“What do you mean one of the most violent movies of all time?” Sylvester Stallone says to Scotland on Sunday about Rambo. “It is the most violent movie of all time!” Slight amendment: it’s also, at times, the funniest super-violent film of all time.

In a letter earlier today to NBC News president Steve Capus about the flap over MSNBC’s David Shuster‘s comment that the Clinton campaign had “pimped out” 27-year old Chelsea Clinton by having her call super-delegates and three of the View regulars, Hillary Clinton said that suspending Shuster isn’t enough — she wants him whacked. This is who she is and what she is — a seething revenge harridan, back-arched, ready to wield the knife at the drop of a hat. Most liberals agree with Hillary (as do I for the most part), but has there been a more loathsome would-be Presidential candidate on the Democratic side in terms of personality and character? Here‘s the letter.

Strange cyborg art created seven years ago for the old Reel.com column, inspired by Jude Law‘s “Gigolo Joe” character in Steven Spielberg‘s underwhelming A.I.: Artifical Intelligence. No biggie but I’d forgotten about this. It was going to be a regular column. Bad idea.

Can we add A.I. to the list of films we’re never going to see or think about ever again? I think that’s an article, no? Permanent Banishings of Filmland, or movies you’d like removed from your memory a la Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Electric chair executions were yesterday suspended in Nebraska, which had been the only state to rely solely on electrocution as its sole method of dispatching the condemned. This doesn’t mean the barbaric practice is totally finished in the U.S. since, as the N.Y. Times‘ Adam Liptak has reported, “seven states allow at least some inmates to choose electrocution instead of lethal injection [and] two others, Illinois and Oklahoma, have designated electrocution as the fallback method should lethal injection be ruled unconstitutional.”

But it’s enough for all of us, I feel, to declare now and forever that Frank Darabont‘s The Green Mile — a movie about a nice-guy prison guard (Tom Hanks) and a little white mouse bearing witness as one death-row prisoner after another gets fried to death — matters even less than it did when it first came out. I hated this application of sentimental sadism with a passion when I first saw it eight and a half years ago, but these feelings have only grown over the years.
I for one would like to say goodbye forever to it. No more DVD rentals, no critical revisionist essays from Scott Foundas or F.X. Feeney, no more watching it on TCM….banish it from the collective unconscious. Am I alone on this?

I finally got around to watching the two Real Geezers videos on YouTube last night, and they’re actually pretty good. And I love that meowing cat in the background! Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple (The Parallax View, Three Days of the Condor) and producer and former writer’s agent Marcia Nasatir (The Big Chill) are sharp and seasoned and don’t mince words.

Semple’s Michael Clayton love is relentless — he’s voting for Tilda Swinton in the Best Supporting Actress category. Nasatir also in her worshipping of George Clooney. Semple loves Diablo Cody and Julie Christie, hates Lars and the Real Girl, and isn’t all that moved by Hal Holbrook. The segments provide a fascinating eavesdrop into the thinking of the industry’s 70-and-older generation. Part 1 is below; here‘s part 2.

With the WGA having finalized its tentative agreement with the AMPTP, over 10,000 writers on both coasts will review the details and vote to ratify or reject them in meetings today in Los Angeles and New York.

