I was in a hair styling salon yesterday (9.29) and, for the first time in a fairly long while, actually sat in a chair and read recent issues of People, Us, the Star and In Touch cover-to-cover. We all know they’re essentially the same rag aimed at a not-terribly-bright female readership. (I worked as an in-house freelancer for People from ’96 to ’98, when it occupied a slightly higher editorial station than it does today, so I have a certain insight.) And we all know they’re essentially glamour porn. What’s changed is that they’ve gone from being hard R to XXX, and it’s nauseating. It makes you want to wash your hands. These rags distort, degrade and generally vulgarize the lives of celebrities (not to mention the human condition) as surely as gynecological X-rated films pass along some extremely rancid imressions about what goes down between men and women they get close and naked together.

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I take back my theory about Team America: World Police creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker possibly being closet righties — they’re a couple of proclaimed Republicans and KY Jelly Bush bitches. In 2.3.01 news story written by E Online’s Emily Farache about their then-controversial Comedy Central series That’s My Bush, it was said to be “ironic that [Parker and Stone] are getting so much flak, because they’re both Republicans and — believe it or not — they don’t plan on ridiculing Bush. ‘What we’re trying to do is way more subversive,’ Parker said. ‘We’re going to make you love this guy.’” They also copped to their Republican loyalties in a Fox News story that ran in late ’01.

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“Life’s hard…but it’s a lot harder if you’re stupid.” — spoken by Steven Keats’ “Jackie Brown” character in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73), reading from Paul Monash’s script which was based on the novel by George V. Higgins.

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“There’s a revolution going on,” the legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle (Hero, The Quiet American) tells the Guardian‘s Zoe Cox, “and the world’s changed. Kids these days have so much visual experience they don’t think in literary or narrative terms. They’re constantly online or playing computer games or fiddling with their phones. These things may not be sophisticated, but they are realigning the parameters of visual experience. It’s almost like the death of the talkies.”

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I’m somewhat surprised to say that Charles Shyer’s Alfie (Paramount, 10.22), a remake of the 1966 Michael Caine original, is a sure hit, a likely Oscar contender and (did I forget to say this?) a very fine film — touching, truthful, emotionally supple. The Oscar part of the equation certainly includes a Best Actor nomination for Jude Law. His performance as a smoothly charming womanizer (a limousine driver in present-day Manhattan) is more shaded and varied than Caine’s, and gets deeper and more affecting as it moves along. Alfie has loads of big-studio gloss and panache, but it pays off inwardly with obvious skill and finesse. Coming from the director of the schmaltzy Baby Boom, Father of the Bride and I Love Trouble, Alfie feels like some kind of life-change movie. The old Shyer movies (which he co-wrote with former wife Nancy) were massage-y and conventional in their audience-pleasing ambitions. ...

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Nikke Finke reports in her latest L.A. Weekly column that CBS, NBC and ABC all refused Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD advertising during any news programming segments. The three networks “said explicitly they were reluctant because of the closeness of the release to the election.” Finke’s conclusion: “So here is Big Media doing yet another favor for Dubya.”

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A Love Song for Bobby Long, which will close out the Hollywood Film Festival on 10.17, won’t be distributed by Screen Gems, which financed/produced, but Lions Gate Films, which recently acquired it. The 119-minute film was reportedly dubbed “Bobby Way Too Long” by critics after it showed at the Venice Film Festival. A relationship drama about the history between a daughter (Scarlett Johansson) and her recently-deceased mother (Debra Kara Unger), it will hit screens sometime in December. Directed and written by Shaine Gabel, it costars John Travolta as Unger’s alcoholic ex-lover.

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Couldn’t agree more with Newsweek‘s “singled out” salute to I Heart Huckabees costar Mark Wahlberg (page 58, 10.4 issue) for his hyper-drive performance as a fireman answering the call of a four-alarm spiritual quest inside his own head. “Who knew Wahlberg could be so funny?,” the David Ansen item asks. “He’s an unhousebroken hoot.”

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Two stand-out elements in Jake Brooks’ New York Observer piece about David O. Russell’s friendship with Columbia professor and Tibetan scholar Robert Thurman, “the primary inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s character in the audacious and philosophically dense I Heart Huckabees (10.1). One, a decision by Brooks’ editor to put the film-title word “Heart” in brackets. (Hello…?) And two, this comment from Russell: “A monk once said, ‘If you’re not laughing, you’re not in on the joke.’ That’s why, to me, it’s not contradictory to have comedy together with these [mystical, meditative, what's-it-all-about?] questions. Investigating what you are is an absurd proposition.”

