This out-of-synch Bill Maher riff about Hilary vs. Rudy on Larry King Live was taped six weeks ago, but the situation hasn’t changed. Knowing deep down that Maher is almost certainly right is enough to give anyone indigestion. Obama vs. Thompson would have been an interesting race, but Hilary vs. Rudy is going to be the smelliest campaign in human history. I can’t believe it’s come down to this. It’s so dispiriting…God.

A portion of the only first-rate scene in an otherwise dated and often irritating film, especially due to some horribly banal dialogue and some truly atrocious acting by some child actors.

I first saw Armageddon at an Academy screening in June of 1998. It gave me a headache because of the machine-gun-like cutting, which I was later told was a result of a deliberate Michael Bay strategy of cutting out as many frames as possible in each scene order to make the film play as fast, hard and compressed as possible. This information came from Armageddon screenwriter Jonathan Hensleigh, who claimed that the film was “frame-fucked” as a result.

In any event, when I saw Armageddon producer Jerry Bruckheimer in the lobby after the screening I did the usual chickenshit industry thing — I half-lied. I told Jerry that the film “rocked” or felt like “rocket fuel.” (Which wasn’t a total lie — it did feel like that, sort of.) As soon as I said this, however, Bruckheimer cocked his head and gave me a “look.” He knew I was snowing him, and I knew that he knew. I felt like a snivelling coward, possibly due to the fact that I was being precisely that.

I shared this moment with a director friend earlier today, and he told me one of his own. A very big (one could use the word “legendary”) producer-director told him that an actress in a scene he was directing was “fucking smiling” too often, “just like fucking Tom Cruise…always smiling, always with the teeth. Tell her to cut it out.” The director later spoke to the actress, who had seen him speaking with the big-name producer. “Did he say anything about me?” she asked. The director replied, “He compared you to Tom Cruise.”

In Contention‘s Kris Tapley has been asked to both edit and write a new Oscar season bloggy-blog for Variety. This is the “fairly substantial announcement” he’s been promising on his site for the last couple of weeks, the one that will “explain the slow-down of activity here and my absence from this year’s Gurus line-up.”

Yesterday I suggested that standard Gurus of Gold and the Envelope Oscar-season predictions “should be given minor attention until at least the passing of Thanksgiving,” and that the prognosticators should “spend the next seven or eight weeks primarily championing the right movies and the right stuff, and not in some elitist, off-in-their-own-realm Village Voice sense of that term.” In response, The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil is half-seriously suggesting that “the Film Snob Moonies have kidnapped Jeffrey Wells over at Hollywood-Elsewhere.com and put a hex on him.” Go figure. I was mainly saying that for the next eight weeks everyone should double-track — keep on with the blah-blah Academy predictions if they have to (i.e., if O’Neil and David Poland insist), but between now and 12.1 they should mainly push the year’s best according to their own core passions.

The first of two New York Film Festival shorts by the great Jamie Stuart appeared today on the Filmmaker website. The short is very “Stuart” (cryptic, sardonic, superb editing), but I can’t figure what’s being “said.” The basic suggestion seems to be that Darjeeling Limited director and co-writer Wes Anderson is some kind of visitor from from another planet. Stuart seems to convey this, at least, by showing us a close-up of Anderson’s face (wearing a pleasant, unguarded expression) while we hear some kind of variant of 1950s electronic space music.

Then the piece goes back to Stuart’s Brooklyn pad (his roommates, telephone calls…whatever). The N.Y. Film Festival stuff doesn’t begin until the one-third mark. We see the Darjeeling Limited cast sitting on the dais after the press screening (which happened, I believe, a good week ago), and notice that costar Jason Schwartzman no longer has a black caterpillar on his upper lip. But the ’50s space music half-dominates — no matter what’s being said or narrated, we keep hearing this “eeeeOOWWWohhhhhhweeeeeee.”

Cut to Anderson, wearing an elegant white suit (which probably cost at least $2500), talking at first about creating an animated film — The Fantastic Mr. Fox, he means, which will be distributed by 20th Century Fox in November 2009. Then he starts talking about watching a DVD of a Louis Malle film called Le Feu Follet (’63), but without English subtitles. Anderson says he doesn’t understand a word because doesn’t speak French. He says he’s been trying to learn French but he’s found it difficult so far. And that’s pretty much it.