Weirdly, the New York writers are meeting less than an hour from now — 2 pm Eastern at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Times Square (B’way and 49th) — but the Los Angeles writers won’t convene at the Shrine Auditorium until 7 pm this evening or 10 pm Eastern, a full eight-hour workday after the NYC gathering.
The WGA West board of directors and the WGA East Council “will meet Sunday to formally endorse the contract. Writers could be back at work as early Monday, depending on whether the WGA√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s ruling bodies decide whether to end the three-month strike at those Sunday meetings,” the Variety story (filed this morning at 3:38 am) reads.
So the Oscars are definitely on, people are going to have to come up with new parties to replace the ones that were cancelled (like the Vanity Fair soiree), Nikki Finke‘s Deadline Hollywood Daily is about to go back to being just another Hollywood website, and all-over “normalcy” (a term coined either during the Warren G. Harding or Calvin Coolidge administrations) is about to kick back in.
“The WGA West board of directors and the WGA East Council will meet Sunday to formally endorse the contract. And writers could be back at work as early Monday, depending on whether the WGA√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s ruling bodies decide whether to end the three-month strike at those Sunday meetings.
Leaders of the WGA made the announcement of the finalized deal early Saturday after spending much of Friday meeting with lawyers over the contract language. WGA West president Patric Verrone and WGA East prexy Michael Winship sent a message to members that stressed the gains made in the new-media sector.
“It is an agreement that protects a future in which the internet becomes the primary means of both content creation and delivery,” they said. “It creates formulas for revenue-based residuals in new media, provides access to deals and financial data to help us evaluate and enforce those formulas, and establishes the principle that, ‘When they get paid, we get paid.’ ”

Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is reporting that the moderately detestable Fool’s Gold will end up Sunday night with $22.6 million, having earned $7.8 million yesterday (i.e., Friday). Martin Lawrence‘s Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins will finish a distant second with a lousy $14.1 million. The Hannah Montana concert pic has nose-dived 65% from last weekend’s debut tally, but will nonetheless place third with $11 million. Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Show is also a tank.
The weekend’s biggest disaster, however, is unquestionably Paris Hilton‘s The Hottie & The Nottie, Mason reports. It opened yesterday on 111 screens “and managed only $76 in ticket sales per location. That means that approximately 10 people showed up and bought a ticket at each of those 111 theatres today. Hottie will sell only an anticipated $23,000 during the 3-day weekend for a $207 perscreen average. That√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s about 26 ticket buyers per location for Friday-Sunday.”

“Mrs. Clinton is losing this thing,” says Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan in a 2.8 piece called “Can Mrs. Clinton Lose?” “It’s not one big primary, it’s a rolling loss, a daily one, an inch-by-inch deflation. The trends and indices are not in her favor.
“She is having trouble raising big money, she’s funding her campaign with her own wealth, her moral standing within her own party and among her own followers has been dragged down, and the legacy of Clintonism tarnished by what Bill Clinton did in South Carolina. Unfavorable primaries lie ahead. She doesn’t have the excitement, the great whoosh of feeling that accompanies a winning campaign. The guy from Chicago who was unknown a year ago continues to gain purchase, to move forward. For a soft little innocent, he’s played a tough and knowing inside/outside game.
“The day she admitted she’d written herself a check for $5 million, Obama’s people crowed they’d just raised $3 million. But then his staff is happy. They’re all getting paid.
“Political professionals are leery of saying, publicly, that she is losing, because they said it before New Hampshire and turned out to be wrong. Some of them signaled their personal weariness with Clintonism at that time, and fear now, as they report, to look as if they are carrying an agenda. One part of the Clinton mystique maintains: Deep down journalists think she’s a political Rasputin who will not be dispatched. Prince Yusupov served him cupcakes laced with cyanide, emptied a revolver, clubbed him, tied him up and threw him in a frozen river. When he floated to the surface they found he’d tried to claw his way from under the ice. That is how reporters see Hillary.
“And that is a grim and over-the-top analogy, which I must withdraw. What I really mean is they see her as the Glenn Close character in Fatal Attraction: “I won’t be ignored, Dan!”
“Mr. Obama’s achievement on Super Tuesday was solid and reinforced trend lines. The popular vote was a draw, the delegate count a rough draw, but he won 13 states, and when you look at the map he captured the middle of the country from Illinois straight across to Idaho, with a second band, in the northern Midwest, of Minnesota and North Dakota. He won Missouri and Connecticut, in Mrs. Clinton’s backyard. He won the Democrats of the red states.
“On the wires Wednesday her staff was all but conceding she is not going to win the next primaries. Her superdelegates are coming under pressure that is about to become unrelenting. It was easy for party hacks to cleave to Mrs. Clinton when she was inevitable. Now Mr. Obama’s people are reportedly calling them saying, ‘Your state voted for me and so did your congressional district. Are you going to jeopardize your career and buck the wishes of the people back home?’
“Mrs. Clinton is stoking the idea that Mr. Obama is too soft to withstand the dread Republican attack machine. (I nod in tribute to all Democrats who have succeeded in removing the phrase ‘Republican and Democratic attack machines’ from the political lexicon. Both parties have them.) But Mr. Obama will not be easy for Republicans to attack. He will be hard to get at, hard to address. There are many reasons, but a primary one is that the fact of his race will freeze them. No one, no candidate, no party, no heavy-breathing consultant, will want to cross any line — lines that have never been drawn, that are sure to be shifting and not always visible — in approaching the first major-party African-American nominee for president of the United States.
“He is the brilliant young black man as American dream. No consultant, no matter how opportunistic and hungry, will think it easy — or professionally desirable — to take him down in a low manner. If anything, they’ve learned from the Clintons in South Carolina what that gets you. (I add that yes, there are always freelance mental cases, who exist on both sides and are empowered by modern technology. They’ll make their YouTubes. But the mad are ever with us, and this year their work will likely stay subterranean.)
“With Mr. Obama the campaign will be about issues. ‘He’ll raise your taxes.’ He will, and I suspect Americans may vote for him anyway. But the race won’t go low.
“Mrs. Clinton would be easier for Republicans. With her cavalcade of scandals, they’d be delighted to go at her. They’d get medals for it. Consultants would get rich on it.
“The Democrats have it exactly wrong. Hillary is the easier candidate, Mr. Obama the tougher. Hillary brings negative; it’s fair to hit her back with negative. Mr. Obama brings hope, and speaks of a better way. He’s not Bambi, he’s bulletproof.
“The biggest problem for the Republicans will be that no matter what they say that is not issue oriented — ‘He’s too young, he’s never run anything, he’s not fully baked’ — the mainstream media will tag them as dealing in racial overtones, or undertones. You can bet on this. Go to the bank on it.
“The Democrats continue not to recognize what they have in this guy. Believe me, Republican professionals know. They can tell.”

