“Wondering if you’re really a Democrat?,” writes Tucker Carlson on the Daily Beast. “Here’s a quick way to find out: Given everything the Democratic party has going for it this year — the overwhelming financial advantage, the legions of new voters, George W. Bush — do you believe the Obama campaign could still somehow, in the final moments, find a way to blow it and lose this election?
“If you answered yes, you’re a Democrat.
“Two weeks out, only the Democrats in Washington think Obama might not win. That’s not the result of a scientific study, but instead the conclusion I’ve reached after many lunches, dinners and elevator rides with DC Democrats. Against all evidence, a good number of them have convinced themselves that John McCain is going to be the next president.
“Republicans have no master plan for victory, no October Surprise. [But] you’ll never convince most Democrats of that.
“Partly this is superstition, like throwing salt over your shoulder when you spill the shaker: predictions are bad luck. But it’s also the voice of experience.
“‘We’re the Cincinnati Bengals,’ says Jay Rouse, a longtime Democratic political consultant. ‘Democrats are used to losing, not winning.’

I decided for the nowhere hell of it to upload this clip of a bed-and-breakfast in Tuscany that Jett and I stayed in after the ’07 Cannes Film Festival. It’s in the small village of San Donato, some 25 or 30 kilometers south of Florence.

We’ve all read about the similarities (or at least the comparisons) between David Fincher‘s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Robert Zemeckis‘ Forrest Gump. The lifespan story of an oddball guy with an unusual but charmed condition, following him from childhood to maturity and all around the mulberry bush. And both films written, of course, by Eric Roth.

Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump; Brad Bitt as Benjamin Button.

But I’d prefer not to go there because of my still-lingering resentment of the Zemeckis film, which I and many others disliked from the get-go for the way it kept saying “keep your head down,” for its celebration of clueless serendipity and simpleton-ism, and particularly for the propagandistic way it portrayed ’60s-era counter-culture types and in fact that whole convulsive period.

Every secondary hippie or protestor character in that film was a selfish loutish asshole and every man and woman in the military was modest, decent and considerate. These and other aspects convinced me that the film was basically reactionary Republican horseshit, and led me to write an L.A. Times Syndicate piece called “Gump vs. Grumps,” about the Forrest Gump backlash. So I’d rather not consider it alongside whatever Benjamin Button may or may not be offering. No offense to Roth, who’s a good fellow and a brilliant writer.

“You know what hurts a movie like Max Payne is the success of the Batman franchise. That obviously is about story and character so they think for all films of the genre it’s gotta be about story and character and this whole backstory of him losing his wife. I don’t care about that. I wanna see Max Payne shoot people. That’s all I want from a movie like this.” — a quote attributed to “At The Moves” co-host Ben Lyons by Criticwatch’s Erik Childress.

David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount, 12.25), which currently has default front-runner status whether it wants it or not (especially with so many presumed award-level films recently dropping out or getting vaguely trash-talked over the phone) will start to peek out sometime during the second week of November. The press event (i.e., not a “junket”) will happen in Los Angeles — New York journos will have to travel or they’ll be up shit creek. “The same precision and exactitude that Fincher invested in Zodiac, he uses here [but] in a warm and emotional vein,” says a guy who’s seen it.

Just when I think I’m finally done with Armond White, he writes something that pulls me back in. Yesterday morning I read his review of Lance Hammer‘s Ballast following the announcement of the Gotham Independent Film Awards nominations, four of which went to Ballast. No one, I had to admit, had come closer to echoing my own thoughts (although my initial reaction last January was to cut Hammer’s film a little more slack).