Miss Moneypenny has died. Lois Maxwell, 80, who played M’s secretary in fourteen James Bond films starting with Dr. No in ’62, was 35 when she first played the role. Her last Moneypenny was in ’85’s A View to a Kill, when she was 58. She spent 23 years flirting and hinting with 007 to absolutely no avail. The Canadian-born actress died of cancer yesterday, 9.29, near Perth, Australia.

Jim Sheridan‘s remake of Susanne Bier‘s Brothers, a first-rate, Danish-language 2004 drama, will costar Tobey Maguire as the older, responsible, married brother who goes off to Iraq, Natalie Portman (he said) as Maguire’s wife, and Jake Gyllenhaal as the younger fuck-up brother who begins to fill his brother’s familial duties when Maguire disappears during a skirmish and is presumed dead.

(l. to r.) Jim Sheridan, Tobey Maguire, Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal

A 9.17 Variety story by Tatiana Siegel didn’t mention Portman, but Sheridan himself told me she’s ot the part last night. I was inspecting a pair of non-prescription reading glasses at the CVS drug store at the corner of La Cienega and Santa Monica Blvds. last night when Sheridan — ruddy-faced, white-haired, wearing a white shirt and dark-gray blazer — tapped me on the shoulder and said “hey.”

Sheridan said he wants the trio to be younger than they were in Bier’s film. The only problem is that the 5 foot, 8-inch tall Maguire is 4 inches shorter than Gyllenhaal, who stands six feet. This violates the general biological rule that brothers are either roughly the same height or no more than two inches apart. My brother Tony and I are about an inch apart, if that, and my younger son Dylan is 6′ 4″ to Jett’s 6’2″ — you’ll rarely see brothers who are 3 or 4 inches apart.

The way to finagle this, of course, is to have Maguire walk around with those special shoes that Humphrey Bogart wore when he stood next to Ingrid Bergman during scenes in Casablanca.

If your idea of a really great film was Michael Bay‘s Transformers, don’t even go to Tony Gilroy‘s Michael Clayton (Warner Bros., 10.5). It’s just not your speed. And I’m not even referring to the fact that some theatres will be asking customers to flash college diplomas before selling them tickets next weekend, and that people with Masters Degrees will be given preferential seating. It’s just not violent or mechanical enough, and there are no jokes about E-Bay and no Shia LeBouf– type guys running around acting lively and endearing.

For a while there I was in trouble myself. I love films like Michael Clayton — I love their moody efficiency — and even I missed a couple of things the first time around.

But it plays superbly the second time. Seriously — this is one of those films that you’ll like (or value) a bit more when you catch it again on DVD in early ’08. I caught it a second time at a plush little screening room in Toronto and came out doubly-pleased. I’m only sorry I wasn’t quite smart enough to enjoy it as much the first time. Plus it has, by my sights, one of the coolest, most stylishly uptown closing-credits sequences I’ve seen in ages. (Which I’m not going to describe.)

Michael Clayton is an assured, tightly written, very well acted moral drama about amoral corporate maneuvers. It’s about the cost of being an amiable can-do guy — the title character played by George Clooney — in this kind of toney and corrup- ted environment.

This is the kind of sturdy, well-honed drama Sydney Pollack (whose performance as a cynical, world-weary law-firm chief is slightly better than Clooney’s, even though he’s strictly supporting) used to direct in the ’80s and ’90s. It’s also a little bit like Roger Michell‘s Changing Lanes, only it doesn’t have as many popcorn- payoff moments.

Howard Hawks once said that a movie will always succeed as long as it has…I forget, two or three or four great scenes (and as long as the rest of the film holds its own). Lanes had four or five great scenes. Clayton has two — one at the very end with a line that invokes the name of a certain spiritual diety in India, and one involving the quietly efficient killing of a man without the usual histrionic crap that all dramas go in for when a character violently buys the farm. There’s also a very cool, quiet-down, early-morning scene between Clooney and three horses shot somewhere in Westchester County, so make it three.

The fact that Clayton doesn’t have what you might call a heavily-beating pulse is okay…really. People in corporate realms aren’t much for that sort of thing. The only guy who really lets loose with serious fire (besides Clooeney and Pollack, I mean) is Tom Wilkinson, playing a brilliant litigator who’s lost patience and possibly his mind (certainly his lawyerly bearing and emotional composure) after defending a huge plant-pesticide or plant-growing company called U/North in a class-action suit for several years.

