Just another tit-for-tat ad, but the speed of it is pretty incredible. It’s a response to very recent Clinton ad aired for the Wisconsin market, challenging Obama to debate her prior to the 2.19 primary there. 24 or 48 hours later, wham…the Obama team is right back at her.

“It’s an odd thing, but in recent years, just about every movie that attempts a sophisticated take on romance, has turned out to be strained and witless. All the successful recent comedies (The 40 Year Old Virgin, The Wedding Crashers and Knocked Up, to name three) have tended toward the raunchy end of the spectrum. It’s as if Hollywood’s wise guys have recognized that middle-class American life is just too complicated, perhaps even too inherently miserable, to get an intelligent handle on.

“You can’t quite treat [modern relationships] as a tragedy but you can turn to its first cousin — farce — and have some profitable fun with it. And who can blame them? Or us, for the benumbed state that something like Definitely, Maybe leaves us in.” — from Richard Corliss‘s 2.14 review in Time.

Late to the table but in complete agreement with Sasha Stone and Kris Tapley that this Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ad on behalf of Best Supporting Actor nominee Casey Afleck is perhaps the best of its kind seen all season. In no small part because it’s in keeping with the aura and tone of the film itself.

It would take four to six hours of calling the Sovet Republic of Warner Bros. to begin to get some kind of answer about who the creative hands were so let’s not, but sincere congrats to whomever the geniuses are.

“Seventy percent of the country is against the Iraq War now,” Young Turks co-host Cenk Uygyur has wrote today. “A great majority of American believe it was a mistake to go into Iraq in the first place. With a country that is this united against the war, are we really going to have two presidential candidates that voted for the Iraq War?
“If Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic primary, both of the major party candidates will have been wrong on the war. Why? Why on God’s green earth would we do that?”

So far, the scheduled Oscar show presenters are Alan Arkin, Jennifer Hudson, Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, Amy Adams, Jessica Alba, Cate Blanchett, Josh Brolin, Steve Carell, George Clooney, Penelope Cruz, Miley Cyrus, Patrick Dempsey, Cameron Diaz, Colin Farrell, Harrison Ford, Jennifer Garner, Tom Hanks, Anne Hathaway, Katherine Heigl, Jonah Hill, Dwayne Johnson, Nicole Kidman, James McAvoy, Queen Latifah, Seth Rogen, Martin Scorsese, Hilary Swank, John Travolta, Denzel Washington and Renee Zellweger.

Definitely Maybe has been tracking decently among women. The general numbers are 64, 32 and 11, but the first choice number is in the teens among women. (Keep in mind there’s an extra President’s Day holiday day on Monday.)
Doug Liman‘s allegedly painful Jumper — almost certainly a one-weekend phenomenon — is still the #1 attraction. The Spiderwick Chronicles is running at 75, 24 and 5. Step Up 2 The Streets is a 16 first choice. All four films are going to do at least decently….no wipeouts.
Vantage Point will do decent business when it opens on 2.22. The most popular March 7th release will be Roland Emmerich‘s 10,000 B.C., which is running at 57, 35 and 6…heavily male. The Bank Job is running at 20, 16 and 1…nothing. College Road Trip is tallying at 58, 25 and 2.

I received a reply this morning from director Gavin O’Connor regarding an item I wrote eight days ago (on 11.5) about Pride and Glory, an Ed Norton-Colin Farrell cop drama that’s been done since last November but has been bumped by New Line into an ’09 release.

I wrote that “you can tell from the trailer that Pride and Glory is a little boiler-platey, perhaps a little too emphatic and histrionic.” I also said that “my general motto is that any New Line film that costars Noah Emmerich (brother of production chief Tobey Emmerich) is a potential problem” but that “there doesn’t seem to be anything to fear from O’Connor, who did a first-rate job with ’04’s Miracle.”
O’Connor said he was writing “to introduce myself and thank you for the kind words about Miracle and set the record straight about Noah Emmerich and your insight into the film’s trailer. For the record, I had to fight tooth and nail to get Noah in my film. Tobey Emmerich wanted me to cast a star, someone who brought overseas name value to the project, and in no way wanted Noah in the movie, and was completely immovable on the subject for a long time.
“I cast Noah in my first film, Tumbleweeds, and also Miracle — he played the assistant coach. He’s a great actor, truly underrated, and one of my favorites. After a long, hard fought battle with Tobey, he finally relented, realizing that I wasn’t going to take no for an answer. When you see Noah’s work I believe you’ll understand why I pressed so hard to cast him in the film. His portrayal of the character is riveting and the complexity and unflinching honesty he brought to the role speaks for itself.
“I had a conversation with Todd Field about his experience working at New Line, and we shared a similar war story regarding Noah. I’m sure you know, Todd cast Noah in Little Children, and he too had to battle Tobey to get him in the film. Todd is a huge fan of Noah’s and expressed that to Tobey. Once again, Tobey resisted, wanting a bigger name in the film, someone with more overseas value, etc. Todd dug in his heels and Tobey finally relented.
“I offer you this information because it’s unfair to presume that Noah gets cast in New Line films because he’s Tobey’s brother. If anything, it works against him, requiring filmmakers to duke it out with the studio on his behalf. And we do that because of the high regard we have for Noah as an actor.
“If anything, its a coincidence that Todd and I, both big fans of Noah’s work, happened to be making our films at New Line. We would have cast him at whatever studio was financing our films.
“It seems to me also unfair to judge my film before you’ve seen it. You’re summarizing the entirety of the film based on a two-minute trailer. I invite you to experience the film in its full breadth and depth, and if after that you still feel that it’s boiler-platey and histrionic, I’ll welcome that critique, and respect your opinion. But until then, in fairness to me as the creator of the film, it would be very much appreciated if you would reserve judgment.
“I’ve been trying to realize this movie for over seven years, and though an amazing experience making the film at New Line, it has now become heartbreaking, watching it get caught up in corporate maneuvering, where bookkeeping seems to take precedent over filmmaking. My film is living in some form of studio purgatory, so it hurts to read negative comments about it before its ever been released.
“I write this letter to you from my heart. With no malice intended. Grounded in humility and sincerity. I hope its received in the same manner. With respect and a handshake, Gavin O’Connor.”
Wells reply: Thanks and point taken. I’m well aware that trailers sometime do a disservice to the film they’re supposed to be selling in a positive way. I’d love to have a chance to see Pride and Glory sometime before ’09. Thanks for writing and again, great job on Miracle.

