Yesterday it took the HE readership 90 minutes to identify the main-title music from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I thought someone would nail it right away, but nope. Here’s today’s main-title clip. (Yes, this is going to be a little game for a while until the tank runs dry.) If someone doesn’t identify this within 30 minutes or less, HE readers are going to have to take a long hard look into the bathroom mirror and ask him or herself, “How much of a hard-core film buff am I?” Because the clip is not obscure. At all.

Last year The Express (Universal, 10.3), an inspirational sport drama about Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy, was being shot on the Syracuse University campus. I know this because Jett, a Syracuse sophomore last year, told me about it. Now the trailer is up. Here’s the Ernie Davis Wikipedia site, if you want to know the whole story.

McCain’s Moses/”The One” ad — hilarious — basically says don’t vote for hope or change or any notion of things being better. Stick with the tried and true and glum way of government. Mind-blowing. Well…revolting, really. But I’ll bet it’s playing with a certain sector of the public.

The ad uses that shaved-down Obama quote thjat popped last weekend, to wit: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.” The actual Obama quote reads, “It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign — that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol.” Naturally, the lying McCain ad guys are using the abridged version.

A CNN report appeared last night on Anderson ‘s news show that seemed a reasonably fair portrait of hunkered-down rural-American attitudes when it comes to beliefs about Barack Obama having been raised a Muslim and/or being a Muslim. Among 50ish and 60ish types, I mean to say. There’s no permalink or embedded code — go to http://www.cnn.com/video/ and then find the report titled “Rumors Stick on Obama’s Faith.”

Reporter Gary Tuchman went to Copperhill, Tennessee, and asked around. He found only one guy who believed Obama is a Christian; everyone else he spoke to believed Obama can’t be rusted and that his interests will be divided between America’s and his Muslim brothers “if he gets in.” Ignorance is not a virus — it’s a choice. You could even call it a kind of faith. Here’s an mp3 of the report.
One beef with Tuchman: when he hears the locals spout their little fairy tales about Obama’s Muslim allegiance, he responds with “but he says that’s not true…he says he’s a Christian.” And the locals go, “Yeah, well…politicians will say anything to get elected.” Obama isn’t saying he’s a Christian — he is one, over and out. Tuchman’s retort is from the same gene pool as Hillary Clinton‘s “he’s not a Muslim as far as I know” line.
When 60 Minutes‘ Steve Kroft heard a group of southern Ohio dumbasses repeat the same beliefs, he said, “It’s not true” — no ifs, and, buts or “he says.”

Tuchman quotes a Newsweek poll, 25% of Americans believe that Obama was born a Muslim, and 12% believe he’s currently a devout Muslim.

Last week I decided against linking to Jeffrey Ressner‘s 7.23 Politico story about David Zucker‘s An American Carol because the basic plot — a documentarian named Michael Malone [read: Moore] finally sees the conservative light in the way Ebenezer Scrooge got beyond being a selfish miser — sounded sickening to me. Three or four graphs into Ressner’s story and I was muttering, “I don’t know want to know about this…I’ve read enough.”

Jon Voight as George Washington and Kelsey Grammer as Gen. George S. Patton in An American Carol

But people here and there started writing about Zucker’s film anyway, the latest being CHUD’s Devin Faraci. He was so struck by one of Ressner’s graphs that he ran it twice. “In a climactic scene, Malone finds political clarity at the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center,” it reads, “while the admonishing ghost of George Washington (played by Jon Voight) hovers nearby.”
This evening a reliable source passed along this verbatim quote from a friend who’s seen An American Carol: “This thing goes beyond heavy handed. It reminds one of the sensation of watching Burn, Holllywood Burn. It tries to be outrageous but just comes off as a paean from a Republican who wants to continue getting tax breaks. I rank it right out there with Skidoo and Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness as far as the WTF nature of it all. The laugh quotient is right up there with The Love Guru and confirms that David Zucker was always the Fredo of the ZAZ comedy mafia.”
Vivendi Entertainment will release An American Carol on 10.3. Keep in mind that the major distributors all saw it and passed, even the Weinsteins.

David Zucker

It seems obvious why Vanity Fair asked the esteemed Patricia Bosworth to write “a five-decade trajectory” piece about Paul Newman for the current issue. They obviously know the poor guy is on the ropes so they’ve decided to tribute him now instead of wait for the sad farewell and then give the go-ahead for a good-old-Paul piece.

I wonder why VF editor Graydon Carter didn’t contact Oregonian critic Shawn Levy to write the article, given Levy’s extensive research on a forthcoming Newman biography over the last couple of years. I’m told Levy has dug up some fascinating new material, including stuff about Newman’s formative early-on experiences.

If you don’t instantly recognize this main-title music, you don’t yet know your stuff. No offense.

Eight days ago Simon Pegg, Jessica Hynes and Edgar Wright visited Laser Blazer, easily one of the two or three best DVD stores in Los Angeles (and certainly the cleanest and friendliest), to sign copies of the 3-disc Spaced: The Complete Series box set. The DVD package came out 7.22. Okay, so I’m slow. A day doesn’t pass when I haven’t missed something.

Glenn Kenny‘s 7.30 riff about the Voight/HE/right-wing spitball kerfuffle on Some Came Running is very droll and enjoyable. I laughed out loud twice. (That’s saying something.) Thanks.

Why doesn’t Wild Bunch make this trailer available with English subtitles? Why isn’t there a bi-lingual Guerilla trailer? What’s the deal with Gregg Goldstein‘s mention in the Hollywood Reporter about “four indie offers being on the table” and still no distrib deal? The possibility that Steven Soderbergh‘s epic (which has had 14 minutes trimmed since Cannes) may not even play commercially until ’09 is ridiculous. What kind of a plastic, quarter-inch-deep moviegoing culture are we to have convinced distributors that buying Che rights is a sucide move?

“A few weeks ago I was in Las Vegas playing blackjack,” director Rod Lurie has written on the Huffington Post. “Two white-guy soldiers who were a couple of days away from being re-deployed to Iraq sat at the table with me. After a few minutes of conversation I asked them who they were voting for. They both said they were voting for Obama.

“When I asked them why, they very simply and honestly told me they want to vote for the guy that will get them out of Iraq. I think this year we will see, for the first time, the active-duty military voting for the Democratic candidate.” — from a piece called “Why The Military Is More Liberal Than You Think.”

Tom O’Neil‘s 7.30 slapdown of Frozen River star Melissa Leo (for pulling rank after arguing with director Courtney Hunt) has resulted in three friendly rebukes — one from myself, another from Thelma Adams and a third from Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone. Undaunted, O’Neil shoots right back, sticks to his guns, gives no quarter.