Amazon is accepting advance orders for the DVD of David Zucker‘s An American Carol (Vivendi, 10.3), which will hit the shelves on January 6, 2009. 83 minutes long, by the way, and presented in a Scope aspect ratio of 2.35 to 1.

For the sheer pleasure and relaxation of it, I paid $14 bills last night to see Burn After Reading at the Arclight. The 7:20 pm show, with a lot of wallah-wallah and hub-bub-bub-bah-bub following the showing of the new W trailer. (Which isn’t online yet.)
And an hour or so later, right in the middle of the first delicious J.K. Simmons scene, a two year-old girl sitting in her dad’s lap two seats to my left began talking and whining and squirming around. Kept it up, no ignoring it. 20 seconds later I leaned over and said, “Do you mind? Please?” The dad, a guy in his late 30s or early 40s, gave me a look that kinda said, “Hey, okay. But she’s my daughter and she’s got stuff on her mind!” But the little girl didn’t say another word after I spoke up.
Most kids will obey a voice of fair but firm authority. The problem is the parents. What kind of parent brings his/her two year-old to a talky misanthropic Coen Bros. movie that’s full of jaded anger and intimations of sexuality and in which people get killed on-screen? And what kind of parent doesn’t take his/her kid out to the lobby when the kid starts acting up?
There’s a brief scene in Burn After Reading in which Frances McDormand and one of her blind dates — a doltish, inexpressive guy in his late 40s — are eating dinner at a restaurant, and he’s not talking with her or looking at her or acting in any way like a gent. He’s just eating his food and staring intently at it, as if he’s reading or counting money. This is how coarse and insensitive types eat, the Coens are reminding us. Boy, do I know it.
When I go out to dinner and see guys staring intently at their food while ignoring women sitting across from them, I become seriously perturbed. Because this is how animals eat. Horses, cats, wolves, cows, goats. Whereas a gentleman looks up at his dinner partner frequently — constantly — during dinner. Before, during and after bites of food. He makes eye contact; he offers thoughts, remarks, pithy observations; he expresses interest in what his dinner partner has to say even if she’s boring.

A major character in a significant 1990s film twice quotes — i.e., says out loud — the following John Milton line from Paradise Lost: “Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to the light.” And the film is…?

Wall Street is allegedly melting as we speak. Barack Obama has called it “the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression.” And yet an MSNBC analyst said this morning that one Wall Street analyst feels that this morning’s 200-point Dow drop is a kind of “victory,” considering what might have happened.
As this morning’s N.Y. Times story reports, “Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old investment bank, is in liquidation; Merrill Lynch, the premier brokerage, has been subsumed into rival Bank of America. One of the world’s largest insurance companies, American International Group, is in a dash to shore up confidence after its stock price dropped 50 percent just after the open.”
“Senior Treasury officials, Wall Street banking bosses and the Federal Reserve are pulling out all stops to avert a collapse of the global banking system,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported last night.”
“A measure of this desperation is the announcement from the Fed issued a short time ago that it will allow Wall Street banks to swap their unsaleable ‘mortgage backed securities’ for Treasury bonds.
“As it was the Fed’s appeasement of Wall Street and the reckless speculation and product-pumping of the Street’s investment banks which landed markets in this predicament in the first place, the recriminations will be endless.”
N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote yesterday that “to understand the problem, you need to know that the old world of banking, in which institutions housed in big marble buildings accepted deposits and lent the money out to long-term clients, has largely vanished, replaced by what is widely called the ‘shadow banking system.’
“Depository banks, the guys in the marble buildings, now play only a minor role in channeling funds from savers to borrowers; most of the business of finance is carried out through complex deals arranged by ‘nondepository’ institutions, institutions like the late lamented Bear Stearns — and Lehman.
“The new system was supposed to do a better job of spreading and reducing risk. But in the aftermath of the housing bust and the resulting mortgage crisis, it seems apparent that risk wasn’t so much reduced as hidden: all too many investors had no idea how exposed they were.”
Obama’s analysis: “The challenges facing our financial system today are more evidence that too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren’t minding the store. Eight years of policies…have shredded consumer protections, loosened oversight and regulation, and encouraged outsized bonuses to CEOs while ignoring middle-class Americans.”
McCain’s analysis: The fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
MSNBC’s “First Read” guys wrote this morning that “one can clearly see that Obama would be an interventionist on the economy — much more so than McCain. This is going to be a tricky issue for McCain, since most folks want government involved when there is a crisis; they don’t want government involved when things are going well. McCain’s going up with a new TV ad on the economy, acknowledging the crisis. But this is one that may be harder for him to distance from than other issues.”

HD trailer for John Patrick Shanley‘s Doubt (Miramax, 12.12), with Meryl Streep, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams in the lead roles. The culture has been making pederast Catholic priest jokes for so long that generating curiosity about who the bad guy is in this film, what he’s probably done and what will (most likely) happen in the end seems like a challenge. So it will all come down to the the craft of it, including, of course, the potential for at least two great performances.

One question: why in the name of God (and that expression obviously has a literal meaning in this context) would old-crow nuns in any parish or sector of the country wear those laughable Pilgrim-women bonnets? The 19th Century anachronism effect is bizarre. They look like Norweigan immigrant women escaping from “Giants of the Earth.”

Ethan and Joel Coen‘s Burn After Reading just barely clipped Tyler Perry‘s The Family That Preys this weekend, earning $19.4 million in 2,651 theaters vs. Family‘s $18 million on 2,070 screens. Overture’s Righteous Kill, the mediocre Jon Avnet cop flick with Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, came in third with $16.5 million from 3,152 screens. And Picturehouse had its best opening ever with Diane English‘s The Women, which made an estimated $10 million from 2,962 locations.

I’m sorry but this five-day-old John McCain voicemail message is extremely funny. Congrats again to the 23/6 guys — inspired. I don’t care that it took me five days to listen to it.

For those who didn’t care to download my Danny Boyle video interview that I did last Wednesday in Toronto, here’s a much faster-loading mp3 of the same discussion.