The Disney publicity guys, a strange and guarded bunch, had an all-media screening last week for Spike Lee‘s Miracle at St. Anna. Naturally they didn’t invite me. I missed it on purpose in Toronto (I was told that the 166-minute length was unjustified), and naturally assumed I’d catch up with it back here. Nope!

Disney always hedges its bets when they’ve got a problem movie of any kind, which Miracle clearly is. But it was also a struggle to persuade them to let me see WALL*E, and that was a near-masterpiece.
Honestly? It’s getting harder and harder to ignore the similarities between Disney publicity and the Church of Scientology
“Spike Lee loses the battles and the war in Miracle at St. Anna, a clunky, poorly constructed drama designed to spotlight the little-remarked role of black American soldiers in World War II,” wrote Variety‘s Todd McCarthy. “Clocking in at 160 minutes, this is a sloppy stew in which the ingredients of battle action, murder mystery, little-kid sentiment and history lesson don’t mix well.
“Nor is it remotely clear who the audience is meant to be; the R rating pretty much rules out younger students, and extensive subtitles will deter action fans, who would be bored anyway. Best B.O. will likely be in Italy, where most of the melodrama takes place.”
As soon as I saw that made-up-to-look-older black guy shoot that made-up-to-look-older white guy in the trailer, I said to myself, “That’s it…the movie is trouble.” I didn’t know a damn thing about it, but I knew. Trailers and ads do more to kill interest in movies than bad reviews. If there’s something wrong with a movie, the trailers will almost always tell you this.

The term “No Talk Express,” I mean. John McCain‘s handlers are obviously fearful that he may say something off-the-cuff that doesn’t add up (which he does a lot), hence a press policy that boils down to “no questions,” “no reporters” and “don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.” Relations between the McCain campaign and the press are said to be in fairly bad shape. Earlier today in Strongsville, Ohio, McCain ignored questions about the bailout plan, prompting one journalist to scream out, “Has your bus become the No-Talk Express?”

One of the things journalists learn sooner or later is that if celebrities use profanity or call you names to your face during an interview, it means they like or at least respect you. Or at least that they trust you enough to take their frank words like a grown-up and not get all emotional. I’ve been yelled at by dozens of Hollywood people over the years, and I still have relations with the vast majority. It’s the ones who never talk to you straight or let you know what’s really going on in their heads — they’re the ones you need to fear.
In this MTV.com interview, Charlize Theron — promoting Battle in Seattle — calls Josh Horowitz an asshole several times, and the twinkle in her eye says it all. And yet MTV.com editors have bleeped out the “hole” each time — what kind of namby-pambies would so such a thing? You can say the word “ass” on TV these days. Nobody cares about mildly salty language.
Eight years ago in Cannes I was part of a round-table group speaking to George Clooney, who was promoting O Brother, Where Art Thou? I started out with a compliment about his performance in From Dusk to Dawn, explaining that I thought he had a certain edge and intensity in that 1996 Robert Rodriguez film that I quite liked. I didn’t mean that he was flat in the films he’d made after that (One Fine Day, Batman and Robin, Out of Sight, Three Kings) but that I really enjoyed what he was putting out in in Dusk to Dawn and that I kind of missed it.
Clooney frowned a bit, looked down, thought it over for five or six seconds, glanced in my direction and said “fuck you.” I’ve liked him enormously ever since. Good fellow.

For the last hour I’ve been trying to verify and contact a small group of people who’ve been passing along an extremely ugly eight-year-old story about John McCain, one to the other (including some in the media) over the last eight or nine days. The story first popped up on 9.14, and just seems too extreme to be believed.
Why am I posting this then? Because it’s gotten around to some extent and the cat is more or less out of the bag, and I’m not aware of anyone having said “wait a minute, hold on here.” Which is what I, a confirmed McCain hater, am saying here and now.
I don’t believe any big-time politician, even one who’d recently been smeared by Karl Rove during the 2000 campaign for possibly having fathered an illegitimate black child (which was total b.s.), would pass along a racial slur about an adopted child to a woman who shares a similar ethnicity — nobody is that dumb. My understanding of human nature just won’t allow it. Even if you consider that 1998 report about John MCain telling that off-color joke about Chelsea Clinton…I still can’t buy it.
The current McCain story in question originated with a San Francisco-based clinical psychologist named Anasuya Dubey, who is alleged to be the daughter of a former Indian Consul in San Francisco. I’ve tried to reach Dubey to no avail (she is said to be “private”) but an e-mail chain has revealed a few things.
A woman who claims to have spoken to Dubey, an author named Frances Moore Lappe of Cambridge, Massachucetts (“Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad“) said in an e-mail to Kate Marianchild, whom I don’t know, that Dubey is “wonderful” and that it “sounds like NBC is on it.” Another interested reporter, according to a group e-mail sent out about the Dubey story by Mary-Kay Gamel, a UC Santa Cruz professor, is Jane Kramer of The New Yorker.
I called Lappe’s office in Cambridge and left a message. I called Gamel’s office and home number — neither had a voice message and no one picked up.
The words attributed to McCain by Dubey are repulsive and incendiary, and it strikes me as awfully strange that a woman looking to see this story circulated and, more to the point, believed would be so difficult to get hold of. She thinks she can put out a first-hand story of this nature during a presidential campaign and just…what, be left alone?
I also flinch whenever words of this nature are attributed to any major-league politician running for high office. They seems too vile for even McCain to have said.
I also wonder how precise and exacting Dubey’s memory may be after eight years, and whether she may have exaggerated the quote somewhat, being a woman of Indian ancestry who would naturally take great offense at such statements, if in fact they were spoken.