“Director-writer Lance Hammer shows a black Mississippi family torn apart by a double suicide attempt, drugs and alienation,” he writes. “But you have to see through these ludicrous black phantoms to the actual white middle-class fantasies at the film’s core.
“Hammer’s style reveals the relationships and backgrounds piecemeal. Each character is overly taciturn: Mournful adult Lawrence (Michael J. Smith Sr.) routinely says, ‘I don’t care.’ Mother Marlee (Tara Riggs) routinely sighs, ‘Maybe we can figure it out.’ And the unreachable, TV-addicted drug dealer kid (JimMyron Ross) aims a gun to bluff courage.
“If not for Hammer’s neo-realist gimmick, Ballast is conventional storytelling but without the pleasures and richness of conventional storytelling as seen in David Lean or Chen Kaige‘s Together.
“Problem is, Ballast’s totally humorless family saga won’t appeal to the Hollywoodized black audience — they want drama! It’s simply another calling-card movie establishing the director’s credentials.
“This shit has been going on since Reagan (Straight Out of Brooklyn) and Clinton (Fresh). African-American life is imprisoned by the art fallacies of Indie filmmaking, controlled by white liberal condescension. Even Barack Obama would be sick of it.”
Hammer is “a rich kid,” a producer friend told me yesterday. It all fits. Today is the final day to see Ballast at Manhattan’s Film Forum.

A new trailer for Kelly Reichardt‘s Wendy and Lucy (Oscilloscope, 12.10 limited), a.k.a., “A Poor Girl and Her Dog.” Wearing short, dark mousey hair and bargain-basement clothes, Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain) looks and acts vulnerable-tough in this quiet little character piece. Good work; her first stand-alone lead role. Pic opens nationally in January ’09.

“You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.”

“Gov. Sarah Palin, Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, McCain spokesperson Nancy Pfotenhauer and Rush Limbaugh have revealed that there is a measurable portion of this country that is not interested in that which the vast majority view as democracy or equality or opportunity. They want only control and they want the rest of us, symbolically, perhaps physically out.

“‘We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington D.C.,’ Gov. Palin told a fund-raiser in North Carolina last Thursday, to kick off this orgy of condescending elitism. ‘We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.’
“Governor, your prejudice is overwhelming. It is not just ‘pockets’ of this country that are ‘pro-America’ Governor. America is ‘pro-America.’ And the ‘Real America’ of yours, Governor, is where people at your rallies shout threats of violence, against other Americans, and you say nothing about them or to them.”

Fans of downmarket torture-porn gore films, I mean. Okay, you can be a clever educated film buff and like this stuff (I respect Eli Roth‘s chops in some respects), but the blood, screams and disembowelment genre is primarily aimed at the animals out here. C’mon, we all know this. The point is that they go these films to have their souls frozen solid with fear and to be grossed out by arterial gushings, mutilated bodies and severed heads. And in a way that not’s predictable…right?
Most horror fans will be going to Saw 5 this weekend, and I realize they can’t be stopped from doing so. They should know, however, that Let The Right One In, the other horror film opening on Friday, will do it to them in a way they’ve never seen before. Here‘s David Ansen‘s review in the current Newsweek:
“Let the Right One In is both a coming-of-age tale and a love story. The pale, lonely, 12-year-old protagonist, Oskar (Kare Hedebrant), is a serious, solitary boy constantly picked on by his schoolmates. He retreats into fantasies of revenge, collecting newspaper clippings of violent crimes.
“Then, in the snow-banked courtyard of his apartment complex in the suburbs of Stockholm (circa 1982), he meets Eli (Lina Leandersson), a strange, unkempt, raven-haired girl who walks barefoot in the snow and doesn’t feel the cold. ‘I’m not a girl,’ she warns him, skittish of starting a friendship. Indeed she’s not — she’s a vampire, eternally frozen at age 12, and dependent on an older man who’s not a vampire (perhaps her father, perhaps not) who kills for her, and brings her the blood of his victims to sustain her eternal life.
“Before he realizes what she is, young Oskar falls in love. He asks her to go steady. Wanting to seal his love, he cuts his hand to share his blood with hers — and we freeze in anticipation of how she’ll react to the sight of his bleeding hand. It’s a breathtaking scene but, like everything in this haunting film, it tilts genre expectations on their sides. By the time Oskar figures out Eli’s true nature, it’s too late to turn off his feelings. She’s transformed his life — she teaches him to defend himself, she’s pierced his solitude and there’s no turning back.
“Grave, melancholy, romantic, with bursts of off-beat comedy, Let the Right One In unfolds with quiet, masterly assurance. It’s based on a bestselling Swedish novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who also wrote the screenplay. He and his talented director don’t deny us the genre’s grisly thrills (strikingly but always obliquely staged), but it’s their psychological acuity that draws the deepest blood: this is a prepubescent love story for the ages.”