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“I played a part in a movie, wore cowboy duds and galloped down the road,” writes Bob Dylan in Newsweek‘s excerpt from his forthcoming autobiography, “Chronicles, Volume One” (Simon and Schuster). He’s talking about his performance as “Alias” in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (’73), for which there was “not much required” and about which “I was probably naive,” the poet-troubador writes. But here’s the real drill-bit excerpt, printed on the lower right side of page 56: “Sometime in the past I’d written and performed songs that were most original and most influential, and I didn’t know if I ever would again and I didn’t care.” Dylan said the same thing more profoundly in a song from Nashville Skyline: “Once I held mountains in the palm of my hand/and rivers that ran through every day/I must have been mad/I never what I had/until I threw it all away.”

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MCN columnist David Poland’s recent take on the presumed potency of Mike Nichols’ potentially Oscar-worthy Closer (Columbia, 12.3) has been, I have to admit, one of his more astute calls. The fact that it’s said to play “a little cold” is an indication, he believes, that producers of other presumed Oscar-calibre films are a bit scared of it. “When people start lining up to smear a film this early, that film has some power,” he wrote earlier this week. “And that is why bad buzz can be a good sign.” My own view is that the Patrick Marber play it’s based upon is a little bit cold (i.e., it reads that way), but it’s also a devastating, well-cut diamond. The Godfather, Part II is a little bit cold also, but if Francis Coppola had warmed it up he would have totally screwed it up.

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Will “security moms” be watching the first Presidential Debate on Thursday evening? Or have they pretty much made up their minds at this stage? The reason Bush is said to be leading in the polls right now is that these hinterland-residing, marginally educated swing voters (i.e., family women who are deeply concerned about domestic terrorism) believe Dubya will be studlier and more sheriff-y in preventing the next 9.11. But of course, if a perverse determination had been made by a sitting U.S. President to try and deliberately provoke another terrorist assault in the wake of the 9.11 attacks, it’s hard to imagine how this could have been done more effectively than by way of Bush’s Iraqi War policy. Is there any Middle East watcher anywhere who doesn’t believe that anti-American hatred levels over there are much higher now than they were before 9.11? And yet the security moms are inclined to re-elect Bush because he makes them feel safer. Got...

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Correction on that earlier item about the authors of the new Rob Reiner-authorized script of Rumor Has it, the currently rolling not-really-a-Graduate sequel with Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Costner, Mark Ruffalo and Shirley Maclaine. The revisions on a recent draft are credited to Reiner, Andy Scheinman and Adam Scheinman. (I wrote earlier that actor Andy Scheinman was “apparently” a co-writer.) Valerie Breiman is also credited as a co-writer.

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An extra-deluxe DVD package containing the 251-minute extended version DVD of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, due 12.14, will be sold with “a special set of specially-tanned leather restraining straps, two pairs of Clockwork Orange-style eyelid inhibitors, and a large bottle of generic eye drops,” according to an alleged copy of a forthcoming New Line Home Entertainment press release. The non-extra-deluxe package will have a suggested retail price of about $40.

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Peter Chelsom’s Shall We Dance? (Miramax, 10.15) is not a Richard Gere-Jennifer Lopez romance-on-a-dance-floor movie. It’s a Chelsom-esque ensemble piece a la Hear My Song. It’s Gere, Stanley Tucci, Lisa Ann Walter, The Station Agent‘s Bobby Cannavale, Anita Gillette, Richard Jenkins…they’re all in it together. Lopez plays an intriguing but essentially support-level character for the first hour…no character deepening, no romantic intrigues with Gere, nothing. Then she and Gere start paying attention to each other at the start of the second hour…but they don’t become the movie. (Was her screen time reduced, as it was in Jersey Girl, when Miramax realized that her Bennifer-generated negatives were going through the roof?) Gere’s performance as an estate lawyer nursing a secret passion for after-dark ballroom dancing is assured and charismatic, and he gives off genuine dignity...

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Can anyone see the logic in Miramax publicists restricting invites to press screenings of Shall We Dance? in the face of a massive sneak preview showing in theatres coast to coast last night (i.e., Saturday, 9.25)? Especially considering that the film is frequently heartening and spirit-lifting and is obviously going to win over the just-entertain-us crowd? It may not have critics doing cartwheels, but I’m a hard-ass and I had very few problems with it.

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The latest title of that currently filming not-really-a-sequel-to-The Graduate romantic comedy under director Rob Reiner is (drum roll…) Rumor Has It. (Not a bad title. It was previously called Otherwise Engaged, which I also like.) As soon as he was hired in mid-August to replace director Ted Griffin on the Jennifer Aniston-Kevin Costner-Mark Ruffalo film, Reiner brought in North co-writer Andrew Scheinman to do a page-one rewrite of Griffin’s script. Scheinman, producer of several Reiner-directed films from The Sure Thing (’85) to Ghosts of Mississippi (’96), is apparently co-writing with his brother Danny, whose IMDB resume includes only acting jobs. Most of Griffin’s script has been wiped off the hard drive. The new script still uses the basic premise (Aniston’s relationship and/or impending marriage to Ruffalo is put on hold while she explores her identity and that of her grandmother,...

