“We must have a public option,” President Obama said in one of his weekly addresses. “Must,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow reminds. “But now he’s changed his mind on that apparently.” So now we’ll have “no public option, no single payer, no national health plan. Maybe some insurance reforms, maybe not. Depends on what else the Republicans want, probably.” This is damn disappointing.

A crudely written post on a blog called Racialicious makes what seems like a fair point about District 9, claiming that the subplot involving Nigerian gangsters has a racist thrust to it. My impression was that director Neill Blomkamp was just going for the usual gritty/scuzzy venality that all bad guys are obliged to exude in futuristic/sci-fi films these days. But given the film’s racial apartheid metaphor I can see how some might be irate about some of the gross particulars and associations.

HE reader Sabina (i.e., “DeafBrownTrashPunk”), who sent the piece along, claims that the outrage of the author, Nicole Stamp, over the Nigerian thugs killing and eating aliens (or “prawns”) is a racist imagining. In fact, a 4.9.09 BBC article reported that Albino Africans have been kidnapped and killed by gangs because some”witch doctor[s]” believe that albino human parts are magical and offer good health benefits.

The article said there was an Albino sanctuary built to protect Albino African kids from being kidnapped and cannibalized. Here’s another BBC article about the same thing, published a month earlier.

You need to wade through nearly two minutes of Ricky Gervais rambling on about his upcoming 11.5 Carnegie Hall gig, before he gets to the one funny bit. (Sorry, but a publicist claimed the video is “hilarious.”) The show will be part of the five-day New York Comedy Festival (11.4 to 11.8). Tracy Morgan, Dane Cook, Bill Maher, Patton Oswalt, Andy Samberg, Artie Lange, Mike Epps, Bill Burr and Mike Birbiglia will also perform at “more than 10 venues,” etc.

Ricky Gervais from NY Comedy Festival on Vimeo.

This morning I wrote director Alejandro Gonzlaez-Inarritu (Biutiful, Babel, Amores perros) about two articles that may result in a problem starting next month, depending how things shake out. One was yesterday’s Variety piece announcing Inarritu’s position as jury president for the Tokyo Film Festival (10.17 through 10.25). The other was an 8.7 article by Salon‘s Katherine Meiszkowski that stated at the finish that the festival “recently decided not to screen The Cove,” the doc about the wretched annual slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan.

A festival spokesperson quoted in the Variety story, written by Mark Schilling, has “denied that a decision has been made [about The Cove]” and said that the festival is “still in the process of sorting out [its] lineup” and that “there will be an official announcement in September.”

So obviously the situation isn’t clear. But one must at least consider that Meiszkowski wouldn’t have flatly written that the festival “recently decided not to screen the film” without qualifying or hedging (i.e., “sources allege,” “it is rumored that,” etc.) if she didn’t have reason to believe that what she heard is solid.

Yes, she may have heard it wrong. It happens. So let’s chill down for the time being. But what if the Tokyo Film Festival in fact intends to blow off The Cove for what would be the most logical or likely of reasons, i.e., political pressure from the fishing industry and/or supporters of the Taiji tourist/fishing industry?

Inarritu, whom I know personally, knows what goes and doesn’t miss a trick. But just as China’s economic support of the Darfur government led Mia Farrow to urge Steven Spielberg to withdraw from a gig as the producer of the Beijing Olympics games lest he be seen as “the Leni Reifensthal” of that event, Inarritu may want to regard his Tokyo Film Festival gig along similar lines. Again, if.

Just as Ric O’Barry, the lead protagonist/hero of The Cove, has been asking Americans to boycott dolphin water shows to protest the dolphin slaughter in Japan, it seemed fair to ask Inarritu to consider declining to serve as the jury’s president if the festival in fact doesn’t screen The Cove. I mean, it can’t hurt to at least mull things over at this stage.

If and when the alleged blow-off turns out to be true, Inarritu serving as jury president would be seen, at the very least, as an unfortunate gesture. It would seem as if he was cool with the festival’s decision. Not to sound like a hard-ass, but it might even be claimed in some quarters that Inarritu — again, if — was deferring to Japanese economic forces that have kept the Taiji dolphin slaughter under wraps for many years. I know this sounds rough. But he knows what I’m getting at.