Last night on Late Show with David Letterman, Bill Clinton stated some carefully phrased, positive-minded sidestep mantras about the presidential race, the economic meltdown, don’t sell America short, etc. Which inspired Chris Rock, Letterman’s followup guest, to ask with genuine pique what’s behind Bill’s inability to say the words “Barack Obama?”

In a 9.23 Huffington Post-ing, New Yorker contributor Paul Slansky wrote the following: “Given that we would never have had the odious George W. Bush in the White House in the first place if it wasn’t for your blow jobs, Bill, it seems obvious that you owe it to the people of this country, and especially to the parents whose kids died in the Iraq War that Gore would never have started, and to all the parents whose kids would be killed in the WarFest that would be a McCain/Palin — sorry, Palin/McCain administration — to do everything in your power to get Barack Obama elected.
“But that’s not what you’re doing, Bill, and it’s not going unnoticed. We see your rage, Bill, it’s too huge to hide. We see that — as Chris Rock so brilliantly pointed out — it pains you to even speak Obama’s name. We see you petulantly rooting against him even as you go through the motions of doing the barest minimum on his behalf to avoid being blamed if he loses.
“You’re not fooling anyone, Bill. You’ve gotten so caught up in yesterday that you’ve stopped thinking about tomorrow. You have the power to influence millions of voters and you’re spitefully sitting on it. Surely you’ve noticed what’s going on in the country. Surely you’re aware of what’s at stake on November 4th. This is not a game that you can afford to take your ball and go home with if you don’t get to play the position you want. An Obama loss will most certainly be part of your legacy.”

Following Brad Pitt‘s $100 grand donation to fight Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that would ban same-sex marriage, Steven Spielberg has has coughed up the same for the same cause. But that video of Keith Olbermann writing a check for $1600 (was it $1700?) to Alaskan charities as part of his Sarah Palin $100-per-lie fund still takes the cake.

“It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. And it is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?” — establishment conservative George Will in a 9.23 Washington Post column called “McCain Loses His Head.”

In a Film in Focus piece called “Genesis of a Poster,” Andrew Percival from Mojo House, an advertising company, discusses the poster for Burn After Reading. The inspiration, he says, was the stylish design of cutting-edge movie posters of the ’60s. The first example he mentions is the one-sheet for The Comedians. And yet he doesn’t mention the name of the godfather of edgy movie poster design in the ’50s and ’60s — i.e., Saul Bass. Why, I wonder? What’s Percival’s obstruction?

I wrote the following last June: “The influence of illustrator-designer Saul Bass persists and persists. Last year ThinkFilm’s Mark Urman ordered up a poster for Sidney Lumet‘s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead that referenced the look of Bass’s classic one-sheets, and this year — now — we have a new poster that also hums with Bassian attitude, particularly in its use of a font similar to one Bass used in the ’50s and ’60s — hand-drawn, block letters — for the films of director Otto Preminger. Before revealing the new poster, here are three Bass samples:

Saul Bass one-sheets for Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm, In Harm’s Way and Bunny Lake Is Missing.

“And here’s the new poster, revealed today on Cinematical, for Joel and Ethan Coen‘s Burn After Reading. The font is actually a mixture of Bass and Pablo Ferro‘s hand-drawn title design for the opening of Dr. Strangelove.”

“I can’t believe this Palin-McCain stuff,” W. director Oliver Stone has told USA Today‘s Anthony Breznican. “I thought the other day [that they’re being] made to look like anchors on a TV show in San Diego. Here’s the old guy with the white hair and the young chick with the glasses, sitting side by side. ‘Trust me…we’re a good team.'” Shouldn’t Stone have said “trust us, we’re a good team?” And why did he say “Palin-McCain” rather than the other way around?

“Why are MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow so biased?,” HuffPost columnist Eric Burns asked last Friday. “Because the Republicans are providing them with so much material that their bias is, at its core, a form of objectivity. They are not partisan so much as perceptive.
“I do not reveal my own choice for president when I state that, several days ago, John McCain made the most eye-popping comment I have ever heard uttered by a candidate for the White House.
“The topic was the economy. ‘My friends,’ he said to a gathering in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on 9.19, ‘this is the problem with Washington. People like Senator Obama have been too busy gaming the system and haven’t ever done a thing to actually challenge the system.
“We’ve heard a lot of words from Senator Obama over the course of this campaign. But maybe just this once he could spare us the lectures, and admit to his own poor judgment in contributing to these problems. The crisis on Wall Street started in the Washington culture of lobbying and influence peddling, and he was square in the middle of it.”
“Uh…yes he was, Senator McCain. Senator Obama was square in the middle of it for less than three years! But you have been square in the middle of it for 22 years! If Senator Obama is too inexperienced to be President, as your campaign has many times suggested, how could he possibly have made such a powerful contribution to the plundering of the American marketplace?
“Nobody in McCain’s audience laughed when the candidate charged Obama with being an economy-wrecking Washington insider. Nobody snickered when the Washington insider accused the relative outsider of maliciousness beyond his years. Or his ability. Or his record.
“I take it back. Somebody snickered. Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow were among them. So was I.
“And so now I ask myself, how hard is it these days for news programs be objective when the material on which they report sounds as if it were produced by writers for Saturday Night Live, and then rejected on the grounds of its being too preposterous to be funny?”

This TV trailer of Oliver Stone‘s W. (Lionsgate, 10.17) is the wildest yet. Brolin’s performance as our current sitting president, it would appear, treads the line between realism and satire like a mountain goat. You can’t tell from short cuts, but it’s feeling more and more to me like a dry-but-extreme Peter Sellers performance in Lolita and Dr. Strangelove.

Josh Brolin in W.; Francis Bacon’s “Pope“