The New Hampshire and California primary numbers were so ridiculously off that pollsters are generally thought to be operating out of bounds these days with a gravely flawed methodology, to put it faintly. This notion seems to be reenforced by two strongly divergent polls that came out today.
A Quinnipiac poll that has Hillary Clinton at 55 to Barack Obama‘s 34 in Ohio, and Clinton ahead of Obama in Pennsylvania by 52 to 36. How the hell does that square with those good Virginians giving Obama such an overwhelming majority two days ago with Obama dramatically cutting into Hillary’s core support base? How can there be more than a 45-point difference between these Ohio/Pennsylvania numbers and the final Virginia tallies? Has Virginia been invaded by aliens from the planet Trafalmadore, or have they landed their space ships in Pennsylvania and Ohio?
There’s also a just-released Rasmussen Reports daily poll showing Obama with a national double-digit lead over Clinton with 49% of likely Democratic primary voters and only 37% standing by Hillary. The “most stunning” aspect of the Obama surge is that “he now leads 46% to 41% among women. Clinton retains a lead among the narrower subset of white women, but her lead in that vital demographic is down to just three percentage points.”
Either the pollsters are drunk or on drugs, the people they’ve spoken to are drunk or on drugs or crazy, or these polls simply weren’t conducted on the same planet. There’s no fourth explanation.

Speaking of the plot and high-octane action scenes in 20th Century Fox and Gavin Hood‘s Wolverine flick, which will open 14 and 1/2 months from now (on 5.1.09), star-producer Hugh Jackman has told USA Today‘s Scott Bowles that “with all the success of the X-Men [films], you feel the pressure to keep pushing it further.”

And that, ladies and gents, is a scary omen. It’s the action movie that has the confidence and balls to hold back and make every shot count that wins. (“Shot” referring to any high-impact thrill moment.) An action movie with anxious-asshole production executives goading the director with exclamations like “you’ve gotta out-blast the last X-Men movie…this is a race, a competition…it’s gotta be more-more-more!” is a movie that has the word MEDIOCRE tattooed on its forehead.

Will Michelle Obama please shut up about “there will be no second run for the presidency” if things run against Barack, blah blah? Due respect and all, but it’s a deeply unattractive thing to say.
Nobody respects a one-shot-and-we’re-gone attitude. You have to hunker down and be a stayer. Harvey Milk lost election bids for a San Francisco city supervisor post three times before he finally won after running a fourth time. Inspiration, vision and natural charm are well and good, but nothing happens without brass and tenacity. (The exception is pitching woo. If you haven’t gotten the green-light signal within the first five or ten minutes of the first meeting, forget it. You can’t campaign your way into anyone’s bed.)

Chuckw286 wrote this morning to say he’s “no fan of Hillary by any stretch, but how would you feel about a deal where she steps down now and becomes Obama’s Secy of State?” To which I said “yeah, that would work.” Doubtful but yeah…maybe. Of course, Clinton probably doesn’t have the character or the elegance to give it up graciously after March 4th (given the way the voting is likely to go), which makes any such notion way premature.
My sensings are telling me that Hillary and her campaign team are going to scrap and claw and take everyone down to hell before this is over, dirty pool (Florida, Michigan) and harridan screechings, finagling and biting to the last breath over the last super delegate, fangs and venom and python squeezings until everyone is red-faced and screaming and crying out “enough already!”

The Diablo Cody pile-ons are coming fast and furious. There are two, actually. A 23/6 parody piece in which Cody weighs in on the current violence in Kenya, and a “leaked” Diablo Cody screenplay on Something Awful, written and doodled by the brilliant Bob “BobServo” Mackey.