Strangely, oddly, curiously, I didn’t hate Get Smart. I wouldn’t have felt very good if I’d paid to see it, but it’s mildly amusing (emphasis on the “m” word) here and there. I was expecting it to be awful and it’s not. It is, however, a little dreary to sit through. Okay, more than a little. But despite the depressing atmosphere of surrender to corporate attitude and authorship in every corner of it, Steve Carell‘s Maxwell Smart is half-appealing. He half-creates his own guy and half-channels Don Adams.

I know what it’s like to feel horribly burned by a bad big-studio film, and Get Smart did not do this to me. I wasn’t in the least bit engaged or turned on and I didn’t laugh out loud once — but I didn’t despise it.

I vaguely hated myself for sitting there and watching it this afternoon, but I have to be honest and report that the audience laughed a lot and clapped at the end. Nobody near me as I was walking out was putting it down. They knew it was basically a nothing movie, but they didn’t seem to mind. Whatever…we’re on vacation! I’ll tap out a bit morethis evening, but I have to get to a Cinevegas movie that’s starting 35 minutes from now.

A better-than-decent Father’s Day speech by Barack Obama in Chicago today, one that particularly chastises black dads who are “missing from too many lives and too many homes…acting like boys instead of men…and the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”

A note from the great Werner Herzog: “As you probably know, I will begin principal photography of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans in three weeks time, with only a very short period of pre-production. But I am doing fine, and this does not make me nervous. By the way: it is not a remake (as reported almost everywhere) — it is a completely different story in the same sense as the last James Bond is not a remake of the previous one.
“On another note: just before the hurricane I was scouting locations in Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Vietnam for The Piano Tuner, and as soon as I arrived in Bangkok I found myself arrested and handcuffed to a chair because of unpaid bills and taxes by the producers of Rescue Dawn. It required much explaining to explain that I was not the producer.”
The Rescue Dawn producer that the Bangkok authorities were looking to get their hands on is almost certainly the notorious Steve Marlton. I’m told that his history, some aspects of which have run afoul of the law, is public record in Oregon.

I’ll never stay in a Las Vegas suite of this size or splendor ever again. I was given this high-roller pad because the wifi in the other rooms wasn’t working and they wanted to be nice to guests of Cinevegas, and I just don’t get here that often or care that much. I hate to sound like a shmuck tourist from Emporia , Kansas, but this place is amazing. Two big high-def flat screens, a little bar with a free refrigerator, a whirlpool bath, a poker table, breathtaking views of the Paris and Bellagio, an iPod music player. Give me a break.

I’m on the 35th floor of the Planet Hollywood hotel & casino, and I have to be honest and say the wireless doesn’t work. (I’m using my AT& T Air Card.) I’m here to do three or four days’ worth of Cinevegas and I’ll soon be off to the races. A Get Smart screening will begin in an hour or so. The machine-gun poster [see below] is the first thing I saw after arriving at McCarran.

From room #3567 at Planet Hollywood — Sunday, 6.15.08, 11:25 am

“Get Smart the movie has precious little to do with Get Smart the iconic TV series from the 1960s, but then again the movie has precious little to do with screen comedy, either,” writes Hollywood Reporter critic Kirk Honeycutt.
“This is a slap-dash effort whose producers threw money and stunts onscreen instead of the satirical gags and one-liners that made the old spy spoof so memorable.
“It’s hard to see how this lame puppy will gain any boxoffice traction other than by waving the banner of star Steve Carell opening weekend. His younger fans, who wouldn’t know Get Smart from Spy, might laugh at the overblown action swirling around their poker-faced hero, but are likely to advise friends to wait for the DVD.” No — the LA to NYC viewing on a 767.

Everyone knew The Incredible Hulk would do well this weekend, and it has. Fantasy Moguls’ Steve Mason is predicting a $55 million-plus weekend with yesterday’s earnings hitting around $21 million. M. Night Shyamalan‘s The Happening was expected to earn $25 million, give or take, but yesterday $12.8 million haul means it’ll do more like $33 million. Kung Fu Panda will come in third, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan will be fourth and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, fifth.

If you were Barack Obama, wouldn’t you make a point of visiting western Europe, Iraq and points in between now and the August Democratic convention? It would help enhance your foreign-policy credentials (image-wise, at least), and allow you to bask in your reported huge popularity over there, in Western Europe particularly but also in the Middle East. A 6.13 McLatchy report, in any event, says such a plan is probably in the works.

As N.Y. Times columnist Frank Rich wrote a week or so ago, “When the world gets a firsthand look at the new America Mr. Obama offers as an alternative to Mr. McCain’s truculent stay-the-course, the public pandemonium may make J.F.K.’s ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ visit to the Berlin Wall look like a warm-up act.”

