiming his words straight at a first lady named Michelle,” says an AP report.

“He said he’d been ‘itching’ to perform it at the White House, and asked the president’s forgiveness in advance. The first lady was soon mouthing the words along with McCartney and the president was swaying in his seat.

After serenading the first lady with the lyrics ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ McCartney joked that he just might be the ‘first guy ever to be punched out by a president.’

“The whole night was built around Obama’s presentation to McCartney of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, awarded by the Library of Congress.

“McCartney said it was a moment like no other. “‘I don’t think there could be anything more special than to play here,’ the Englishman said. And then he volunteered to make it a regular gig. ‘Lunchtimes, we could come around,’ he offered. ‘We’re cheap.’

“McCartney, 67, left no question about how he felt about Obama, telling the president that in tough times, ‘You have billions of us who are rooting for you and we know you are going to come through.’

“Later, after the TV cameras had left, he expressed appreciation for the Library of Congress and added a zinger: ‘After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.'”

The Gershwin prize is named for the songwriting brothers George and Ira Gershwin, whose collections are housed at the library. Previous recipients of the Gershwin award are Stevie Wonder and Paul Simon.

The concert will air on PBS’s “In Performance at the White House” on July 28 at 8 pm.

There will be an encore presentation at 9:30 p.m.

I’ve no interest in whether Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson are currently “on” as a couple, but I know they’re almost certainly doomed if Pattinson fails to find some degree of assurance or validation from outside the Twilight sphere. They both need to succeed in films without vampires or werewolves, but especially Pattinson given (a) his apparently limited acting range and (b) his shitty choices so far, which have created a vague “uh-oh” feeling.

Robert Pattinson on the set of the currently-lensing Water for Elephants.

Relationships between actors are never entirely defined by feelings and character and commitment. They’re about about the necessity of similar career grooves. If over the next two or three years Stewart’s career just piddles along like Pattinson’s, they may work out. But if she catches on with a great performance in something really successful or Oscar-worthy while he’s still treading water, they’ll be finished in a matter of months.

Pattinson’s stock clearly fell in the wake of his boring performance in Remember Me, a second-rate romance by way of some 9/11 exploitation. RP’s previous appearance as Salvador Dali (with that absurd uptwist moustache) in ’08’s Little Ashes didn’t do him any favors either.

Pattinson currently has three extra-curricular features in the pipeline, and if one of them doesn’t “take” on some level he’s done. I’m sorry to sound like a Darwinian hard-ass, but if you don’t think agents are thinking and saying the same things then you need to get out more.

One look at Pattinson’s appearance in his next film, a period romance called Bel Ami, and your heart goes “meh.” Co-directed by Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod and based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant, it’s described as “a chronicle of a young man’s rise to power in Paris through his manipulation of the city’s most influential and wealthy women.” In other words it’s a period Lothario story in the vein of Stephen Frears‘ Cherie.

Pattinson on the set of Bel Ami.

Next comes the currently-shooting Water for Elephants, which is being directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine) from a Richard LaGravanese screenplay. (Here are pics from the set.) It costars Reese Witherspoon, Christoph Waltz and Hal Holbrook. It’s about a young guy who gets a job as a circus vet. Maybe, but it seems minor.

Pattinson’s third and last shot is Madeline Stowe‘s Unbound Captives, a western that Stowe wrote and will direct. The synopsis says it’s about “a widowed woman [being] rescued by a frontiersman and the two searching for her kidnapped children,” etc. Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz costar. I’m guessing that Jackman will plays the fontiersman so I don’t know where this leaves Pattinson.

As reported by Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Tom Cruise will reanimate producer Lev Grossman — his Tropic Thunder character — on this Sunday’s MTV Movie Awards (airing at 9 pm). Not just in this Risky Business riff but in two others about Twilight-ers.

I’ve always suspected that the name “Lev Grossman” was a riff on Sid Krassman, the coarse Hollywood producer depicted in Terry Southern‘s Blue Movie.

In a just-posted piece about the critical firestorm that last weekend greeted Sex and the City 2, N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis suggests that Hollywood.com critic Thomas Leupp owns the idea that SATC2 might inspire anti-American terrorist acts. “It could become an effective inspirational video for suicide bombers,” Leupp wrote, “provided they can endure the film’s two-and-a-half hour running time, of course.”

Leupp may have been the first critic to express this, Dargis implies, or was the most articulate or noteworthy…whatever. But for one reason or another she chose his quote to represent this view, so draw your own conclusions.