And yet it’s always “on the case” and never boring. The material that Gilroy, the director-writer, runs with feels as seasoned and authentic as this kind of thing can be. There’s no shovelling — no “oh, come on…give me a fucking break” moments whatsoever.

Clooney’s title character is a “fixer” for a large Manhattan law firm called Kenner, Bach & Ledeen. He basically puts out fires for the firm. He facilitates, cajoles, finagles, paves over. He calls himself a “janitor,” and the fact that he’s never been made a partner tells you that his colleagues more or less agree.

Grappling with debt, a gambling problem and family issues (a fuck-up brother, a son he’s trying to be close and steady with), Clayton is asked early on to clean up a mess after Wilkinson’s Arthur Edens suffers a freak-out (rips off his clothes, babbles excitedly, scares people) in some Midwestern state while taking a deposition in the U/North case.

Clayton is initially appalled at — frightened by — Arthur’s behavior, but gradually learns that his craziness is based upon righteous disgust at the malfeasance he’s been spinning all these years, having come upon damning evidence of corporate guilt in the deaths and illnesses of U/North customers.

When U/North’s frosty top counsel (Tilda Swinton) discovers that not only Eden but Clayton are onto this, she does what all morally deficient can-do types in films of this sort do — she hires a couple of low-key hitmen to shut them up. Clayton, at the same time, is gradually coming to the end of his janitor trip and, by and by, a kind of epiphany.

Taking place over three or four days and told largely in flashback (although it doesn’t skip back and forth in any kind of irritating fashion), the movie is, truth be told, a little hard to follow at times. But like I’ve said, it’s beautifully spoken — Gilroy is a master at measured, just-right dialogue that’s the opposite of purple — and it’s my kind of adult moral thriller. And I absolutely loved that Swinton lets her flabby stomach be part of a getting-dressed scene. It’s just a little too dry and cultivated for the Cabo San Lucas T-shirt crowd.

Fred Kaplan has written a moderately interesting N.Y. Times piece about Ridley Scott‘s Blade Runner, which has been re-cut and re-stored for the umpteenth time, and which will play in theatres prior to showing up on DVD on 12.18 as “The Final Cut.” The payoff is the narrated slide show about the origins and influences of this 1982 classic — worth clicking on.

“The clue to Deckard’s true nature” — the fact that he’s a replicant — “comes in a scene that was cut from the original release,” writes Kaplan. “[It was] only recently unearthed by Charles de Lauzirika, Scott’s assistant and the restoration’s producer. In the film, Deckard falls in love with Rachael (Sean Young), a secretary at the Tyrell Corporation, the conglomerate that makes replicants. She discovers that she’s a replicant too. Her memories of childhood were implanted by Tyrell to make her think she’s human.

In the last scene of Scott’s “Final Cut” version, “Deckard leads Rachael out of his apartment. He notices an origami figure of a unicorn on the floor. A fellow cop has often left such figures outside replicants” rooms. In an earlier scene, Deckard was thinking about a unicorn. Looking at the cutout now, he realizes that the authorities know what’s in his mind, that the unicorn is a planted memory, that he’s a replicant and that he and Rachael are both now on the run. They get into the elevator. The door slams. The end.”

Letterman: “A hard-boiled egg and an orange? Gee, you can’t go wrong there.” Hilton: “Yeah, but [the jail experience] is over and I don’t want to talk about it any more.” Letterman: “Uh-huh…well, this, this is where you and I differ because this is all I want to talk about.” You might think you’re sick of this but watch this…happened last night. The way she turns on the sniffles when Letterman won’t let up is exactly how this empty vessel got out of jail the first time…before they sent her back.

Two days ago director Wes Anderson told MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz that work has begun on a bells-and-whistles Criterion DVD of the great Bottle Rocket. The only way to see this seminal ’90s film now is on a bare-bones Sony Home Video DVD that’ came out in December ’98 — no extras, voice-overs, deleted scenes, nothing.

“We’ve just begun work with the Criterion Collection [people] to do Bottle Rocket on a new DVD that’s going to have all kinds of stuff,” Anderson told Horowtiz. “There’s a lot of Bottle Rocket that was on the cutting room floor, so we have a lot to work with on that one.”

Of course, one reason why this seems like such good news is that it provides escape from the present. A shaft of sunlight in an otherwise dark atmosphere.