I’m guessing that this matter will be quietly addressed with back-channel discussions between Inarritu and the festival fathers, but if the festival officially declines to show The Cove and he serves regardless it will look awkward all around. Obviously his call. I wasn’t trying to go all eco-dolphin-nuts on him. I was just sayin’.

Steven Spielberg thought he had all the time in the world to dawdle and delay on his Abraham Lincoln biopic. But now Mr. Harvey Tintin has been beaten to the Civil War punch by Robert Redford, who reportedly intends to direct The Conspirator, the story of Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt, sometime this fall.

You’d think with all the fanboys out there and all the Avatar hype that the free tickets to Friday evening’s “Avatar Day” preview would be totally gone coast-to-coast after this afternoon’s online giveaway. Actually not so far (i.e., as of 10 pm eastern). I thought this would be like the sale of Bruce Springsteen concert tickets, but nope. Avatar looks seriously hot in the big cities but elsewhere….well, not quite a stampede.

All the big-city theatres are online-requested out and some of the IMAX theatres have filled up in various territories, but there are scores of regular and IMAX theatres in the hinterlands that still have tickets left. Florida is wide open except for Orlando and Tampa. Kansas City and Las Vegas still have seats. Philadelphia-area New Jersey theatres have room. Columbus, Ohio, is sold out but theatres in Charlotte and Concord, North Carolina still have seats. All the New York theatres outside of Manhattan are still open for business. Four Houston IMAX theatres still have seats but two San Antonio IMAX theatres are all filled up. Twelve theatres in Washington state (Seattle and outlying areas) have seats open.

Does this mean that (a) people in outlying realms are always slow to pick up on viral happenings?, or (b) that some people are figuring what’s the hubba-hubba about a 16-minute reel?, or (c) that Avatar has a ways to go with the middle-American geek-Eloi? Maybe a bit of all three. But if I was a Fox marketing guy I’d be wondering why tickets to a free peek at the year’s biggest event pic weren’t Gone in Sixty Minutes.

I was so overjoyed by losing the services of my second Windows laptop today (incredible dumb luck for both of them to crap out in the space of two weeks) that I forgot to even try to get my tickets to Avatar Day. The Avatar site crashed soon after the noon Pacific/3 pm Eastern deadline, of course, but I just tried to get a pair for the 7 pm Leows Lincoln Square showings on Monday and the site didn’t laugh and tell me to forget it.

I have to admit that one of the reasons…okay, perhaps the reason why my second laptop stopped working and may in fact be dead is because I bitch-slapped it a couple of times. It was acting all gummy and sluggish so I slammed it with the palm of my hand a couple of times. Remember how Han Solo whacked the Millenium Falcon when it wouldn’t start up in The Empire Strikes Back? Anyway, what’s done is done so I had to buy another one today. $500 bills and change. Much bigger hard drive, more memory, etc.

Criterion’s November schedule has been inspected and Steven Soderbergh ‘s two Che movies aren’t on it so a December release is the earliest possibility. Criterion will put a Bluray version of Matteo Garrone‘s Gomorrah in November, but only standard DVDs of Arnaud Desplechin‘s A Christmas Tale and Michael Ritchie‘s Downhill Racer (’69) that month.

The Downhill Racer disc “will feature a restored high-definition digital transfer; new video interviews with screenwriter James Salter; film editor Richard Harris; production manager Walter Coblenz; and former downhill skier Joe Jay Jalbert, who served as technical adviser, a ski double, and a cameraman; audio excerpts from a 1979 American Film Institute seminar with director Michael Ritchie; and a booklet featuring an essay by critic Todd McCarthy.”

Hollywood & Fine‘s Marshall Fine is an Inglourious Basterds fan because he basically sees it as a delicious suspense film. And he’s right to the extent that the best pop-through scenes convey a sense of impending violence that is drawn out over several minutes, hence the growing suspense. (As before, all spoiler whiners are advised to stop reading at this stage.)

Denis Menochet, Christoph Waltz during opening scene of Inglourious Basterds

Except these money scenes all involve a suspicious and well-spoken German officer, and deliver the same three elements. One, the German has sniffed out a secret that an anti-Nazi character is trying to keep hidden. Two, he begins to voice his suspicions ad infinitum. And three, he suggests with increasing Tarantino-ish panache that he’s might well bust or kill that person for keeping this secret and being in league with anti-Nazi forces.