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Legendary words from Alec Baldwin….seriously: “Movie marketers are taking actors and they’re kind of inserting them like suppositories into the cavities of the moviegoing public. The business is so kind of self-referential now. There’s a whole kind of industry now about the forensics of the business, so to speak, that wasn’t there 20 years ago.” So what’s a site like Hollywood Elsewhere in this rear equation? Not a lubricant…that’s E.T., People, Entertainment Weekly, etc. I don’t think I’m even wearing the plastic gloves.

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Any talented 20-something web designers out there living on a trust fund with a little extra time on their hands? Two regular columns a week plus WIRED every day plus editing the other columnists plus assembling each page with jpegs and whatnot…I’m losing it. This isn’t whining — it’s fact. You could be from Botswana…I just need some help.

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The first words…the first sound…in I Heart Huckabees is a rapid-fire obscenity spew from the mouth of Jason Schwartzman. It’s brash, funny…sets the tone. But it was probably borrowed. John Malkovich’s character in the original 1987 Circle Rep production of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This made his entrance with the very same bit. Did David O. Russell (then 29 years old) ever catch a performance?

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Critical reactions to The Motorcycle Diaries have been mostly admiring (like mine), but the political legacy of the real-life Che Guevara is taking bites here and there. Daily News critic Bob Strauss complains that it’s “a feel-good movie about a guy who helped to establish the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, for which he killed many and ordered the executions of many more.” And Salon‘s Paul Berman laments that “the cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. [He] was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction in Cuba. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s ‘labor camp’ system…that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.” Yikes…

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George Butler’s Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (ThinkFilm, opening soon) “brings to the surface a Kerry I didn’t know existed: charismatic, idealistic, eloquent. {So] who turned this brave leader in to a Stepford candidate?” writes critic B. Ruby Rich. “Activist groups like MoveOn.org could do worse than buy airtime to show Kerry’s historic testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a passionate attack on failed foreign policies and warmongering. Yeah, just the kind of speech he ought to deliver now in 2004.”

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There’s been a bit of a Huckabees dust-up in reaction to Sharon Waxman’s friendly-but-unflattering David O. Russell profile in last Sunday’s New York Times. The beef on the part of two Huckabees cast members I spoke to on Wednesday evening is essentially this: the dynamic between directors and actors during a shoot amounts to a special insiders-only thing with its own particular self-enclosed rules, and that it’s hard for a visiting journalist to understand this special camaraderie as fully and clearly as the filmmakers do. Hence Sharon’s overly matter-of-fact Huckabee’s set report (in the view of these actors) about Russell and his cast going through all kinds of emotional loop-dee-loops. Let’s just leave it at that.

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The relentless energy coming off Michael Moore’s site (www.michaelmoore.com) is truly intoxicating right now, and is almost enough to dispel lamentable notions that Kerry has so hopelessly cocked things up that Bush has the election in the bag. Moore isn’t having any of this defeatist crap. His 9.20.04 message (“Put Away Your Hankies”) says, in part, “Enough doomsaying! Bush is a goner…IF we all just quit our whining and belly-aching and stop shaking like a bunch of nervous ninnies. Geez, this is embarrassing! The Republicans are laughing at us. Do you ever see them cry, ‘Oh, it’s all over! We’re finished! Bush can’t win! Waaaaaa!’ Hell no. It’s never over for them until the last ballot is shredded. They are never finished — they just keeping moving forward like sharks that never sleep, always pushing, pulling, kicking, blocking, lying. How do you think they’ve been able to [run the...

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Topher Grace (Traffic, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!) has delivered his first exceptionally skillful, star-level turn in a quality film. It’s on view in Dylan Kidd’s P.S. (Newmarket, 10.15). The 26 year-old Grace plays a talented young painter who becomes an object of intense romantic obsession when a 40ish Columbia University employee (Laura Linney) becomes 98% convinced he’s some kind of reincarnation of a boyfriend she had when she was 18 or 19, but who was killed in a car crash. Based on Helen Schulman’s novel, and written and performed from a woman’s emotional perspective, this is Kidd’s answer to those who thought Roger Dodger meant he was the new Neil Labute. I don’t want to say this is some kind of woman’s film; it’s not. But it’s anchored in Linney’s performance, and she visits some amazing places in this thing.

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This is strictly an L.A. deal, but Maureen Dowd will be at the Skirball Center on Thursday, September 23, to chat about her book Bushworld with New York Times colleague Alessandra Stanley. Writers Bloc is organzing the event. It’ll start at 7:30 p.m.

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Oops…sorry. My earlier WIRED line about “L.A. Times TV writer Carina Chocano taking Manohla Dargis’s slot as second-string film critic under Kenny Turan” was wrong. I’m not clear what Chocano’s position is, but Dargis was never Kenny’s second. She was explicitly hired as a lead critic (as she subsequently was for her current slot with the New York Times), and equal in position to Turan.

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