With ’08 election fever starting to heat up, James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo‘s …So Goes The Nation, which is out on DVD today, might attract fresh interest. As I noted last fall, the doc “explains in the frankest terms imaginable how the John Kerry campaign blew it big-time with the middle American voting public, and how cagey and brilliant the Bushies were at almost every turn.”

Distributed/produced by IFC First Take and Genius Entertainment.

The two things that come through on the doc are the fact that (a) many millions of Americans out there are living in states of appalling ignorance and religious superstition and are therefore ripe for shrewd exploitation, and (b) the Kerry people made so many mistakes it’s hard to keep track of them all, even in a doc as lucid and well-organized as this one.”

On Monday, 2.26 (i.e., the day after the Oscars), Manhattan’s Museum of Television& Radio is presenting “The Unseen Dylan: Newly Restored Outtakes from Don’t Look Back,” with an introduction by Patti Smith and “rare footage” presented by the doc’s director D.A. Pennebaker. MTV exec vp Bill Flanagan and On The Road with Bob Dylan author Larry Sloman will also attend. (A NY staffer said there are no plans for this presentation to happen at MTR’s Beverly Hills location.) It’s all a promo for the Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back — 65 Tour Deluxe Edition DVD that “streets” the next day.

Patrick Goldstein‘s latest “Big Picture” L.A. Times column is about CNN talk-show host and whorish, suspender-wearing blurbmeister Larry King. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel, or is it more of a case of “give him enough rope…”?

Goldstein is, I feel, derelict by failing to mention a clearly understood fact: when a movie ad uses a Larry King rave, it’s an almost-certain tipoff that the movie has problems. Anyone with half a clue about the movie business understands this.

“King sometimes will even blurb a movie he didn’t like,” Goldstein observes. “At lunch, he told me of the time he and Shawn Southwick, his sixth wife, took their two boys to see Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. ‘I had no idea what was going on,’ he says. ‘I turned to my wife and said, what is this movie about? I don’t get it.'”

(I get it. POTC: DMC is basically about the sheer wondrousness of Gore Verbinksi‘s creative vision and relentless perfectionism, no matter how long the final cut runs, plus producer Jerry Bruckheimer‘s refusal to step in and argue for brevity or conciseness of any kind.)

“But when I dug up King’s old blurbs,” Goldstein writes, “guess who was at the top of the ad for the movie, enthusing: ‘Finally, a Movie Worth Seeing Over and Over Again!’ Larry! I thought you didn’t like the movie!

“‘I didn’t,’ he explained. ‘I told the CNN person to tell the studio, ‘I didn’t understand the damn movie at all. I’d have to see it over and over again to figure out what happened.’ And then they went and used it!’

The following five graphs, which appear at the end of Goldstein’s article are priceless:

“[King] still can’t get over the fact that All the King’s Men, his idea of an Oscar picture, was slammed by critics. ‘What was wrong with that movie?’ he asks. ‘I don’t get it. How could they knock Sean Penn, who is our best film actor today? The girls were great. Jeez, they even rapped Anthony Hopkins!”

King complains that critics would rather pan a movie than praise it. “That’s what I don’t get about ’em,” he says. “It’s like they don’t even want to like the movie. I have a confounding time with a guy like [The Wall Street Journal‘s] Joe Morgenstern. Sometimes I don’t even know what he’s looking at.” King is still upset that the critics bashed The Holiday, calling it corny and sentimental. ‘What — is sentimental such a bad word?’ he says. ‘If a movie makes you cry, it has to have moved you. I cried in Letters From Iwo Jima. Is that such a bad thing?’

“King makes no apologies for the way studios use his name to sell tickets. ‘Do you really think people think Larry King is a movie critic?’ he asks. ‘Come on! I’m the guy on CNN who liked the movie. I mean, after Roger Ebert, how many film critics could I even name? Joe Morgenstern. The guy with you. [The New York Post’s] Lou Lumenick. [The New York Times’] A.O. Scott. I mean, how many people in Dubuque, Iowa, know any of those guys?”

“You can’t even put King in a roomful of critics without all hell breaking loose. When I called Morgenstern Friday to let him respond to King’s gibes — he said he was ‘honored to be deplored by Larry King’ — he told me King had caused a scene that very morning, taking cell-phone calls in the middle of a screening of the upcoming film Breach. After a barrage of complaints, King went outside, only to have his phone go off again after he returned. ‘There was almost a brawl,’ reported Morgenstern.

“When I asked about the incident, King was apologetic. ‘But it was urgent. They were important calls, things I had to respond to. I didn’t talk on the phone for more than a minute or two.'”

Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke on the how, why & whatever of Reese Witherspoon‘s decision to dump Endeavor for CAA. Good reporting, but on a scale of 1 to 10 how much do you give a toss?

With the success of Pan’s Labyrinth a matter of record, Picturehouse’s Bob Berney has invested further in the Guillermo del Toro business by acquiring all U.S. rights to The Orphanage, an atmospheric thriller produced by del Toro (among others) and directed by J.A. Bayona.

AICN’s Drew McWeeney (a.k.a., “Moriarty”) is calling Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost‘s Hot Fuzz (Focus Features, 4.20) “an instant classic” in the vein of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale‘s Used Cars. The film has also persuaded him that Wright and Pegg “are great screenwriters [because] they’ve managed to take the things they did well in Shaun of the Dead and do them again, and I think they’ve actually fixed what they needed to fix, structural issues that sort of deflate Shaun for some of the third act.”

A totally behind-the-curve Eddie Murphy profile by the AP’s David Germain. I understand how these pieces are supposed to read — you’re supposed to blow dryly refined kisses at the celebrity subject — but the article is dated 2.12.07…c’mon. It’s like Germain’s AP editor said, “Let’s deliberately not go where some of the others have been going…let’s be deliberately Pollyanic about the Norbit impact…let’s just pretend Eddie’s a great guy and that everything’s cool and give him a nice friendly pass.”

Museum of Modern Art film department manager Sean Egan informs that the remastered Berlin Alexanderplatz will have its North American premiere at MoMA between April 10th and 15th. The new print is supposed to look “fairly amazing,” he says.

Emmanuel Levy is apparently the only other blogger-critic of note who’s gone to bat for Zodiac thus far, calling it “an epic-scale psychological thriller” and “a sprawling American masterpiece.” Paramount publicity doesn’t want any such comments circulating too broadly between now and Friday, 2.23, the embargo date that they’re asking old-media types to observe. They think the buzz will get lost in the ether if it comes out too soon, even though the opening date is only two and a half weeks off.

Robert Novak is reporting that “according to Democratic sources, former President Clinton got Steven Spielberg to step away from a tacit endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama. Spielberg has let it be known that he will host a future fundraiser for Clinton” — Bill or Hilary? — “as part of a policy of helping all Democratic presidential candidates. But Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen seem to be clearly in Obama’s camp.” Let no one ever accuse Spielberg of lacking backbone or principle. A little massaging from an ex-President, some smiles and choice words and wham…he’s on the fence.

I’ll be doing a live chat with Hollywood Babble-On‘s Marty Keegan on Thursday, 2.15, sometime around 1 pm. Keegan describes the L.A. Daily News-sponsored show as a “revolutionary” internet deal that allows for live broadcasts over your computer or cell phone, and also for the audience to text or phone in live, their questions and comments being incorporated into the show.

Keegan, a comedian-writer, is married to Time magazine reporter Rebecca Keegan, who’s one of the few people in the L.A. bureau to have survived those sweeping staff cuts.