Another article stating the plain-as-day conclusion that Heath Ledger, exercising his own free will, yanked the pulley that opened the Sweeney Todd trap door he was standing on… whoops!…ka-thunk. Same thing with Brad Renfro, who “accidentally” overdosed on heroin. Kind of like all those U.S. soldiers getting accidentally killed in Iraq due to being in the way of bullets and IED shrapnel.

Having read about this morning’s There Will Be Blood McDonald’s milkshake delivery, Toronto Star critic Peter Howell wrote just now to say that Canadians “know how to do a proper milkshake promo.

“Critics attending this morning’s screening of The Band’s Visit at the Varsity Cinema were intercepted going in by a rep for AMPR, the publicity firm that handles Paramount Vantage in Toronto. We were given printed invites to a special There Will Be Blood event after the screening, across the street at AMPR’s office.
“We were treated to high-quality milkshakes made from the milk of reputable Canadian cows — and we had a choice of vanilla or chocolate. No McDonald’s for us. A nice Canadian touch was the Timbits (tiny Canadian donuts) served with the shakes. A good time was had by all. We talked about how the only thing that could have improved the event was to go bowling afterwards.”

No explanation, no nothing. I run a chunk of dialogue every year or so and that’s that. Listen or not, no harm either way.

“At this point, it’s difficult to separate Juno hatred itself from a more general ennui inspired by the film’s marketing campaign. If anything, the sharply split popular opinion on Juno, and the depth of loathing it’s capable of inspiring, seems more reminiscent of Hillary Clinton. Both ladies are heading into a hotly contested election; it remains to be seen whether their champions or their haters will win the day.” — from Dana Stevens‘ 2.8.08 Slate piece, posted at 1:10 pm, called “How The Backlash Against Juno Started.”