“There are certain days when you can feel the air sucking out of Washington’s giant hot-air balloon, and Friday was one of them,” writes the N.Y. Times Mark Leibovich in a 6.15 piece about the news of the passing of Tim Russert.
“News of the Meet the Press host’s death moved entirely too fast, in that unnerving way that these things do in the viral media world, but especially here — the cycle of rumor to ‘did you hear?’ to confirmation (‘it’s online’) to disbelief lasted a matter of minutes. Riders on the D.C. Metro stared into their BlackBerrys, and every politician with access to e-mail was issuing statements, from the president on down.”
It was a whopper for me personally, I can tell you. Heartbreak for his friends, family and colleagues; a loss for the world of political TV coverage; a chill up the spine of every heavy-ish person out there over the age of 40. I felt for the MSNBC team yesterday during their marathon coverage. They were simultaneously reporting and dealing with their own private grief. They couldn’t see any way around not covering it as an all-day, stop-the-presses, death-of-JFK event. They didn’t want to turn it off, and probably couldn’t have if they had a change of heart.
That said, there’s this little voice stating that I understand and respect the rules that govern the observance of the death of anyone famous, particularly one as beloved as Tim Russert, which is that you may not talk about the circumstances that may have caused his life to end and whether or not it could have been prevented or at least delayed.
Type in the words “cholesteral plaque enlarged heart” and tell me what it gradually tells you. I’ve done a little reading for 20 minutes or so, and — I’m saying this as plainly and respectfully as I can — it just doesn’t seem as if a tree just uprooted itself and fell on the guy.

In tribute to what I keep hearing and hearing is James Franco‘s superb comic performance in Judd Apatow and David Gordon Green‘s Pineapple Express (said to be his best since playing James Dean in that Mark Rydell TNT movie), here are episodes #1 and #2 of “Acting with James Franco.” Comedy releases him on some level.

“The largest group of Obamacons hail from the libertarian wing of the movement,” reports The New Republic‘s Bruce Bartlett. “And it’s not just Andrew Sullivan. David Friedman, son of Milton and Rose, is signed up with the cause on the grounds that he sees Obama as the better vessel for his father’s cause. Friedman is convinced of Obama’s sympathy for school vouchers — a tendency that the Democratic primaries temporarily suppressed.

“Scott Flanders, the CEO of Freedom Communications–the company that owns the Orange County Register — told a company meeting that he believes Obama will accomplish the paramount libertarian goals of withdrawing from Iraq and scaling back the Patriot Act.
“How substantial is the Obamacon phenomenon? Well, it has even penetrated National Review, the intellectual anchor of the conservative movement. There’s Jeffrey Hart, who has been a senior editor at the magazine since 1968 and even wrote a history of the magazine, The Making of the American Conservative Mind; and Wick Allison, who once served as the magazine’s publisher.
“Neither man has renounced his conservatism. Both have come away impressed by Obama’s rhetorical acumen. This is a particular compliment coming from Hart, who wrote speeches for both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. They both like that Obama couches his speeches in a language of uplift and unity.
“When describing his support for Obama, Allison pointed…in the direction of a column that his wife (who has never supported a Democrat) wrote in the Dallas Morning News: “He speaks with candor and elegance against the kind of politics that have become so dispiriting and for the kind of America I would like to see. As a man, I find Mr. Obama to be prudent, thoughtful, and courageous. His life story embodies the conservative values that go to the core of my beliefs.”

As the Warren Beatty AFI tribute the night before last, Shampoo scriptwriter Robert Towne recalled that it took nine years to get that 1975 film made. ‘I’ve never known you to hold a grudge, reveal a secret or forget a phone call,’ he said to Beatty. ‘In 45 years you never opened yourself up. After all these years I’ve come to consider you as wise as Benjamin Franklin, who [was] also a ladies man. You’re part Fellini, part Machiavelli.'” — from Anne Thompson‘s Variety-blog account, which I should have linked to yesterday.

I’m just going to put this out there because it matters to me. A lot. I once saw with my own eyes a one-sheet for The Presbyterian Church Wager, which is what McCabe and Mrs. Miller was called before it was renamed. The poster showed Beatty and Julie Christie standing next to each other, and a photo (I think) of the unpainted church that was built over the course of the film, and which caught fire at the finale.
The poster I saw was a professionally composed piece of promotional art, and was therefore part of a limited print run. (It was probably used for display at exhibitor conventions.) Somebody, I’m guessing, has probably seen this poster somewhere, or at least heard about it. I’m looking to persuade an owner of ths poster, if I can find such a person, to let me make a high-quality xerox of it. I’ll then persuade Beatty to sign it for me, and then I’ll frame it and hang it on my wall and blah-dee-blah.