“Ask not, you know, what your country can, like, do for you. Ask what you, um, can, you know, do for your country.” That’s how Maureen Dowd‘s 1.7.09 column begins, but it’s actually a defense of Caroline Kennedy‘s suitability for New York’s U.S. Senate seat. Odd.

Because Sylvester Stallone did Mickey Rourke a solid by hiring him to appear in Get Carter, the Wrestler star is going to costar in The Expendables, an ensemble actioner that Stallone will be directing for Nu Image/Millenium.

The presence of producers Avi Lerner, Boaz Davidson, Danny Dumbort, etc. — the Bad News Jews of the 21st Century — suggests that on one level it’ll be another crap programmer. On another it might be another laugh-riot actioner in the vein of Stallone’s recent Rambo flick — a classic of its kind.

Rourke “will play an unscrupulous arms dealer who becomes the go-to guy for a group of mercenaries planning to topple a South American dictator,” the Variety story says.

So it’s going to be a new Dogs of War with Stallone, Rourke, Jason Statham, Jet Li, Randy Couture and Dolph Lundgren taking on a Hugo Chavez stand-in? If they try anything I’m going to join Sean Penn, Oliver Stone and other Chavez defenders in beating them back.

The Stallone-scripted film begins shooting in March in Brazil.

This looks to me like a totally disreputable israeli paycheck movie, and shame again on Stallone and his scumbag producer pallies for (apparently) intending to symbolically demonize Chavez.

John Irvin‘s Dogs of War, a 1980 actioner that costarred Chris Walken and Tom Berenger, was an excellent, tough-as-nails mercenary film, by the way.

Coming Soon‘s Ed Douglas informs there will be “some combination press/public screenings for some of the bigger movies at Sundance this year. RIght now I know that Adventureland, Brookyn’s Finest and I Love You Philip Morris are three of the films being handled this way. Probably Spread as well. Plus there’s a sneak preview scheduled for Wednesday, 1.21.

“There are currently no separate press screenings of those movies scheduled, but there will be press tickets available for the morning screenings of these movies at the Eccles. I don’t know if there will be a separate reserved press section or not but they’re obviously trying to do something different this year. I don’t know why they haven’t made this information more widely known but you will still need to get tickets for these,and I really hope that these don’t count towards your one or two comp tickets a day you’re allowed to get.”

Nobody wants to see a shot-for-shot, concept-copying remake of the old 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, but with McG at the helm of Nemo, a new version of the Jules Verne novel, it can be safely assumed that the stuff that worked in the 1954 Disney version will be either ignored or vulgarized beyond recognition. But it’s a good thing, at least, that McG has been consigned to the family-film ghetto. Keep him there.

The finalists in the feature film category of the 23rd Annual American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) Outstanding Achievement Awards competition are…not terribly exciting! Five timid choices reflecting, yes, quality work, fine, but also cautious consensus values. In alphabetical order:The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Claudio Miranda); The Dark Knight (Wally Pfister, ASC); The Reader (Chris Menges, BSC and Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC); Revolutionary Road (Deakins); and Slumdog Millionaire (Anthony Dod Mantle , BSC).

The winner — Mantle, I’m guessing — will be named at an ASC soiree at L.A.’s Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel on 2.15.09. My personal favorites are Deakins’ work on Revolutionary Road and Pfister’s on The Dark Knight.

Why doesn’t anyone just say it? On top of the taint of accepting an obviously cynical U.S. Senate appointment from Gov. Rod “stinkbomb” Blagojevich, Roland Burris is a pathetic replacement for President-elect Barack Obama because everything he puts out — particularly in terms of his appearance and speaking style — seems to be about caution and equivocation. He’s a dull, timid pre-Obama type — not of this era.

Burris — face it — looks like some kind of mediocre mouse. He’s only a little over five feet tall, it appears. His voice is underwhelmingly soft and high-pitched. He wears a 1964 Adam Clayton Powell moustache. He exudes the aura of a go-along clubhouse politician in the David Dinkins mode. Yesterday MSNBC commentator Jonathan Alter said Burris has been known for years as “the Casper Milquetoast of Illinois politics.”

The only good thing I can imagine is that he might one day be seen as a black Harry Truman.

The word “prescient” obviously comes to mind in the matter of Patrick Creadon‘s I.O.U.S.A., one of the Oscar Shortlist Docs that’ll screen on Saturday, 1.10, at the Tribeca Cinemas. Made in ’06 and ’07 and first shown at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, it warns of America being on the brink of a financial meltdown due to rapidly growing national debt and its consequences for the United States and its citizens. “America must mend its spendthrift ways or face an economic disaster of epic proportions,” the copy says. So Creadon’s film will become one of the five nominees because his crystal ball was in perfect working order…right?

In a very concise and satisfying way, N.Y. Times guy Dave Kehr has explained the Oscar-bestowing mentality though the decades. Posted a whole week ago, read it last weekend and forgot to bring it up.

If the Blu-ray industry really wants the format to gain a serious foothold, drop the prices of those damn Blu-ray discs. I’m getting angrier and angrier at those $31 dollar prices on movies like Pineapple Express. Hell, I’m getting really angry at those $31 dollar prices on movies like The Third Man. Which, by the way, is a very slight burn in my book. The Criterion Blu-ray looks fine, but not that much better than the standard Criterion DVD version.

Digital Domain’s wondrous digital effects in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — particularly the “aging and youthing” of Brad Pitt — “are so perfect as to be virtually invisible, free of the usual trappings of CGI — that too-fluid, too-fake, superimposed look that makes the cattle stampede in Australia, for instance, feel so unthreatening.

“Paradoxically,” writes Vanity Fair.com’s Julian Sancton , “this may mean that the most impressive visual effects feat of the year may go unrecognized.

“‘The thing about Benjamin Button,’ says Judy Duncan, editor of the visual effects trade mag Cinefex, ‘is that, obviously all the [Academy] voters in the visual effects category know what they’re looking at, but the vote for the final winner goes to the entire Academy — including actors and writers and producers — and I don’t know if most of those people are going to know what they’re looking at. They’re going to assume it was all makeup.

“It’s stunning work — I actually think it should win — but I don’t know if the average moviegoer is going to recognize that.'”

That would be absurd, of course. The standard of good visual effects is not to be able to identify them. And yet to think that some people out there would be oblivious of this aesthetic…God!

Because the prosecutor’s office in Shreveport, Louisiana has dropped all charges in the Josh Brolin-Jeffrey Wright bar incident that happened last July (and which was recounted by Brolin during a W. interview last fall), the cell-phone video footage has finally been released.

It’s now on TMZ. If anyone can send me an embed code, please do.

The shaky camera work is maddening, but what’s been captured is quite intense. Theatrical even. The sight of the teary-eyed Brolin and Wright embracing each other before being cuffed is quite the statement about sticking by your buddy as the wolves circle. And the shots of Brolin kneeling on the sidewalk with his head down — he’s Albert Finney-as-Martin Luther preparing to be lashed. It’s almost like Willem Dafoe‘s last scene in Platoon. Not to mention the bulls holding Wright face-down on the sidewalk and zapping him with a taser gun, and a woman shouting at the cops, “What are you doing!? Why are you doing that!?”

This really would make for a fascinating short film. Seriously. Brolin (a talented man before the camera) needs to do this.