My own, for what it’s worth, is that Dargis doesn’t respect HE like she could or should. Because I was first to plant a flag on the SATC-terrorism thing.

Way back on May 28, 2008, after seeing Sex and the City: The Movie at a commercial Paris cinema, I called it “another Taliban recruitment film.” In a followup piece I suggested that “young Arab men might be so repelled by its celebration of putrid 21st Century chick culture that joining the Taliban might seem freshly appealing.”

Now, you can surmise that I wasn’t quoted because my “Taliban recruitment film” remark wasn’t written in response to SATC2, the focus of Dargis’s article. But of course, the same content that everyone is responding to in the current film was also stinking up the place in ’08’s SATC: The Movie. The fact that the girls travel to Morocco-disguised-as-Abu Dhabi in the newbie is a mere geographical anecdote. The spiritual cancer at the heart of the SATC franchise was just as pernicious two years ago as it is today…c’mon. Both films were sired by the same seed.

All of which suggests that Leupp may be enjoying his moment in the N.Y. Times sun because I was too far ahead of the pack. Forget The Man Who Knew Too Much (also partly shot in Morocco) and consider The Man Who Spoke Too Soon.

Lionsgate has apparently delayed its Killers screenings for critics until opening day (i.e., 48 hours hence). They’re obviously looking to prevent negative reviews from denting the weekend gross, but I thought reviews don’t matter to undiscriminating Eloi.

The way Ashton Kutcher seems to be half-yawning is a mistake, I feel. He’s trying to suggest a certain nonchalance (“don’t worry, baby….getting shot at by rival spies is no biggie”) but it comes across as a kind of boredom. And Katherine Heigl ‘s haircut makes her look much older than she seemed to be in Knocked Up, like she’s 38 or 39 and lives in the suburbs.

The July issue of Vanity Fair contains one of those oh-to-have-lived-a-champagne-life-in-the-50s-or-60s articles about the coupling of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It’s an excerpt from Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger‘s Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century (Harper, 6.15).

The fact (i.e., outside the bubbly spell of this book and article) is that Taylor and Burton were considered to be celebrity boors and attention junkies after they meshed in Rome in 1962 and thereafter became known as Liz-and-Dick — the first Hollywood power-couple whose paparrazi photos gradually developed the power to make average people feel nauseous at the drop of a hat, certainly by the time they made The Sandpiper in ’65.

They had both enjoyed their proudest professional moments in the ’50s (although Burton managed to recapture some of his glory in two ’60s films, Becket and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold), and seemed to do little else except spend and party and squander once they hooked up.

Taylor had hit her physical, sexual and professional peak from the time of ’51’s Father of the Bride through Butterfield 8 in ’60, and Burton was in an enviable groove during the same approximate period, tackling a little Shakespeare on stage along with films like The Desert Rats, The Robe, Alexander the Great and Look Back in Anger. But they began to signify a kind of jet-set boredom and the notion of attention-for-attention’s-sake after they became a famous couple. They were the first to be seen in this light, I suppose, becoming in a sense the Bennifer (my favorite term was always “B. Lo”) of their time.

The two photos above — Taylor during the filming of Suddenly Last Summer in ’58, and recently with her current boyfriend, the allegedly gay Jason Winters — remind us that the elixir of youth is spent before we know it, and that it all downswirls into wheelchairs and tired bones and cluelessness. It’s a brutally cruel process.

Taylor in ’55, during the shooting of George Stevens’ Giant.

“Before Brangelina, TomKat and Speidi there was Liz and Dick — that is, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the super-couple who set the standard all others can only aspire to in terms of modern celebrity,” reads Rebecca Sacks‘ summary. “What other couple has been condemned both by the Vatican and on the floor of the House of Representatives? What other couple lived as decadently, as opulently, and as passionately? What other couple could conquer both Hollywood and Broadway the way these two did over a span of two decades?

“Kashner and Schoenberger trace the arc of this epic, turbulent love affair, which appropriately began on the set of Cleopatra — a story about another romance for the ages, and one of the most expensive films ever made — and ended spectacularly with jealousy, anger, and divorce, despite the fact that Taylor and Burton never really fell out of love.

“[The authors] scored a major coup in persuading Taylor to allow them to publish scores of never-before-seen letters that Burton wrote to her, and passages from many of the letters are included in the excerpt. In addition to demonstrating that Burton was a gifted, lyrical, playful writer who could effortlessly summon the beauty of the Shakespearean language he so loved, the correspondence reveals poignant and intimate truths about the power of the bond that Taylor and Burton shared — sexual, creative, and spiritual.”