Mike Huckabee playing bass on Leno last night; talking about weight loss, the yanking of the Romney attack ad, etc.

And Hillary Clinton‘s visit to Late night with David Letterman. Dancing WGA picket girls, “Oh, well…all good things come to an end,” Letterman’s Old Man and the Sea beard (“I know what you’re thinkin’…Dave looks like a cattle-drive cook…two months and I’m finally out of rehab”), etc. Superb bad-credit advertisement at the end.

A friend of a friend of a guy who knows somebody who overheard somebody talking in the Pacific Palisades Gelson’s the other night says the following about JJ Abrams‘ Cloverfield: (1) Forget the metaphorical Hollywood Elsewhere don’t-show-the-monster angle. The monster will definitely be seen, I’m told, at roughly the 25-minute mark. (2) The origin of the film “has nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11 or a terrorist metaphor.” (Of course not!) The origin of Cloverfield, I’m told, was Abrams being in a toy store with his son and looking at all the Godzilla toys and thought to himself, ‘Hmmm…why can’t I do one of these…?’ A little brainstorming and voila, Cloverfield was born. (I actually made the Gelson’s part up. This actually comes from a homie of one of the Cloverfield higher-ups.)

Obama’s final Iowa spot. Now is the time, Judah. Today is the day.

Sean Penn has been named jury president for next May’s Cannes Film Festival, which will run from 5.14 to 5.25. What does this signify? Nothing. The Cannes people got in touch, Penn said yeah, off to France and whoop-dee-doo.

The top five films in the Village Voice/L.A. Weekly Film Poll: There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Zodiac, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and I’m Not There.

“Speaking of polemics, I know I’m not the only one among us who loathes The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, aka My Left Eyelid, aka Awakenings for the smart set. Yes, I’m talking to you, Scott. I’d dis the thing myself, but I’d probably have to watch it again to do so properly, and we all have our limits — mine came about two minutes into the interminable, pretentious, Brakhage-for-dummies POV shtick at the outset of Butterfly.” — Village Voice critic Nathan Lee in a 1.2.08 posting for the Slate Movie Club.

Forget Jorge Camara‘s statement of hope. The WGA has told the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. “in no uncertain terms to forget about any chance of an interim deal that would allow NBC to air the Golden Globes,” reports Variety‘s Dave McNary.
“The WGA has great respect and admiration for the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn., but we are engaged in a crucial struggle that will protect our income and intellectual property rights for generations to come,” the guild statement read. “We will continue to do everything in our power to bring industry negotiations to a fair conclusion. In the meantime, we are grateful for the ongoing support of the Hollywood talent community.”

One of Chris Rock‘s best bits at a recent sold-out Madison Square Garden show “involved a sideways reference to his personal life. While discussing Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton‘s presidential campaign, he mocked the notion that she had presidential experience, explaining that marriage doesn’t confer professional expertise. By way of example, he mentioned his own marriage. ‘I’ve been with my wife for 10 years now,’ he said. ‘If she got onstage right now, y’all wouldn’t laugh at all.'” — from a 1.2.08 N.Y. Times review by Kalefa Sanneh.

“The big story of 2007 really, in critical discussion, is the Trilogy Of Critical Onanism (in order of jerk-off) — The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, Zodiac and There Will Be Blood.” — from David Poland‘s 1.2.08 Hot Button column (even though the page identifies itself as “The Hot Button — January 2, 2007”).
I could be snide and call this the flip-side of the Poland Curse. If you believe in the legend that any film strongly pushed by Poland for Best Picture contention is all but doomed, you might also conclude that any film he calls masturbatory probably has considerable merit.
Of course, presumption isn’t needed in this instance. Minus these three films 2007 would have been a much leaner feast. Zodiac is my choice for the Best Film of the Year, and currently sits on so many Top Ten lists that it seems silly to debate Poland’s jab.
That one lantern-lit night shot in Jesse James — i.e., the train coming ’round the bend with the James gang is waiting to stick it up — is so drop-dead breathtaking that it justifies the entire film’s place in the ’07 pantheon. (As well as cinches Roger Deakins‘ Best Cinematographjy Oscar.)
It took me a second viewing to realize that the sickness running through There Will Be Blood — a malevolence that climaxes with the bowling-pin finale — has a stick-to-the-ribs quality that grows more scalding and pernicious the more you re-view and re-think it.

Cristian Mungiu‘s 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days “manages to deal with abortion without advocating any stance other than compassion,” writes Times Online critic Kevin Maher. “It illustrates what happens when a woman’s right to choose her biological destiny is removed, and yet it also shows a picture of abortion that would please the most adamant pro-lifer.”

And yet, as I wrote last summer, the likelihood of any American right-to-lifers seeing this movie is next to nil. Their commitment to stopping abortion is sincere, but it pales next to their xenophobia. I suspect that most conservative Americans would rather jump into a raging volcano than see 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days.
The right-to-choose and pro-life viewpoints in Mungiu’s film “cancel each other out, leaving a moving portrait of two lonely women who bond in an unforgiving regime,” Maher writes.
“It’s very difficult to explain why the film moves so many people,’ says Mungiu, who shot the movie in 2006 for 600,000 euros. ‘But I honestly believe that it has a soul. As soon as we finished editing it we knew that we had something strong, emotional and balanced. It is a film that speaks about something important without ever being preachy.”

Hillary Clinton will appear on tonight’s Late Night with David Letterman, which is cool with the WGA because the show’s production company, Worldwide Pants, has struck a side-deal with the union.

But it won’t be cool for for GOP presidential contender Mike Huckabee to appear on this evening’s broadcast of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Leno’s show hasn’t signed a separate WGA agreement but will begin airing all-new shows tonight all the same. Huckabee has said “he supports the writers and did not think he would be crossing a picket line, because he believed the writers had made an agreement to allow late-night shows on the air,” says a Time report. WGA picketers have reacted accordingly.