As I recall this happens four times in the film, and three of these times with Christoph Waltz‘s Col. Hans Landa in charge of the verbal games. The one time he’s doesn’t do this is during a scene in a cellar-level French bar, but the German officer who handles the honors is a Landa stand-in — less humor and banter but with similar inflections and insinuations, like a cat playing with a mouse before killing and eating it.

The first interrogation between Landa and a French farmer is the best scene in the film because it comes at the very beginning and is therefore a fresh and alarming (and very nicely written) thing to grapple with. But the second time it happens you’re going, “Oh, this again.” And the third and fourth time it’s like “again? How many times is Quentin going to repeat this bit?”

“What Tarantino understands is that the key ingredient in a thriller – the thrill, if you will – is the suspense, not the payoff,” writes Fine. “Sure, in any work built on a tension/release model, the release feels good – but it’s the tension that thrills you, that makes you squirm and feel totally alive to the moment.

“That’s why the saying goes, ‘The suspense is killing me.’ It’s the anticipation that makes every nerve jangle, not the catharsis.

“And that’s what the cagey, canny Tarantino has done with Inglourious Basterds, his most accomplished, crazily entertaining film yet: He’s created a series of scenes of unbearable, exquisite tension. He positively luxuriates in suspense — just before he hits the release and lets the screen explode with gunfire and other pyrotechnics.

“It’s as if the five acts into which this film is divided are each a big bomb with a long fuse. Early on in each act, he lights that fuse, then lets the audience simmer in the suspense he creates, even as they wonder how much longer before the burning fuse reaches the dynamite.”

The problem is that it’s basically the same bomb and the same fuse, five times over.

District 9 pulling down $37 million last weekend is good balancing news for those who’ve been tempted to think in recent weeks (i.e., like me) that the moviegoing public is divided into mindless Elois who will only pay to see crap and discriminating fans who prefer films like The Hurt Locker and David Twohy‘s The Perfect Getaway and The Baader Meinhof Complex. District 9 was a bridge attraction — a high-octane Joe Popcorn movie with better-than-respectable chops.

Despite (500) Days of Summer essentially being a film about how to make yourself miserable by living in your own romantic bubble and ignoring obvious warning signs about the character of your beloved, which makes it a partly intriguing but partly tedious thing to sit through because it’s obvious early on that the relationship between Joseph Gordon-Levittt and Zooey Deschanel can’t work because “she’s not there,” the film has caught on with 20somethings and that’s the bottom line.

I’m okay with that. Everyone is. Marc Webb‘s film has some mildly arresting aspects. Gordon-Levitt’s looks are still too Japanese dweeby for my tastes, but his performance is more tolerable in this film than anything he’s previously done. The Graduate allusions are well realized. The musical fantasy sequence is very nicely done. There’s a class of guys out there who regard Deschanel as hot stuff (Jett among them) so why not leave well enough alone? Because I can’t. If I was 25 and ran into her in a bar (and if she wasn’t “Zooey Deschanel”) I wouldn’t even turn my head.

President Obama’s reported decision to bail on pushing public option health insurance — a government-subsidized alternative to private health care that would obviously push prices down — is, for me, a heartbreaker. I confess to knowing zip about whether insurance co-ops, which the Obama administration is now floating as an alternative, would have as strong and decisive an effect on keeping costs down…but I strongly doubt that they would.

I do know that there’s no honor in compromising in order to save face. By my sights the public-option tent-fold is a wimp move. A bad day for the Obama brand. The greedy insurance-company bastards are having their way.

N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman, whom I trust, says in an 8.16 column that Obamacare (as it was understood before the public-option capitulation) is basically “a plan to Swissify America, using regulation and subsidies to ensure universal coverage.”

But “if we were starting from scratch we probably wouldn’t have chosen this route,” he adds. “‘True ‘socialized medicine’ would undoubtedly cost less, and a straightforward extension of Medicare-type coverage to all Americans would probably be cheaper than a Swiss-style system. That’s why I and others believe that a true public option competing with private insurers is extremely important: otherwise, rising costs could all too easily undermine the whole effort.”

Howard Dean said this morning on talk shows that “you can’t really do health reform without” a public-option program. He called a direct government role “the entirety of health care reform. It isn’t the entirety of insurance reform…we shouldn’t spend $60 billion a year subsidizing the insurance industry.”